Month: March 2004

“Well, do you ever get the feeling that the story’s too damn real and in the present tense?
Or that everybody’s on the stage, and it seems like you’re the only person sitting in the audience?

Skating away on the thin ice of the New Day…”

---

I wonder, does everyone have one of those pieces of music that seems as if it was written specifically for them?

Me, I have about five, and one of them is a piece that I hear at least once a morning echoing through my inner ear; Jethro Tull’s “Skating Away”, which contains the snippet above.

The reason I ask this is in my talks with random people it appears that, yes, people do have a specific piece of music they identify with… Unfortunately these days it’s usually some piece of modern music that either deals with some personal psychosis, some authority issue, or some relationship-gone-bad thing.

I wonder if this isn’t another cause for the recent rash of humans I like to lump into the “asshole” category.

I’m hoping that I’m not the only person noticing the sudden upswing in humans out there that either cannot perceive the world around them, or believe that they are far more important than it. Seriously, from my rather detached view of humanity I’ve been seeing an ever increasing number of people who’s universe extends about three inches beyond their fingertips… People who are incapable of noticing the world around them.

This “shrinking personal universe” is the only thing I can figure that’s causing the issues I see out there every day. For example, people don’t even bother to look when crossing a street or pulling out into traffic anymore… They just assume that people will stop for them or simply don’t notice the several tons of vehicular death coming towards them. Up in Alexandria they’re having a really big issue with people simply ignoring stoplights and that every intersection up there is in a perpetual state of ‘yield’.

Then there is the inundation of “reality” people get these days at home from the TV. I counted no less than 12 TV shows that based their ratings on people competing against one another to be the biggest ass. It’s a well known fact that TV influences how people pattern their lives and humanity right now seems to be worried about being voted out of “life” if they’re not one up on every one around them.

Another disturbing trend in television seems to be the advertisement of strife. In a commercial for some “reality” show about these guys building street rods they emphasized the conflicts that would be in the episode rather than what the episode was actually about. A similar advertisement on a different channel for some “reality” show about people remodeling a house showed some guy chewing out some other guy rather than telling me what the show was about.

It’s easy for me to not like TV… All I have to do is turn it on for a few minutes.

In my view, things are rapidly heading towards watching christians get eaten by lions again, which I wasn’t fond of the first time around…

In the “I don’t believe they still make this” category; Zonkers…

I hadn’t seen these things since, oh, the mid 70’s when I was 5-7 years old. Well, they’re back if you look hard enough, and complete with the great packaging they were famous for in the 60’s…

The can I have here has such witticisms as “net wt. 24 oz (680g.) – Almost 25 TIMES MORE than one ounce!” and a dozen other things such as this festooning it’s exterior.

Oh, and the “Win a continent contest” is still running! See, in 1970, on the original Zonkers box, they offered consumers of the crunchy yellow stuff the chance to win the continent of our choice by simply identifying the following voice; “Hello, what is my name?”

Surprisingly, nobody guessed correctly. So they have released clue #2 on the new cans: “I’m famous to some, but unknown to others. I may not like pie or have sisters or brothers.”

They say here that if nobody answers correctly clue #3 will be released in the spring of 2036… Oh, and the typeface of the mystery voice has been altered to make identification more difficult…

Now if they’ll just bring back OK Soda, I’ll die happy. 😉

You have just received the Amish Computer Virus. Since the Amish don’t have computers, it is based on the honor system. Please delete all the files from your computer. Thank you for your cooperation.

Zeze and I decided to go see “Return of the King” again yesterday as it was our day off and it sounded like something fun…

We got to the local theater during the matinee times and both of us got in for about ten bucks. We decided to pick up some munchies for the show; a small popcorn, two sodas, and a bag of candy. $17 dollars later we were sitting in a half filled theater, which is pretty impressive considering the movie has been out for *months* now.

This is when things went south: All the previews were missing the center channel so there were no real vocals, just lots of effects sounds.

We sat there, cringing at the static pops and crunching coming from the sound system up until the movie started. We were hoping that the problems were caused by whatever gear they were using and the movie would be ok… Nope.

If Peg sees this; yep, the theater still sucks sound wise…

Zeze gets up to go hunt down someone to fix it and the theater staff fiddles with it all the way though the Gollem sequence at the beginning of the movie and as Gollem shows up to wake Sam and Frodo, the projector stops…

Zeze and I go to get our money back and on the way we encounter another movie patron who is doing the same. She’s an older lady wearing elvish leaves earrings and Zeze starts up a conversation with her out of the blue… Zeze does that.

