Diary of a Wolfeman

(psa)

Just a quick heads-up for those of you out there who own a domain name that is due to expire anywhere within the next decade: you will be receiving a letter in the mail from a new Registrar trying to get you to switch over. There is no requirement to do so, and it is not a bill. If you’re happy with your current Registrar, throw away the letter.

(/psa)

I received another letter today, this one from my stepsister. I’ve never talked about her before because I don’t talk to her, and feel no need to talk about her. See, when The Old F.a.r.t. married the MallHag, he got stuck with her daughter as well. The both of them are the worst sort of mall-bunnies a man could run afoul of. I admit that The Old Man was never a good father, but it got worse after he married MH. This was back when my brother and I were both fighting tooth-and-nail to get by, and would every now and then get stuck in a “crap they’re gonna evict me!” or similar problem. Dad, however, was never in a position to help because the Hag had already spent all of the money – on the daughter.

They are currently long-haul truckers who spend a fair amount of their time on the West coast and could conceivably drop by to see us sometime, but they only ever see my bro, because her parents live in the same town. The last time, they spent the weekend with the in-laws, and saw my brother for an hour. I’ve been here for 4 years, right on I-5, and they’ve stopped to see me once.

Of course, this is the same man who bragged to me about how much money he was saving on his new house because the builder was using illegals to build it – at a time when I had been unemployed for 6 months and was signing up for food stamps because thousands of tech jobs had been outsourced to India.

Bitter? Moi?

In the eight years I lived in ‘Vegas, the stepsister lived there for I think 7, and the only communication I received from her at all was via her mother – something about having met an old girlfriend of mine and wanting to know if she could give out my phone number. Never heard from her again, and this was sometime before I got married, which means pre-1995. (The return address on the letter was First-initial.Last-name, and I couldn’t remember what the initial stood for. That’s how long it’s been.)

Well, she is finally worth something to me: she’s blogfodder.

Today’s letter was a teaser invitation about her upcoming wedding. Not a full invitation mind you, but a teaser invite with the pertinent names, date and location with a “More info coming soon!” tacked on the end.

Worse than that, the thing is printed on a fridge magnet, with a quote from Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”. Ok, if you just look at the lyrics, it can me thought of as a love song – but it never struck me as one. More like a man reminiscing about a love that burned him, but he can kinda look back on it as a lesson learned.

The kind of song a divorced guy would sing.

On a wedding invite.

Excerpt from an email I received today:

I am contacting you today via your on-line resume and I was wondering if you would be interested in an opportunity to work with Brand-X Insurance and Financial Services by building your own Brand-X Agency. I am looking for a few business minded individuals who have the desire for personal growth, career fulfillment and financial success blah blah blah blah

Dear Salesfeeb-
I appreciate the fact that it took nearly every neuron you posess to find the email address on my resume, but I really have to ask how it could possibly have occurred to you that a techie such as myself would be even the slightest bit interested in devolving into a lower life form by becoming an insurance salesperson?

Since I have no interest in becoming a sales person, you sending me this email with no invitation to do so or any prior business between us classifies the email as SPAM. Not only is it the bane of my existence, but in some regions it is illegal and punishable by severe fines. In others, we will simply hunt you down and publicly flog you, because this kind of stupidity really needs to be more painful.

Please refrain from sending these “opportunities” to me or any other IT person in the future. It is a waste of bandwidth, a waste of my time, and a waste of your time as well.

I just got done reading the Engadget “historical” post Greyduck linked to, and all of the comments – most of which were kids saying “wow! 2 years before I was born!”

Hmm. I was 13 in 1985, attending 8th grade and learning to program in BASIC on a Commodore Vic20. Growing up in the hick town that I did, it wasn’t until 1991 when I moved to Portland the first time that I heard the term ‘BBS’. I used a Commodore 128 with a 1200 baud modem to log into that first SCA BBS as ‘Cyberwolfe’.

Yes, child, 1200 baud was once considered high speed.

And now I bitch about how slow DSL is.

Tonight we had an orientation pot-luck dinner down at Peninsula Park for my daughter’s new school. Having given up completely on the regular public schools’ ability to teach anyone anything, we have enrolled the Pookster at Trillium, a magnate school here in Portland that takes education more seriously. The school is smaller, so each child gets more personal attention from the teachers, allowing them to actually learn something.

