As most of you who read this bullshit already know, my days are hella long, but shorter than they were last Nobember. I’m up at 4:00am (commonly referred to as o’dark hundred). I leave the house just before 5:00am, get to work by 7:30am, leave work at 5:00pm, and if there’s no Asian drivers or left lane vigilantes, I’m home by 7:30pm. Bedtime rolls around at 10:00pm and I get to do it all over again in 6 hours. I hate this, but it wasn’t too bad, as open tickets in my department were usually completed by mid-afternoon. I was able to start an update during lunch, possibly complete a rough draft during the slow afternoon, and put the finishing touches on it before going to sleep. That all changed when the company that employs my sorry ass purchased an ICANN-accredited domain name registrar (as I mentioned in my April 10 update oh so long ago). My department handles all the issues from domain registrants. While things are starting to calm down, it’s still a huge drain on my time. I’ve probably spent a total of 8 hours looking at the Hosting ticket queue since the Registrar came online in late March. It feels that all my time is monopolized in the Registrar queues, which are usually filled with an assload of spam, sprinkled with a smattering of “English only from the knowledge of retarded registrants it comes from the translator.” Sometimes it’s like talking to Yoda‘s retarded European cousin, Yodaski. “Goodly English I speak not. My domain name, renew I must or expire it will.” So, I guess what I’m saying is… I have an excuse. Laziness aside, after a day at work lately, I don’t want to go near a computer… weekends are spent sleeping… and sometimes this blog feels like work, and I can’t have that.

Speaking of work, things are going swimmingly for The Company. I don’t know much about it, and I probably shouldn’t talk about it anyway… so I’ll only mention that they signed a big contract that promises to take The Company to a whole new plateau. It’ll be nice to see us grow, even if we become something resembling an aborted Comcast fetus. Maybe us indentured servants will see a modest pay increase out of it all. It sure would be nice, since the price of gas is robbing me for all I got… like a ten dollar whore in a by-the-hour no-tell motel. Fuck, I need a low interest, long term loan just to pay my share of the carpool gas… goddamn raghead terrorists and their gas-peddling pusher refineries! At least the price is dropping some… I spend $45.00 at the pump now instead of $46.30. Time to buy a Pepsi.

Funny that I mentioned fetuses, because it’s definitely fucking spring. I have a house full of parrots that are full-swing into their springtime (albeit masturbatory) humping cycle. There’s more birdy jizz in those cages than in Lindsay Lohan‘s stomach after an all night bender… and that’s a lotta jizz. Nearly every woman I know seems to be in their springtime mating cycle, too. Jesus Christ! They either just had a baby, are pregnant with a baby, want to have a baby, or being called “baby.” It’s like a fucking barnyard, man. I swear I heard Marlin Perkins narrating in my office last week. “We’ll wait here while Jim passes out some protection, and I’m not talking about the kinda of protection you can get with an insurance policy from Mutual of Omaha.”

The picture of Nirvana‘s Nevermind cover was photoshopped (although I used GIMP) by me to be a crude representation of a newborn in our office. The baby was actually a girl, but the news was the baby was “6lbs 14oz, 18″ long, 14″ head full of hair!” Now, I’m a bright young old man, and I know the 14 inches referred to the circumference of the head, but I couldn’t help think of a baby with a giant head, and a 4-inch body. It made me laugh. Speaking of Nevermind, the baby in that picture was three months old in 1991, and the parents were paid $200 for the shoot. If you want to feel old, take a look at this picture of Spencer Elden (that’s his name) in 2005. Goddamn, I’m ancient! I remember the day that CD came out! I wonder if girls giggle and want to see his wiener for comparison purposes. Punk-ass fucker probably gets more trim in a year than I’ve seen my entire life. I’m not bitter.

Is anyone sick of all the Paris Hilton coverage on every fucking news outlet on the planet? It’s absolutely incredible that her in and out and in again prison fiasco is monopolizing the headlines. The bitch was born with a gold-plated platinum spoon wedged in her face. If her last name was Green, or Smith, or Nahasapeemapetilon… and she worked at a nail salon, McDonald's, or a Kwik-E-Mart she’d be just another dumb, talentless cunt with small tits. She’d be living in a mobile home with a cocktail of cum from every mullet-wearing hillbilly in the trailer park oozing from her orifices. She literally has nothing to contribute to society. Seriously, do you think the world would miss her if she fell into a well in Midland, Texas, never to be heard from again? I say we take her, Nicole Richie, and all their socialite friends, cut off their heads, arms, and legs, toss the body parts in a bus, fill the bus with concrete, and send the whole goddamn thing into space on a collision course with the Sun. Or we could just kill ‘em.

Okay, now that I’ve probably startled the shit out of you with my overworked imagination, I’ll wrap this update up and call it published. Let’s hope it’s not another six weeks before another diatribe graces this site.

