Five (7/24)

The thing I wouldn’t talk about Friday isn’t happening. I don’t know how I really should feel about that.

Yes, it seemed like it could be kinda awesome.

Just after I got that, though, something else may have come through.

At the same time, I am sorta getting in to what I’m doing.

No complete crash towards the end of the afternoon.

And interrupted by my wife phoning me to tell me she’s on her way home. I guess the racist fucks from Charlottesville are going to be rallying in DC this year.

You can’t imagine the immensity of the fuck I’m not giving.

I’m listgening to a recap of a Millennial’s weekend.

I don’t even know what to say, other than maybe I’ve eaten that much avocado as she had that weekend in my entire life.

Are you more likely to be swayed by logic or passion?

Given what I’m listening to right now, it’s definitely the former. Ayn Rand made lots of somewhat compelling arguments about reason being what separates humans from common animals.

Yes.

At the same time, passion is also important. Caring about what you’re doing, doing something you think is important, makes you more likely to do whatever you’re doing well.

I’ve been neglecting the things I think I do, even adequately, to try and sustain for a while.

Why do I do that? Because I’m passionate about being able, despite my failing eyesight, to look at myself in a mirror.

I don’t have any big regrets about what I’ve done. Maybe about some of the self abuse I inflicted on myself, sure.

But I never have portrayed myself as something I’m not.

Is that the battle between and logic? I don’t know.

I could probably ramble on all night, but I”m not sure that’s at all worthwhile.

Perhaps I short-arm this one a bit.
DNS woes are still wreaking havoc.
But I’m sitting listening to a meeting, so I figured I’d do the import of many, many old entries.
How do you feel about the political climate of the country?
I really don’t know.
I’m watching with bemusement about the 3D Printed Guns. Also what’s happening to the retired military talking heads who are getting their security clearances pulled.
The thing is, and I voted for one of the people who didn’t win the 2016 election, is the constant accusations of “treason.”
Could it be because people are really dedicated to seeing the president executed?
Somehow, I can’t put that past them. Maybe that makes me a horrible person.

Three (7/22)

I’ve been fighting through DNS gremlins the past few weeks with this.
I was too blind to get things really working the way I wanted when all of this moved to where it is now.
Then I updated to the new systems-ified Debian release, blowing up my well-tended legacy install.
I also haven’t gotten the mailing list stuff setup yet.
There’s backups on a sever that’s languishing somewhere with the rest of our stuff, as we hang in out temporary landing spot.
All that said, things are sort of coming around. Am I satisfied? No, not really, but it’ll get there.
I do have energy to work on things again, at least.
Still going through debates about where we want to land. *shrug*
You can change one significant event in history, and only things directly related to it will change in the future. Do you change it, and if so, what event do you choose?
The Treaty of Fucking Versailles.
There’s little more to say about that.
One of the places I am completely with Glenn Beck is that Wilson was the worst president in history..
Why did the phrase, “JDAM for Rushmore” just pop into my scarred brain?
More tomorrow, I’m sure. I am keeping up, though this afternoon’s issues gave me some second thoughts.

Two (7/21)

Before I start in to the prompt I’d selected, I was reading through some of what I’d written last summer.
It totally seems like a different life.
I was unemployed, prior to my re-entry into the cluserfuck that I’d left a little more two years before.
During my thing yesterday, I mentioned that when I was in the clusterfuck managing the Windows Server environment, I was digging through my scarred brain to recall things I hadn’t done in about fifteen years.
Yet, that’s what was still being used.
Also, never engineer from scratch.
Colonel Boyd actually addressed this.

The payoff isn’t until about the six-minute mark. Essentially, though, he told the Air Force higher-ups that they had a choice between making something that was only marginally-better than the F-111, or building something correctly from scratch.
Do you think you can ever trust a politician’s word
I really don’t have malevolent suspicions about others.
Maybe that’s a character flaw.
But I really don’t think most people are out to hurt others.
Politicians are, first and foremost, people. In the vast majority of circumstances, they’re not to do anything bad.
The geriatric folks running Washington, aren’t trying to mess with anyone.
No, they may not understand Facebook or Bitcoin. To me, that says they just shouldn’t try to control those things they don’t understand.
But, hey, let’s have the fucking FCC regulate the Intertubes!!1!
So, with the basic assumption that the vast majority of people don’t leave the house every single day looking for ways to screw others, you have to say that politicians aren’t either.
Would you be hesitant to ask a politician with a cell phone in his hand what time it is?
Well, he’s a politician, so he can’t be believed, amirite?

