Slip.Net – A Most Unreliable Narrator

were most of your stars out? : a conspectus on writing part i

Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.

– Adam Gopnick on J.D. Salinger

This has many beginnings.
12 years ago when Justin and I were mere children living in San Francisco, I whined incessantly that all I wanted to do was write. I had been publishing journal entries online since 1996 but they were random and scattered, in content and location. There was no coherency to them with the exception that they were about me, whether about my life or my emotions, but the running theme was that I was somehow worked into the story. And most of it, whether I remembered it or not, is true.
In the spring of 1998, one my co-workers at Slip.Net told me how she decided to start putting her journal entries online in a diary format. I thought this was brilliant and in May of that year, I registered simunye.org. I thought I was being oh, so clever naming it “The Lisa Chronicles,” because that is all that it is — a chronicle of my life. I knew that it was something that could work: professors had praised my writing during my first foray into college that I had more than enough voice to make a living with the written word. Writing an online diary of sorts seemed to be a natural extension of that same concept – if enough people like it, it would spur me on to write more, push me into honing the craft and make something out of it (like every other 20-something pretentious fuck twit who thinks they can write).
But could I actually make a living off of it? I, then, never even bothered to try and find out.
Justin says that if I”m passionate about writing, really passionate as I exclaim during our near monthly argument on the topic, why am I not doing something with it? Why do I push it away and bind it away from me, like loose hair?
Continue reading “were most of your stars out? : a conspectus on writing part i”

the man who

i’m tired.
i can’t remember the last time i’ve felt so drained. i’m not sure when the last time i’ve felt this way before — i’m sure it’s probably been pretty recent, BUT, the thing is, i sat at work today, bored. BORED out of my mind.
I was thinking today on the way home how I’m liked at work, but i’m not popular. I’m not sure if this really makes a difference to anyone, but it makes a difference to me. Especially since I was coming from slip.net where respect was earned about who you fucked, not what you do. Anyways, I like where I work as there is no time clock to punch, i manage myself and my work can be somewhat exciting. But i’m not driven by it and i’m not passionate about it and i don’t think, no i’m sure that this is NOT what i want to do with the rest of my life. The problem is the following: It pays well, it’s impressive and it looks well when people ask me what i do for a living. The downside is: i’m bored, it’s stressful, and it can disrupt my life (ask Paul about the many days i’ve come home at 10-11pm at night). A lot of the people that i work with, really do love what they do. It is challenging and it can provide satisfaction and you do learn on the job. But, to me, I’m bored. I don’t care if someone wants a t1 or not. Seriously. It didn’t take long for me to become cynical about the job after speaking with consultants day after day who were not hip to what they had exactly ordered. and the times i have to explain over and over what dns is and bgp. i don’t give a fuck what my ex-boss Scott says, this is a tech support job — just way more high falutin.
when i first started working at UU, everyone told me how much they loved their job, how stable it is and how much the management (even with WorldCom’s interfering fingers) was incredible. And to be honest, none of that really has changed but there has been a rash of people leaving and we’ve gotten so many new “engineers” that now i’m a “senior engineer” which frightens me because i don’t feel like i know enough to be a “senior” engineer in anything.
one of the managers, lenny, whom i’m friend with; suggested that i come work with him in his department which is in the same region as i work in. there have been so many rumors and accusations with so many shifts of power, that i am not sure what to believe. but i do know that i don’t want to transfer to another department after the fiasco i had with working with scott.
i was thinking today that i have worked exactly half my life. i got my first job when i was 14 (working at sbarros pizzeria at woodland mall in grand rapids). i can’t remember why i had gotten the job, other than i wanted to demonstrate responsibility and make my own money. i made 3.15 an hour as i bussed tables and i fended off advances from the young Italian stud who worked in the kitchen. i don’t know why i quit. probably tired of being hit on, couldn’t get rides and i was not doing anything really worthwhile. the jobs lead on to working at footlocker, a few restaurants and etc and so on. now 14 years later, after holding down variety of jobs and such, i find that it’s 14 years later and while my life has changed significantly, i just find that this whole working thing is pointless. especially when i got the social security update of my earnings and i haven’t earned really jack. it was so depressing reading all those bright and shiny figures to realize that when i am 65, it will all mean nothing.
can you imagine working for another FORTY YEARS? I can’t.
pictures
here is a new pic of me and paul. new as of tonight.
i’m really really tired.
see you tomorrow.
x0x0x0x0x

