Dear Internet,
All we’ve talked about is me, me, me. I think it’s time that we talked about you.
I think we need a break from each other. Or at the very least, we may need to start seeing other people.
You see Internet, I love you, I do. You’ve given me my husband, job & life skills, friends, and adventures galore. You are beyond delightful. But our current arrangement is not working out for me at the moment and that saddens me. Truth be told Internet, it hasn’t been working out for quite some time but I was always desperate to hold on to you and be deliriously desperately in denial of the hold you have on me. When we first met Interent, everyday was a fresh day of learning. I was always digging into your nooks and crannies, scratching you under your chin. Now, it seems, nothing is really fresh anymore. Everything is a retweet, a digg, a stumbleupon, a like, or a tweet.
I’m just not that into you anymore.
Continue reading “I may or may not quit you”
Tag: Internet
busy as a bee
I never did finish my NaNoWriMo novel, but congrats to the people who did. I had issues, matter and concerns happen in November and it was perhaps the overwhelming stress of trying to be wonder woman that I just threw down my lasso of truth and said ‘fuck it’.
modgirl.net has been nicely updated, much more than my LJ, which is fine. My new project was installing and using the patch for greymatter to add all the old entries in my journal and use a database instead of doing it singlehandedly. If you want to read the past, be my guest. I suppose I have this fetish that I need to get this completed sometime in my life. I have this fantasy where my children will find the web page and get a better understanding of my life. Nothing like living in the ether.
[Originally published at LiveJournal.]
coming soon
First I was in Michigan for five weeks. Then! Roadrunner got hit with codered and rendered us useless (internet wise) for almost 2.5 weeks. Then! Moe turned off FTP and I had to figure out how to upload all my crap other than command line scp (godbless winSCP and it’s gui).
I am hoping to get everything back up and in working order within the next few weeks. If you are truly bored go to watch me cam. In color even. You may even get a glimpse of one of my new tattoos/piercings. I forgot to mention that part didn’t i? 😉
See you soon
x0x0x
Lisa
a self-portal
betcha always wanted to know how i got so many goddamn domain names
well, regardless if you do or don’t, heh, here it is anyways. it is currently sitting at www.simunye.com/readme.html, so you can go to www.simunye.com to view all my crap 😉
what the hell is a “self portal”?
i asked myself that several times when i came up with the idea, but it basically boils down to this:
in 1996 i registered my first domain, simunye.com (which you are looking at now). initially, it was just your usual catchall personal homepage bullshit with my writings, bs, pictures and what not. starting in late 1997, i registered simunye.org and had decided to start doing “consulting work” and make .com the ” business” page and .org the journal. later, .com just became a referrer for the .org and the .org became the lisa chronicles.
the lisa chronicles was the start of an almost daily journal that was included previous ‘zine work i had one as well as updates that i was doing more frequently (about 3x a week). In 1998 i had registered bitchasshoe.org as a joke and trippingonstars.org as a personal narrative on daily fragments. this brought my stable of domains up to four.
in 1999, when Paul and i had moved in together, that required a new domain: geek-haus.org which then lead to novageeks.org being registered for our friends locally. soon i became tired of being associated with the word simunye (zulu/xosha for “we are one”) and registered rabey.net as the new home for the journal.
and lastly, in early 2000, i registered verbosity.org as a new ‘zine i was going to be working on with several people (it, obviously, never got off the ground).
In late 2000, I decided that I had have enough of rabey.net, and registered both modgirl.org and modgirl.net. That is now the new home for the online journal. However, to keep things flowing, rabey.net does now point to modgirl.net/org so that anyone can access any three of those domains and get the same page.
then Paul had to get in the act and register supercilious.org for his own personal use.
my friend Sam and i came up with an idea and i went and registered annoyingthings.org.
this brings the grand total to twelve domains.
i then started wanting to do a genealogy site on my surname ” rabey”, and since rabey.net/org/com were taken, i will be registering rabey-online.net/com/org within a few weeks, bringing the grand total up to fifteen domains.
