Category: Uncategorized

  • Another day closer…

    It’s amazing how my outlook on things has improved since I finalized my launch date. I now get up every morning with a smile as I’m another day closer to getting the hell out of here.

    The new bearings for the rear axle on the Honda should be in today and installed. Once that is done I’m going to see if I can get the AC in the car fixed for free as well… I don’t really *need* the AC for the trip, but it’ll be nice later in the year when Denver gets around to being punished some more and it’s 100+ in the shade.

    Which brings up an interesting point: You know how everyone says, “But it’s a dry heat”? They’re right. It got up to about 78 here the other day and I thought I was going to die… The air got so thick with humidity it was hazy and it felt like it was in the mid 90’s. No amount of sweating works as you’re already wet and there’s no way to evaporate to cool off as the air around you is wetter than you are, which makes breathing without gills difficult at best.

    It was truly miserable.

    An interesting aside to all of this misery is that the swampy rain-forest atmosphere here is really good for plants. All kinds of plants. And as it’s spring the plants are all having plant sex… Zeze’s burgundy colored Lincoln was a nice mucous-green yesterday after work due to all of the pollen… You can see it floating in the air as a fine mist.

    Ick.

    I have to breathe that!?

    Ick.

    Then there are the bugs… Virginia has the insect market cornered and they don’t like it out side any more than you do. So it’s a constant battle to keep the outdoors, outdoors. The mosquitoes here can suck a small child dry in seconds so -no one- is outside near sunset for fear of their life. Then there are the “noseeums”… Some microscopic biting black fly that burrows into your skin, causes big red welts, and travels in packs…

    Ahh, highlights of a Virginian summer…

    And people live here.

    Pink FloydWelcome to the Machine

  • Almost done…

    Well, here it is, Sunday, and guess where I am? Work…

    Dan has suddenly decided that the full page add for the phone book needs to be done in black and white rather than color… And the press date is Tuesday.

    So I have 3 days to do a weeks worth of layout… I just wish the man would stop, focus for a second, and make up his mind.

    He’s driving me crazy… His whole “start somewhere near the end, then jump to the beginning” style of doing anything is enough to drive the pope to drink.

    Oh well. I’ll be out of here sooner or later; probably sooner rather than later at this rate.

    BostonForeplay/Long Time

  • Roadtrip 2; Maryland…

    Yesterday went rather well, even if I didn’t manage to get out of the house till 2 pm and Dan kept calling to find out where I was, what I was doing, how long it was going to take, which car I was in, when I was coming in to work, if I was coming into work today, where random object “A” was, who I last talked to at Mary Washington about a teaching position, how the car was running, where Kevin was, and about fifty other things I can’t remember… In other words, it was a nice day and a typical Dan-ing.

    See, if Dan had his way all of his salaried employees would work 8 am to 8 pm Monday though Saturday and only have to put in an hour or two on Sundays as long as they put in a few hours at home every night… After all, that’s what Dan does. The problem here is Dan makes roughly a million a year take home and we make far, far less.

    So, though it irks him, I try to get two days off a week and try to only work 9 to 7-8, depending on what emergencies Dan creates around 6 pm when the hourly folks go home.

    But more about Dan in some other post… He’s a nice guy, just hell to work with.

    Warning: Hardcore nerd stuff ahead…


    Anyways the trip went well. I once again brought Zeze along for the ride and we headed over to southern Maryland by way of highway 301 and the Nice bridge… It’s really the Nice bridge; named after some guy with the last name Nice.

    From the top of the bridge you can see our first site of the day, Faulkner. Faulkner is HUGE and can be used as an example of what the underground stations look like size-wise.

    As with a several of the sites we went to yesterday, Faulkner appears to still be in use by AT&T though it has a few cell phone sets on the tower, there is no indication that the site is owned by anyone other than AT&T. Also, in the deeps of Maryland there hasn’t been much in the way of population growth, so chances are everyone’s calls still go though the switch at Faulkner.

