Tag: The Lisa Chronicles

Dragon who sits on the treasure

Dear Internet,
This past week has been hellacious.
When I came home from my conference super late Thursday night, I found out TheHusband had thrown his back out (he’s feeling MUCH better now), which coupled with my exhaustion from prepping, traveling, and attending the conference prompted me to stay home on Friday. The last year has been rough as all the up/down with the drugs and surgeries has wrecked unexpected havoc on my person, so even a three day trip with a one hour time difference throws me. Dr. P. has often talked to me about the body’s memory and our idea of what we think we can handle and what we can truly handle. Sometimes you need to rest and pull back, even if your mind says otherwise.
In trying to find a way to decompress, I started working on a project I started over holiday break: Importing all old diary/blog content into a single site. We’re talking hundreds, maybe thousands of entries spanning nearly 20 years. With the continuous issues at EPbaB and no defined time frame for the final domain move, it was going to be sketchy moving the content to it in its current condition. But, exporting data out of WordPress is easy and if I can get as much of it into EPbaB before we do the final cut over, I’d save myself hours and hours of time.
Even despite the time saving, there is no easy or direct way to do this – some if it is in plain text format, some if it is importable via another host provider, some if it was grabbed from SQL tables. I started working on the SQL table stuff first, as TheHusband was kind enough to dump it all in a text file for me. This is a tedious job, for I have to do the following:

  • Paste the content into the text side of the editor
  • Add title in title box
  • Strip out all wayward “” that randomly appear throughout content
  • Strip out “rn” which should be appended at the beginning of all returns (between paragraphs, typically) but are also apparently random
  • Adjust date/time of post, as it will be backdated
  • Turn off auto-posting to LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr
  • Check to see if entry was cross-posted to LiveJournal in its first posting and use LJ to check for tags used, to apply to this posting
  • Lightly edit (spell check, grammar)
  • Once post is published, unlink broken links found (if any) and add post to list on Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes to highlight

(TheHusband commented some of the above could be accomplished by a global search/replace, which is true. But I would still have to manually edit each entry with date, title, and so on.)
Friday and Saturday, this system worked out okay. EPbaB remained relatively stable but it’s slow going. On Sunday, TheHusband and I prepped for the week ahead and I didn’t get a chance to work on the site until much later in the day. As I was getting a little bonkers from the previous methodology, I decided to see if I could invoke the import LiveJournal tool within WordPress.
That was a huge mistake.
The import tool stops after importing $X number of entries, which it won’t tell you what the max is but you can find out by the number count of your posts. (It’s about 100.) Secondly, you can’t choose which categories, tags, or any other formatting will be applied before the import. It just chooses something and runs with it so after the content is imported, you still have to manually change each and every entry.  Thirdly, the entries it chooses are random. I had some things from 2002, 2004, and 2008. The import, in turn, created nothing but an even bigger mess since the entries are random and I have no clue or idea what it pulled.
But why am I doing all of this?
My brother from another DNA, John, often lives a curiously parallel life to mine and while we may not often talk, our influences often tend to be the same. He recently, unbeknownst to me at the time, decided to undertake a similar project and listed his reasons why:

Because badly formatted, dead linked stuff – like much on this blog at the moment – just looks amateurish. Things will, eventually, look neater and consistent, and also hopefully fulfill my OCDs around the numbers 3 and 5. Speaking of which:

  • To remember. Good times, bad times, things of use I’ve forgotten, and so I don’t make the same often dumb and easily avoidable mistakes.
  • To remove repetition. I keep writing the same things over and over. As well as looking a bit odd, it’s a complete waste of time. Note to self: learn how to improve memory.
  • To see if there’s any really good stuff. Stuff which can be put into another format or media e.g. an ebook.
  • To look for opportunities for making a living that I’ve missed.
  • To have a much more efficient infrastructure, and platforms, for adding content online in the future. And to make myself come up with a damned good reason for starting to add content to the Internet somewhere else.

