Learning to Relax

I started writing this on Thursday, but got distracted. I’ve sortakinda been off work since Tuesday, and trying to figure out what to do with myself. See the title.

I’ve been trying to burn built-up leave. When you go, what, five years without any paid time off, you grow accustomed to just working all the time.

Because of a change in my company’s policies just before the lockdown, I had a ton of time built up that I needed to spend before the end of the calendar year.

A few weeks ago, I told my boss that I probably just wouldn’t be working on Fridays through the end of the year.

So, after I finished paying my protection racket to the “professional organization” that has a protection agreement with the government, and demands money from me every three years just so I can stay working.

My psychologist thinks that I should try doing my writing via a microphone. I don’t know what to do with speech-to-text stuff, and I’m not sure what to do with the resultant audio.

Do I try to record a podcast?

Nobody wants to listen to that shit.

Besides, who knows if I physically can even do it. This morning, after doing my normal things, I’m slowly calm down.

But when can I get some continuous sleep?

I don’t know. I’m not sleepy at this point, but definitely, as the kids would say, woke as fuck.

So work on the NoJoMo stuff for next month.

11/1: Intro, etc.

11/2: ???

11/3: Election Day

11/4: Election Day reactions (if we know the winner….) Other things in the week, relatives’ birthdays.

11/11: Veterans’ Day

11/26: Football, especially Thanksgiving Football. (As I write this, the games are evenly balanced among conferences; if you look at some previous years, I was complaining about the paucity of AFC teams….)

11/27: Thanksgiving

11/30: Final/wrap-up

Another thing I did this morning was clean up some Shmoocon entries I’d accidentally had under the NoJoMo tag. Oops.

I think what I did during the summer was somewhat-effective. Maybe I’ll try to incorporate that in. My first thought was to do that for every entry, but given everything that has been, and will be going on, I worry that I’ll be writing far too much.

Resistance is futile

Or is it government?

Today’s news is that President Trump has COVID-19. That is on the heels of Ralph Northam also has it.

One flaunted his sparing mask use. The other wore his as a badge of honor.

Both got the virus.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s no omniscient answer?

I come back to, “Government Doesn’t Work.”

Buy things that support the science that’ll knock this out. Pray if you believe in God. (And understand that belief in God doesn’t preclude science….so says the guy who’s entrusted his complex medical issues to a medical center at a Catholic university…)

Continuing On The Theme

Per last entry, I’m seriously limiting Facebook access.

Im happier for it. I did end up checking in yesterday, because I was concerned about my oldest friend’s family. No news, but I did see that I had a message.

Email.

Fuck Zuckerberg, his content moderation, and data mining.

I did watch The Social Dilemma.last weekend/early this week.

You can leave. To quote a former company slogan, “Just Do It.”

And I’ve gotten disrupted by the news of Ron Paul’s live steam stroke.

But it leads me back to what I was about to say about the cesspool that is Facebook.

Yes, I plan to revisit more frequently after the election.

And I will be “unfriending” people liberally.

If you’re not offering anything other than annoyance, I don’t have time for you, and I will eliminate you from my experience.

Time To Go Away On Holiday

Background music is this. (You’ll need to click the link because I’m consciously avoiding the totes-didn’t-used-to-do-evil company and its video site…)

I was messing around in the sewer that is Facebook more lately. This was largely in order to get my fantasy league up and running, but that’s finished, so why stay? I will miss looking at some of my favorite podcasts’ private groups. “Blue-pilled” friends’ posts about the various conspiracy theories too nutty to even make CNN, on the other hand.

The place is a wasteland, and I’m going away again.

Maybe I peek in periodically, but probably not.

I plan to write here in November, perhaps despairing about whichever of the two major parties’ candidates garners a sufficient plurality to be president. (And if it’s not the guy from his basement in Delaware, the posts about how by voting for someone other than him, I’m voting for Trump…)

If I miss out on something you think is very important, my cell number has been the same since 1999. My email address is still sean@757.org.