with that being said, i started the portal page to help those interested in me to navigate around and keep track of everything in one place.
here is the list of domains and what they do:
annoyingthings.org: things that annoy us
modgirl.net/org: online journal
supercilious.org: Paul’s website
novageeks.org: where the novageeks hang out
geek-haus.org: Paul and Lisa’s life uncensored
simunye.org/.com: self-portals
rabey-online.org/net/com: genealogy about the surname ” rabey”
rabey.net: points to modgirl.net
bitchasshoe.org: points to modgirl.net
verbosity.org: points to modgirl.net
trippingonstars.org: points to modgirl.net
the following categories are how the self portal is divided:
on-line opinions – where i sprout my mouth off publicly
on-line journals – projects in the journal genre
round robin – domains that point to modgirl.net
misc. – stuff that is unique
mailing lists – mailing lists i run
local – things that will be localized on the simunye.com network
wish lists – buy me stuff!
xx0x0x0x0xx
lisa.
bow down, for i am enabled
note: this is going to get rather technical, so i’m going to use an analogy that i’ve used in teaching in the past about how the internet basically works. To explain how traffic (ie: internet traffic) flows from your computer to the internet, it works like this: You live in San Francisco. You know there is are many routes to get to San Jose. Do you Take 101? Do you take 80? Do you drive the backroads? The point is you have many choices, but which one do you take? Do you take the shortest path? The fastest path? Each packet on the internet makes these kind of decisions based on routing protocols (what they can and cannot do).
Now, lets throw up another scenario. You are looking at renting/purchasing a home. You want to make sure your path to work is less stressful and trouble free. You consult the home owners association, the builders and find out that taking a path down main st is guaranteed to be yours exclusively alone to use. Your family and yourself can drive virtually undisturbed to work without having to deal with overzealous commuters.
But wait!
one day you wake up, drive to work and realize that your comfortable drive has turned to hell. You contact the builders and the HOA and find out that the selling agreement in your property was “limited” due to “increase” in others wanting to experience their own comfort drive. Since the guarantee was verbal and not in the contract, you are basically screwed.
This is, in a nutshell, what paul and i found out about remington apartments this morning.
You see, we are bandwidth whores. After working at UUnet for nearly 2 years and having broadband at home, going back to anything less than cable internet is purely bullshit. Thankfully RoadRunner has upgraded their systems and I can experience damn near t1 speeds at home with fairly little congestion on the network. Now that it is time for paul and i to move, we started looking at apartments and fell in love with remington. Not only were they close to work (five minutes!), they had amenities up the wazoo and kept telling us that they had “t1 speeds wired into every apartment”.
We should have known it was too good to be true.
What tipped us off this was a ruse was when none of us (paul, myself, scott who now lives there, greg and nadia) could get a set date on the install of the circuits to provide said bandwidth. We had started stalking the apartments since last august. By October we were convinced we were going to be living in one of their “luxury” apartments. When Scott moved in, we started pestering him about the t1 speeds. “in a few weeks” he said (as he was told via bbrez, the firm handling the dss and internet connectivity), by january 19th we were told. By February 1st was another verdict. DEFINITELY by the time you move in (march 1st) we were told yet again when we went to go look at the apartments. “If not by the time you move in, they will be in big trouble!” we were told by the apartment manager. So paul and I felt confident that we would have the requisite speeds. So we dropped our deposit off on this past saturday and were excited about the prospect of our new home.
But something wasn’t right within me personally about the whole bandwidth issue. We were not getting a straight answer from anyone in the company (techs, sales, marketing, etc) about what is exactly going on, so i took matters into my own hands.
The latest we had heard from Greg was that there was a t1 being dropped into each apartment building. Each building houses 32 apartments. Lets say 2 people per apartment (since most are 2+ bedrooms) and you are looking at 64 people on that connection. You say that half those apartments have internet-ready computers. And half of those are users. You are looking at 16 people who will be sharing that t1 (being conservative here).