Very eloquently and succinctly, he lines out all the reasons I’ve found myself struggling with over the years and could never quite express. The first half of point one is incredibly important to me. Second half of point one and all of point two are me in massive volume. Points three and four are going to become important to me in the next year plus for numerous reasons and I’m always looking at point five as the proverbial monkey on my back.
I did find out today, despite what I had written earlier, a time line for when the domains need to be sorted, which is April 15. That is when my portfolio will be due so that is when everything must be working on the back end by. The content will more than likely not all be transfered by that point, but hopefully I can come out of exile and go back home!
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2009 (and again in 2009), 2004

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: March 23, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
Dear Internet,
This week I was in Minneapolis for Library Technology Conference, which turned out to be a pretty awesome thing. I presented on, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Institutional Repositories and got to meet a lot of awesome people. Before I left, I wrote about my packing list, which turned out others were into the packing list idea like me.  The follow up is coming soon. TheHusband threw his back out when I came home, so we’ve been taking it easy around here though I have a lot of work to do over the weekend.

Writing

Last weeks Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes included nearly 20 entries from The Lisa Chronicles, mainly from 2008, that I was able to get online. The wonkiness of the site issues prevented me from putting up an intro, so consider this to be it.

Reading



I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Amazon | Local Library | GoodReads)
By Alan Bradley
While at LibTechConf, I observed something I had always suspected to be true – even the most techiest of people prefer print books.
In a conversation with a friend, we were rationalizing the difference of an ereader and a paperback while traveling, namely that for most of the flight (if the flight is relatively short), the ereader has to be turned off and stowed. It also has to be unpacked when going through security lines and there is always the danger of cracking the screen. None of this is a problematic with paperbacks. While I had my iPad and my laptop with me on this trip, both were too cumbersome to read in bed,  while using public transportation, and obviously while in an airport and on the plane. After passing through security on my way to my gate to get home, I slipped into a bookstore and picked up the fourth Flavia de Luce mystery, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows.
I loved the first three titles of the series and I’ve been waiting forever to get this book via the library in print and eBook form, but the wait was always too long. While I swore I would not buy a book this year, I was desperate. By the time my flight landed several hours later, I was more than half-way through the book. I inwardly chuckled as people on my flight struggled with their ereaders and laptops during the flight while I happily read my paperback. A proper review will be forthcoming.

Watching

  • Formula 1
    Lewis Hamilton has left McLaren for Mercedes – how will McLaren fare this season? Will I have to shred my tshirt in disgust? Will I get up at at 4AM to watch the Pan-Asian runs? How is it possible all the drivers are inhumanly beautiful?
  • Top Gear UK
    The seasons ended with a bang, almost literally, as the boys were sent to find the source of the river Nile, which had them driving all over Africa. The views, as to be expected, were breathtaking.
  • Banshee
  • Mr. Selfridge
    Staring Jeremy Piven playing the titular role loosely based on the life of American Harry Gordon Selfridge, who opened up the eponymous department store in London in 1909. Mr. Selfridge walks the viewer from the opening of the store to all the trials and tribulations of the Selfridge family, key store employees, and other people of the era. Much more palatable than The Paradise, BBC’s version of similar story, ITV seemed to waste no money making the store, the set, or the storyline luxurious. It’s coming to PBS in a few weeks.

Weekly watching:  Vikings, The Vampire Diaries, Portlandia, House of Lies, Elementary, Spartacus, The Americans, Archer, and Project Runway

Links

What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa

Things I may or may not have learned

It’s a vampiric version of Romeo and Juliet with a mixture of The Cure and Morrissey song lyrics to fatten it up a bit

– My tl;dr summary of Breaking Dawn

Dear Internet,
TheHusband was kind enough to extract content from what I was thought to be corrupted SQL tables of previous incarnation of the blog, with the date range of 2008 – 2010. Because the data was all dumped in a text file for me, I had to manually place it in EPbaB, which is incredibly time consuming. If you follow me on Tumblr or LiveJournal, you may have seen a plethora of the posts show up that while were time stamped with the correct date of their original publication, were showing up as new content in the Tumblr and
LiveJournal feeds, which caused some confusion when several people asked me what the devil was going on! Understandable, so I turned off the auto-posting when I work on the project but plan on writing up a summary (such as this) of the content posted so you can follow along.
I’ve so far have been able to get through July and early August of 2008. A month has shown me definite patterns to my thoughts, like struggles with my mother and that I was able to expand nearly 3 THOUSAND WORDS on a review on Breaking Dawn. I’m both curiously fascinated and total cringe worthy of this forensic expedition. But one thing absolutely does not change: I am always of the fierce opinion.
More to come soon.
TTFN,
Lisa

A Study in Scarlet


Backyard after the great snow, January 14, 2012. (Using the cutout filter from Photoshop.)