I don’t feel right, I’ve got a crack in my heart

“You know Lisa, when you do something, people think it’s cute. When I do the same thing, people ignore me.” – Paul
Paul and I have been having this on-going “disagreement” on who started what and when and how. Simple euphemisms and mannerisms have become intertwined no one can remember who is a lisa-ism and what was a paul-ism. Scary.
Anywho, Paul and I talked about which songs describe us to a T. Paul picked No Fair Fights by Prick as one of them. He ripped the song for me and now that I finally have a working sound system, I finally downloaded it and have been replaying it over and over again. And anyone who knows me the slightest knows that I have a thing for lyrics (hello! Why I love Afghan Whigs and like bands) and I really dig the lyrics for this song. Paul will probably sit and smirk but hey, the words rock.
knee hurts. ow.
Anyway, I haven’t been writing much cos my life was anymore of a mess it would be a soap opera. Well, it is. Let’s see, in the last three weeks, I’ve had the following things occur:

Roommate sideswiped car trying to miss one of our nine cats (damage estimated at one thousand dollars)
I got canned from Slip.Net. That was fun. I won’t go into reasons why I was canned (the following Monday after being said canned, my website got hit from 80% of Slip.Net’s SF office. Word on the street was that I had “walked” out. Wrong, I was canned.)
I took myself to the ER for “feeling funky” — found out I am slowly killing myself with stress. Basically, what had been happening started out with ear ache for the last couple of months. Then I was always so damn tired. Then for the last week I’ve been feeling like “airy” like I’ve been really high and i was losing sensation in my body. I remember standing, naked and dripping water on my bedroom carpet looking for the strength to get dressed. Sharp shooting pains going down right side of my body. Nine hours in the ER and find out it’s stress. Which I kind of thought.

So, I have start eliminating stress from my health, quit smoking, quit drinking caffeine, lose weight and get in shape.
And that alone above isn’t stressful? heh.
(Damn! I wish I was your lover)
Oh and the trippy thing? Save for the ER, all of these occurrences happened on a Friday. And on THIS upcoming Friday, I’m moving:) wooha!
“Time flies by when flirting with Lisa.” – Paul
Argh I’m so excited! I’m leaving and going down to San Diego and hooking up with Bear, Ducky, Moe, Jon, and others. Than driving to Texas and then ON TO ATLANTA BABY!!!!!!
Four days and three nights.
Yum.
I had more indepth things to say, but yanno, it’s 3:54am.
I’ll save the bitching for another time.
x0x0x0x0x
Angel Baby Heaven