Adiot.

Karen Taught Me In Sixth Grade

I do wonder sometimes how Ms. M., and her “roommate” are doing

(Yes, it’s pretty clear in retrospect that they were lesbians, but that doesn’t matter in the least, now does it?)

But she wouldn’t have been happy about people not wearing masks.

The materialistic nature of so many things lately has me a bit dismayed.

One of the things that’s crossed my mind lately, and I’ve seen it reinforced in some of the things I regularly consume, is that the war on “assault weapons” is the new War On Drugs.

I was living in Suburban DC when Marion Barry got busted for smoking crack in a hotel room.

Given what I was taught in the mandatory DARE classes, I wondered then, as I still wonder now, how did he not die? I mean, if you smoked crack ,you died. Look at Len Bias. Crack. Perhaps the first time, and he died.

Debates on Twitter after seeing this from Ron Bailey over at Reason.

Now that weed’s been “decriminalized” throughout much of the country, we need to find something for the police state assembled to fight it to do. Guns!!1! Those are scary, right? And the ratings spike on MSNBC every time there’s a school shooting!

I get it, Chuck, it’s dangerous, that I don’t trust you and your outfit, exclusively.

On a related note, two things I noticed from “alternate” media.

I need to go watch the Vice bit about the Antifa fucker who died while the police were trying to arrest him. I know, I know, Jerry Nadler says Antifa violence is a myth, but people are really dying because of this.

There is organization going on. People are coordinating to make sure it happens. The question is whether the truth will ever come out about it.

Or, maybe, it’d be easier to pass off things as discredited stories about foreign connections, as “debunked conspiracy theories.”

Were the fine censorial folks at CrowdStrike helping tailor a narrative to prevent even the sympathetic corporate media from looking in to things that’d make the resurrected, and blessed duopoly candidate look better? I don’t know. Does it matter? To the average MSNBC viewer, not in the least.

But when you see things like this, if you don’t take a moment’s pause, that’s your issue.

Twenty

No flashback today. Just free-write.

There’s not a ton to say other than I’m tired, and feel accomplished.

I finished paying protection for my certification protection racket paid so I can keep working for a few more years.

Seriously. How the fuck is this not a racket, exempt from RICO?

Hopefully it’s worth it. This is different than at some of the times in the past; I didn’t pay for the materials with money I don’t have.

But I’m finished.

And now, maybe, I can relax after my bit of work tonight.

Happy birthday to me, I suppose.

The daily writing didn’t really feel like much of a drag. I can only think of once when it seemed like I was getting distracted by other things.

More to come in November. Maybe I can enjoy that this year, finally.

Nineteen

Tysabri tomorrow. It can’t come quickly enough, though I didn’t get an answer when I called today to confirm my appointment.

I think the place where I get them is actually only open Tuesday and Thursday at this point, which would explain the lack of a callback.

That leads me to the news I started looking at before I started writing. Even though I really don’t much like the rich white people’s welfare that is NPR, or their cited source, of Reddit, interesting story about fitness speakeasies.

No shit..

Is anyone really surprised by this?

Eat special foods, drink alcohol, have sex, engage in capitalism. You, know, basic human things. Government can’t stop them. Not in prison.

Those things even happen in prison. Government isn’t going to stop them.

I would say, “sorry,” but there’s nothing to apologize for. I shouldn’t be sorry that you don’t understand that.

And, no, people who engage in those things aren’t bad, either. They’re humans. Deal with it.

Spent time today trying to plan out time off so I don’t lose a bunch of PTO at the end of the year. Ugh. I kind of played hard-to-get with this job, and, as a result, I ended up getting a lot of PTO in lieu of money. I loved my last gig, and would have stayed for just a little more money. Oh well.

Flashback time.

08/19/2010 – 8/19/2010

So, after last night’s knot, tonight’s was a gusher. Must have hit a vein or something.

