Month: October 2003

My SaniTest(TM) Results

My score is:129

For easier understanding, the HPLHS SaniTest assessment algorithm converts your raw score to a scale of 1 to 10. This number is your INSANITY INDEX.

Results:

INSANITY INDEX 7.18 It’s a good thing that you took the SaniTest(TM), because your score suggests that you’re highly unstable. You teeter on the brink of more serious madness, perhaps as a result of frequent exposure to morbid imagery and bizarre literature. Although capable of great achievements, your perceptions of reality are not reliable. Other notable people who score at this level include new age pianist John Tesh, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and former mousketeer Annette Funicello.

Take the Sanitest

I updated my website with some pics from florida tonite. most of them are family shit, but i got some nice shots of the blue angels, as well as my grandmother’s mask collection (she is the one in the pic with the terminator glasses on).

So, I got back from Jacksonville alive. I must note, however, that my return was marked by the most frightening airport landing ever. There was about 4-500 ft of pea soup fog just below an upper ceiling of 20-40 mph winds. We missed 2x approaches, and the last was nearly a crash.

Not fun.

Although, since my return, I have worked every night on some sort of technical project. I am approaching burnout I fear, with more work yet on the horizon.

Richelle’s machine died, so she got a nice upgrade – my machine was left untouched by whatever ill spirits took out their technological wrath on our house, but, for some reason, my server decided to stop working. I had to regen it, then get everything working again. I forget how much I have put into that shitty lil box – I think a tape backup is in order, if i can ever afford a DLT drive.

I have a teleconference this afternoon to discuss future business plans for one of my consulting gigs. I got another application written for NHPA, and it seemed to work, despite the fact that it needed much tweaking, and nearly choked the shit out of their web server (sending 5500 emails will do that sometimes i guess). Hopefully I will see some of this money soon, as Richelle and I really need to firm up some wedding plans. I don’t know where the $ goes – it just seems to evaporate – wah!

I am booked solid at the 9-5 from now until my birthday (at least) – and that assumes that shit keeps working, which, for most of October, it has not. I am going to have to start working extra hours before the end of this project if things don’t lighten up soon.

On the upside, I like the new semagic – it has condensed my LJ reading during the day somewhat with its new “x posts to alert” setting – muy bien sema.

I have no Halloween costume yet – to boot, i have a huge meeting tomorrow, so that will make this, officially, the first year that i do not dress to work in the long history of 9-5. I wish i had just not fucked up on the calendar planning earlier, I would have taken the bloody day off. I don’t even have a costume yet – i have to do that today after work!

I still dunno what to do tomorrow night either. Part of me really wants to go to a club or to innuendo – my bro was talking about going to the canvas lounge – but i don’t have any details on it yet. Mebbe I should just rent some scary movies and stay in – bleh.

This is somewhere i really want to go… but it has not opened in NYC yet! Dammit.

Too much work and responsibility lately – I feel like my head is gonna pop. I had this big surge of creative energy before things really started getting to be a drag in the work department, and now it is squashed by the number of things I need to keep track of. My only positive highlight of said surge was that I managed to compile a mess of my poems for editing.

Linkages:
Gone Bad (#1, #2 is linked off #1, good zombiage)
Reasons to avoid the stock market

My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul
caracarn goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as Doctor Octopus.
bruteforcemethd tricks you! You get a broken balloon.
bubbabobobbrain tricks you! You get an evangelical pamphlet.
cassieclaire gives you 19 dark blue orange-flavoured gummy fruits.
chellez tricks you! You get a block of wood.
clearmind tricks you! You get a thumbtack.
derfwad tricks you! You get a rock.
evilshell tricks you! You lose 14 pieces of candy!
fonem tricks you! You get a used tissue.
fox_in_socks gives you 9 green lemon-flavoured gummy bats.
gabsosteel gives you 3 light green coffee-flavoured pieces of bubblegum.
caracarn ends up with 17 pieces of candy, a broken balloon, an evangelical pamphlet, a block of wood, a thumbtack, a rock, and a used tissue.
Go trick-or-treating! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern.

and it is Delta.

I’m stuck in Jacksonville. The freaking Marlins won, and here I sit in the midst of a large population of gloating folk. I think I am going to ask the next person who makes fun if they an compute the ratio of total WS to the number we have won over the years. Then I am going to use their bloodily attached forearm as a crude baton and get medeival on them.

by the Elder Evils…Bledsoe is making me almost sad to be a New Yorker. At least the Giants won.

I did lots of computer work this weekend. I reinstalled 2 machines, and one machine about 6 times. I reconfigured 3x laptops, did lots of network troubleshooting, and even fixed my aunt’s sister’s laptop.