love

How do you have a girl fall in love with you?
You buy her boots.
friday
Friday, September 17 had to go down in history as being one of the worse days in mankind. Well, at least in my personal history line.
I woke up early Friday morning to take Justin to work when I noticed something odd about my car. It didn’t look “right.” I found a note attached to what used to be my drivers side mirror. It was from Cathleen. It seems that during the night she was pulling into our driveway, tried to miss one of the cats and ran into my car instead.
All of Pleasant St. heard me screaming “FUCK!” at 5am. What a way to start the day.
This is the story she’s sticking to, but, I’ve conceded that to an extent it can’t be true. See, not only is the drivers side mirror fucked up (and hanging by a few wires) but there is also a 6 foot long scratch going from tire well to tire well. ugh.
I played show and tell all day at work with dragging people out to look at this mess. I wouldn’t have been so pissed if it were not for the fact she a. left me a note and b. i had spent nearly a grand within the last month getting my car out of impound and getting it ready for the trip in a few weeks. I forgot to mention this didn’t i? My car got impounded for being parked in a “commuter” zone on 3rd street in san francisco. I had a nice little anxiety attack at the corner of 2nd and Stillman, Justin slapped me and I was back to normal again.
The other fucked up part is that while both my roommate and I go through the same insurance company, they are notoriously slow with getting their act together. Last October I had rolled into a car while waiting at the toll booth to get onto the Bay Bridge. No biggie really, my foot slipped off the break when i had leaned down to grab my cd-holder. But the woman whom I had hit claimed that she got a neck injury! Ugh, I wasn’t going any faster than less than 1 mile per hour. You heard that right. 1 mile per hour. And she’s claiming neck injury?
Lisha twitches.
Anyway, that started off this past glorious friday. Got into work and found that we had a power outage at 6am with no UPS back up. Though power was restored fairly shortly, NIS+ had taken a dump which meant that people couldn’t get logged into the network and route. And if they were logged in, they couldn’t route. I was logged in at 6am and had gotten dumped (I was in fact, writing this column). I went to log back in and got these lovely funky errors. I tried dialing into several other providers and couldn’t route for the life of me. I figured something had gotten fucked up along the way so I did some maintenance and found that my disk had errors. No biggie. Went to reinstall Windows (which overwrote LILO) and then it started crashing back to hell and forth. I couldn’t even just BOOT into windows without getting a ton of errors.
bah.
So Friday.
Car got sideswipped.
Windows partition died (I’m now exclusively in linux or mac)
network goes down.
I’m sure I can think of a few things or ten that also went wrong. I kept claiming I was going to go home and buy a fifth of vodka (750 MIL for you non-us folks) and drink it down and fix my machine. I did neither. I haven’t even ATTEMPTED to get into windows to fix it. I should, my firewall is so airtight that I can’t even freaking do DCCs on IRC. I can’t ftp (ftpd is broked — jesus) and mah stupid fucking quickcam sucks ass in linux. *growls* However, GNOME is quite pretty. I like it much better than KDE or windowmaker. I should say, Enlightenment with Gnome on top. Whatever. It’s pretty. If you want to see my KDE desktop?
obsess
The strange man lurking on all my desktops is Paul.
You wanna see something really sick? Go here.
I had conceded in my head that I was ready to talk about this. I’m not yet. Don’t ask. I’ll tell you in a few weeks.
moving right along
I’m so fucking bored at work, it’s not even funny.
A little over a month or so ago, someone had asked me to send out an email for them to the staff mailing list. I had done these requests before. This time, the letter was not (supposedly) appropriate. Both me and the letter-writer got “in trouble”. The thing is, that they couldn’t fire me and since I’m leaving anyways, they haven’t done jack. All I do everyday (and all day) is fuck around. I try to get involved with projects but they don’t give me responsibilities because they know I’m leaving. Many people wanted to see me fired — but if they fired me they would have had to fire the letter-writer which they were not going to do.
They also gave my counterpart Matt a raise so that now I AM the lowest paid person in the company (at least in our SF office) — and I am also one of the most senior people there.
Fucked eh?
To be honest, I care and I don’t care. I haven’t give a shit about my job in a few months seeing how fucked over Matt and I were getting. We were promised raises back in April and July only to never see them follow through (well, now at least for me). I spend all day doing documentation because they want what’s in my brain but yet I didn’t “qualify” for a raise.
BAH.
I’m so stressed out these days, it’s not even funny. As my leave date approaches it seems more and more shit is being thrown in my face. Carolyn, Cathleens sister moves in (making five people living in our 2 bdr house instead of the original 2). Justin is moping around because I’m leaving, we have nine cats that Cathleen promised to take to the SPCA months ago and never did (I’m so leaving that up to her). Our house looks white trashy enough to make me gag, I’m sick of my job. I hate the area (is there any real reason why it takes me 1.5 hours to drive a 20 minute drive?) and the list goes on and on. The only bright thing is that I’m leaving, but with the added expense (car stuff + misc crap that keeps popping up), I’m finding myself frightened enough to start just freaking out.
I have no idea.
You know, I told Shelly on the phone last night that I was afraid of things working out. I have NEVER been happy — at least I know not for the last four years or more. I can’t remember when I was just freaking content with my life. Many people have said that my cross country odyssey makes them slightly jealous. you know, me doing a thelma and louise bit (minus louise, minus brad pitt, minus going off a cliff) as I will be alone for four days in my car. alone. with a carton of ciggies and 260 cd’s and a trunk full of computer equipment.
And I can’t get through peoples heads how frightened I am of packing up and just MOVING my shit cross country. I do so well with impromptu things but since this is planned and this has been dragging on for months now, the closer i get to my leave date, the more I find myself falling apart.
I’ve never ever told the story of how I came to California or why I came. I think maybe less than a 1/2 dozen people know the truth, and even then it’s hard for me to swallow. The last four years of my life have been this period i like to call the dark period because so much has happened to me in such a short amount of time it’s ridiculous. I find that, when I go to tell the story, my mouth drys up and I block out events. I knew what I was doing to get me here and I manipulated my way across the west. I can’t forgive myself for doing that but I also am having a hard time forgiving the person that I was involved with.
To many of you, my life starts when you read this and for majority of the world I’ve always lived in Oakland and I’ve always worked at slip.net. To be honest, it’s always felt like i have. Like there is no time and space before this. But there is. I’m NOT a california girl and I’m not happy here.
Justin has said he is afraid that I’m running away (again) to something that doesn’t exist. That my move to Virginia will just make things worse. I know he’s being selfish. If he could, he’d live with me forever, work at PBI and watch the Hitler, I mean History, channel is his off times. But I’m such a shell of a person I used to be — that it disgusts me. I can’t deal with it much longer.
I’ve got everything lined up in a row. Prospective boyfriend obsessing over me. New job at a kick ass company (making phat bank), new place. My own place. New things to do. Education. Everything. It’s like, God finally knocked some sense into his head and said “Yanno, Lisa has been having a rough life as of late, I think I will finally put things in perspective for her and give her what she wants” and the thing is, I’m so fucking intent on destroying it because I can’t handle being happy. But see, I can’t believe in a god or a god when I can barely have faith in myself.
I know, this much is true. There has never been a righter time in my life to move on then now. I know, that despite my grumblings, this is the best thing for me. I know that the trip will be fabulous and that I will fall in love on the way and that everything will work out for the best.
Because to be honest, I really have nothing left to lose.
Except myself.
Or maybe I’ll find myself out there in the wilds of Texas and join my mom in a convent.
I’m just kidding.
x0x0x0x0x
moi