I drove my truck to Seattle on Monday because our regular carpool driver was working in the Oak Harbor office. So, like any other day, I was up before the rooster across the street. Since I’m still coughing due to pneumonia, I didn’t get much sleep Sunday night/Monday morning, and I was dog-ass tired. I jumped in the shower to wash hair, face, pits, crotch, and ass… in that order… hoping that the shower would wake me up more. By the way, have you ever noticed how mighty a fart sounds through wet ass cheeks in the shower? It brings a smile to my face, no matter how tired I am.

By 4:55am, I was out the door and picked up one other commuter and headed south to Seattle. It was an easy trip, and we pulled into the Westin parking garage before 7am. I parked on the 5th level — like we do every day — put the borrowed keycard (that gets me in the garage for free) in my sun visor and hopped out of the truck. I locked it and headed to the elevators to get into the building.

Monday was a busy day at work, but whenever you’re busy, time seems to fly by quickly. However, by 5pm, I was ready to get the fuck out of Dodge.

As I was riding the elevator back to the 5th level, I was searching, in vain, for my keys. They weren’t in my pocket. Before heading back into the building to check if I left my keys on my desk, I checked the ignition. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck! There’s my motherfucking keys! It the ignition! Fuck!

I could have sworn I had an extra key at my desk, but I checked all the drawers and cabinets of my desk, and there was no key to be found. The CTO of our company gave me a wire clothes hanger, but after 30 minutes of fucking with it, I realized the hanger was too flexible. I called Tina to have her find a locksmith in Seattle for me. Tina called me back at 5:45pm, and gave me the number of Abel Locksmith & Road Service on 12th Avenue South. I called them and they said they’d be “right over.”

I learned a couple things that day; always have a spare key in my wallet, and in the native tongue of locksmiths, “right over” means about an hour. Shit. By 6:45pm, I met the locksmith outside the parking garage… because his truck height is 6-feet 10-inches, and the parking garage height is 6-feet 8-inches. Simply excellent.

Johnny McBreak-in shoved a wedge between the glass and door skin in order to get various wires and rods shoved into the door. He spent 15 minutes wailing and yanking on his tool before he gave up on the driver’s side door. I mean, he was pulling with so much force, he bent his tool. And yes, I know I just used “yanking,” “pulling,” and “tool” in the past two sentences. What of it?

This “professional” locksmith had much better luck opening the passenger side door in only two minutes. He reached in and grabbed the keys from the ignition. I tried opening the driver’s door with the key, but couldn’t turn the key to the unlock position. What the fuck now? After dicking with it from the passenger side, we realized that all that zealous yanking pulled the plastic door panel over the lock pin… uh, lock knob? What in the sweet and sour hell are those manual locking knob thingies called? Anyway, once the “manual lock plunger knob doohickey” (technical term) was back in the hole it’s supposed to be in, the door unlocked properly.

The whole ordeal cost eighty fucking dollars — eight zero period zero zero — and two hours of time. I wasn’t even kissed as he was fucking me. Wotta rip off! No matter… we were heading out by 7:00pm and all my windows were intact. One good thing about leaving Seattle at 7:00pm is there’s no traffic. I was back in Oak Harbor by 8:35pm (average speed of 60 mph) and there wasn’t a slowdowns to be seen in that shithole called Everett.

Two items of note: I’ll probably get reimbursed by my insurance company since I have emergency road service coverage on my policy… and I now have a spare key in my wallet, at my desk at work, and at home. Monday was the first and last time I will ever be locked out of my vehicle.

Fucking Wal-Mart… I went there on Wednesday for bird seed, cough medicine, milk, cereal, pop, and a few other items we needed at the house, including cigarettes (not for me, I don’t smoke). I did my shopping and got in a line with a cashier.

Normally I use the cool self checkout at the Wal-Marché, because I’m all about self gratification. But since I needed cigarettes, I hit a line with a cashier. She scanned all my items like a good smiley-faced monkey, but couldn’t seem to get the cash register to by-pass the age check on the cough medicine. Fucking safety checks. God forbid a teenager puts down their heroin needle for a bottle of Delsym. On top of that, the chick wouldn’t sell me cigarettes at that register, giving me an excuse of company policy. I had to use lane one where the tobacco products are sold. I complained that I would have gotten in that line if I had 10 items or less, but I had about 16 items. I’ll be damned if I’ll violate the sacred Item Limit at the Wal-Mart and have some hoarse-voiced, yellow-fingered little old lady holler at me because she couldn’t buy a new pack of Benson & Hedges menthols before she slipped into another nicotine fit.

So how fucked up is that? Wal-Mart puts the cigarettes behind one register with a 10 items or less limit, then forces customers to buy cigarettes at that register only. Fuckers. I had to pay for my 15 items at Register Three (with a credit card), then take my “must be older than 18 to purchase” cough syrup to Register One and make another credit card transaction. Dicks.

There ya have it, another quality update. I don’t want to hear any more bitching… ’til next time.

At least he asked politely.

