Dear Universe: Please add bleach to the gene pool, love Humanity.
Maybe this is what we (as a species) get for glorifying reproduction in the mainstream media. The vast majority of those who do reproduce beyond their own numbers (ensuring population growth) shouldn’t, and the vast majority of those who have desirable traits aren’t fooled by the media and choose not to reproduce (or reproduce enough to increase their numbers).
Sadly we are left with such wonderful examples of humanity as this: jwz – I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure..
A wonderful thing called life…
It has been a busy week this week and there is no sign of it calming down for a little while longer. The company I work for, Frontier has recently purchased a small local telephone company (ILEC) that is headquartered in Dallas, PA. My boss, his boss and I all went down Wednesday and Thursday to meet and greet the team and what is essentially our analogs there. It went pretty well and it was nice to get a chance to scope out the operation. The 8 or so hours in the car in two days was pretty grueling on my back, so I was quite happy to get home Thursday night and get to sink into bed.
Friday was Sanford and Amy’s wedding, the ceremony was held at the Churchville Methodist Church, and was rather tear jerking. I think I caught myself holding Carla’s hand a few times during it more to calm myself down than her, though I doubt she’d believe that ;) The reception was held at the Burgundy Basin out in Fairport and barring the disappointingly burnt coffee it was a good time. Sadly the DJ seemed to have an 80’s club music theme going on so I never did get a dance in with Carla, but it was amusing to see her and most of the other girls there dance like dorks. It seemed like she had fun so I was glad.
I finally made the connection of where I knew the “Rich” that one of Carla’s friends is married to from. It’s such a freaking small world I swear — years ago when there were still BBSs around I had met him on a local board called Chat City. He even signed my keyboard, which is a story for another time.
I was proud of myself last night, despite the fact that many people at the reception were smoking and that I myself was drinking fairly heavily I resisted temptation and will shortly reach 8 months since I last smoked. It is something I can be proud of and I must admit the temptation was fairly high.
It is amazing how time flies, and how life twists and turns around in such crazy ways. This time next year I will probably be living alone and if you had asked me this time last year what I’d be doing in May of 2008 my answer probably would have somehow involved being married which is about as opposite as living alone as I think you can get. I imagine that in a few short months I will be somewhere looking back on this with the same sort of retrospect.
Sometimes I catch myself wishing for the future, but my Grandfather always used to say, “Don’t wish time away, someday you’ll be wishing for it back.” I keep trying to remember that, and the fact that once I get past this trial and hardship in my life I’m only going to encounter another one. Whomever is the next lucky recipient of my heart is likely to cause me as much frustration and heartache and pain as all the ones before her and while I endeavor to learn from my mistakes I know I have many more to make. So there really is no point in wishing this test away, a new one will only rise to take it’s place. What I should be doing is making the most of the day to day joys, no matter how tiny they are.
Of course what I should be doing and what I actually am doing are two entirely different things. Such is the dichotomy of life.
Status on Apollo
Yesterday Apollo lost a hard drive which caused the RAID 5 array to run in degraded mode. This is of course no fun and is much cause for concern. Earlier today I was able to replace the failed hard drive and now things are better.
3w-xxxx: scsi2: AEN: INFO: Rebuild started: Unit #1.
3w-xxxx: scsi2: AEN: INFO: Rebuild complete: Unit #1.
I spent some time today with Mom, Sarah, Chris and Shannon, my sister’s Australian boyfriend. It was neat to see them all before Sarah goes off to Australia for the summer.
Life really has a way to kick you in the teeth sometimes
So I woke up this morning and apollo, the main server for the house was off in the weeds smoking crack or something. This worried me as it doesn’t often crash and that usually means something really not good is going on. Sure enough a quick reboot shows a whole bunch of errors on boot and the 3-Ware drive array has a giant DEGRADED tag on it.
Sigh. Figures.
I tried to rebuild the array hoping it was a recoverable error with the drive…
3w-xxxx: scsi2: AEN: INFO: Rebuild started: Unit #0.
3w-xxxx: scsi2: AEN: ERROR: Drive error: Port #0.
3w-xxxx: scsi2: AEN: ERROR: Rebuild failed: Unit #0.
That’s how well that went. I went out and bought a replacement hard drive, so I’m waiting to get the motivation to install it and rebuild the array. It is not exactly a fast process.
3w-xxxx: scsi2: Found a 3ware Storage Controller at 0×1810, IRQ: 17.
Vendor: 3ware Model: Logical Disk 0 Rev: 1.2
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
SCSI device sdd: 1465185024 512-byte hdwr sectors (750175 MB)
In other general news, work is okay I’m not entirely burnt out yet nor terribly bored but I am somewhat frustrated with things in general. All hail the company though I suppose, I really wish that it wasn’t such a fight to get the raise I was promised…. 6 months ago. I have to go to Pennsylvania next week for two days before Ami and Sanford’s wedding to visit the telco we bought down there. It’s kind of pointless, none of my systems are really affected in any way by this, the hard work is all being done by other people and systems. My stuff will be extremely minimal so I don’t know why I’m getting dragged down but I don’t really have a choice.
Otherwise life is finally returning to normal, I still miss Carla but it’s not keeping me awake at night anymore. I think our friendship is getting stronger all the time despite the stress we’re both going through which is a good sign. I’m getting geared up to move at the end of the year, I’m looking forward to living alone for a little while.
I don’t usually link to other journals but…
This is amusing to me as social commentary, and as a representative of the awful affect that the DMCA has on our society. I think we’ve gone too far at this point and I really hope that we can figure that out and fix it before the land of the free and the home of the brave degrades into a complete and utter joke.
http://rachelhyman.blogspot.com/2007/05/regarding-fake-ids.html
Also the fact that this is even plausable is scary:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1155
In other news, I saw Spiderman 3 last night, it was good in spite of the emo haircut they gave bad-Peter. I then proceeded to drink too much Scotch and go to sleep way too late. That Ardbeg stuff is pretty damn good, it’s lighter colored than I would have expected from the nose and the flavour, but hell it’s tasty.
Empeg oh wonderful Empeg
So for those of you who do not know, I have an Empeg — specifically a Mark 2a (RioCar) model. The hard drive blew in it the other day for the second time since I purchased it in 2001, which totally bummed me out since it’s the only radio I have in the RX-7. Today I put my trusty 6.4G IBM travelstar harddrive back in it. I bought this drive last time the drive in the Empeg blew and it has been sitting around ever since. I guess
I’m lucky I still have it around.
It has gotten me thinking though how much I miss having the Empeg in the car when I’m not driving the RX-7 so I’m going to look into seeing if
I can get another sled so I can install it in the Kia. I have a spare amp and all I would need would be the sled and cables. It shouldn’t be too hard to do.
Carla is out of town this weekend and I am on-call. Joy of joys.