Lisa 2000

I’ve been pretty busy. busy enough to not have done the lisa chronicles AND! (drum roll) to actually backtrack the last few days because I think they are pretty darn exciting.
Tuesday: 12.8.98: The Great San Francisco Blackout
As half the world probably already knows, SF had a blackout (pre-Y2k test run?) last week. Cause was “human error.” This “human error” left over 1 million people without power for a minimum of between 4-6 hours. Cellular phones were jammed as people were using those as soon as the lights went out. Traffic was jammed due to no signal lights. One woman calling into an AM news radio station bitching about how SF’s “Finest” should be directing traffic and not giving out parking tickets. I said, quite audibly, that the woman should “shut the fuck up.” I was pms-ing? Or something that day.
We personally didn’t get any power till after 12:30pm PST. This sucked as we were planning on leaving right when the power switched back on. Generators? ha! you can forget it. Ours all died and we were one of the only ISP’s who were having problems. However, by mid afternoon majority of the power and problems were resolved and we were back up and running.
As stated above, many commented that this felt like a pre-Y2k test run. That gave me food for thought for about 10 seconds before I dismissed it out of my mind. Reason? PG&E are looking to lose -a lot- of money for this little fuck up. Claims are being filed due to this “human error.” Do you think they want a repeat of this in a little over a year? No. But we won’t discuss the Y2k problem. It gives me a headache.
It was the one day I was glad I lived in Oakland.
Thursday: 12.10.98: Not So Silent What?
Tonight was Live 105’s not so silent night Christmas party, being held in both San Jose and San Francisco. The SF line-up sucked by in comparison, while the SJ line-up look like it was going to be a rockin” night. I had scored not only free tickets but VIP passes to the shindig. The only bands *I* wanted to see was Everlast and Cake.
But it seemed not to be mine. 🙁 By 4pm that day, we were having some major problems with the computers in the tech area. Coupled with a splitting headache, I gave up my ticket to Jason. Chris was supposed to drive the three of them (Christ, Jennifer, Jason) to the show. By 6pm, I saw Jason and Jennifer still roaming around the office. Turned out Chris flaked (as per usual it seemed), so I got to go -again-. I left work at 7pm, and as we were heading south of SF, I heard the announcer (they were also broadcasting it live) announce that Everlast was up next. I cringed. I looked at the time. it was 7:15pm. The show wasn’t slated to start till 7:30pm! And when did a concert ever start on freakin’ time?!?! So I sat there, slamming my fists into the steering wheel while speeding down 101 as Everlast did his thang. Damnit. I think I frightened Jennifer and Jason. That’s okay though. Jason bought a pint of smirnoff and when we arrived at the show, we did quick shots of it as we walked towards the stadium.
The only bands I got to see were Cake and Garbage. Soul Coughing came up after Everlast and thus we missed their set as we were too busy parking. We walked out during OffSpring, Hole we listened to on the radio (gods! Courtney Love sucks fat dick! Literally.) and Rancid didn’t come on till 12:10AM, right when I dropped Jennifer off at home.
It was a sucky, sucky night.
The VIP passes were cool, but they were serving cheapie beer (bud light) and carlo rosi wine. geeze, even *I* would have served something better than that. No one hung out in the VIP area and they weren’t too strict about checking for the passes either as we walked in several times without them noticing. All it was, was the media hypes smoozing with each other. I had already been there/done that during college.
I’m seriously thinking of writing to tommy boy records and requesting an autograph of my man everlast. This shit bites!
Friday: 12.11.98: Four Hour Tour
I strolled into work late today as I had already worked nearly 40 hours this week as well as having that damn headache from the night before. Found out on wednesday that Computer Currents had their winners for their annual readers poll. guess who won? you’ve got it. Slip.Not won for best isp as well as best web hosting. Gawds! who would have thunk it? As someone once quipped, it seems that either the polls were rigged or someone was on crack. to celebrate, Ted made us take a company picture.