One (7/20)

Description of what I’m doing, and why
I’m writing every day until 20 August.
Why? To get back into the swing of writing.
This is something I’ve done for the past few years. It’s kind of a summer version of National Journal Writers’ Month.
I’m plunking away on this while I’m rewatching training videos for the fourth time. Most of these have multiple-choice tests where they’ll show you which ones you missed. This one, however, doesn’t.
It’s frustrating. Both that I have to spend so much time on this, and that I have to keep watching it until I manage to pick the right tile in the Minesweeper game.
It does make me happy, however, that I’m no longer in Norfolk, where, professionally, your ability to buy chances to play Minesweeper determines your career potential.
But, hey, Virginia Beach actually topped a list! Negative Equity
So, got sidetracked writing this. It may be something very positive. The ability to use the phrase, “make the magic smoke come out,: says a lot.
We’ll see what happens, I suppose.
To quote Forrest Gump, “and that’s all I have to say about that.”
So. Back to the writing. No, I’m not going to post my prompts ahead of time. I have many of them, already.

Twenty-nine (8/17)

I thought earlier today, counting on my fingers, that I was okay on the days.
Nope, I’m still a day early. Oops.
That said, at least someone actually did read some of what I said yesterday. If I was petty about it, I might complain that it only took 28 entries.
So flashback time….

8/17/2011

Pffftbt….
So, the nurse lied to me over the phone last week. I have two new lesions since December, one of which was active during the scan.
Staying on the Copaxone for three more months. Anotehr MRI in November.
There’s now a blood test for the virus that causes PML associated with the Tysabri. I guess about half the population have been exposed to the virus, and, therefore, shouldn’t use Tysabri.
Pfffftbt.
I don’t really know what more to say. Don’t like waking my wife up with less-than-good news.🙁

That definitely feels like another time in my life. Copaxone sucked for a variety of reasons, but it wasn’t the hell that the next two DMDs would be. (Disease Modifying Drugs)
The second seriously had me considering taking the Red Line like Kate Mara on House of Cards.
The third completely screwed up my lower half, and gave me nice hives. I did have another exacerbation on it, too, though the neurologist kept me on it because the flare stopped after IV steroids.
Then I had to find new specialists because none of the ones I’d been seeing accepted my plan from Healthcare.gov. It was awesome.
Back to the Copaxone, though. I wrote that a few weeks before my wife and I went on our year-delayed honeymoon. (Yes, we had our first anniversary in New Orleans. She’d forgotten about it, and was more than a little surprised when flowers were delivered to our hotel room….)
But it was some nice time away. People at work today were razzing me about something NOLA-related. I called someone a Saint. compared to someone else. (I think I called Bill Gates a saint when you look at him next to Larry Ellison.)
So. My usual line about the Saints — “I’ve been a Saints’ fan since before Jim Mora was famous for ‘Playoffs?!'” So before the information about Greggggggg’s bounty scandal came out. Before the hiring of Buddy Ryan Jr.-B. Before #BlewDat.
“Blew Dat” is actually the name of one of my fantasy teams this year. I need to figure WTF is going on with the other league(s).
Something to do this weekend.
But, all in all, a pretty successful week, I think. My ticket queue is nearly empty (and all but one of those is almost finished) I got my Tysabri infusion.
So time to go do weekend stuff.

On Writing

I’ve been picking through past writings. Words used to come so easily; my diary would show that, if you could read all of it. (And, no, even if you’ve got an account there, you can’t. Much of it is only for my own consumption.)
I’m trying to remember how easily this stuff used to come to me. Perhaps my inability to really read many things stops the thought flows. Who knows?
I listen to lots of podcasts. I’ve not dug out my radio from where our stuff is stored. I do listen to some things that are broadcast, but much of it is Intertubes-only.
I also might not have as much time to think as I’d like.
Getting closer on my work setup in the temporary landing spot. Maybe I’ll get it finished soon. *shrug*
Reading old entries, I have to wonder if I actually could handle law school now.
Yes, I can’t see worth a damn. My speech is even slower than ti twas before they know what was wrong with me. But I can still listen. I can still write. Could I be lawyerly?