I have been incredibly lackadaisical in regards to posting here as of late, but much of that has more to do with technical difficulties over pure laziness. But this is said from the person who only took down their holiday tree on January 31.
To not put a too terrible fine point on it, several things occurred:
  • All of my domains were infected with the same malware injection not once, but three times
  • The same week as the last injection infection took place, my provider was dDOSed.
  • Though I was ritualistic with backups of my WordPress databases across all of my domains, I apparently missed a crucial step as when I restored the databases, none of the content populated through the WordPress GUI. Ergo, logging into PHPmyAdmin shows me all of the lovely, lovely entries from many, many years and logging into WordPress shows me posts = 0. That’s sobering.

So if you’ve been wondering where the hell I’ve been and why every single one of my domains is empty – here is that explanation.
While I took massive steps to protect myself from future attacks and did everything by the book (supposedly), the best recourse seemed to be to wipe everything, including SQL tables, across the Lisa network and start fresh. A week after I blew everything away, I remember thinking how much relief I felt having no presence (or virtually no presence) on the web. How long has it been? 10 years? Maybe 12? Actually it’s been 16 since my first page up on Geocities and wrote my first entries, wondering if anyone would ever read them? And even when I was not writing, there were bits of me always present. But during that semi-glorious week in January, there was nothing. And that relief turned to emptiness.
So the cycle starts again, as it was in the beginning and so too shall it go forward to the future.

Morris Street Project: May 14, 2011

Morris Street Project, Week 9
Nothing earth shattering to report in the world of our gardens this week other than everything is blooming within an inch of its life after the recent rains, including all the fucking ivy and creepers that keep coming back though I seem to spend a gazillion hours pulling, chopping and murdering anyway I can. We’ve also planted some of the vegetables and began plotting what to do with the rest of our lot as either the former owners or the flippers laid out and landscaped the plot to an inch of its life but did not do any upkeep in the interim until we bought it. This means that various ivys, nettles and creepers have taken over controlled areas and we may end up tilling most of our front and back yards back to soil and starting anew for next year. TheHusband grumbles that our city lot is much harder to tame then if we had bought the damned 22 acres in Ada with the bubbling brook simply because we could have just let everything gone wild. His consolation is that our dream of buying a ruin villa in Italy for our vacation home means that he can get his goddamned bubbling brook with olive trees aplenty. That is until we both see something of a modern condo layout in which, all plans are pulled from the table on the goddamned bubbling brook.
But I digress. In other news, the excavation company has not been working on our street all week, so what you see below has not changed since the image was taken. The talks from the crew that our street will be “finished” by the end of June seems to be a lot further away then they make it seem. I’d just like to point out that since we moved here in January, there has not been a week a port-a-potty has not been installed somewhere on our block. I’d like to think that with this being a historical neighborhood, that is not necessarily “period.”
Morris Street view.
Throbbing Manor view.
Drainage ditch across the street from our house.

Conversations About Mother (part i)