    There was a lot of recent fiber running all over the place and a newer fiber “hut” at the base of the tower which also leads one to believe that it’s an active facility.

    Once I had taken lots of photos from around the site we discovered that the front door was unlocked, so I simply strolled in. It’s just an entry foyer, but even that was fascinating from a “cold war” view because there are simply just two doors inside… Both massive metal doors that look like they’d be found on a bomb shelter, one goes into the main building, the other says “Shower Room” which is the radiation shower entrance.

    From Faulkner we trekked north on 301 to Waldorf.

    Waldorf is another active AT&T site complete with employee cars, cameras, and lots of “go away” signs.

    The neatest thing about Waldorf was the Ground Entry Point (GEP) antennas on the top of the tower. GEP might still be hush-hush, so if you’re curious, look it up on Google.

    The next site was Pomonkey… I just love east coast town names. 🙂

    This was your typical route-relay site. Nothing of much interest here besides the facilities work that American Tower has done to the side to provide for up to six cell companies… This includes new fiber service to the building and new power equipment.

    Of course it’s obvious we’re in the back woods by the presence of a sign type I’d never seen before; a “do not climb” sign… Apparently ten foot chain link, barbed wire, and hazardous RF level signs don’t mean much here.

    From Pomonkey (chuckle) we back tracked a bit to Westwood.

    Westwood looks like a building style found where two separate microwave routes merged. AT&T seemed to have this design system where when two routes met, each had it’s own building ‘welded’ onto the building for the other. Essentially you’d end up with the equivalent of two sites in one, sharing a common tower.

    This facility has also had the power and communications upgrade from American Tower.

    Next up was a site in the really deep, backwoods, nowhere of Maryland; Prince Frederick.

    Prince Frederick (PF) is so far away from what constitutes for humanity in southern Maryland that it looks like it’s been untouched from the “day of silence” when the network was turned down. I took quite a few photos of this site simply due to the fact that this is what they used to really look like.

    Of all the sites I’ve seen here on the east coast, this is the first that I’ve found that has been vandalized; all of the silver bearing wave guide from the base of the tower has been cut away and removed. All of the copper wave guide tube is still there, but the silver radius bends aren’t, which means someone knowledgeable has been here.

    The tower also had lines hanging down with petcocks on them to drain condensation out of the verticals… Another feature you don’t see in Colorado.

    From here is was getting late so we decided to head for home. Here is where Zeze learned an important thing; trust the Bill and his amazing direction/distance senses.

    Zeze used to live in southern Maryland and figured there was a better way to get home than what I figured… We ended up about ten miles from Baltimore. 😉

    See, between Rai’s eyes, Aryntha’s jedi phozone abilities, and my mutant direction sense, we’re pretty much unstoppable in tower finding.

    Anyways on the way back south down 301 we took a quick side trip to see if we could get close enough to “Brandywine” to get a photo or two with no luck. Brandywine sits in the middle of a rather large government block of land and is labeled on maps as “US Naval Radio Station”. We made it as far as the gates to the area, but the tower is nowhere to be seen from there.

    So we got back here to the townhouse at about 10 pm and I spent the next 2.5 hours whipping all of the images into shape and getting the temporary OMFUXS-east web site set up to work by date.

    That was my day yesterday. 🙂

    And with that I’m off to work…

    YesBig Generator

  • A possible day off…

    As I attempt every Friday, I will try to not go into work today. Instead, I think I will head northeast of FBerg and see if I can find a few more towers to take a look at.

    I think today I will attempt to find some locations in Maryland; “Faulkner” (which should be huge according to my route maps), “Waldorf”, “Pomonkey” (I love Va place-names), “Westwood”, and maybe “Prince Frederick”.

    These are all on the Maryland peninsula and all are within 25 miles of Faulkner, so it shouldn’t be too extreme of a trip. I figure if I stick to the back-woods areas traffic shouldn’t be as big of an issue as it was last week. That and there is some very nice scenery here there in Maryland if you can get to it when it’s not raining, a million degrees, or covered in a thick coating of humanity.