I am very tired. I didn’t get to sleep until @ 3ish, and that is after the time shift. Now I will be lucky if I make it home by 2. i’m just glad that my bro can give me a ride.

Today was my cousin Roarke’s 13th birthday. I gave him The Annotated Dragonlance Chronicles, and The Cleric Quintet Collector’s Edition.

This weekend there was also a local air show, featuring the Blue Angels. While I find the wasteful recruiting propoganda reprehensible, and detest the development of millitary technology, it does not lessen the awe one feels in the presence of such powerful machines. I will have some pics n movies later in the week when I get them off my cam.

Apparently, my grandmother always wanted to be a pilot, but my grandfather forbade it. She got misty talking about it. That certainly made me sad – that someone could live as long and as fully as she has, yet still carry such a deep regret.

I just want to sleep, but I needed to caf up so I can think on my feet as they shuffle departure times and gates. Tomorrow is going to suck.


This is something that was sent to me today that gets amusing despite its length.

Q: Daddy, why did we have to attack Iraq?
A: Because they had weapons of mass destruction, honey.

Q: But the inspectors didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction.
A: That’s because the Iraqis were hiding them.

Q: And that’s why we invaded Iraq?
A: Yep. Invasions always work better than inspections.

Q: But after we invaded them, we STILL didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, did we?
A: That’s because the weapons are so well hidden. Don’t worry, we’ll find something, probably right before the 2004 election.

Q: Why did Iraq want all those weapons of mass destruction?
A: To use them in a war, silly.

Q: I’m confused. If they had all those weapons that they planned to use in a war, then why didn’t they use any of those weapons when we went to war with them.
A: Well, obviously they didn’t want anyone to know they had those weapons, so they chose to die by the thousands rather than defend themselves.

Q: That doesn’t make sense Daddy. Why would they choose to die if they had all those big weapons to fight us back with?
A: It’s a different culture. It’s not supposed to make sense.

Q: I don’t know about you, but I don’t think they had any of those weapons our government said they did.
A: Well, you know, it doesn’t matter whether or not they had those weapons. We had another good reason to invade them anyway.

Q: And what was that?
A: Even if Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator, which is another good reason to invade another country.

Q: Why? What does a cruel dictator do that makes it OK to invade his country?
A: Well, for one thing, he tortured his own people.

Q: Kind of like what they do in China?
A: Don’t go comparing China to Iraq. China is a good economic competitor where millions of people work for slave wages in sweatshops to make U.S. corporations richer.

Q: So if a country lets its people be exploited for American corporate gain, it’s a good country, even if that country tortures people?
A: Right.

Q: Why were people in Iraq being tortured?
A: For political crimes, mostly, like criticizing the government. People who criticized the government in Iraq were sent to prison and tortured.

Q: Isn’t that exactly what happens in China?
A: I told you, China is different.

Q: What’s the difference between China and Iraq?
A: Well, for one thing, Iraq was ruled by the Ba’ath party, while China is Communist.

Q: Didn’t you once tell me Communists were bad?
A: No, just Cuban Communists are bad.

Q: How are the Cuban Communists bad?
A: Well, for one thing, people who criticize the government in Cuba are sent to prison and tortured.

Q: Like in Iraq?
A: Exactly.

Q: And like in China, too?
A: I told you, China’s a good economic competitor. Cuba, on the other hand, is not.

Q: How come Cuba isn’t a good economic competitor?
A: Well, you see, back in the early 1960s, our government passed some laws that made it illegal for Americans to trade or do any business with Cuba until they stopped being Communists and started being capitalists like us.

Q: But if we got rid of those laws, opened up trade with Cuba, and started doing business with them, wouldn’t that help the Cubans become capitalists?
A: Don’t be a smart-ass.

Q: I didn’t think I was being one.
A: Well, anyway, they also don’t have freedom of religion in Cuba.

Q: Kind of like China and the Falun Gong movement?
A: I told you, stop saying bad things about China. Anyway, Saddam Hussein came to power through a military coup, so he’s not really a legitimate leader anyway.

Q: What’s a military coup?
A: That’s when a military general takes over the government of a country by force, instead of holding free elections like we do in the United States.

Q: Didn’t the ruler of Pakistan come to power by a military coup?
A: You mean General Pervez Musharraf? Uh, yeah, he did, but Pakistan is our friend.

Q: Why is Pakistan our friend if their leader is illegitimate?
A: I never said Pervez Musharraf was illegitimate.

Q: Didn’t you just say a military general who comes to power by forcibly overthrowing the legitimate government of a nation is an illegitimate leader?
A: Only Saddam Hussein. Pervez Musharraf is our friend, because he helped us invade Afghanistan.