The other parents there fit a fairly narrow typeset, in that they are almost 100% Urban Yippies – Yuppies who are trying to be hip, cool, with-it or whatever they call it these days. The kind of people who really want to be like the cool kids in Hawthorne, but can’t give up the Volvo. They don’t eat American food (everyone knows all the good food came from somewhere else), and most of them ascribe to one form or another of herbivorism.

Which means, of course, that there wasn’t a shred of red meat within a three-block radius. Hell, the only meat-like substance I could recognize was a tuna casserole. And just what exactly is in ‘vegan wheat-free pumpkin bread’? I so wish I had had the cash, I would have run down to 7-11 and cleaned out the hot-dog stand just to watch ’em twitch.

Urban Yippie: Those are tofu dogs, right?
Me: Help yourself!
UY: Wait, this doesn’t taste like tofu…is that meat? Oh My God! I have eaten a poor cow!! Aaauuugghh! the horror!
Me: Muahahahaaa!

I understand idealistic people, but don’t have much in common with them, and it’s amazing how differently we see things. Case in point: when it came time for everyone to sort themselves out by grade level (and we’re talking about the parents here), instead of just pointing off to one side and saying “K through 2nd grade please gather over here”, they told us all to make a siren noise, while the 3rd-5ths were to make an “ahem” noise and so forth, and we were supposed to sort out the din and gather by sound.

Yep. Idiocy at it’s finest.

Warning signs that you are dealing with an Urban Yippie:

The man you are talking to is…
Carrying the youngest child of the brood in a front-mounted sling-type whatsihoosits,
Goes on about this great quiche he made the other morning, smiling in that “I’m whipped and I love it!” way,
Is not wearing a beard, but still hasn’t shaved in at least 4 days.

The woman you are talking to…
Has either rimless or black-framed glasses,
Is wearing baggy clothes that look like they may have come from the Gap or L.L. Bean,
Isn’t wearing a bra.

Toss into this mess myself, the EMC and her husband TS. The EMC fits in, as long as you don’t look too closely at her piercings and tats – she wishes they had a Volvo. TS, however, is a tech support geek and a solid introvert. Then there’s me – the guy who’s looking around for a proper branch to use to spit one of these idiots and toss ’em onto a fire.

Hey – the herbivores eat the vegetables and then the carnivores eat the herbivores. It’s the Circle of Life. Deal.

While walking out to the cars to get Pook’s backpack, TS says to me “whenever we come to these things, I always want to put ‘Hi! I’m TS. I’m a Xenophobe.’ on my nametag. Then when they say ‘what’s a xenophobe?’ I can say ‘it means I want to fucking kill you’ and smile at them in that really-I-was-joking…-or-was-I? kind of way.”

Thank DoC the EMC is the one who has to deal with them the most.

11:30pm, and weather.com says it’s 66F outside. Utter bullshit, I assure you. Well, maybe not bullshit, but the fact that the air is absolutely still means that the warmer air in my house (and it gets warmer by the minute) isn’t moving. At. All.

Who in the bloody blue blazes builds a house so weathertight that they fail to include an exhaust system to remove waste heat?

Yet again, another case of “If they had asked ME first…” It was so hot in my house it woke me up at 4am sweating. It’s almost enough to make a ‘Wolfe shave his head.

Then again, it could just be worse for me considering I spent the larger part of the day tucked into an air-conditioned server closet at precisely 67F. That was nice. The fact that I once again got nothing accomplished was not so nice. It seems the antivirus server has become borked, so it came out to go back to the shop for rebuild – along with the two other “spare” machines I will use to Frankenputer something worthwhile out of.

Really, it is necessary. When it takes a full five minutes to reboot a server, things are screwed. Considering that the server in question is a former domain controller that got demoted to simple antivirus chores, this should allow for some streamlining. Too bad we already bought a Windows-based AV suite – it seems like a perfect time to overhaul them into a Linux solution like Clam or Astaro.

It should be illegal to drive a musclecar at anything less than 105% of the posted speed limit in the fast lane. Yes, I am speaking directly to the nitwit in the Mustang 5.0 headed South on I5 Saturday afternoon. (50 in a 65 zone. In a 5-0. What a maroon.)

When you are driving in the right-hand lane (AKA the merge lane), do not speed up in your stupidly oversize truck so that some poor bastard like me can’t get in front of you, when there is plently of room for me to do so. Especially when you have room to change lanes, you fucktard. Will it really slow you down all that much to let me in?