    The PoliceSynchronicity II

  • Disinsipration…

    Ahh… The final changes to the advertising work are done and satisfactory and the Valvoline coop graphic came in today so I got that incorporated too. So it’s off to the press with it.

    In the lull I got to looking at one of the inspirational posters hanging on the wall in Dan’s office and figured “I can do that”…



    It looks really good when printed on glossy at 300 dpi.

    Zeze went and put the print I made here on the 4550 in a nice frame and it’s now on the wall as you enter our half of the upstairs… The IT cave.

    So far only the accountant and Dan have actually read it, everyone else just assumes it’s *another* inspirational poster…

    Dan and the accountant think it’s hilarious though. I guess I did my job. 🙂

    Pink FloydTime

  • Huh? What’s this?

    Hark! What light through yonder window breaks? Could it be? No… It couldn’t be.

    It’s SUNLIGHT!

    Houston, we have a sunrise…

    So here I sit, laptop on lap and cup of earl grey in hand here on the front porch. I like this time of day because the rest of the world is still asleep. There is a big forest just west of the complex (I’m on the current western edge of FBerg) and the birds seem to be happy with the sunlight too.

    I’ll be finishing up the yellow pages ads today. One is a full page color and the others are business card sized B&Ws. Yet more things for my business portfolio…

    We’ll, I’m going to sign off and just sit here for a while…

    Have a good day out there!

    “Weird Al” YankovicHardware Store

  • Door to door god…

    Just had my first run in with the local ‘Witnesses’… I should have known better than to answer the door as no one visits here at 8:15 in the morning on a weekday.

    Oh well. As usual I believe I sent them away with more questions than they arrived with and they forgot to give me all the paperwork… I was hoping for a watchtower to put in the window to ward off the next batch.

    Of course the fact that a big, disheveled, hairy monster opened the door and hit them with his patented ‘this had better be really damn important’ glare put them off their pace right out of the gate.

    Unfortunately my townhouse here sits right next to a big multi-million dollar Catholic Operations Center, aka “church” and I’m about two blocks from a big Mormon whatever they call it.

    I’m sure I’ll see both of them as well before I make good my escape from here.

    Stevie NicksEvery Day

  • Day 52…

    I believe the “logo madness” at work has ceased for the nonce. Dan has sent everything off for trademarking and until that is done I can’t post the newest versions of the logos for the shop.

    Other than that it’s another day in a long stream of days. I believe today’s word shall be “bleak”.

    Pink FloydYet Another Movie/Round and Around

  • Another week of “moist”…

    According to the weather it’s going to be another week of gray and wet. At least Friday was nice. I guess one day of sun per month is the RDA for Virginia.

    In other news it’s April 12! The Spamiversary!

    Back on this day in 1994, a pair of attorneys in Arizona launched a homemade marketing software program that forever changed the Internet.

    From Cnet this morning:

    Hoping to drum up some business, Laurence Canter dashed off a Perl script that flooded online message boards with an advertisement pitching the legal services of Canter & Siegel, the law firm he ran with his then wife, Martha Siegel.

    The response was immediate and harsh, offering one of the loudest signals up to that point that unchecked marketing would not be tolerated in the new medium. Thousands of recipients registered their displeasure, and a new label for the burgeoning business of unsolicited mass Internet advertising was coined.

    “Send coconuts and cans of Spam to Cantor & Co.,” one outraged Usenet reader wrote amid the uproar that followed the Canter & Siegel message. “(Be sure to drop the can of Spam on its seam first.)”

    Ten years after Web surfers began using the spam label to describe intrusive online marketing, junk e-mail has ballooned into an epidemic of massive proportions. But righteous anger over the problem has increasingly been replaced by resignation. With no effective solution in sight, many people now ruefully wonder whether the “Internet era” might more accurately be dubbed the “age of spam.”