[side bar: a t1 has 24 dso channels. Each dso is capable of 64K (56K + 8bit overhead). You can theoretically get 24 people on a single t1 at 56K modem speeds — which is what ISPs use. Now to make money, ISP’s oversell their connectivity, with the ratio being 5 to 1, which means that for every t1 there is up to 120 people trying to get on it to get the interweb from that t1 ALONE. 5 to 1 is a conservative standard, i’ve seen it as high as 10 to 1 (with the rule that not everyone will be using the interweb at the same time, therefore they are reselling that bandwidth) with the average being 7 to 1.]
So, if bbrez was dropping a single t1 into each building, 16 people would be (conservatively) attempting to use that. Using the above the sidebar as a rule of thumb, we would not be getting split between us nothing more than dialup speed!
So I called and got the number for the VP of marketing. He gave me the song and dance and I told him “Look, I work for UUNet, do you now who we are? We are the largest tier 1 provider in the world. I do my living turning up t1s, t3s, and OCs. What you are telling me is not computing here as “high speed bandwidth”, it’s a little more than dialup according to your own conversions!” Then he started on the marketing and sales bs. I told him to shove it (i literally did). I was not a fluff head without any technological background, I did this for a *living*. He referred me to the VP of Technical Operations, with whom they called me back and did a conference call on this subject. They kept telling me my idea of “high speed internet” was unrealistic (um, okay) and I kept asking them “Can you guarantee me 384 up/down connection all the time”. No response. This went on for nearly 30 minutes, when they said they would “get back to me” and we hung up.
I got a standing ovation in the cube farm when I stood up to stretch from my co-workers and people asking me to dispute their bills.
And the kicker?
They are not dropping a t1 into each building, they are dropping the t1 into the WHOLE COMPLEX! 13 buildings x 32 apartments =384 units. On a single t1. FUCK THAT! “Well upgrade as needed” i was told. And when are they planning on dropping the local loop? They just got the order into verizon and they have a 45 day FOC date. Oh fucking please. Which means the service won’t even be available on our move on date!
To be a bitch, I called the vp of marketing and said “Can you please let me know whom your peering with and what your plans for aggregate bandwidth is and why you did not plan on dropping a tiered t3 at 3 or 6mbs and therefore could increase bandwidth when demanded instead of installing additional t’s. Call me at work tomorrow at 703.xxx.xxxx. Thanks!”
Doesn’t matter. I compiled a list of seven possible replacements that paul and i did a star system and i will be calling those places tomorrow. I already know that one place has available rentals for our time frame. as a preclude to this all, this wouldn’t be an issue if there were other options in that area, but there isn’t! RoadRunner (our current interweb cable provider) only covers fairfax county, and the new complex is in loudon county. There is aldelphia cable, but that is uni-directional (t1 downloads/modem uploads) which would be okay, but pauls work requires something a tad bit faster than dialup! The area we live in is so convoluted because we have three cable providers (cox (roadrunner), aldelphia and comcast(@home)) and in some areas whom you get is dependent on where you live. you could live five blocks from john doe and have a different cable provider. DSL is not an option since most of the newer apartments are having fibre dropped to the curbs, which rules out true dsl unless someone got off their duff and did PPPoE, like bellsouth.
I’ve already told bbrez and remington that I will be filing with the BBB for false advertising. But my bitching gave me a sense of betterness because this chickie does not take bullshit from anyone, especially when it comes to bandwidth.
x0x0x0x
lisa lisa
some people collect thimbles, i collect domain names
I’ve bought 2 more domains.
if you are reading this now, you will now see that you are sitting at modgirl.net (or modgirl.org even though nothing points to that direction right now and probably will not in the future. however, for 10 dolla and fortytwo cents a year for registration, whose to bitch?).
the domain count is now: simunye.com, simunye.org, bitchasshoe.org, trippingonstars.org, geek-haus.org, novageeks.org, verbosity.org, modgirl.net, modgirl.net, modgirl.org.
i really really think I’m done now.
