Rambling Monday Evening
Lets start a bit earlier When I got into work this morning, I found a pile waiting for me. I already knew most of it was going to be there. It is vacation season at my day job. It seems like I know what I'm doing at work. If people didn't think I were knowledgeable, they would not keep coming back to ask for more. There is a saying “The only reward for hard work is more work.” I believe it. I hope Tpro takes off soon. If not, I'm going to have to ask for a rase. Not because I need one to cover my bills ... Because I'm worth it.
Now it is late into the evening The sun has long gone down. The August evening is hot and humid. No one is outside. Have children ever played in the street here? My neighbor is home playing a video game. The only sound outside is the rumble of car stereos as they pass. This complex is going down hill. I should move. I hate moving. I know people who move every six months. That sounds like a mess in motion. That is far to much excitement for me. I like my excitement boring. I just wish I had some one to share all this monotony with. I've gone over thaat one already.

Shizilate this site
You have got to try this site out. It does miracles for my blog. OK, it appears to be down at the moment. It is worth the wait.

Geek Moments
I am ...
Typing this on my laptop.
Typing this on my role up keyboard (that I'm not quite used to yet).
Watching Tom and Jerry on the second monitor hooked up to my laptop.
Watching Tom an Jerry from AVI files on my Linux file server.
Burning a DVD with my other Windows box, the one without a monitor.
Using VNC to control the computer that is burning the DVD.
Listening to Tom and Jerry on my stereo hooked to my laptop.
Watching the Half Life 2 demo video on the laptop screen while Tom and Jerry play on the other.

Is any one impressed out there?

Saturday Evening
Jen Rathuurn is playing this evening. I wish I could make the show. I've been a poor fan. It would be better if I were out among friends this evening. I feel much more alive today than the last couple of weeks. I think a concert among friends would have been just the ticket (so to speak). I'm trying to get some coding done. It isn't going very quickly. It never does. I have Futurama playing in the background. I will miss that show.

Crappie Hardware
Sylvia gave me one of those flexible indestructible keyboards. The trouble is, every fifth or sixth keystroke is doubled. In other words, I have to backup on most every word and delete some keystroke that got doubled by mistake. It isn't the speed I'm typing. I've tried fast and slow. They both cause the same trouble. This is enough to make the keyboard useless. My typing is bad enough without the keyboard doubling every fifth key in the process. I wander if I'm hitting multiple keys at the same time. It is dreadfully slow. Nothing works. Crap. The driver for the pad thing that comes on the laptop seems to override the mouse driver. This means I can't get the mouse to adjust to left handed use.
First the wireless router I bought doesn't work. It quits after a few minutes. Now the keyboard I intended to use for the laptop turns out to be a dud. The mouse won't work left handed. I think I should stay away from new hardware for a while. Did I loose a bet with God? I hope my code is less buggy than the hardware.

Migraine
This is about an hour after the above was typed. I figured out the keyboard. I normally type pretty fast and bounce my fingers as I type. This method doesn't work with the rubber keyboard. I have to mash each key specifically and make sure not to bounce.
Anyway, I figured out why I've been such a crab lately. I have a migraine. I've noticed the pattern before. I'm a grump for about a week and then I'm a happy guy for a day. Then, I have a migraine. It starts with a squiggle in my field of vision. It isn't a blurry spot, it is a place where the brightness is messed up. When the squiggle is on the left, the right side of my head hurts. When the squiggle is on the right, the left side of my head hurts. I can take the pain. It is the nausea that stops me in my tracks. I've taken a hand full of aspirin and Tylenol so I should be OK. The squiggle is almost gone now. That is a good sign.

Sorry it has been so long since my last entry. I have been very angry lately. It is all due to stress. I am at a place I've been looking at for a long time. I'm working on a real future and it scares me to death. I have a task from Tpro. The task is to write a script to schedule and run a backup on an NT server. It isn't all that complicated. I find myself trying to make it complicated. I have to keep backing up and looking at the simple flowchart that Tom gave me. I'm ashamed at how slow I'm going. It is the same thing that made school hard for me. It is the same thing that makes DND hard for me. I'm so afraid of failure that I trip myself on the way to success. If you succeed you are expected to succeed again. That is hard to keep up. I want to succeed I want to fail. I want to be free to give it my best and find out what happens.
My Grandfather was an avid carpenter. He build rooms on houses, basement and all. He took out walls in the house. He always left one thing undone. I said it was to feel needed. I think maybe it was because if you are not finished, you have not failed. I never asked my grandfather.
My Father was looking for a purpose. He volunteered for the draft int the sixties during Vietnam. You can ask the to call your name in the draft apparently. It is different than joining. He went to Korea and was a supply guy like Clingier in MASH. He was in charge of four million dollars worth of dump-trucks for a day. He said he felt funny signing for them. Anyway. I wander myself it having a legally blind son made him find his way. He seems to have his eye on the ball more than his father.
My Uncle on my Father's side (my father's only brother) was an Air Force man. He was in procurement as far as I can tell. He has driven a limousine and worked for some other companies since the Air Force. I only know now that he wants to sail.
I lack drive. Arnold Schwarzenegger was asked what the one most important thing that contributed to his success was and he answered “drive”. I believe it. Id-Kelly is a lousy programmer.

Pictures
Well, there are some troubles with the pictures. They don't all look clear, and one of them is turned 90 degrees. I'll get around to fixing them. Meanwhile I'll put some more on The next set of pictures will be of friends. I hope none of them get upset.