My brother and I are not on cordial enough speaking terms to the effect that we do not meet up, speak/text or are even Facebook BFFs. Our only connection is in regards to our mother, and even then contact is either brief moments filled with monosyllabic conversations or heated arguments that result in a lot of shameless threats thrown from both sides.
TheHusband, who finds my brother to be a gigantic asshole and refuses to allow him to step foot into our home until my brother apologizes for several unsavory things he’s said to me, did agree that any kind of “family” gathering should be done in a neutral location to keep the drama to low murmur. This is done to appease mother who continually harps and makes noises on “Why can’t you all just be civil to one another?” whenever my brother and I begin to bicker. Mother, however, seemingly and innocently forgets that much of my brother’s and I intolerance of each other has been started by her in some way and additionally while complaining about our sibling behavior, chooses to ignore the fact that she’s not spoken to half of her own brethren (she is the eldest of seven) in nearly five years for various infractions only known to her (and of which she can never explain when asked). Regardless of historical nods, my frustration levels skyrocket whenever a tentative olive branch is swung out to greet him, my brother will consistently denounce any kind of gathering, neutral or otherwise and effectively cock blocks any kind of civility I attempt to share when planning “family time,” regardless of how desperate my mother is to have it.
Therefore to save my sanity and have less dealings with my brother, family celebrations are now split in half for mother, who spends half her time with me and the remaining with my brother.
It is no surprise for this past Mother’s Day, I told mother that she should make plans with my brother first and then we would do our plans around those plans with my brother were made concrete. A day or two later, she tells me that she and my brother were having a mid-day meal at the retirement villa and that after, she’d like to come to our place to hang out while TheHusband and I gardened, followed by meal and game playing (Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit). Because it was her day, I also told her to pick the meal which to her meant giving me the breakdown of a four course (but very simple) meal, which TheHusband and I shopped and prepped for the day before. As mother no longer drives due to neuropathy in her feet caused by diabetes, additional timing is taken into consideration when scheduling events with her. I made it very clear to her that due to my work schedule the following day, it would need to be an early night and that since dinner would take about 1.5 to 2 hours from prep time to table, we would like to eat in the later afternoon with her tucked up back home at a fairly reasonable hour. She agreed.
With surface history of the dealings with my brother mentioned, I was not surprised upon receiving a call from my mother an hour before I was to pick her telling me that my brother could not make it to the mid-day meal (of course) and that instead, he was picking her up in the mid-afternoon to go to a party that was being held in his honor (his birthday was last week). With no thought to our feelings, plans, or prep for the meal she informs me that she’s going to this party. I asked her to call me if she was going to be arriving later then 5pm so we could plan accordingly. She in fact didn’t call until 6pm and was terribly surprised to find out that no, I was not picking her up and no, we were not having dinner as planned and in short, no, we’re not celebrating Mother’s Day with her. I made mention to dropping off some items of hers at her house the following day and hung up.
The following day, I kept to my promise and dropped some goods off at her apartment that I had ordered for mother from Amazon. Mother looked emotionally beaten and was clearly visibly upset. While I sat ramrod straight in a chair, pissed at how rude she behaved the day before, she proceeds to tell me with fat tears running down her cheeks that my brother spent the most of their time together the day before berating her for her behavior. Why was she not fast enough with her cane? Why is she so slow? Why is she not doing a million things at once like she used to do? My brother then apparently bragged that the people who were throwing him the party considered him as a second son (their own son died in a car accident in October 2010 and he and my brother were quite close) and that he wanted to be adopted by them. My brother is 32. On Mother’s Day, my brother used his time with her to talk about her failings, her missed actions and how horrible she was as a mother and did absolutely nothing else.
I struggled with two things that day: One how best to approach mother diplomatically in regards to her own fairly atrocious behavior and secondly, to not get caught up in the mother/brother drama that has pervaded me for nearly my entire life. I succeeded in the first but failed in the second.
This is a gloss over the day to day workings of my immediate family, which accounts for the partial disjointedness of the writing when attempting to explain in the shortest amount of time possible a second in a dysfunction that has been ongoing for decades. Much like that day when I sat ramrod straight in the chair, upset and angry for her behavior towards me, I could feel the undertow pull of her laying down the guilt no matter how much I fought against it. The unspoken listing of her wants and needs, rejecting the possibility that she’s ever done anything wrong is strong. How dare I criticize her when clearly my brother offended her the most with his behavior? Obviously, she should not want to live if we both think she’s the most horrible mother in the world!
I realised then I had two options: Instead of writing short stories where the mother is always violently killed, I would end up murdering my own OR I could start writing publicly about my family to get the tale out into the open. At the very least, it will keep me out of prison. At the very most, it will serve to help articulate years of feeling inadequacy for being born and save me thousands in future therapists bills.

The Lisa Chronicles: What’s in a name?