If you think that’s bad, I came up with a list of all the AIM names I’ve come up with (and registered) over the years:
in reverse chronological order:
LisaIsAModGirl
lisadefleurs
manicpanicangel
pr0nstah
litebritegirl
UUnetGrl
vixenchyk
sipgirl
linuxgurl
sarahphile
those are the ones i REMEMBER.
I’m sure I’ve also forgetting a few. probably. old age kicking in.
pauls also gone and finally gotten himself a home. of course, we had an argument on how to spell it.
if it were not for joker and a thesaurus, I’d be out of business.
readme.txt
paul’s parents have left and i’ll save that for when i’m more coherent. i just finished a project (albeit a small one) that i’ve been working on this evening. the concept is called “a self portal” and it is situated on simunye.com and simunye.org. i just wrote the readme file for it, and that is tonight’s entry (i’m lazy and full of good japanese food — fuck off).
———-
what the hell is a “self portal”?
i asked myself that several times when i came up with the idea, but it basically boils down to this:
in 1996 i registered my first domain, simunye.com (which you are looking at now). initially, it was just your usual catchall personal homepage bullshit with my writings, bs, pictures and what not. starting in late 1997, i registered simunye.org and had decided to start doing “consulting work” and make .com the “business” page and .org the journal. later, .com just became a referrer for the .org and the .org became the lisa chronicles.
the lisa chronicles was the start of an almost daily journal that was included previous ‘zine work i had one as well as updates that i was doing more frequently (about 3x a week). In 1998 i had registered bitchasshoe.org as a joke and trippingonstars.org as a personal narsative on daily fragments. this brought my stable of domains up to four.
in 1999, when paul and i had moved in together, that required a new domain: geek- haus.org which then lead to novageeks.org being registered for our friends locally. soon i became tired of being associated with the word simunye (zulu/xosha for “we are one”) and registered modgirl.org as the new home for the journal. and lastly, in early 2000, i registered verbosity.org as a new ‘zine i was going to be working on with several people (it, obviously, never got off the ground).
this brings the grand total to eight domains.
having that many domains (and not doing jack with them) started to bother me. bitchasshoe.org and modgirl.org were being updated (modgirl more so than bitchasshoe). novageeks was going to be static and geek-haus, simunyecom/org and verbosity i had no idea what the fuck to do with.
i started mapping out what each domains worth was to me and what i had envisioned. it broke down to the following:
- modgirl.org: daily (well almost daily) journal of my life
- bitchasshoe.org : running commentary on current events
- verbosity.org: daily fragments that didn’t fit anywhere
- novageeks.org: local updates for the Northern Virginia area
- trippingonstars.org: my “personal” website
- geek-haus.org : lisa and paul: uncensored
- simunye.com/.org: portals
the idea of a “portal” became necessary as a way of explaining how my mind works (many tangents at once), my different interest and likes without jamming it into one page. someone may like one page and not the others or what have you. having a portal to link to the many websites made it easier for me (it is all about me) without having to figure out where everything was going. also, anyone who is a “fan” (and i use that term loosely) will be able to see so many sides to me.
cheesy? perhaps. but it sure beats having to go through one webpage through link via link via link to crap.
the website breaks down into the following parts:
- online opinions: areas where i distribute my wealth of knowledge publicly. each link takes you to my main user page where you can read my opine on books, local dc crap, movies and what not.
- on-line journals: broken down by “genre” this takes you to the sites where i do majority of my writing.
- wish list: you know, if you feel like you love me and want to send me presents.
- misc.: stuff that doesn’t fit anything in particular.
- mailing lists: mailing lists i run or co-run that you may participate in.
- local: these are going to be sites on the simunye.com domain i have created in reference to personal interests and likes. i hope to bring a more educated and informative section to things that matter to me.
if you have any questions, please feel free to email me and give me comments, hellos or what not.
xx0x0x0x0xx
lisa
ranting: or why i’m getting annoyed with the whole “generation x” feel good books, websites, cutesy domain names and anything else i can think of
rynsey came over tonight to keep me busy while the boys were watching rasslin’. She and I walked around Safeway and two bookstores gossiping about people magazine (where are they now? issue), thanking god that we weren’t watching the PPV and various other topics. The topic at one point came up to web logging, journals, curtsey domains, and the like:
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU PEOPLE THINKING OF?