Q: Why did we invade Afghanistan?
A: Because of what they did to us on September 11th.

Q: What did Afghanistan do to us on September 11th?
A: Well, on September 11th, nineteen men, fifteen of them Saudi Arabians hijacked four airplanes and flew three of them into buildings, killing over 3,000 Americans.

Q: So how did Afghanistan figure into all that?
A: Afghanistan was where those bad men trained, under the oppressive rule of the Taliban.

Q: Aren’t the Taliban those bad radical Islamics who chopped off people’s heads and hands?
A: Yes, that’s exactly who they were. Not only did they chop off people’s heads and hands, but they oppressed women, too.

Q: Didn’t the Bush administration give the Taliban 43 million dollars back in May of 2001?
A: Yes, but that money was a reward because they did such a good job fighting drugs.

Q: Fighting drugs?
A: Yes, the Taliban were very helpful in stopping people from growing opium poppies.

Q: How did they do such a good job?
A: Simple. If people were caught growing opium poppies, the Taliban would have their hands and heads cut off.

Q: So, when the Taliban cut off people’s heads and hands for growing flowers, that was OK, but not if they cut people’s heads and hands off for other reasons?
A: Yes. It’s OK with us if radical Islamic fundamentalists cut off people’s hands for growing flowers, but it’s cruel if they cut off people’s hands for stealing bread.

Q: Don’t they also cut off people’s hands and heads in Saudi Arabia?
A: That’s different. Afghanistan was ruled by a tyrannical patriarchy that oppressed women and forced them to wear burqas whenever they were in public, with death by stoning as the penalty for women who did not comply.

Q: Don’t Saudi women have to wear burqas in public, too?
A: No, Saudi women merely wear a traditional Islamic body covering.

Q: What’s the difference?
A: The traditional Islamic covering worn by Saudi women is a modest yet fashionable garment that covers all of a woman’s body except for her eyes and fingers. The burqa, on the other hand, is an evil tool of Patriarchal oppression that covers all of a woman’s body except for her eyes and fingers.

Q: It sounds like the same thing with a different name.
A: Now, don’t go comparing Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are our friends.

Q: But I thought you said 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11th were from Saudi Arabia.
A: Yes, but they trained in Afghanistan.

Q: Who trained them?
A: A very bad man named Osama bin Laden.

Q: Was he from Afghanistan?
A: Uh, no, he was from Saudi Arabia too. But he was a bad man, a very bad man.

Q: I seem to recall he was our friend once.
A: Only when we helped him and the mujahadeen repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan back in the 1980s.

Q: Who are the Soviets? Was that the Evil Communist Empire Ronald Reagan talked about?
A: There are no more Soviets. The Soviet Union broke up in 1990 or thereabouts, and now they have elections and capitalism like us. We call them Russians now.

Q: So the Soviets, I mean the Russians, are now our friends?
A: Well, not really. You see, they were our friends for many years after they stopped being Soviets, but then they decided not to support our invasion of Iraq, so we’re mad at them now. We’re also mad at the French and the Germans because they didn’t help us invade Iraq either.

Q: So the French and Germans are evil, too?
A: Not exactly evil, but just bad enough that we had to rename French fries and French toast to Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast.

Q: Do we always rename foods whenever another country doesn’t do what we want them to do?
A: No, we just do that to our friends. Our enemies, we invade.

Q: But wasn’t Iraq one of our friends back in the 1980s?
A: Well, yeah. For a while.

Q: Was Saddam Hussein ruler of Iraq back then?
A: Yes, but at the time he was fighting against Iran, which made him our friend, temporarily.

Q: Why did that make him our friend?
A: Because at that time, Iran was our enemy.

Q: Isn’t that when he gassed the Kurds?
A: Yeah, but since he was fighting against Iran at the time, we looked the other way, to show him we were his friend.

Q: So anyone who fights against one of our enemies automatically becomes our friend?
A: Most of the time, yes.

Q: And anyone who fights against one of our friends is automatically an enemy?
A: Sometimes that’s true, too. However, if American corporations can profit by selling weapons to both sides at the same time, all the better.

Q: Why?
A: Because war is good for the economy, which means war is good for America. Also, since God is on America’s side, anyone who opposes war is a godless un-American Communist. Do you understand now why we attacked Iraq?

Q: I think so. We attacked them because God wanted us to, right?
A: Yes.

Q: But how did we know God wanted us to attack Iraq?
A: Well, you see, God personally speaks to George W. Bush and tells him what to do.