When I started keeping an online journal in 1998, the main reason I started chronicling my entire life online was for me to remember it. I have no memory of my childhood and most of my tween years up until the age of 13 and there are even spots of time in my 20s that are vacant.1 If personal recollections, photographs, handwritten letters and other realia were so incredibly fragile, were my words digitally constructed that much stronger? Could I not access them at anytime and any point with no fear of deprecation?2 Wasn’t this the whole point of the internets? Justin and I bicker about this topic quite a bit because while he understands as to WHY I’m so obsessed with keeping my digital life in order, he still thinks it’s an invasion of privacy. But for someone, himself, who can easily recall his life at any stage with minute detail, I can see his point. But for me, I don’t have that option. I became obsessed with chronicling my life because I wanted my imprint to last forever. And this is why my online journal was called, “The Lisa Chronicles.”
I kept the name for nearly a decade, regardless of which domain it was hosted on, but in 2006 (in several more entries to come, you ‘ll see how 2006 proved to be a pretty pivotal year), I registered a new domain with a different idea: shesgotplans.net. I wanted to go beyond just writing chronicles of my life/snarky commentary, I wanted to have an all-in-one place place to showcase everything I was/will be into: Books, movies, music, food, opinion, pop culture, photography, librarianship and archives (and everything in between). I had gone from having my own domain for keeping my online journal, to LiveJournal and was feeling the pull of having my own site again where I could do the above. The name of the domain was culled from an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,”3 when Meridith exclaims about Finn, her mens of the moment, “And Finn! He’s got plans!” I wanted shesgotplans.net to not only be entertaining, but also to keep track of anything new or fun or interesting that I was obsessing about at the moment. Food? I would want millions of pictures of food and recipes. Photography? Here’s what I learned and why I liked these tips. Writing? Here is a new short story/poem/ I wrote and you can have it for free. Music? Here is the latest CD I’ve been digging and why you should dig it or why it fucking sucks.
That was the general idea. My writing, when I started in 1998, went from dozens of posts of month to one or two (if that) and then to nothing for months at a time by 2006-07. I started and stopped writing. A lot. When I started my MLIS in the fall of 2008, I saw it as a perfect way to reboot my writing while I worked on this degree. I wrote a lot of posts about librarianship, archives and anything remotely related. And while in the last several months, since graduation, I’ve been writing more personal then professional, the number one reason why people come here is for the “So, You Want To Be A Librarian/Archivist?” series.
That depresses the fuck out of me as I feel I’m much more than a snappy piece about going to library school, at least I used to be. No one reads me anymore because I’m provocative or interesting and that bothers the hell out of me. I feel I have grown way too conservative and soft in my old age. Gone were the days of owning domains like pronstar.org and bitchasshoes.org4, writing about sex, drugs and rock and roll. I’ve become so hypervigilant about what I was posting on what network5, with what content that saying the word “fuck” made me cringe. Me. Cringe at saying the word fuck!? What in Nigel’s name has happened to me? Don’t answer that. With all that is being said, I don’t want this to become some boring ass librarian page of dick tugging and circle jerking.6 But that is what is happening. The top keywords that drive traffic here is “So, you want to be a librarian?” and “Jobs that require MLIS.” I’ve taken back ownership of “The Lisa Chronicles” for the journal title, content will be be more what I envisioned and lots more updates are planned.
It feels good to be back.
1. I blame the memory loss to conscious forgetting and loads of alcohol. I married my husband because he remembers more of my 20s than I do.
2. Digital archivists will bicker on this point, but for the sake of the piece, it makes sense. 3. Don’t judge. This is where she goes back to McDreamy. Again.
4. .Exhbit A: pronstar.org and Exhibit B: bitchasshoe.org.
5. Numerous (okay, 2) people have emailed/FB’d/etc me to warn me to watch I say on Twitter/blog as possibly be detrimental to me obtaining a job. I understand and get that, I’m not incredibly stupid.
6. There is enough of clique in the library world that it drives me INSANE that this behavior is so easily accepted and even, in some cases, applauded.