We wind up talking with this lady in the lobby for over an hour. It turns out that she’s been recently laid off from Oracle as her QA job has just as recently been sent to India. She’s very happy to talk with us, nerd to nerd, for a while as she’s now working at Home Depot where her co-workers wouldn’t know a computer from a sheet of plywood.

Her biggest worry is the fact that Home Depot doesn’t give you benefits for over a year…

She worked for Oracle for over 20 years, has won several awards for the performance of her job, and was well thought of in the big building on the beltway… But in the end it all meant nothing in light of cheap labor in a country where there is no OSHA, no EPA, no unions, and no standard of living…

In the end we went our separate ways and I was happy to have met another decent human being. I had heard a lot about the IT industry being out-sourced to India, but had never actually met anyone who had suffered this and it struck me. I also ended up pondering the fact that it’s not just the money these folks lose, but the loss of health care benefits they lose for a year or more that really sucks. This day and age a person simply -can’t- afford to go see a doctor without the power of some HMO behind them…

I hope she makes it ok. I really hate to see bad things happen to good people, especially when there are so many bad people out there that it could have happened to instead.

Zeze saw my little Ri’Hahns and wanted a little zebra (Zeze is addicted to zebras) for an icon. So here ya go…

---

W00t! A day off! The first thing I’m going to do is… Nothing! Hahahaha!

To make it even better, I got paid yesterday which is my first paycheck from this IT-esque position Dan created at his shop. I’m making about double what I was in Colorado in take-home cash, but I also have rent to cover now so it works out to be about the same. Well, I’ll have medical benefits too which is a big difference from working with Larry.

So far the best things that have come out of moving here is that I have more space and the fact that I don’t have to drive two hours to enjoy things like book stores and computer stores… There is a Borders Books and a Best Buy a mere 15 minute walk from here.

And with that I think I’ll get on with my day of doing nothing.

Have fun out there…

Whoa! There is actually a sunrise this morning. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see the sun again.

Today I get to spend some time working on another web site for Dan. This time it’s for a new high performance shop he’s opening up which specializes in those annoying little rice burners… Dan found himself a few technicians who have created some of the fastest and neatest little street racers around and is building a business around them.

After looking though the photo album they have I was pretty impressed. These guys aren’t the typical 10 inch exhaust tip and huge wing on a stock celica “rice boyz”. These guys build 8 second street legal race cars out of cheap and light japanese parts.

In talking with the leader of these new additions to the Express Orphanage it came out that I do both competition stereo and automotive painting. So the chances are good that I’ll be in on a few of these gnat-like annoyances before I get out of here.

That’ll be fun… Well, ok, it’ll be different which is enough for me.

See, I used to have an 87 Chrysler Le Baron back in Connecticut that I had set up for the fledgling “Crank It Up” competitions back then and I took 5th in the one show I went too before I got married. The system in that car was completely hand built right down to the windings on the inductors I used to make the tailored band passes for the speakers… While I only had 200 watts in the car, it was a really tuned 200 watts and while it wasn’t loud, it was so transparent inside the car that some pieces of music could induce vertigo… I didn’t have a lot of loud but I did have a lot of musicality, which is what counts in my opinion.

During the one show I went to I had a judge in the passenger seat and was into the 3rd stage of the session where I got to play a piece that I wanted (There were three tests, one was a tone test, the next was a piece of music the judge supplied, and the third was your own) and that piece was Queen’s “Gimme the Prize” from “A Kind of Magic”. At the end of that piece there is a lot of glass explosions and the judge dove out of the car thinking that the windows were coming out. 😉

Changed the look and feel of ye olde journal to match the whole black and white motif of Ri’Hahn who’s a black and white Unicorn.

I’ll also be drawing up a few more little Ri’Hahn images for the journal just to add some variety to things.

This might be of interest to any arty folk out there; one of my favorite artists, Roger Dean, is offering really nice scans of some of his more famous pieces for use as desktop images. If you’re interested, click here.

More grey skies and drizzle here… According to the weather folks it’ll be like this for some time.

I figure by the end of the week I’ll be sprouting mushrooms.

Let’s see… Something vaguely interesting, or at least informative, about my day yesterday…

I had dinner at an “all you can pack down your gullet and still waddle out of the store” place called “Ryan’s” last night with Dan. It’s amazing to watch Dan eat… He’s on some high protein diet and therefore doesn’t eat bread or other carbohydrate rich food and instead eats pretty much nothing but steak. Lot’s of steak.

I have the unfortunate ability to go weeks on a single McMuffin, so I just don’t eat all that much. Last night I had to stretch out three small tacos and some green beans while Dan packed away several fried fish, porterhouse steaks, a chicken breast, and desert consisting of ice-cream, pie(sans crust), and some sort of cherry based cobbler thing…

See, Dan takes us, Zeze and I, out to dinner at least once a week. It’s kind of a “dinner and a meeting” thing as opposed to “dinner and a movie”.