Q: So basically, what you’re saying is that we attacked Iraq because George W. Bush hears voices in his head?
A. Yes! You finally understand how the world works. Now close your eyes, make yourself comfortable, and go to sleep. Good night.

Good night, Daddy.

phantom laser-lined butterflies of my past
batter my dreams at night – they make the unmistakable click
of thorax on glass
over and over

i awake in the morning to the psychedelic wingpollen marks
itching on my forehead.
it washes down the sink drain with tartar and toothpaste
into the sewers below.

why are all the yesterdays in warm sepia,
and the tomorrows in Technicolor,
but the today seems like one long commercial break?

where is the magic that keeps me going?
lost amongst the commuters –
it tries to shout at me through the changing leaves of the riverside,
or the light in her smile,
sometimes i read it between the lines
but it is no longer tangible… it steps hollow
like the Claudius’ brother dancing at my front door
but never speaking until the cock crows.

what’s new and shakin? not me.

Last week was burdensomely busy – this week promises much more of the same. I just got out of the frigidity that is our server room – i need to get me some typing gloves.

This weekend in a nutshell:
Friday night – Cooking and video games.
Saturday – Light cleaning, busytasks and video games early AM, followed by narrowly avoiding having to go into work – after 2 hours of remote troubleshooting.
Saturday night – went to a little sports bar in the middle of Westchester to watch the Yanks drop game 1.
Sunday – worked big chunk of the day away consulting – with lots more to come this week. Hopefully made two new business contacts yesterday though, which is a good thing.

I recently subscribed to gamefly – I have two games – Heroes of DnD (which I am really digging) and F-Zero for GC. 20$ a month for a netflix game rental queue? How can you go wrong?

Today I have regenned a sever halfway, and started writing a complete SRD for each server we have, in case I get hit by a bus or something. I realized it today when I went to install – if anything happened to me, they would be pretty screwed.

I did some good cooking this weekend. I improvised my own version of Kris’ much desired White Pizza Dip – as well as two trays of lasagna. In an effort to stave off office butt, I am working on now bagging lunch a few days a week.

The past few days have seen voracious reading though, even if it was mostly fluff stuff. Tonight’s commute home begins the long ride through my heavy scholasticism that should get me through xmas.

I need to get my personal life as organized as my professional one.

