20
Nov
This week, while productive, was boredom honed to its finest edge. I finished what I needed to are work and home. At work though half of my department was gone and well over half of our clients. I may have mentioned that our department is small as is our supported base. This makes weeks like this very boring. I cleaned up various databases, made my deadine on the one project I had, and managed to make good forward progress on another project. I don’t deal well with boredom and there was nothing to break the monotony this week. No developers running code and crashing nodes. No changes to the scheduler defaults. No storage upgrades. No outages. Almost a perfect week as far as support goes. Me, well, I wish I had my meds.
On top of all of that I played with ROMs for my phone, read a dozen comic books, finished two and a half novels (around 500 pages each) and worked on a personal project in python involving RSS, NNTP, and a specific type of media collection. I did all that from work and still accomplished everything I was supposed to and more. The problem with this is that my mind was scattered beyond belief. Every night when I got home I was brain dead and couldn’t think. I just wanted to watch TV and let my brain run out of my ears. Boredom makes my brain shut off and not in a good way. On the surface I appear to be functioning normally but inside I am screaming for something to challenge me. This is not like wanting to do nothing in a weekend. That’s my choice. That’s different. Forced boredom is something that makes me completely insane.
Now that’s over. Capped off by a good weekend the week of boredom is behind me. At least one would think. The rest of the year is likely to be a repeat of the same. It is vacation time and it will be a ghost town at work. So if I seem a little insane this holiday season it is not for the normal reasons. I am actually looking forward to the holiday season this year. At least the outside of work part.
15
Nov
I guess I pretty much fit all the nerd stereotypes. I play pen and paper RPGs whenever I get the chance, read comic books, script/code in no less than four languages, run Linux by choice (but believe in the right tool for the right job and am not an open source zealot) and even work in a high end tech position. This post isn’t so much about that because I think that anyone who reads this blog already knows these things about me. This is something a little more lighthearted than my last few entries because it is bugging me. There is this website: GoodReads that tracks your reading. They allow you to set up challenges for your self and my challenge was initially 40 books this year. I set the number there because I couldn’t remember everything I had read during the year up to the point I started the challenge. What is bugging me is that they allow you to count graphic novels as books. So I went and added all the trades I have read this year and increased my goal to 60 books this year. I am currently around 7 books ahead for the year and only need to read three more. What is bugging me is that I don’t know if I should count graphic novels/trades as books. It almost seems like cheating to me. I am nowhere near sure though. I did read them, the site lets me count them so it isn’t cheating per se but it doesn’t feel like I should get credit for a whole book from a graphic novel. I mean A Game Of Thrones counts as one book and that was ~800 pages, Variant, the book I read yesterday, is ~200 pages and counts as a whole book but both of those are book with text filled pages. So for now I am allowing them to count but it bugs me a little bit. Any thoughts?
I have a phobia. Not one that is normal. You see I have a fear of medical personnel. I have panic attacks even visiting people in the hospital. You can’t imagine what it is like to go see a doctor when it is something wrong with me. The problem is that over the last couple of years I have been getting sick a lot. Not deathly ill but lots minor illnesses that come complete with fever and all the rest of the nastiness. These things range from colds to flu-like symptoms. They put me down for a day or two and then are gone. But it is not normal as they crop up once or twice a month. So long story short I have to go see a doctor. I have to bite the bullet and go. I have to know if something is wrong other than just me getting every virus that waltzes in the door.
For most people this wouldn’t even be a question but for me it feels like a life or death decision. If I were to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t even be thinking about going if it weren’t for my family. I mean missing a day or work here and there wouldn’t bother me but it affects our financial situation. My boss isn’t bothered by it. So on that front there aren’t any issues. In the past I would just carry on with the status quo but these days it seems to be complicated. I don’t need this complication.
In my search to simplify my life these things seem to keep popping up. Things that used to seem normal jump up and demand to be corrected. This is one of them. My health is important in ways I never realized and now I am thinking about them.
So now I have to figure out how exactly I am going to make myself go to the doctor. Wish me luck…
6
Nov
As I was driving to the park and ride the other day this song came to mind:
Minor Threat – Minor Threat
We’re not the first, I hope we’re not the last
‘Cause I know we’re all heading for that adult crash
The time is so little, the time belongs to us
Why is everybody in such a fucking rush?
Make do with what you have
Take what you can get
Pay no mind to us
We’re just a minor threat
WE’RE JUST A MINOR THREAT
Early to finish, I was late to start
I might be an adult, but I’m a minor at heart
Go to college, be a man, what’s the fucking deal?