My mother has discovered she likes text messaging on her iPhone. I’m not sure this is a good thing. Neither is my dad, considering he’s having to modify their plain to support it……

Work is a mess. I’m just not sure why I’m doing the work they have me doing. It’s nothing but frustration. The processes are insufficient, so you bolster them, so people just ignore the processes, which means more processes are needed, etc.

Systems engineering is perhaps a bigger pseudoscience than homeopathy. Why am I doing it? I can read, write, and speak. Many other IT people can’t be bothered to do the first, and simply can’t do the last two. A year ago, I might have recoiled more, but at this point, I’m operating under the realization that it’s something I can continue doing if my body further fails me. But it also means I probably ought to think more about grad school. Ugh.

I am halfway tempted to see what additional accommodations I could get as a “disabled” student. Is that wrong? 😉

Homoeopathy. Um. Ever see people start acting drunk when they’re plied with non-alcoholic beer, but don’t know that?

The mention of higher education was interesting considering that it’d not be terribly long before my wife was in that world.

I’ve seen bits here and there that say that, yes, I could do what I considered back then.

But, why?

I’m finished, and I shouldn’t be wasting someone else’s money doing it.

Eighteen

Very long day. I’m tried, but almost finished with this stretch, at least.

News:

New coronavirus! Everybody panic!

Still discouraged about the thing I stumbled across yesterday. I think I might like living “in the swamp” if there were things around to enjoy.

Instead, there’s just creeping statism. I can’t really bring myself to approve.

Or care.

I would like a nice cocktail. I kinda suck when it comes to bartending.

I also don’t have the right stuff, and being now-eternally-blue Virginia, I can’t get things delivered.

I have to go somewhere to get my vote cast so it’s counted, and buy liquor.

But I only have to show ID at the ABC Store. How’s that work, again?

Flashback:

…and I didn’t even drink last night – 8/18/2002

Weird fuckin’ dream. I think I was down along the gulf coast, and I accidentally drove my car off a bridge. The rest of the dream was spent looking for and then fixing the car. In the meantime, I was finding all sorts of weird shit off the bottom of the ocean…..

But I got some good sleep….

Oh. Good sleep. Um. Yeah, being on the next-to-last day of my Tysabri infusion is probably part of the reason I’m not sleeping well right now

*yawn*

Seventen

Rather uneventful day, though I’m guessing that Microsoft pushed an update that broke a lot of smartcard applications.

News is rather slow, but I heard one of my various podcasts read this today.

Shit.

I kinda feel the same way, and the things about being in a big city are really gone. Who knows when they’ll come back.

Can I hold out long enough to let me get settled there? I really don’t know.

And after I do get settled, can I live peacefully? I’m not worried about the mob violencemostly-peaceful protests, but the agents of the state, itself. Would whatever I rig up for protection be protection against low-level criminals, or would be against agents of government?

Montgomery County, Maryland Democratic Republic (MDDR) got rid of no-knock warrants in drug cases. Plus, like, Marijuana has been decriminalized, anyway, so it’s not an issue. But they’re still fine for things other than drugs, so Duncan Lemp still happens.

I think it was TFC who were discussing recently that the “War On Drugs” is being replaced with a War on Guns.

But you don’t use drugs, or own guns!

I know, but that’s not the point.

They’ll still enforce it against the people who are least-able to take on corrupt government.

I have no idea what other site I was using when I wrote this. I transposed it to OD, but don’t have the site’s name anywhere.

Lessons?

  1. Be rich
  2. Put up whatever signs you think will dissuade looters
  3. Vote Democrat!

Maybe it’ll work. But I can’t do any of those, easily. I’m working on the first, but it’s a whole-hog approach.

We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it…..