Last week’s “dinner and a meeting” choice was a steak place called “Damon’s”; I had some soup and a small sandwich, Zeze had a small steak and potato plate, and Dan had a 24 ounce prime rib followed by a 14 ounce house steak covered in gorgonzola cheese and pepper corns.

Yes, going to dinner with Dan is an adventure.

Other than that there just isn’t much to report from here in redneckville…

359 days to go…

Well, it’s a grey and rainy day outside today which really makes me long for a fireplace, a cup of Earl Grey, and a good book… I have the good book, so I suppose one out of three isn’t bad.

Yesterday morning turned out to be kind of interesting in a back woods Virginia kind of way… I had to run down to old-town Fredericksburg to get the utilities switched into my name and this required going to the town hall…

I walk though the doors of this building which has been shot at with cannons during the Civil War and am presented with three choices. On my left is the County Assessor and Notary window, on my right is the City Treasurer window, and between them is a dark hallway leading deep into the bowels of the building. Well, as neither of the two windows say anything about public works I decide to spelunk my way into the innards of the FBerg political machine.

I follow this tunnel along while admiring the rustic “been here since the US was founded” bulletin board which is festooned with hundreds of random notes including a missing horse note and several people selling some random rust bucket. I press on past the wrought iron pull down grate for the elevator which may very well still be mule powered and finally encounter a wooden door with a piece of paper taped to it; “Public Works”.

I enter the closet like space which ends in a half-round teller-style window and explain to the very nice lady why I’m there. She’s much like a happy grandmother and I find myself yes-mam’ing her and expecting a tray of tollhouse cookies any time now.

She takes my information and actually types it all up into a form which she puts into an actual file cabinet back there in her office, then types up another sheet of paper and hands it to me with instructions to go see the Treasurer out front. Yes, I said types… And not a computer either. We’re talking IBM Selectric here.

After the nicest “Have a nice day Mr. Miller” that I’ve ever gotten I return to the surface and stop by the Treasurer’s window… The same lady greets me there and due to the look of surprise on my face she explains that the Public Works department is new and that it used to be a function of the City Treasurer’s Office, and that they haven’t really gotten it all sorted out yet. The big problem is that the Treasurer is allowed to handle money while the Public Works folks aren’t, so she has to send people from one desk to another… Ok.

Anyways I pay my $60 filing and meter fee and she types up another form which goes into another big wooden filing cabinet, then, after making some accountant shorthand in this huge book, types up a receipt for the money which she hands me.

Small town? Not really… We have everything from Best Buy and Circuit City to Chipotle and Crutchfield’s here. There are no less than five Chik-Fil-A’s here and about a dozen McDonald’s stores… A Super Target and a Super Wal-Mart too…

I guess it’s just a case of “it’s not broken so why fix it?” and they are still using the same system they used when the town was a battle field.

Virginia is another one of those places where you learn that climate is what you expect and weather is what you get. A case in point was the micro-hurricane that came though last night…

It started off with 60+ mph hour winds and sprinkles of rain blowing up against the north end of the condo here with enough force to make the brand new walls creak and newly planted trees in the parking lot fall over. Then the downpour of biblical proportions began which made it appear as if someone was aiming a fire-hose at the windows and that was followed by a WWII type barrage of lightning and thunder. All of this was either do to, or caused, a 10-15 degree drop in the temperature outside in as many minutes which required switching from AC to heat for the night.

Dan called from the shop during the high speed wind phase, where Zeze and I were opening the north and south doors of the condo and creating miniature tornados in the living room for fun, to tell us that the power was down. So we had to stop with the entertainment and log on to all of the various servers there to shut everything down… I just checked as much as I can from here and it appears that everything is ok… Except that the Sun is still down. The Sun is the Unix-based email/DNS machine which is a holdover from when Zeze’s son ran the network there.

This morning it’s back to hot and humid so I just switched back from heat to AC.

It cost so much to move into this place and get myself square with Virginia that I didn’t have anything left over for living room furniture. But you can tell two nerds live here by the dual $3000 G4 powerbooks laying about.

No furniture to speak of, but we have the best laptop computers on Earth… Need to have priorities you know. 😉

Both desks point at our amazing home theater setup; a 13 inch monitor hooked to the cable box and running discarded computer speakers. It’s suitable for Discovery Channel stuff, which is about all I’ll stop to watch as each of the laptops play a movie much better and with far better sound than the little TV we have.