    Despite unceasing efforts to rein in junk e-mailers–including federal legislation aimed at limiting the practice enacted in the United States–spam is big business. Some of its most shameless purveyors have raked in fortunes, while the rest of the world has paid in frustration, wasted time and stolen network resources that one recent study, by analyst firm Basex, valued at $20 billion per year.

    Even Canter later claimed that his pitch was a success, bringing in between $100,000 and $200,000 in business.

    Read more about it here.

    Thomas DolbyClose But No Cigar

  • Happy Easter…

    Good morning out there in ‘net land.

    Nothing really earth shaking to report from here, under leaden skies and rain.

    I did get a chance to fiddle with another commission piece last night which I’ll put up here. I started this piece back in 2002 and while the person who commissioned it got it a few days after they asked for it, I never felt as if it was finished. The image you get here on the journal has to be of such a low resolution and size that you don’t get any of the detail, but you’ll get the idea.

    This here is “Pendy” aka Pendragon from the MUCK Alfandria.

    R.E.M.Wichita Lineman

  • I’m Back, part two

    Yesterday proved to be a much needed break from the day-to-day around here. I took Zeze with me and quite possibly created another tower nut.

    Once again I was shown just how many people live here as it took over an hour to get to any site, which were all within 25 miles of here, simply due to sitting in bumper to bumper traffic… The worst was the hour plus it took to go four miles on 17.

    At around noon we started off by sitting in line to buy gas at the local Sheetz then out of frustration we left and waited in line to buy gas at the local Wawa. Yes, Friday afternoon there were so many people out there driving around that we had to wait in line at gas stations with 12-15 pumps.

    The only silver lining I can see on this is that here in Virginia expensive gas is $1.69 and cheap gas averages around $1.40.

    Ok, after putting $12 into Zeze’s Lincoln we slogged our way to the highway and spent the next half an hour creeping towards exit 133… We live about 2 miles from exit 130 which is the FBerg exit on I-95.

    The first site on the list was “Berea” and is located right next to the Geico building there in Stafford. It didn’t have any American Tower signs and the grounds had lots of old AT&T gear laying about, so I surmise that it’s still an AT&T tower.

    Next up was “Stafford” which is located north-west of Stafford by about 5 miles. As with most AT&T tower sites, Stafford is located on the Virginia equivalent of a mountain… A mole hill that rises roughly 80 feet out of the surrounding swamp.

    From Stafford we decided to hit the other two sites I’d wanted to visit. This is where it took us an hour to cover four miles back to I-95 on 17, then once we were back on I-95 it took another half an hour to get to exit 126 from exit 133.

    Once we got off the highway and out into the wilds of Virginia things got a little better. Our next stop was “Corbin” which is across the road from the north boundary of Fort A.P. Hill.

    From Corbin we went south a little bit more along the west side of A.P. Hill to just north of Bowling Green, to, well, “Bowling Green”.

    This site was the best find of the day as it still had it’s horns and was a very unique style of relay site. Of note was the design of the building and the fact that there were nine huge concrete guy-wire blocks ringing the site. I’m not sure what used to be at the Bowling Green facility, but it wasn’t free standing and based on the locations of the blocks, it was big.

    After that last find we decided that as we were already out and had already spent the lion’s share of the day sitting in traffic, that we might as well sit in it some more and get our trip to the CompUSA in Woodbridge out of the way.

    So off we went and spent nearly two hours getting from exit 126 to exit 156. I bought Zeze this new bluetooth connected headphone thing and picked up the external firewire drive case and 120gig drive I’d been saving for.

    We took route 1, which parallels I-95 on the east side from Woodbridge back to FBerg and even with the traffic lights we made it back in 45 minutes. We got home at about 10pm…

    So with an average time “on site” at the towers of about 15 minutes, 30 minutes to get gas and another half an hour in CompUSA we spent eight hours sitting in traffic yesterday and went a total of 102 miles in that time… So we averaged what, about 13 miles per hour? Eheh… I love Virginia.

