I’ve been listening to a lot of music on shuffle recently, and it ended up playing the Tim Exile song from the Warp 20 box set entitled “A Little Bit More”.  I had avoided listening to that track, I haven’t listened to a whole lot of the box set, but I especially skipped Tim Exile’s track as I found “Nuisance Gabbaret Lounge” to mostly live up to its title.  “A Little More” was really good though, so I eventually ended up tracking down his last album “Listening Tree”.  How one goes from making uninspiring, if not unoriginal, breakcore to making something this great (at its best moments at least) is not something I easily understand.

(pardon the stupid video, the song’s good)

I’m really enjoying watching the gradual development of a new genre as the more experimental and minimal electronic music genres get vocalized and become ever so slightly pop.  Matthew Dear’s “Asa Breed” would’ve been really incredible except for the slight issue of obnoxiously stupid lyrics.  Feel free to suggest other music like this, if I missed this album for more than a year, I’m sure there are several others I’m missing.

Last night I finished the first day of week 7 of the Couch to 5k plan, which means I officially made it further than I was last October when I stopped running when mother died.  Yesterday apparently was also the six month anniversary of her death, which I wouldn’t’ve known if it weren’t also my brother’s birthday (he mentioned it at his birthday dinner).

Hopefully running becomes easier soon, the plan has one continually pushing further, hopefully when that stops it will become less unpleasant.  My hip is still sort of bitchy…

For once, I noticed that a product I liked was discontinued before it disappeared out of stores:

Although I really did prefer the cranberry…

I’ll stop posting cat pics for awhile, promise.

Thursday I signed the acceptance letter of the job I hinted at in February’s last post, my official start date is the beginning of next month.

My initial intent was to make a post that is a laundry list of the things I am never going to have to do again, but when I start one it is harder to write than it seems like it should be. It is beginning to sink in slowly just how different my life is about to become, but the difficulty I have in making that list says to me that I really don’t understand yet. After years and years of being on-call most of the time, I have acclimated emotionally and mentally to being restricted in the things I can do after hours and on the weekends. I recognize that it is a fact that I could get in my car and spend the weekend somewhere else entirely, but I somehow don’t believe or comprehend that that fact is going to be true almost every weekend for the foreseeable future. Add to that the idea that I’ve spent almost the last 8 years of my life implementing and supporting computer systems of different sorts, and while I am certainly horrifically sick of that and ready to do something else, I don’t know that I can really imagine what doing something else full-time is going to be like. I don’t mind the travelling that I’ve done, but travelling 1/4th of my time, especially to the middle-of-nowhere places that my company owns hospitals in, might end up being less than ideally exciting. I’ll probably also net less money this year than I would’ve otherwise, but I thought I’d give this work-life balance thing that others seem to have a shot, at very least because it will give me a better chance at getting the other things done that I need to be doing.

Here’s an attempt at the list anyway, because I think the exercise is probably a good one for me:

• No more being responsible for fixing things that I am powerless to actually influence or fix.
• No more having to reverse engineer why a system is broken without documentation or support from the vendor (or anyone, really).
• No more endless fighting with vendors because their systems are broken and they know it is easier to blame us than to take responsibility.
• No more being woken up in the middle of the night over stupid shit (or any shit at all).
• No more having to rebuild servers because they are so old that they have rusted to the point where they’ve stopped working.
• No more having to explain to people that don’t really understand what a network is, that our network is functioning perfectly and they need to look elsewhere for their problems, and then having to repeat that to them the next week, and the next month, and forever.
• No more fucking printers ever again for any reason at all.
• No more endless parade of dying UPSs taking down entire sections of our network in the middle of the night.
• No more spending my nights and weekends fixing things that people were too incompetent to fix during daytime hours.

Apparently it was time for me to find something else to do, making this list is just activating my almost bottomless bitterness and resentment that I feel about many of these issues.

I will however, miss the total catastrophes, I always did love it best when all of the shit hit the fan at the same time (at least the ones that don’t involve issues with computer systems while patients are cut open on operating tables).

Here’s hoping.

I lost the month of February.
Give me enough time and I might be able to piece the individual parts together and eventually tell you most of the things that happened during the month. Maybe.

The only things I clearly remember are the things that broke at work, starting with this, on our storage array on one of our sequel clusters:

That failure wouldn’t’ve been so bad if not for 2 things:
a) a 4 hour replacement contract doesn’t mean shit in the middle of a snowstorm
b) it would’ve been entirely avoided if my coworkers had bothered to google that error message when it first appeared

I had gotten the bluray of Amelie imported from Australia that evening, so I spent a lot of the night watching it (while waiting for DHL next-flight-out’s shipment of our replacement controller (DHL still exists in some fashion?!)). I remember being glad I wasn’t one of the people who were busy clearing the parking lot all night in said snowstorm, which means I wasn’t that bad off at the beginning of the month.

Unfortunately, at the end of that week vendors who came out to fix our flaky microwave connection to one of our buildings up the street killed the hell out of all of it. We managed to frankenstein something together that same weekend, but it never worked well.

When you give people an imperfect solution, they just see the faults in the solution. They don’t really understand what the alternatives would’ve been. It didn’t matter that we’d put in 20+ hours of work during the weekend so they’d have connectivity of some sort come Monday, it just mattered that their shit was slow.  Granted it really was pretty bad (apparently the window coating or something interfered with the signal during the day, when we tested at night it was really decent), but the alternative was complete work stoppage.

All I really remember after that is many many hours of standing on roofs in the cold.

I fucked up my hip somehow.  I don’t know if I sat on it wrong, or slept on it wrong, or what, but it is amazingly painful to sit down, or stand back up, or lay down, or even walk most of the time.  Falling asleep with my 25+ lb cat sleeping on my legs was probably a bad idea.  It was also probably a bad idea to walk for 2 hours when it was already hurting a bit, its been a lot worse since then, but I really needed to do some sort of exercise as I feel completely disgusting, and a 50 degree night in February was too much to pass up.

One of my grandfather’s legs was a bit shorter than the other, and he was too vain to wear shoes that would compensate for this, so over the years his hip deteriorated more and more to the point where standing up was a few minute long affair that was obviously horrible for him.  He also turned down a hip replacement as he was somehow continually convinced that miraculous healing was going to occur.  I must admit that I’m somewhat convinced that my hip will soon be miraculously healed as well, but if its like this in another week or so, I’ll begin thinking about talking to some sort of doctor about it.

The idea of miraculous healing was a strange enough one to try to understand, especially as it spread generationally down from my grandfather, even without experiencing a little of what it was like to live with the constant pain he did.  Understanding what it takes to maintain  that belief through decades of continual pain is not something I can do.

This is mostly a test to see if my new webhosting is working, but the cat I like less was underrepresented on this site, anyway.

[spoiler show=”notes” hide=”hide”]I’m pretty disappointed in this. I got lackadaisical because I had done a pretest with one of the candles, and it had burned for half an hour, so I overestimated the time I had to mess with things, not taking into account the much smaller percentage of the candle that showed above the litter, and also the increased burn rate from the heat from all of them so close together. The fact that my camera was still set on SD from something else I had been working on the week before, and my complete lack of understanding how to prevent it from adjusting its light compensation also make it much crappier than it otherwise would’ve been. I’m out of candles and out of time, so this is what you get, presumably the end of me doing litter box themed projects.[/spoiler]