Flashback:

OJ #6 – 8/17/2002

Saturday, August 17th, 2002 2:55 am

I used to be 1337, now I’m just 14m3

So, yeah, I bought a Mac. B+W G3. Got it in Thursday afternoon. It’s been a bit of a chore to get everything up and running, but I think I’m finally getting there.

The machine I bought didn’t have an OS installed. No problem, because I wanted to run OS9 and OSX, anyway. I figured I’d grab a copy of OS9, and wait for OSX 10.2 to come out next week. First of all, I couldn’t find a copy of OS9. Nobody is selling it. I only found one copy on Pricegrabber, but it was like 85 bucks, and didn’t seem to be from a reputible dealer. So I went down to CompUSA and asked whether I’d still get the $29 upgrade to 10.2 if I went ahead and bought a copy of OSX 10.1. They said that’s the deal, so I decided to go ahead and buy it. When I opened the box, guess what was inside? A copy of OS9. Turns out OSX actually runs a copy of OS9 inside a virtual machine in order to run legacy apps……sorta like what OS/2 used to do with Windoze 3.1.

Anyway, to get “Classic” mode to work properly, you’ve gotta have a working OS9 install. But OS 9.2.1 refused to install on my machine. I needed a firmware upgrade. Okay, so I’ll just do that from inside OSX, because that installs fine. No dice. The installer only runs in the old OS. Shit. Long story short, an older version of OS9 I found at work allowed me to run the update, then install 9.2.1, which is what I’m running now. I always dug it anyway.

OSX is sweet in its own kind of way. Right now I’m basking in the nostalgia of old skool mac, yo. It’s been a long time away, and I feel like a tool for not getting one of these sooner.

In conclusion……see the subject.

Current Mood: nostalgic

I gave that Mac away after lending it several times. OS X 10.1 was fun in that if Finder crashed, you couldn’t do anything with the machine at all. Unless you turned on ssh access. Then you could ssh to it, and reboot it.

With my opening topic in mind, I can only imagine if computers were regulated like the rest of the economy. There’d be a regulation that says I have to be able to run 68K Carbon binaries on my new Macbook Air.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

Sixteen

Motivation to not write is kind of high this morning.

In a way, this is a good thing.

No, today I’m working to not do anything work-like.

I should plan some time the rest of the year when I’m not going to work.

Maybe when my protection is finally paid, I will finally take some time to myself.

But what can I do?

I really don’t have any idea.

So. News.

CNet has a story about when the next stimulus checks could arrive.

But nothing’s been passed. Is CNet just itching for people to get more checks so they buy new tech stuff? I know that most of the ones we got before went to buy new iPhones for me and my wife.

But I’m still having trouble putting my finger on a few things I want. “What do you want for your birthday??!?”

I don’t know. There’s new stuff I could use, certainly, but I just don’t have the really do anything..

Maybe that’s a desire to retire in a way?

Don’t know.

So flashback….

Billy, You like movies about Gladiators? – 8/16/2001

Blah blah blah…not working, tired, blah blah blah porn.

Billy, You ever been in a Turkish Prison?

I’ve developed a distinct problem as excess testosterone kicks in. See, it’s like this….although I’m twenty-two in less than a week, I cannot grow a beard, despite my best efforts. I get weird patches of growth, and none of it ever comes in very well. I still have that problem. And it was okay, though, because although shaving bothers me, I was able to go two days between shaves if needbe. Not anymore. I’m developing five o’clock shadow. So I have to shave. Or not. I can just look…..scruffy.

Billy, You ever hang around a gymnaisium?

Am excited that I may get to meet an OD’er IRL. 😉 Will give details if it happens, and if there’s mutual consent to do so. That’s later today, now, I guess. It’s going to be busy. [REDACTED] birthday today. She was born on the one-year anniversary of Elvis Death Day.

Billy, You ever seen a grown man naked?

My head works like a radio show. Stern. Don & Mike. Corolla. Various drops interspersed in the main though stream.

Kinda how I roll.

*quackquack*

Yeah. Never was much in to Imus.