Ryns and i were sitting here looking for bras online when i piped up about the curtsey domain names: “Do they just pick out random names from the dictionary, hop over to internic and get a .org after it?” rynsey just shook her head and laughed. she had an explanation for most of the websites i was naming (on why they were named for such), but it seems to me that the trend recently isn’t just getting a cool domain, but getting a domain with any old word or a word you are fond of (however it seems that some of the words i would be interested in using for a domain are taken already by the same said group i am talking about here).
i spend hours upon hours checking these damn websites out. it’s almost an obsession with me. going through blog’s list of “who just blogged freshly” i check to see who has a “cool” domain and who doesn’t. if the blog is on a “free” site (like GeoCities or tripods or crosswinds), i will not check out the site. i am, an internet elitist. (i also do the same thing for diaryland.com as well as other websites for zines/journals/diaries — i check to see the domain name first before i go to see the site).
this goes without saying, that i’m bored with the current trend of things on the web.
i’m bored with going to websites and finding projects started and never finished or never explained why they were abandoned (like teethmag.com for instance). i’m finding it harder and harder to find good information or sites worth reading without finding something similar to someone else’s site. i came across this one only to have Paul and a few people who were standing behind me ask me wasn’t that a site i had already done. when it wasn’t but carried some of i’m also scared about a new idea i came up with as i had found a zine that had the idea, ran with it and has even down to the marketing idea we were thinking for verbosity already in place.
now, you have to understand my thinking: if i see something, i don’t think to make it better or think to make it different — i just wonder why people want the choice — because we have so much available to me. why have three different restaurants offering hamburgers (mickey d’s, burger king and wendys) when one is enough? i’ve thought this way for years. and it’s hard for me to make the distinction — and even more so (however, i’m the connoisseur of pens. pentel rsvps in fine point blue please) now as i get older — i keep thinking: who am i, what do i like, and what do i want.
cheap and easy
you may notice some changes happening around pronstar.org recently. Paul, my widdle luv muffin (even though he is denying me sex because I had a cigarette today) has been working on a web tool for me to update my site with ease from anywhere in the world without having to use nothing but a web browser. we are still beta testing that out — and while we do, i had gone through and started cleaning up my dead links. You may notice the links in the archive section NOW work (when before they hadn’t) and if you were really hard up, you could read all the back crap i wrote from 1995 on to current.
As of today, I’m up to November of 1998 on cleaning up bad links/images/spelling/typos. If you find anything in “Poetry”, “FUCK”, “Essay”, “Short Stories”, or “Past Journals” that has a dead link, typo, missing image: PLEASE LET ME KNOW! This is really really important to me as I’m making sure everything is organized and good to go when we convert it over. I’ve been doing my damndest to make sure everything is working but I know I missed some stuff.
like a bad penny
there has been a resurgence of activity on the lisa-network. first it started out with someone contacting me via aol im asking me about f.u.c.k. and when i wrote for it. which kind of surprised me because i haven’t had an issue published in over a year (probably going on two) and on the 7th (i think) anniversary of FUCK, jericho closed down it’s doors — and you have to admit, 7 years is a long time to run a ‘zine (especially on the internet). and that got me wondering about dear old fuck and as i was going through the archive list, it got me thinking about the mind set i was in when i wrote that. and then it dawned on me that my style of writing always began with a topic bar and the first sentence. there was never a set subject or topic other than what flowed from my head. sometimes i had an idea and i based it off of that — and other times, it was just words that i strung along to make it look pretty.
but the main point is, i had fun doing it.
i miss doing stuff like fuck, because it gave me someplace other than my website to showcase how i wrote. it wasn’t a matter if someone agreed with me or not or if they even liked it, but they still read it, which was an improvement over NOT reading it.