white ninja
~~~
for those who voiced concerns re: last post, thanks.
the lady who headed up the now-defunked drama department where i met the majority of my longtime comerades-at-arms ~9 years ago died yesterday, from brain cancer. She was 36.

i had a rough night. the writing was very cathartic – the offers for support were much apprecaited.

Life is a big web.

You start out as a strand strung between two parents – sometimes one, with the strand flapping in the wind, looking for a second anchor. Occasionally, the web is abandoned after creation, to flutter in the breeze until it secures itself somewhere.

Not all land – most do though, in some place or time.

Once the web is strung, it begins to grow – slowly at first, but with astounding intricacy as and alacrity as the years go on. Before you know it, the initial anchor(s) of the thread are buried in a spiraling pinwheel of fine fibers – some doubling back on themselves, some forming v’s and x’s as line meets line, which leads to another intersection.

This web withstands the rigors of the world it hangs in. It can hold up to the snows and rains – the occasional gust of wind, bitter cold or sweltering heat, the brightest sun or darkest moonless nightscape. The web hangs in until it cannot anymore, and then it’s core disperses, back to the skies, leaving anchors and small nooks of its pattern behind – often connected to other looming patterns of other webs as they grow and connect.

Occasionally the departure of a core of a web is sudden, and unexpected. It flies before the surrounding anchor lines really have time to interweave. It leaves many stronger fibers reeling in the open air. Sometimes they connect again to other pockets of weave – sometimes they, like the core, drift away.

On a very rare occasion – the departure of a core of a web leads to the tightening of its connected strands. Sometimes those strands anticipate the upcoming contraction, and loop round each other and the surroundings as tightly as they can to weather better the change.

Other times, it happens so suddenly the contraction threatens to tighten the pattern such that they collapse into a morass of fiber – twisted and knotted in such a manner that it would be impossible to untangle what remains as individual threads. All that remiains is a twisted rope of lives – stronger than any individual web, but impossibly connected – unable to grow or claim interindependence.

That is what this evening felt like. The bottom dropped out of a big part of my web, but in such a manner that never, until it drifted free in the whistling air, had I noticed that it was an anchor line.

So much of the last decade of life…

Laughter, drunkenness, concern, love, anger, regret, guilt, closeness, trust, truth, lies, hope, song, dance, death, and birth .. all wrapped in a bond of youth, hormone, and happenstance. This tapestry of life owes its pattern to one anchor who had seen to it, unwittingly or no, that a small collection of high school students would pour their heart and souls into a dream.

That is not to say that portions of this pattern might not have been without the anchor – some strands had already crossed.

I will not play the “Wonderful Life” game – what is past has past – and I would change nothing in the forming of the pattern in the weave.

That dream that brought us all together never came to be.

That was what I thought of after I got off the phone – how hard we practiced, and how much we wanted it, and how it all disappeared because of popcorn, a birthday, and Leslie Neilson.

How much of the last 9 years is because of the hopes and organization of that one strand, now lost in the wind?

My web will tighten – the strands I am bound to will glisten with tears like springtime dew in the moonlight. We will mourn the departed strand, as well as those who have found their own paths away from where we sit now, spread between each other in the still dawn of the day after our youth – and the fast approaching sunrise of our oncoming middle age.

We will all weather the contraction – but, for myself, it will be with a sobering realization that much of my existence here and now, is owed to that strand floating free.

I hope with all my heart that the web she left behind is as touched as I was, in what is a very brief connection to a radiant strand of light.

A priest decides to take a walk to the pier near his church. He looks around and finally stops to watch a fisherman load his boat. The fisherman notices and asks the priest if he’d like to join him for a couple of hours. The priest agrees.

The fisherman asks if the priest has ever fished before, to which the priest answers no. He baits the hook and says, “Give it a shot, Father.”

After a few minutes, the priest hooks a big fish and struggles to get it in the boat.

The fisherman says, “Whoa, look at that big sonofabitch!”

Priest: “Uh, sir, can you please mind your language?”

Fisherman: (THINKING QUICKLY): “I’m sorry, Father, but that’s what the fish is called: — a sonofabitch.”

Priest: “Oh, I’m sorry, I did not know.”

After the trip, the priest brings the fish to the church and stops the Bishop.

Priest: “Look at this big sonofabitch!”

Bishop: “Please, mind your language, this is a house of God.”

Priest: “No, you don’t understand! That’s what the fish is called and I caught it. I caught this sonofabitch!”

Bishop: “Hmmm, you know I could clean this sonofabitch and we could have it for dinner.” So the Bishop takes the fish, cleans it and takes it to the head mother.

Bishop: “Could you cook this sonofabitch for dinner tonight?”

Head Mother: “My lord, what langauge!”

Bishop: “No, Sister, that’s what this fish is called, asonofabitch! Father caught it, I cleaned it, and we want you to cook it.”

Head Mother: “Yes, I’ll cook that sonofabitch tonight.”

That night the Pope stops by for dinner. He thinks the fish is great and asks where they got it.

Priest: “I caught the sonofabitch.” Bishop: “And I cleaned the sonofabitch.” Head Mother: “And I cooked the sonofabitch.”

The Pope stares at them for a minute with a steely gaze, takes off his hat, leans back in his chair, puts his feet up on the table and says, “You know, you fuckers are all right!”

yeah, so, its Monday, you wanna piece of me? on a day where everyone else seems to have off, and i had to get up and go to work, you are lucky you are getting any quizzes at all.

Pardon the baseball refrences in the rating – I can’t help myself.

So i noticed that I have been unreasonably quiet of late.
This is not a byproduct of not having anything to say, it is because I am horribly busy.

Work has been a downright pressure cooker. I had my Google appliance kick on me, had my applications server crash – had to deal with an open SSH vulnerability on two of my DB boxes, and had a project that should have had an 8 month lead dumped in my lap for a three week development window.

Yeah, busy.

I am trying to balance my 9-5 with a hopeful wave of upcoming side jobs with which I hope to finance my wedding.

So even when I am not working, I am working, to some extent or another.

I finally got my cable issues sorted out (I hope).

My second monitor finally gave up the ghost. Circut board looks like a carbon snake. So now I am working inefficently until I can get another box. Hopefully a xmas present for meself.

Richelle and I finally got our bed – it is nice, despite my misgivings about it pre-purchase.

I need to learn a whole lot more about setting up and securing enterprise relational databases than I currently do, in order to meet some upcoming projects, so I will be worming my way into that field even deeper than I already am.

I need to update my comics cache, I am horribly behind.

Carnivale has become a new obsession.

Recent books:
Scotland: The History of a Nation
Pandora
Wind Walker
Centuries of Darkness: A Challenge to the Conventional Chronology of Old World Archaeology

I need to collate some reasearch – badly. A lunchtime conversation last week launched this realization with a certain sense of hope and dread, all mixed with a twist.

In anticipation of getting my ass kicked at trivial pursuit this weekend whilst at the cape, mostly because everyone knows that orange is the bane of my existence, I offer this lil trivia bit: