Tuesday Again

Tuesday morning, it's raining and I have to get up and going today. They've changed personal reviews to 4 times a year and the better part of the rest of my day will be spent updating mine then meeting with my boss to go over it. Not much there to go over, or that I can share, but it is one of those painful things that you have to do to keep a job in this day and age.

I started site updates this morning. I just haven't had any time lately to do updates. Life has been busy, busy, busy. I'm turning 34 in 2 days and I'm sitting here wondering where the hell the cool age of 33 went. I spent the year working, I mean it's great that I've outlived a lot of my heroes, but DAMN, I didn't do anything "rock 'n' roll" this year and I didn't do anything that made it stand out.

Mortality is hitting. I know my family seems to have a longevity gene (aka being too old and stubborn to die), and if I stay in shape and don't screw myself up I'll probably live to 90, but still, 34 is coming in 2 days. It's half to 68. It's too old to hang out with college kids. It's the age I'm supposed to have kids and be a dad and all of that. I don't feel like a failure, but again, damn, where did life go?

Between personal projects and actual work, I could be busy for all of the hours that I'm awake. I've ben taking a lot of time to play a game with a friend of mine lately, but I still am constantly busy non-game times. I don't know when I'm going to find time to get to the DMV (my license needs renewing FAST), and I had to put in for paid time off in order to take time off on my birthday and saturday. I don't really have plans, but I *am* going to catch up with all the other busy work I have to do on those days.

Today I wasn't supposed to be into work until 2. BUT I sat there with a headache and couldn't revise my review yesterday. Now I'm playing catch up and I hope to god that I can get my act together before my 3pm deadline. Oh well, wish me luck.

k9
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Another Week in Eternity

I'm having some sort of a week. I mean it was exactly 13 days since I've had to do a total reformat of this computer. This time I uninstalled Norton Internet Security 2004 (it had decided that I've registered it too many times and Norton's Customer Service's solution was for me to buy another copy to get it to register), and switched to Trend's security package only to notice in my horror that Norton and Windows XP Service Pack 2 killed my network. Nothing I did was bringing it back so ...

The only loss this time was the .xls file of all my DVD's. I had just updated it and totally forgot to back the damn thing up. It's not like I can't reenter all that data, but I'm not feeling the greatest and the last thing I want to do is mindless data entry. In fact, I'm off of work for most of this week because I'm not feeling the greatest. It's a flare up of a condition I went on and on about in previous blogs and you can search my handy dandy archives if you really want to know more. Needless to say, I don't feel great and don't want to think about it.

Right now I'm copying the 200,000+ image files for this site from my backup machine to this one. That's one thing I actually remembered to do. I always back things up to my TV machine. I can get the strips themselves back, but I don't have enough space on my server to store all 200,000+ graphics files so they have to be backed up locally. It's a MAJOR PITA to copy them back over here each time I reformat. It's reminding me that I need to do captures of the new G4TechTV since the new shows started up ... But I'm going to put that off for another day. I did mention that I don't want to think about anything that requires thinking about anything right now.

Watching a special about Robert Ballard's return to Titanic. I don't get the whole Titanic mania. I never saw the 1990's movie (if there's a "must see" movie, I'm not going to see it), and I really have no interest in the story. I mean ships sink every year, there's tons of wrecks that had more dead and better stories than the Titanic, but they're not commercialized and haven't become part of our cultures mythos as Titanic.

I remember when there was a great debate over if people should bring up items from the wreck. Dr. Ballard is pissed off about the plunder of the great ship. You know what? Screw that. Screw it in it's ear. We're human. We plunder every other great site. If it's there and if someone is going to pay for the crap, we're going to take anything that we can move. It's human nature. Nothing, and I mean *nothing* is sacred and there's nothing that makes Titanic holy. It's a big pile of metal in the shape of a ship. Salvage what you can get from it and make what money you can from it before the sea claims the rest of it.

Iceberg, dead ahead. Bah.

People are already doing that with the twin towers. Hell, they even "acquired" parts of the twin towers to put on a motorcycle on 'American Chopper.' If there's one thing that should be sacred in this year (where 9/11 is a such a political issue), it's anything to do with ground zero or the twin towers. But it isn't. It's being exploited for political and commercial purposes and you can find items from the destroyed buildings for sale or used as parts of "commemorative" products. I mean, if that's not sacred why the hell would anyone care about a stupid shipwreck like the Titanic? Seriously.