    ElectrasyCosmic Castaway

  • 0ld f0ne…

    Ok, looks like today I’ll be heading out to see a few AT&T sites. On the menu for today is “Berea”, “Stafford”, “Corbin”, and “Bowling Green” with possible stops at “Post Oak”, and “Rhoadesville” for updates.

    Though Dan just called Zeze (my phone is off) and wants me to go in to talk with his daughter about art stuff… Fortunately I didn’t get the message.

    Brother BearLook Through My Eyes

  • A day of rest…

    Today I’m going to turn off my cell phone, hop into the Honda, and just go for a drive out in the back woods of Virginia.

    I’m in need of an adventure.

    I guess that’s another thing that makes me the antediluvian, gypsy-esque person that I am… I like to go forth and see things I’ve never seen before, go places I haven’t been yet, and do things I’ve not gotten around to doing yet. All of which are very ‘anti’ in today’s society…

    Well, I guess I’ll gather my maps, put new batteries in the GPS, burn a CD or two of music, grab my camera and get on the road.

    Get out and do something today… And have a great day out there!

    Peter GabrielGrowing Up

  • Whoops…

    I wonder if someone at Microsoft got fired for this one…

    Saved for future laughter, I present…



    Yes, that really is an Apple Powerbook 3400 being used to push Windows XP games.

    GenesisSecond Home by the Sea

  • Lunch time entertainment

    Ok, first off, you have to go here.

    Ok, from the web page that just popped up you can have a little target practice with celestial bodies!

    My first attempt assumes I’m still in Colorado and I drop a 500 meter chunk of rock on Virginia with some common speeds and angles. (swoon)

    Ok, the results are that I could make a 30+ mile across hole in Virginia, thermally kill everyone here, and the chances are slim that anyone in Colorado would even notice.

    I really like this web site. 😉

    The Alan Parsons ProjectLucifer [instrumental]

  • Day 45…

    As I sit here, steaming cup of Earl Grey in hand, I ponder the direction things are going. Wolf and Lyon have both voiced their opinion of my current state, literally, and Aryntha and Rai have done similar, though more pointedly. (chuckle)

    I’m nearly finished with the basic frameworks for the web sites for Dan’s main shop and the performance shop down the hill. There’s one more to do for the Ladysmith store, then that will be, as they say, that. Now there is the incessant tweaking that Dan will want to do and has been doing and then all of the programming that he wants done too.

    He called me here at home at about 11pm last night to go over the name for the performance shop again.

    I swear the man doesn’t sleep.

    See, he’s been with his attorney and trying to get the names of the stores trademarked and last night she sent him an email stating that there are already about a zillion “Express Auto Performance” places out there, but there aren’t any “Express Performance” stores. So he called to get me to change everything to “Express Performance” so that he could see what it would look like… Right then.

    I told him to go home, go to sleep, and we’ll work on it when I get to work this morning.

    A.D.D. as a management skill; he latches on to whatever thought traipses though his head like a rabid Pomeranian and worries it to death for up to ten minutes before something else catches his attention, then he’s off on that track. This pretty much annoys the piss out of everyone around him.

    I personally don’t mind it much as long as he leaves me alone after 6pm and on Sundays, which hasn’t happened yet. Maybe I should start turning off my cell phone after hours?

    Anyways, back to the root of this post; my escape from Virginia…

    I figure as soon as I get Dan’s web sites up, running, and get him trained on how to update them, then I can start figuring out how to get back to Colorado.

    Yes, right now things generally suck, but I’m getting paid for that level of suck. Upon moving back to Colorado there is that whole “find a job” thing that I’ll have to do, which isn’t hard, but it’s such a crap shoot anymore. Basically any tech-industry job out there is going to suck because it’s either:

    A) Preparing to move to India.

    B) Has moved to India but they suck so the few people still locally employed have to do ten times the work for what amounts to slightly better than minimum wage.