This is why I don’t own a firearm, people: I live in a target-rich environment.

In an attempt to scout things out before installing a new ceiling fan the EMC gave me for my bedroom, I tripped both of the breakers labled ‘lights’ in my switchbox: the only thing that turned off was the alarm system. Then of course there’s the fact that there are two light fixtures in my room running off of the same switch, so I’ll need to re-route some of the wiring to do it right. I just love electricians.

A note to HR recruiters: do not personally correspond with people you do not intend to call up for an interview. Hullo, tact?

I am even better at interpretting Microsoft verbage than I thought I was. I took the extended job-placement test at a recruiter’s the other day, and one of the tests was on MS Server 2003, an area I have very little training in. The test seemed to be simply phrases extracted from the manual re-phrased as questions, and I was able to correctly guess the answer far more often than I thought I would. Often enough, in fact, to score 10% higher than a large portion of other test-takers.

The other test they had me take was on MS Office support, and the only place I did badly was on the Access portion – a product that Microsoft has yet to realize that nobody uses. (Anyone wanting an actual database uses SQL or D-Base.) I nearly aced the rest of the test. I really need to take some certification tests so people will listen when I say I’m the Techie From Hell.

To the asshat in the baby-blue VW pickup that was tailgating the car in front of me today on Hwy 224:

You are so fucking lucky that it was not me in my old ’74 Plymouth. That car was made of solid American steel, and I would have brake-checked your ass hard and told the investigating officer that a cat ran in front of my car.

You would have been sitting there with steering wheel in your teeth and the engine to your POS would have been permanently mated to the radiator, all because you were in such a fucking hurry to get someplace else you couldn’t follow a simple safety concern.

What a prick.

It seems that I have another mandatory day off scheduled for this week – it was supposed to be tomorrow, but our kick-ass office manager managed to get a couple of appointments for me. This just means the day got pushed back though, since the boss is under the impression that he just can’t afford to pay more than 80 hours in a pay period right now, and this would be a 96-hour paycheck.

So. He’s already not paying me what I’m worth, he’s shorting my hours, and I don’t think he’s managing the business correctly. It’s time to start looking for work again.

To this end, I was traipsing through Craigslist when I ran across a killer job – it’s got all the perks, looks challenging, and it’s something well-suited to a JOAT like me. Wow, right? Wrong – it’s a damn contract position, three weeks duration. Nearest I can figure, their current guru is taking some time off and they need a stand-in. Bummer.

The good news is, there were a couple other cherries in the pile. Time to dust off the ol’ resumee…

So, aside from minorly misleading directions from the website map, I managed to get new tires on the front of my car this morning with no real ado, and then proceeded out to Sandy for my day’s appointment.

Just about the time I was running out of things to do, the call came in to take a priority service call back downtown. I hop in The Beastie and am merrily blazing down the highway when I happen to notice large clouds of bluish-white smoke billowing out from my car. Crap! I pull to the side and look under the car to see vital fluids dribbling liberally onto the pavement.

Double-crap!

My boss pulled through again and got me towed to a mechanic via his AAA card (I gotta get one one of these days) where I found that the oil pressure sensor had cracked, and was shooting oil straight onto the exhaust. Thankfully enough, it’s a cheap part, and the labor wasn’t that bad. All told, I got a new sensor installed and an oil & filter change for $85.

The upside is that now the car sounds great, and handles alot better with the new tires. Now I just have to save up the money to get the trans fixed.

For a long time at our shop, we have been comparing the wear on the hard drive of a computer to tread wear on your tires when it comes to doing routine backups. You know that as your hard drive ages, wear and tear will eventually cause it to fail. So, when we see a drive we think is on the way out, we will reccommend the customer do a full data backup and consider replacing the drive now, before they have a blowout and lose everything. “You wouldn’t drive on the freeway with bald tires would you?”

Hmmm…bald tires…Now that I think of it, it’s been a while since I put new rubber on the Little Black Beastie. I’d better go check…

Sure enough, the left front tire has belts poking through on about a third of its circumference. Yikes!

So, the car has an appointment tomorrow morning to get some new tread. Luckily, I was just about to turn in a mileage report worth almost the cost of new tires, so it works out rather nicely :)

Now all I have to do is find a transmission shop with messed-up computers willing to barter services…