Take the money and run. Preserve what you can and get the suckers to pay $20 to see it. That's the American way.

k9
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State of Mind

I've never been one to do drugs or alcohol. My family has a huge history of alcoholics and I have seen the addicting personality at work. We can't do something small, it has to be big, and I think my dad was always the worst of the worst when it came to indulgences with an excuse.

When I get messed up, it usually comes in the form of heavy emotions. Can't think. That sort of thing. I'm a mess for days but I never truly get messed up where I'm a danger to anyone or myself. I think the two constants in this world are that the sun will rise in the morning and that I'll get over even the hardest of things in a couple of days.

I tend to channel emotions into things. Those few readers who actually read my old poetry know that I can do some kick ass stuff when I put my mind to it. But the downside is that I have to be so emotionally messed up, so completely out of it, that all I have is my thoughts and my computer screen to bring me back. I personally think our best run of strips (Martin's "Gremlin" marriage), was written during the darkest time in my life two years ago. All I had was my thoughts a lonely hotel room and a seriously broken spirit.

Whenever I do a big batch of strips or a big site change (oh like both I'm doing now), it's usually inspired by something more going on in my life. I think the ultimate compliment to a loved one would be that I do my greatest work when she is gone. Thoughts of her or emotions caused by her are what inspire me to do my greatest work. She is that memory that brings be back to earth when my mind goes waltzing around the universe again. She is the dream that guides my way through the darkest places. It is her beauty that inspires, that lights the burning embers of my soul and pushes me to do works of art, masterpieces of ego ... uh, then again, I just said I had to be totally messed up to do my best stuff, so ah, catch 22 here.

So what am I? I'm not sure at this point. But I am progressing with strips and the site overhaul. Take your clues from that. I know exactly how season 30 ends. I know how to put an end to TechTV in strips once and for all. Then how to pick up the G4TechTV stuff. I haven't commented on that yet since I haven't seen that yet. In a way I wish everyone had waited before making their minds up and doing the same. I have NO expectations that it'll be good, but I'm not going to call it an abortion or take potshots at it until I actually see it for myself.

On that wonderful note, I'm out of here. Time for a long nap and I have more strips to write.

The horror. The horror.

k9
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Anyone Miss Me? (Massively Long)

A week or so later ...

It's been the week from hell. I've been saying that quite a bit lately. Everytime I start to think that a week couldn't possibly get worse, I go and top myself. Don't ask. I'll leave it at I'm on an old 80gig hard drive on my main machine because I think one of the sources of the recent problems was that the 120gig was insane. Literally insane.

It was sane enough to fool Norton System Works. But I'm realizing that Norton System Works hasn't been very good since the late 1990's. Right now it's a joke when it comes to actually fixing anything other than registry problems. Want to check a disk for errors? Forget it. Surface scan? Forget it. All dumbed out of the latest Norton package. Why do I pay $40 a year for this crap? Oh. Security. Great.

It's sad that when I reformat I have exactly 6 and a half minutes to get from installing my satellite dish software for my internet connection to registering windows and getting the firewall up before the computer is infected with a port sniffing trojan horse. That's one thing I've learned: firewall immediately. Screw anything else. If you have a static IP, firewall immediately. Don't make me explain, just do it. I've reformatted too many times lately and everytime I'm slow I get a different variant of this or that stuck on the machine when my ports are open. Don't know how to firewall? You're screwed. I ain't explaining it.

I'm also awaiting a new monitor from ebay. I've been working so much lately that my 3-year-old sony trinitron has my work screens burnt into it. My replacement is a 3-year-old viewsonic, which should be here this week. Start the dead pool, I'm going to kill that son of a blinky soon enough if life keeps going the way it has been.

Well, no, it'll probably survive. One of the hell week highlights was moving things around in my entertainment center so there's more room for a big monitor in there. I'll be taking the LCD out of the entertainment center and putting it on my computer here. Then putting the new CRT in the entertainment center and using it as a TV.

Why then did I go out and buy a new TV for this room? Simply put: video games. There are times when I'm doing stuff on both computers and can't play a game or watch TV. To play video games I have to go in my bedroom. Which is fine, but I can't be on the computer in there. This, of course, means that I now have a way to do three things at once. Which should scare the hell out of you.

Blah blah blah blah me me me. Okay, site update time. I had a bunch of new strips written. I'm transferring them from my tv machine to this machine as we speak. It takes about an hour and a half to transfer all the files for the site from one machine to another. Thankfully it's not randomly crashing like the old hard drive. Yet.

So another hour or so until a new strip ...

With that ...

k9





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