and moving along this curve, i suddenly got a flux of people who joined the mailing list, emailed me and signed the guestbook. while the domain is eye catching (is it not?), i haven’t been updating like i usually have been (even if sketchy) and there is no reason why this influx should be going on —
but who am i to argue?
so i think it’s spring — the influx of people getting what i have to say and the whole cleaning up issues i’ve been having recently with paul working on the back end of this dealie and me just plowing around on the front end. and i was thinking about this tonight when our new friend corey came over and showed us his old zine, verbosity. and again i got thinking.
and if you smelled smoke in Virginia, you know why.
regardless, i want to start a new zine. haven’t gotten any ideas yet, but i do have a few interviews lined up with a few people who are funny (like doug the advertising hound writer and tony, the vegan porn slut and finally keff, the mega star of userfriendly). i don’t have a theme and i probably shouldn’t be doing anything until i get pronstar.org up and running smoothly again, but hey, i’m just saying, if you want to help out, email me and let me know what you can do 🙂 i just am interested in doing something fun and worthwhile again — and basically kick start pronstar.org back into action baybee!
smoke free for five days
see topic
and in other news
- my brother came and gone. we had fun. we bought him a laptop. we test drove a durango. damn i miss my brother. pictures will be forthcoming.
- i’m being sued by shelly for a verbal agreement. the court date got moved to may 5, 2000. while some of you asked me her response to me moving from Virginia Beach to Fairfax, take a gander at how she felt about it.
- i am now a flaming redhead. i bleached my hair from black to yellow to make it red.
- we are not moving to boston. i think.
- i’ve been working at uunet for almost five months now. paul and i have been living together for nearly four. and we haven’t killed each other. joy! 🙂
- i am tired and all the wonderful joyful things i was going to tell you, i have forgotten.
good night.
x0x0x0x
moi
spring cleaning
well, hi.
as you have probably figured out, you have been re directed to a new domain. a few days ago, i had sent out a chronicle to the mailing list only that talked about how i was feeling — primarily with having the domain simunye.org. oh sure, there is nothing aesthetically WRONG with the domain, but after having it for nearly two years and being known as this name for longer, there were just too many bad feelings going on with it. this isn’t a new thought (i had mentioned it before for months) but it was time to do something about it.
i was trepidations about getting another domain. i already own 6 previous to this and other than simunye.org, nothing else was actually being used (half-hearted projects i had come up with and stuff i had thought about doing), so those domains were just sitting there. my friend dayan and paul both suggested that i use bitchasshoe.org, but that didn’t seem to jibe either.
i really, really wanted modgirl.net.
why you ask?
because back in my early 20s, i had bitched to my shrinks that i only seemingly had two redeeming qualities: being incredible in bed AND being able to write. while i’m sure paul won’t let me run off to start making pronmovies (and we’ve been seriously talking about making our own to boot), something about the name pronstar just is so *me*. so to commemorate a new year, a new life, it was time for a new domain name.
in the spirit of cleaning, i’ve removed all dead files from the other domains (simunye.com/simunye.org/bitchasshoe.org/trippingonstars. org) and everything points here. Paul and I are going to be working on geek-haus.org sometime this week (to celebrate our community we are seemingly founding) and we have also grabbed novageeks.org (which will be especially for northern Virginian geeks as we are now like the social coordinators of everything going on).
so what does all this change mean for you, the average viewer?
basically, nothing. if you are on the mailing list, nothing will change as the name of the journal is still called “the lisa chronicles”. And if you have come here by the redirect from simunye.org, all you have to do is rebookmark the site. the only thing is that there are going to be broken links here tonight as i’ve been pretty impatient on getting this up — as you will see the design has stayed somewhat the same but the aesthetics have changed. i’m slowly going through broken links and through pictures and finally getting everything straightened out. hopefully during downtime within the following week, there will be very little site maintenance to do other than daily updates.
BANG! BANG!
x0x0x0x0x0x