ick.
However, all was not lost on me. All the wimmens in the house (and the mens to be sure) dressed up in their finery for the Christmas Party aboard a damn boat that cruised around the Bay. Free dinner and drinks completed the evening.
As stated, most of those i work with dressed up. Me? I wore t-shirt and jeans. I had dressed up the night before and wasn’t about to go stumbling around on a boat, knowing i would be drunk, with a skirt on.
Turned out I was the bright one (gee..). Most of the grrls froze to death while I disco’d my way across the back end of the boat in total warmth.
i.rock.my.world.slip.net.
here is a cumulative listing of the evening:
*Dinner sucked. Made up for it with an open bar that I learned I’m in love with Cosmopolitans and that marchino cherry’s are my best friend.
*We almost went back to the boat dock (called a slip, get it? ha.) because some of our illustrious members were smoking pot and the captain threatened to turn us in to the coast guard.
*I was the life of the party. The more I drink, the more I dance and the more I danced, the more I impressed people (i think). Justin was amused because majority of the mens wanted to dance with me. they were gay, but hey! it’s my ego we are stroking here.
*I almost got into a fist fight with one of the sys admins. he attempts at being condescending by day and submissive by night. thought he was being cutesy when he did *something* (don’t remember) but it pissed me enough to push him and punch him in the chest. damnit, i need to stop picking fights with people. 😉
*They wouldn’t let me go partying with everyone after the tour and no one would drive to freaking east oakland to hang out with me. gawd! my life sucks.
Saturday: 12.12.98: Chaos Manager
Received a phone call this morning from Jason. Seems that Scott (shock shock) didn’t wake up to get to work on time. Sivan called Jason sometime around 10am and I got a phone call short time later. Could I please drive into SF and unlock the tech area? Sure. i had already planned on going into work for a few hours so I didn’t have a problem doing this.
Arrived at work, seeing Carolyn and Sivan hanging out with Jim Lincoln in the reception area. My key doesn’t work. Paged sys admins, no response. Paged ted to my cell phone since no other phones were in use. Jim leaves as I attempt to coordinate the troops. Track down a sys admin who shows up and gets us in. In the interim, contact Scott due to his page but his line is busy for over an hour. bright light bulb goes on above my head as I realize he’s probably on aol. Log into aol and put him in my notify list. bingo! he’s the first one who shows up. I msg him and ask him what is going on: is he going to work or not? he msg’s me back and says that his car didn’t start last night (friday) when he got home from the party and he had to walk back to his house from BART, which was an 1.5 hour jaunt. he doesn’t have money for the bus to take back to bart nor does he know what buses to take. Frustrated, I told him the situation was under control and log off. he emails me begging not to try and get him fired because I don’t like him. Excuse me? I don’t dislike anyone. People get on my nerves, sure, but I don’t expound energy with fuckups. Sorry, that ain’t my style.
I emailed him and said his own actions would be his calling card. i only report them to the higherups.
This is what he did (more or less):
*Didn’t wake up on time to get to work (he had to be there by 7am and didn’t call anyone till after 10am).
*Didn’t make arrangements with any of the other supervisors to take his spot.
*Didn’t attempt to reconcile or bring his ass into work.
I noted to Don Juan what occurred over the weekend since he was in Arizona.
Scott is *not* my responsibility. If the company wants to keep him on after this (and his other problems of getting to work on time, etc) that is Slip.Net’s responsibility, not mine. however, to me, if you value your job and want to make a living, you could at least have a track record of getting your ass -in to- work instead of whining about it to others how you can’t. Geez, I learned the hard way that not to many company’s favor someone who isn’t going to take their job (even if it is with slip.net and even if it is shitty) if they don’t mosey their ass on in on time. Scott was already fired from the GAP because of his constant lates. Doesn’t look too hot.
And this kids, has been another report from the bunker.