Timid Wave

Pretty much how I roll these days.
I do need to figure out where all my archives are, and get them properly restored.
In many ways, I’m rebuilding from scratch.
This started this spring when my wife moved to pursue her new job.
About a month and a half later, I got laid off from the hell I was in. Our lease was expiring at the end of May, so off to join her.
I had a job lined up before I left. They were in the midst of a contract recompete. I would move, get settled, and travel to the company’s headquarters on the sinister coast for training.
I barely heard from them on the recompete progress, so I started looking at for other things.
I landed one pretty quickly, and agreed to take the gig. It paid slightly more than the thing that’d gone silent, anyway. I wasn’t thrilled with the location or work situation (no telecommute at all, versus full telecommute after the training week), but money was starting to get tighter than I’d like.
The final week of May I spent throwing darts trying to find something, anything, that’d let me back out of the thing to which I’d agreed.
I finally heard back from the thing with the west coast folks — they lost the contract, but still really wanted me for the role with the new company.
Um.
But they weren’t moving quickly at all, so I started the new job. People were nice, and I think I was trying to figure out what it was they wanted me to do. They, themselves, didn’t really have a firm grasp about what they were supposed to be doing. That I had some familiarity with what they were getting into helped, but I didn’t have a firm grasp.
Last week went okay, and I think I was doing some good work piecing things together.
Then Monday. Let’s do this day-by-day…
Monday:
I heard back from the recruiter for the left coast thing. They’re on Pacific Times, so it must have been about 1030 Eastern.
The message was along the lines of, “I’m not supposed to be talking to you, but email this guy who’s handling things for the folks who won.”
As I was composing an email to him, he phoned.
I had an offer letter by about 1330.
I start Friday. I guess some of the folks with the company that had lost the recompete, and had signed on with the winner, were really excited to get me on the team, still.
I told my supervisor, who’d told me that I needed to tell him if anything was going on, that I would discuss with my wife, and decide.
She gave the greenlight, so I accepted.
I SMS’d the HR manager where I’d been working that I needed to speak to him.
I’m resigning. Please work to figure out my last day.
Tuesday:
I got into the office a couple of minutes late. It’s almost as there was some sort of event going on in the District that rich white folks really wanted to see. After settling in, and getting coffee, I told my boss that I’d decided to accept the position. The HR folks still hadn’t told me when my last day would be. So this is probably about 0900. The HR people didn’t get back to me until probably 1330.
Oh, he can go now if there’s really not a lot for him to do. So a bit of tidying up, turning things back in, and I was out the door at 1600.
Fucking weird.
I’m writing this now just after noon on Wednesday.
I am supposed to start the new job Friday morning.
A grand total of six days on the job.
What is this, I can’t even…
But details on the new thing:

I don’t have to travel to train, get support, anything else. The new overlords are within easy Lyft/Uber distance, but my role is still almost entirely telecommute.
Yes, it pays a bit less than the short-term thing. But I also get paid time off, and paid Federal holidays. I also don’t have to spend $30 a day in ride fare.
I’m somewhat excited by the company. It’s one of the fragments of one of the bigger companies that disinter-grated over the past few years.

On that last thing, maybe I shouldn’t be. In 2016, one of the major parties’ candidates railed against the “gig economy.” (Yes, that might have been the candidate who won all of Virginia’s electoral votes, even though the majority voted against….)
Nobody works for a company for thirty years anymore.
Things like health insurance maybe shouldn’t be tied to your very unstable employment?
But don’t mind me. My brain’s scarred, and I’m missing my treatment scheduled for today because I moved….

New Year, etc.

Writing as I try and tie up loose ends on the next-to-last day of the year.
Making progress on some things, but others keep popping up randomly.
I can find some solace in realizing that everything changes.
And this site says everything gets deleted, eventually, but notsomuch this, now that there’s more than one author.

30

I’m finally plunking away at this last one late on the afternoon of the 30th.
It’s been an experience, but I’ve gotten through once again.
Seven years.
Looking back over what I’ve written, though, I’m not terribly upset about what I’ve brought out. Looking back, specifically, at 2012 was probably a good thing for me.
Today at work, I said something about the importance of having someone review my missives. I do sometimes write things that maybe aren’t immediate applicable. During a revision, however, I wonder how much I bury.
I really don’t do that, here. What you see is what you get.
And I got disrupted in writing this. First was this recruiter who looked me up in LinkedIn. It looks interesting. (How many companies do you see on Glassdoor with a 5.0 rating?)
Then a call from my patient advocate who I probably won’t be able to speak with after my health insurance changes next year.
So more changes ahead, probably. Whatever. Things are getting better. Are things as good as they were five years ago? Hard to say, really, but I’m excited.

Author: sean