    C) Managed by an ass hat fresh out of whatever factory makes MBA ass hats and India doesn’t want to deal with him/her.

    D) Can’t be moved to India because the job requirement specs out for Superman and has an 80 hour a week requirement.

    Basically I’m wondering if I should just duck my head and plod on. I keep eyeballing those green fields out west, but getting there will require jumping a few fences and I’ll probably find out the field is full of prairie dogs.

    Hmm… Well, I’ll ponder this some more while I finish my tea here on the front porch, then I’ll head into work to make with the miracles for another 8 to 10…

    Have a good day out there folks!

    Jethro TullTeacher

  • Sunlight!?

    Shhh! Don’t tell anyone, but there was actually a sunrise this morning…

    It looks as if it might actually be a decent day today.

    More later. I’m going to go sit on the front steps with my cup of tea and enjoy some sunlight.

    Pink FloydHigh Hopes

  • It’s not an office, it’s hell with flourecent lighting…

    Well, so much for my day off… Here I am at the shop cranking out another dozen versions of the logo for the performance shop down the hill.

    Basically I’ve done a specific logo for just about everyone who works here now and they’re voting on which one works best. I predict that six months from now Dan will walk in here and ask “What if we move that word over here?”

    In all reality I’m getting closer to having them come to a consensus as to what they want. I’m staying neutral and not having any opinion on anything… I’m the artist, my job isn’t to “like” or “dislike” anything, I just keep pushing pixels till someone is happy.

    Well, ok, I told them that I personally didn’t like the turbo idea…

    They really like my idea for the black sign and in the few tests I’ve run here it’s crazily eye catching at night, which is good. Basically it fakes having blue neon which has been proven to be more attention grabbing than just about any other color. Then there is the green neon line in the middle that does the same…

    All in all, when it’s in the window of the shop down the hill, people stop to see what it says. 😉

    Well, back to the grind… I have to put my programmer hat on now and fix Dan’s database reports.

    Bleh…

    Stevie NicksTrouble in Shangri-La

  • Treading water…

    Well, I can say this much for Virginia; the weather men are usually right…

    Then again, the hard part of a meteorologist’s job here is making “rain” sound interesting seven days a week… I’ve heard everything from “lots of liquid sunshine” to “it’ll be moist out there today”.

    Again, being from the nicest place in the US, I have a different view of weather men. In Colorado it’s just simply impossible to forecast the weather more than about an hour in advance as it’s such a volatile atmosphere there with the mountains and all.

    So, as the saying goes; “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute, it’ll change.”

    Colorado is also the sunniest state in the US… Really, check it out. That’s why people from all over the world go there to ski; you can go down a pretty big mountain in several feet of fresh powder in your shorts. It’s so dry there that snow fluffs as it falls and 40 degrees is really 40 degrees, not -18 with the humidity.

    Anyways, I’m off to the bank here in a bit to do bank things and arrange my funds to pay the $1040 rent today. Ouch…

    Fortunately I long ago mastered the art of financial acumen and can cover such large monthly items while still having a fairly good time every week… For example I’ll be heading up north to a new theater to catch “Hell Boy” and “Home on the Range” today. So expect reports from those…

    I also got the emoticons for the journal done this morning… I got enough done to cover the basics and I’ll be adding more as time rolls on.

    Speaking of rolling, I have to get rolling myself. Have a happy out there folks!

    RushThe Spirit of Radio

  • ‘nother gramer testy thing…

    Well, lunch is about over, here’s the last quiz for the day…



    HASH(0x8ad523c)
    You are a heavenly guardian of grammar. You know
    every rule and exception as if it were
    ingrained in your soul. Your perfectly honed
    talent for language is a gift and a curse.
    Other people can tell how intelligent you are
    just by listening to you speak or reading
    something you’ve written. Unfortunately, your
    friends want to kill you because you never stop
    correcting them. Good luck with that.

     

    How well do you command the English language?
    brought to you by Quizilla

    The PoliceEvery Breath You Take