and now for something you’ll really enjoy

procrastination is thine own enemy.
or something.
However, since my well laid plans didn’t get executed, here are links to the archives of the lisa chronicles:
November
October
September
August
July
Writings
as many of you have already guessed, i didn’t get the new chronicles updated and designed on time as i had liked. work and the fact that shelly is arriving today from Virginia has prevented me from doing so. however, never fear! i know that many of those that are loyal readers have been checking the site everyday and my guilt factor has gone through the roof. mainly because i knew that i am taking much too long to get a chronicle up/redesign the site within an appropriate time. so in lieu of that, i’ve decided that till the new design is up and functioning, i’m still going to update the chronicles as often as i did before. just not aesthetically pleasing as i had hoped. so please bear with me.
thoughts laid bare
it had come to my attention a few days ago, that someone who once mocked me and my style is now emulating it.
when i found out i was pissed, royally pissed to the point that i was seething. those in the know think i was being a tad obsessive about the whole thing (me? obsessive? muhahaha) and it had nothing pertaining to me (the website). i told my friends they were smoking a bit of crack and they needed to get a new dealer. they thought i was reading too much into it.
and maybe to an extent they were right. BUT! (the all important but here) i’ve been mocked and ridiculed for my “work” or whatever the hell this is for a long time and by the same people. So when I go to their website and see they are planning on doing what they MOCKED ME FOR, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t be pissed either or at least a bit angry.
Another aspect of all this is that they have also started preaching stuff on their website that have been some of my philosophies (again mocked and criticized) that I subscribe to.
So you are saying to yourself “lisa, get over it!” and perhaps you’re true. But I hate hypocrites. I hate the aspect that someone suddenly “found themselves” and then they start preaching the belief systems I preach and calling it their own ideas.
it’s annoying and it makes me sick.
this isn’t just about doing an on-line journal (hell everyone and their brother does that) but it’s the style, the concept and taking bits and pieces of who i am and turning it into their own production.
i am happy, in a way, because now i’ve become even more disillusioned about them. it makes me feel like they finally admitted i was right (which, we all know, i am 😉 and just don’t have the balls to tell me.
i hate the concept of “finding oneself” or whatever new-agey term you want to use. It’s like a cop out. you always knew who you were, you were just masquerading behind the prospect of it because you were too much of a coward to admit it, even to yourself. and i also hate liars with such a passion it even shocks me sometimes.
I’ve heard time and time again “lisa only believes what she wants to believe” and i used to cringe when someone said that, but! (another important but here) if what i say you think is bunk and then end up prescribing to the idea and then calling it your own? HELLO here! Don’t use your intimidation of me as your weapon and don’t use my words against me in an argument. and importantly, don’t tell me i’m on crack when we both know what i say is TRUE and that time and time again I have been proven to be right. don’t use your fear of yourself as the weapon to sting me with mind fucks. it just ain’t happening homey.
i’ve learned, through time, my perceptions of people are about 98% accurate AND that chances are, if i call you on something, you are doing what i say you’re doing.
damn, i’m being cryptic here or what?
that’s quite all right. it’s my damn webpage and i can do what the hell i want to do with it, including and not limited to:

putting up pictures of my piercings
my writings which are mostly not understood
critiques of the world at large
bitching about anything and everything because i have the right to.I know, from experience, that people don’t like it when others tend to be dead on about them. i also know that my perspective of things tend to be a skewed than the world at large. i also know that my ego is the size of Nebraska. i also know that many people are intimidated by the “whole package” (as it were) because my tendency to be -in your face-.