Upstairs are the three bedrooms and yes, we do have beds. Zeze has the big room at the front of the house and I have the two smaller ones at the back. This is due to my dislike of heat and the master bedroom being blasted by the sun all day (the south end of the house). This also lets me have a sleep-chamber and a separate room for my artistic pursuits (once I get *another* drafting table and my art stuff from Colorado).

So there you have it; my current digs. I figure I’ll only be living here till the lease is up then high tailing it back to Colorado. There’s just nothing tying me to this place and I miss my “family” out there.

I’m here at work with Zeze, working on the web site for the shop, listening to Fleetwood Mac, and enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee while Zeze checks on some networking issues that have cropped up recently.

Last night Zeze and I went and saw “Hidalgo” at the local cinemultiuberplex; it’s a really well done movie for anyone who has an even passing fancy of horses and has some really beautiful cinematography as well.

The movie is based on the life and times of Frank T. Hopkins, a famous long distance / endurance horse racer who won over 400 races in his career and was a champion of the Spanish (American) Mustang breed which allowed him to win all those races. The stallion, Hidalgo, whom Vigo Mortensen as Frank Hopkinks calls “little brother”, almost steals the spotlight from Vigo on several occasions and proves to be just as capable of an actor.

Overall I thought this was a pretty good way to spend $20 and you’ll definitely leave the theatre with a nice, warm fuzzy feeling.

Well, I need to get back to the web site. Have a good day out there in the matrix!

Well, here I am in the new townhouse after a hellish two days of running around, contacting folks to prove I really exist, signing mountains of paperwork, forking over thousands of dollars, and of course schlepping everything I own (both suitcases) from location to location.

It’s a really nice place though; about three times the size of Aryntha and Rai’s place or slightly smaller than Wolf and Lyon’s house, split level, three bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, a garage, and heaps of storage space. It’s also *new* as in not even a year old and I am the second tenant. I’m on a nice quiet side street which is a short bike ride from “central park” which is the local shopping mecca, and I have yet to hear my neighbors do anything…

Of course all of this luxury comes at a price; $1040 a month.

Today, my day off, I’ve been obligated to attend the graduation of one of Zeze’s relatives up in Maryland… No rest for the weary.

Yesterday saw Zeze and I taking a mini road trip to the south of Fredericksburg along the byways of central Virginia. We basically got lost while taking a back way from Dan’s shop to the school in order to drop off some paperwork and decided to ride out our state of lost and see where it took us.

We eventually ended up on a road where I could just see the top of an AT&T microwave relay tower and based on the relative location of FBerg behind us I determined that it was the Post Oak facility. From there it was easy to navigate us back to where the old farm was, which is now called “Quarter Moon Farm” and appears to now be a subdivision full of clone-homes. What was once our driveway is now “Quarter Moon Way” and the whole area has upscaled quite a bit. Not bad I guess for four years…

At least the Post Oak AT&T site hasn’t changed and it still has it’s feed horns… Too bad I didn’t have my camera with me. 😛

I’m still working on the acquisition of a car, and once I’ve achieved that I’ll start driving around to all of the old AT&T sites here In Virginia. Hey, it’s a hobby. 😉

Well, I have to run and make with the web pages… Have a good day out there.

Some times I wonder why it seems that only crazy people get rich… Maybe it’s all those years of obsessing over money that makes them crazy? I don’t know.

Anyways, all of our well planed plans at acquiring this school out here in Virginia fell though. This isn’t really a “bad” thing, but it sure is frustrating.

The short version of the story is simply that the fellow who currently owns the school went crazy and refused to sign any agreement that came from an attorney. He insisted that our insistence on running all of this though a lawyer of some sort meant that we didn’t trust him… Well, yes, that is basically what it meant, but none of us are much for “spit and a handshake” anymore due to the countless times we’ve been screwed by it.

So this fellow acquiesced two days ago and wrote up his own agreement for us to sign, again without any legal advice (he’s too smart for that). His three page document basically laid out in several places the fact that the corporation was hiding something in it’s books and taxes, and he ended it all with a blatant “as is, where is” which negates any stipulations in the document.

During all of this Zeze and I were doing everything in our power to make this guy happy including cleaning out his cat infested storage shed and basement, and performing a complete inventory of everything in, or owned by, the school.

Well, yesterday after an hour or so of talking about it all amongst ourselves we just decided to walk away from the deal as something was amiss and we didn’t want to get caught by it.

The whole thing is just very surrealistic.

So now we’re brain storming something else to do as our financier has set aside $100k and figures we should do “something” with it.

Other than that it’s grey and overcast here today. That’s nice though as it makes the temperature outside pleasantly cool. I’m trying to enjoy it as much as possible before true summer sets in and kids start frying eggs on the sidewalk for the entertainment value of it.