Between the eyes
I have a zit right between my eyes. My eyebrows come together in the middle a little bit. I have gray/blond eyebrows so it is hard to tell. It cracks me up how often I hit the zit. It turns out I take off my glasses and rub my forehead when I need a minute to think. That is probably where the zit came from in the first place.

Don't ask
This hillbilly lives in the woods. One day a city slicker comes by and asks "Where the action is in these parts?"
The hillbilly says "Well, there's a party tonight and you are invited."
The city slicker says "I'm there, what kind of party is it?"
The hillbilly says "Well, there is going to be some drinking, fighting, cussing, and sex. Can you handle that?"
"Sure, Who all's coming?" answers the city slicker.
"Well" says the hillbilly, "There's you, and there's me."

France heat
3000 people have been killed in France by the heat wave this month. The temperatures are in the nineties and low hundreds. No one over there seems to have air conditioning. I live in Houston. That is a typical August day here. Only we add ninety percent humidity to boot. If I were dropped in the forest of Canada even in the middle of August, I bet I would freeze to death the first night. I don't know how to cope. A report from Iraq said the temperature there is 125 Fahrenheit, more in spots. Now that is a desert temperature. That must be why the French hire solders from other areas for the Foreign Legion to fight in the deserts.

Meeting
We had a meeting this afternoon for Tpro. Things are looking up. I have a challenging task to perform. It involves doing some things I know and doing some things I must learn. It is the whole reason I got into the Tpro scene. It is late and I need to pay bills. I need to do quite a few things. I hope I find the strength.

PICTURES!!!!!

Please let me know if you have trouble getting these to work

Lesson of proportion
I have a aunt who's two year old got a little toy barn one Christmas. The poor tike cried because she couldn't go in her barn. She sat there with her feet in the open doors and cried staring at the barn. I felt terrible. I witnessed the suffering of reality upon the learning brain of a child. It was fascinating.

Nuremburg 2050
Big corporations do funny things. Enron got in all kinds of trouble because they applied their records retention too late. They destroyed documents after an investigation began. Had Enron just followed their own records retention policies on a daily basis there would have been far less evidence for the DOJ to sift through. When in Excel or Word at my day job, when you hit save a screen pops up for records retention. Some one asked me if that screen can be killed. "Yes, but then I would have to purge your memory." I answer.
I thought about the method I would use to disable the automatic pop up that asks about records retention if I needed to do so. The list of places I would look for the hooks that pull up that screen popped into my head. I thought about who put in those commands. Nowhere in the system keeps that information. A vision of a court room full of people in wigs on one side and robots on the other side pops into my head.
A wigged one asks "Why did you incinerate that orphanage?"
The robot answers in a very calm calculated voice "I was following orders."
The judge asks "Who gave you those orders?"
The robot with little emotion says "That information was never entered."

Work and friends
It is Friday afternoon at my day job. I'm sitting here wanting so much to leave. The walls are closing in. I have some friends who want to go eat this evening. I can't wait. Something so simple as a night jawing with friends sounds like paradise. I'm quite blessed in the friend department. (you know who you are). I've only really hurt one friend in the past few years. I wish I could fix my relationship with Dawn. She was and still is a good friend. If anything happened to one of us the other would still come to aid. I miss her terribly. It is the normal man vs woman stuff that drive a wedge between us. We hardly ever email any more. There was a time I wanted to marry her. I have no idea what she ever thought of me.
I'm turning up the music and trying to look busy. I've had some problems making things work here this week. A bunch of users have had problems getting things to work that worked fine a couple of weeks ago. The new workstations we are getting are all laptops. Something like 40,000 will be purchased over the next year or so. I"m responsible for setting up software to install from the network so users don't have to make decisions during install, or find the CDs. It is almost as boring as my other job. I support a VMS database software for the tracking of material and specifications for chemical plants. Just typing it makes my eyes role back in my head.

Weekend
Friday I got off from work and headed over to Josh's place to put together a computer network for a client. The computers had already been unpacked and plugged up. We sat there for hours making setting changes and tweaking things to work best for this client. We really need to figure out how to shorten that part of the work. It would have been impossible with a larger implementation. Hopefully we will get the work process honed enough to shorten the work.
We configured the server for ACT, and people's file shares. The tape backup is still not configured. Tom wants individual scripts to run the tape system and I'm starting to think the tape software is the way to go. We will figure something out. We changed the login stuff. We set up VNC on a bunch of the systems. Friday night was very interesting.
Saturday we went onsite. We setup the new computers and ran a network wire for a printer. We moved all the legacy computers into “server” room and got them ready for Monday. Some of our guys will be out there ready to answer user's questions and finish up the configuration.
All in all, this has been fun so far. I'm learning new things all the time.

Some things I've learned this weekend
My opinion of VNC gets better every time I use it.
The most reliable Microsoft feature is Windows 95 sucked the day it came out and still does today.
Windows NT 3.51 has no taskbar. It is amazing how much Windows depends on the Taskbar. (that is two thing)
The network wizards in Windows XP make it harder to setup internet connections than Windows 2000.
Windows XP has hidden control panels. At the command prompt type “control userpasswords2 <enter>”.
The $500 firewall isn't ten times better than the $40 one.
A 2 year old is far more willing to help set up a computer than a 35 year old.
You can fit 6 computers with 6 flat panel monitors and all the crap you need for an install in the back of a BMW and a Nissan Pathfinder.
Letherman tools are a necessary addition to the human body (I knew this already, but the lesson keeps reinforcing itself)