It’s not how old I am, it’s how old I feel
Take your time
Try not to forget
We never will
We’re just a minor threat
WE’RE JUST A MINOR THREAT
I think one of the problems with life today is that everyone is in a hurry all of the time. Sometimes I take a two lane road to work. It is fairly narrrow and there are four ninety degree turns in about a half mile stretch. The speed limit for a good portion of this road is thirty MPH. I tend to drive the speed limit most of the time as I really hate getting tickets and it just seems like it’s easier than watching for the cops everywhere I go. Topping that off on this particular road the curves are sharp and there is more than one neighborhood so I drive the speed limit. In return for this I am rewarded with angry drivers flashing their lights, flipping me the bird and passing me in a no passing zone. Normally I just shrug all that rot off but when someone gets so pissed they pass the four cars behind me and me almost causing a head on collision with a truck in the other lane and narrowly avoiding my truck swerving back in to the lane I take notice.
If you cannot manage to get out of your house in enough time to drive the speed limit on your way to wherever you are going it is not your right to very nearly cause injury to other people in your hurry. If you dont have enough patience to drive within the laws, regardless of your agreement with them, then maybe you shouldn’t drive. There are times when people are in a rush for legitimate reasons but every single morning and evening at almost the same time isn’t likely. Your impatience gets all over my nice and relaxing drive. Thankfully I have a bus ride from my driving destination to get over your arrogant selfish driving habits.
Yes this time I let someone get to me and I shouldn’t have. I try very hard to rush anything these days. I have a fairly stress free life. I cannot imagine being the type of person that feels like they have to rush everywhere. That cannot be a happy life. Only the miserable must feel like they are always behind or late. I am thankful that I rarely feel rushed in anything. My job is one where my boss is anti-pressure as in actively tries to make sure we haven’t taken on too much. My family doesn’t rush anything, maybe even when we should. But all in all I have an easygoing life. I truly feel sorry for those under so much pressure that they will put the lives of others at risk just to make it to the stop light only to find that the guy they almost ran off the road is at the same light, right behind you, waiting for it to turn green.
I feel better having ranted a little bit. I am not some hippie that thinks anger is always wrong. I do get angry but in this case I think I feel more sorry for these people than I do anger towards them. Have someone spew talking points at me and you can see me really go off. So don’t take this as me being any less aggressive although I probably should learn to be.
Watch, at least, Tim’s intro in the video above before reading further…
So I have been an observer to some drama as of late. Yes it is drama on FB but it is people going off about things that happened in real life that had real consequences and not petty crap. I have known the people involved, and I won’t be mentioning any names here, for better than two decades. In this incident I didn’t take sides. Hell I didn’t even comment until it was all over. In the end I unfriended one of the people involved for reasons totally unrelated to the drama. In fact the drama isn’t even related to this post other than to suggest that some of the people involved examine their relationships through the lens of how complicated other people make their lives. Let me expound.
The person I unfriended hadn’t made a positive or even neutral comment on FB in over a year. Every single thing they said was complaining about how their life sucked and then explaining how it was someone else’s fault. I didn’t bother commenting on the posts or trying to point out how things like being behind on your electric bill and getting your lights shut off was not likely the fault of the company providing you electricity. I have known them for years after all and wanted, at the very least, not to be mean. Even without responding to the drama this person created for themselves their posts still showed up in my stream and no matter what when someone is negative all the time it brings down those around them. I thought about it long and hard and while I don’t hate this person, as Tim suggests in the video above, they did add complexity to my life. They added drama even if it was through observation only. You can’t know someone that long and not react in some manner to their words and suffering even if it is self-inflicted. Further thought on the matter makes me think this person has issues that I cannot ever help them with. The need to always be a victim is one that is draining for everyone around the person with that need. I won’t speculate as to the cause of the problems but I know that I have my own issues to work on and I can’t help this person with theirs. In further thinking on it I realized this person has been like this for most of the time I have known them and when we were hanging out in real life it was very draining.
If we were hanging out in real life today I would have to cut off those ties but since it was FB I could just unfriend them. I know that may sound harsh but I am a grown-ass-man and don’t need the teenage drama this person exudes. I do honestly hope they get the help they need and come out the other side a better person but when a person won’t take responsibility for their own failings and the situations they cause then I can’t have them around me. I spent enough of my life doing exactly that and I have no time for someone so self-centered that they can’t admit their own mistakes. Sure I still complain from time to time and even do a little of that over on FB but the difference is I know that 99% of the time the reason something in my life is fucked up is because I fucked it up or allowed it to get fucked up.
Once someone begins to take responsibility for their own life then they are usually worth helping. I will no longer bother trying to help anyone whose first reaction to any problem is to figure out how it’s not their fault. In fact those people who would rather cry about their problems than actually work on fixing them will get told, just like the video above: “Speed on before you get peed on!”
I don’t feel that this little piece is technically “mean” but some will likely deride it as such. This is about self-preservation and making sure that I have enough emotional stamina to help people who want help and deal with my own shit. If I am forced to constantly deal with other people’s shit and they ain’t working on it then I don’t have the energy left to deal with fixing my own shit. It’s really that simple.