a new beginning

for the last two days i’ve been uploading the old chronicles into the new format that i talked about oh so long ago. you see, pauly had created this neat database for me that allows me to write a chronicle anywhere in the world via a web browser and while it doesn’t have all the tricks of blogger he felt really slighted i wasn’t using it. i told him that going through the past was hard and especially if i had to reread it all over again as i uploaded the crap to his new database. but he was insistent that i give it a try (and modify it to my own needs so that it would be completely personalized to my tastes).
so i did it.
over 200 entries later, i started reflecting to the writing i wrote and the person i’ve changed. what really hit home with me today was that going through all the old stuff within the last year about moving to virginia, being with paul and start a whole new life.
looking back on the last 6 months, i noticed that all the dreams and promises i made to myself to make that a reality wasn’t happening. shit got fucked up. and i started getting sick — really sick. having anxiety attacks, feeling like crap, gaining weight, not talking to anyone — stuff that was chronicled here and not chronicled anywhere but inside my head. i was going to the doctor literally every week because i couldn’t take feeling like this — and who can. the chest pains, feeling of being not being in control of my body, the whole nine yards. PHYSICALLY there is nothing wrong with me. Mentally, well, that would take years to fill.
so i’m wanting to the do the right thing. i really do want to do the right thing. but that requires a lot of change on my part and a lot of the changes aren’t that easy to make. like quitting smoking, and losing weight and working out. finding a job i like and doing stuff FOR. ME. stress takes a huge toil on your body — whether or not you want to believe it or not. my body is acting like it’s 90 and the funny thing is — after all the talk of death and morbid crap that i wrote in the past — i don’t want to die. i really really do not. i want to LIVE.
as the chronicles has it’s second anniversary this month and goes onto entering it’s third year, i thought that i would start all over. reintroduce myself to you. introduce yourself to me. lets meet and befriends. and hopefully, when this all blows over, we’ll be happier for that.
so hi.
my name is lisa.
i’m a 6′ tall 270lb network engineer living in virginia. (well depends if i have my job tomorrow or not heh).
i live with my boyfriend Paul. he’s a programmer for thinkgeek. we have a lot of flakey geeky friends who hang out here. we make plans and break them occasionally. like every weekend. or something.
moving right along, my goal is to lose weight (can we say 100lbs. whose rooting for me over there?) and to finally quit smoking (i’m down to my last two right now). and to just FEEL better and not have to pop pills every five minutes because i think i’m dying (i’m not — really).
i boast an impressive cd list and an even more impressive shoe collection. i like texture and fabrics. i like the colors orange and lime green. i love bands like rem, afghan whigs, the eels, blur, new order and luna. i like things british. i like reading. i LOVE wildflowers. i love wild kinky sex (as long as it’s from paul). i love reading and doing things creatively. i like tacky and kitsch.
that’s me in a nutshell.
and so we begin on another journey with lisa — and this time hopefully she’ll get some shit straight.
or die

intermission

Recently I’ve been thinking ’bout redoing da chronicles.
But since I haven’t had any new idea’s come up to me, I’ve delegated myself to just keep updating what was existing now and leave it as it is.
however, for some strange quirk, I went to other web sites tonight that were (gasp) similar to mine, but instead of feeling intimidated or depressed about better sites, I thought:
I can do better than this
And so I shall.
The Lisa Chronicles will be up in a bit. Hopefully new and improved. Enjoy.

Love, Lisa *sm00ch*

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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 $275 bucks. Um, yeah.
    3. One of the tech geniuses at work came to me and said that they can’t dial out on the testbed machine. I quiz him and he claims he has done everything I’ve asked. We have a machine that is set up to dial with the following: ISDN, x2/v.90, Flex/v.90. With no switch box and two comports, I emailed the geniuses and told them that they would have to unplug the cable from the isdn modem back into the back of the x2 modem. Then they would unplug the phone line from the flex modem and plug it into the back of the x2 modem. takes about 15 seconds to accomplish. He didn’t do that. I snarled and fixed it. he doesn’t like me anymore *guffaw*.
  3. Winders 3.x: i started thinking about hooking up the one/only winders 3.x machine to dial-out to test calls. so i start fucking with the irq’s/com ports and start moving crap around. it doesn’t work. USR’s website has no articles on it neither does M$. 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.
  4. 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! 😉
 

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