some people just can’t handle being told “like it is”. I don’t have time for this namby-pamby-third-grade-pigtail-pulling.
Get the fuck out of my way and let me rule the world as I have planned!!!!and no mack, this isn’t about you 😉
I’m frightening you aren’t i?
Sometimes I frighten myself.
But that’s quite all right. I’m quite used to this.
So, moving right along, Shelly is staying with me till December 1st. I don’t know what the options are for me to upload/redesign this page. Since Justin and I have our little network going now but still no modem sharing (as it were, no dedicated connections of any type are available in my area), we are still tag teaming getting on-line. I might pacify Shelly to getting on-line while I do my website or something. I had planned on redoing her page while she was here, so perhaps we can do that.
So don’t expect me to have another chronicle up for about a week. I made good on my promise to myself to purchase a journal and write down my thoughts and feelings that I wouldn’t have the balls (yet) to put on here. If some of the stuff is any good, i’m sure I’ll put it here.
So in other words, don’t expect an update for about a week. 😉
Have a happy holidays!
Love,
Lisa
*sm00ch*
If you are really bored, check out http://www.mangot.com/theslip. It’s pretty obvious what this is. I won’t tell you what ones refer to me nor which ones I put on there 😉 Enjoy!

badda boom, badda bang

first off, i’m lame. i wrote a chronicle that never got published on it’s date. i’m just now sending it out to the list and putting it on the web. so please forgive me. i should be punished 😉
things that piss me off

Novell and Oracle. Spent about a total of 15 hours attempting to fix ted’s machine at work within the last few weeks. See we run a front end for Oracle called Clarify (the -not- so clear solution). It is the database we use to track customers and the ilk. On 98% of the machines located in the office, I have been successful in getting the software installed and functioning. On ted’s machine, it’s been a fucking nightmare. The freak has novell, nt networking products plus he has used other ODBC drivers for other software (Platypus, FlyCast, god knows what else). I’ve been all over the web and Oracle’s support site looking for the answer. So Scott and I call their support and spend another 45 minutes on the phone, ONLY TO LEARN that it’s a damn Novell issue. See, my understanding (correct me if i’m wrong) from what the support guy told us was that novell overrides anything in autoexec.bat. so even though I have all the SET PATH’s set correctly and all the bells and whistles installed, it won’t work because if you go into dos and do “path” nothing but Novell crap comes up. It’s a security issue. or some such. The hilarity of the whole situation is that when the machine logs into Novell it says “Welcome to the AI network, oh brilliant one”. *guffaw* Needless to say, with it’s been a joy attempting to fix this piece of shit. His machine is so fux0red that it won’t load windows and gives me the lovely “can’t find win.com” upon booting. I told dave this, and he said “what does this have to do with a webpage?” I said “huh?” oh! no no no oh gorgeous one, win.com is the front end gui (or something). he says oh. dave is great. he’s an unix admin who admits to know nothing about winders. Dave is leaving us for better things. *sob* We won’t have any more cute boys to look at anymore. *sob* Dave does rock though. I’m thinking about signing up to go skiing/snow boarding with him in January. Check out his webpage for more deals.
Stupid people. I have three case studies for this:
1. Walked into work on the morning of 11.18.98 and found a post-it on my monitor that said “Paige’s machine is fucked!” Walked over to said user’s machine and took a look at it. Nothing out of the ordinary. Machine booted, logged into the network, and I could route, see the network etc. Shrugged my shoulders and left. Turned out she had unplugged the power cable from the computer with her foot. Um, yeah.
2. Customer brings his machine in yesterday to have fixed. It’s running winders 95 and it’s booting slow as hell. Check to see it’s a 486/25 with a 100MB hard drive. Took FIVE minutes to boot past the splash screen. Spoke with the guy last night, turns out he had bought it at an auction for $275 bucks. Um, yeah.
3. One of the tech geniuses at work came to me and said that they can’t dial out on the testbed machine. I quiz him and he claims he has done everything I’ve asked. We have a machine that is set up to dial with the following: ISDN, x2/v.90, Flex/v.90. With no switch box and two comports, I emailed the geniuses and told them that they would have to unplug the cable from the isdn modem back into the back of the x2 modem. Then they would unplug the phone line from the flex modem and plug it into the back of the x2 modem. takes about 15 seconds to accomplish. He didn’t do that. I snarled and fixed it. he doesn’t like me anymore *guffaw*.
Winders 3.x: i started thinking about hooking up the one/only winders 3.x machine to dial-out to test calls. so i start fucking with the irq’s/com ports and start moving crap around. it doesn’t work. USR’s website has no articles on it neither does M$. geesh. fucker is hooked up to the right com port but won’t recognize the modem. tried four modems and nothing works. tried settings here and there. terminal doesn’t recognize it. i hate my job.
Toast/DAVE (not to be confused with heartthrob.slip.net): macintosh products that allow you to burn cd’s and get on the lan. spent better part of my day attempting to get it working so that i could burn cds. i had to ask pifke to allocate me space on the nt server (even though i have admin rights, i am not anywhere near the actual machine) for Oracle so that twinkletoes could install clarify/oracle at home. got it to the point where it will write the cd but now gives me hardware errors. no/little documentation and mac’s just fucking suck!

in the mood
i’ve been spending an amazing amount of time just aimlessly surfing the web. i’m incredibly bored.
i’ve been thinking about the stuff i want to write and stuff i’m missing so….
I’ve got the itch to re-do the site again. i’m frightened. 😉
a-t-t-i-t-u-d-e
the other day, one of the new sys admins said that he couldn’t see lemming (our nt domain). i told him to lean out of his cube, look behind him and he’ll see lemming. *guffaw* when i diligently got up and walked over to him and putzed around with his machine. he’s running nt workstation and i figured it would be a lmhosts issue. it was.
but what he said was that i would make great MIS managerial material. i kinda snickered and started thinking about it.
since i’ve been the position of “IS” since august officially, i’ve started getting cold sales calls on having people sell me everything from admins to dsl (I asked the guy if he knew who he was calling.. he said ‘no’. i told him he called an isp and that we sell xDSL. fucking moron). plus some companies have been shipping me shit like t-shirts and notepads to be swayed by their services.
but what i have also noticed is my attitude. i always used to say (about unix admins) that people who think their god, aren’t. there is no way in god’s green earth that they know everything about everything. and it’s true, but i do know that some admins tend to “humble” themselves for the little people and that some admins actually do know everything about everything.
but as of late, i’ve started becoming ‘god’ in terms that the people i work with are now starting to ‘ph33r’ me. i’m not kidding. i was told recently by someone i work with is that people hate coming up to me because a. i’ll grill them to see if they followed different procedures b. will be an ass towards them if i found out they haven’t.
this is a two-sided coin. Because a: i figure, i write a lot of white papers on how to do crap, and i present the information the departments once or twice, they should have the brains to figure out how to do it from there on in. why should i have to explain myself over and over again if the information is documented and within easy reach? I shouldn’t. They should use their brain cells to figure it out for themselves. It’s all there. But they won’t. And I have always loathed stupidity or the lack of trying.
it’s always been this way. I was fired from one job because i was “too aggressive” and “too independent” in getting my work done. I knew how to figure out how to fix shit and if i couldn’t figure it out, i knew how to research. IT IS NOT THAT HARD!
But obviously it is. I’ve started to have almost contempt for people who aren’t at my skill set/intelligence level. And I don’t want to have to help it! I will not dumb myself down because some moron can’t figure out how to go to support.microsoft.com and look up the answers themselves! I just can’t!!
The irony of all this is that I’m good at what I do. I have the brains to get the job done. My skill level and knowledge of computers has tripled since I’ve started doing this full time. And i know, if I got a degree somewhere I could actually make 2-3x the money I’m making now and actually have a great life.
but this isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life. i don’t want to spend my days teaching stupid people how to map a fucking printer. i need a challenge. anything will do.
I’m just so happy i’m going back to college in January. yeah! If i never have to work on computers again for the rest of my life, i will be happy! 😉