I should apologize for being so lazy and not updating my blog for more than 2 weeks. I do have a good goddamned excuse though. I was busy dying of pneumonia. Once again, I contracted “the pneumonia” and it landed me in the hospital. I couldn’t fully breathe, I was coughing more than a Volkswagen Rabbit burning ARCO gas, and was running a temperature that was a degree or two below the surface temperature of Venus. The picture here is of my digital thermometer two tenths lower than my highest temperature of 103.1°F (39.5°C).

I went to the ER of Whidbey General Hospital, where they took my temperature, blood pressure, hooked me up to oxygen, connected me to a heart monitor, and drew what seemed to be a gallon of blood for testing. After the sixth vial of blood, I joked with the vampire tech, “If you take any more, I might need a donut and a glass of juice.” He didn’t think that was funny at all. He didn’t even crack a smile. What a great bedside manner.

After a bunch of waiting, and waiting, and waiting, an X-ray technician named Vu came to take me to the X-ray department. He wheeled my hospital bed down the hallways like he was driving his rice burner down I-5. If I had hair, it would have been a blowin’ in the breeze. They have a new digital X-ray machine at WGH, so after a two quick snapshots of my lungs, Vu pushed my bed back to the ER like he was in the M*A*S*H Olympics. (Remember that episode?)

Six days later, or what seemed like six days later, Nurse Dave came in with two pills and a needle. The pills were 500mg each of Zithromax, and the needle was a pint of pudding. Okay, maybe it wasn’t pudding, but Nurse Dave jabbed that thing in my right arm and injected some thick-ass antibiotic into the muscle. That needle was in my arm for a long time. When I got home later that night, I was bruised to hell around the injection site, and it felt like a there was a golf ball under the skin. Fuck!

The doctor finally came back in and said he was going to send me home only because the hospital had no open beds. They sent me home with an oxygen tank. Yes, like some old cigar-smoking septuagenarian, they wanted me to tote around an oxygen tank with one of those nasal cannulas wrapped around my ears and stuck up my nose. Who am I, Mick Jagger? Pass the Geritol.

When I went into the ER, my O2 saturation was 84%. Pretty low. They put me on two liters per minute, and my sat level went up two percent to 86%. They pushed the rate to four liters per minute and it didn’t really help. So why would they send me home with a tank prescribed at two liters per minute? Maybe I’m a cynical fucker, but I think they just wanted to jack my final bill up. My insurance is good, but not that good. I took the tank home, but didn’t turn it on. I had the home medical supply company take it from the house as soon as they could. I need to get the phlegm off my lungs in order to get more oxygen and breathe easier. And they call themselves doctors…

I also took home a nebulizer, and a prescription for Zithromax and Albuterol. The nebulizer is basically an aquarium air pump on steroids. It pumps air into the inhaling apparatus which turns the liquid Albuterol medication into a vapor, which is inhaled… like some medication bong… which is not nearly as much fun as a real bong. The Albuterol gives me the jitters and makes me a little ill. The Zithromax was no fun either. I had to take another 1000mg the day after leaving the ER, and 500mg a day for 5 days after that… and it also made me feel a little sick and turned my poo a nice consistency of chocolate pudding.

I missed 7 full days of work, and did a lot of sleeping. I didn’t even look at my laptop during my convalescence. I’m feeling much better, but I still get short of breath just walking down the hall. It’s going to take a long time to heal completely…

When we left work yesterday evening, the start of the soul-crushing love-fest that is our nightly drive home was like any other. The roads were dry, the surface streets were clogged (like they ate too much cheese… draw your own conclusions), and all appeared normal. But then we tuned in KOMO AM 1000 and heard about severe winter conditions in Everett and Marysville. Our cell phones began to ring. Worried loved ones were concerned that we might be stuck behind a recent 50 vehicle pile up (story – crash pictures) on I-90 near Snoqualmie Pass. Our commute doesn’t take us anywhere near I-90, thankfully, but the weather on north I-5 had us worried. By the time we made it to the northbound express lanes, the traffic slowdowns had already begun. Every day, we drive past a digital road sign that reports travel times to Lynnwood and South Everett. Normally that sign reads 30 to 45 minutes to South Everett. Tonight, it read 65 minutes. Fuck. As we got closer to the sign, we realized we misread an “8″ as a “6.” Eighty five minutes to make a 20 mile trip. Do the math, people… that’s 4¼ miles per hour. Four and a quarter! Jesus fucking cajun-style Christ! To be fair, that electronic sign is for the main line, not the express lanes. But considering the express lanes weren’t going any faster than the main line, it’s close enough for government tolerances. We tired quickly of the traffic radio, and switched to a CD of The Crystal Method.

It was slow going. After the express lanes ended, it was snowing quite heavily. We were driving in and out of snowsqualls up to Lynnwood, where it was snowing continuously. It wasn’t sticking, just making the roadway wet. Traffic flow sucked. The HOV lane was moving at about 20 miles per hour, where the regular lanes were stop and go. We finally made it to South Everett a full two hours late. The snow was coming down solid, and made for some pretty cool pictures with our shitty camera phones. Here’s a photo, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and even a short movie in MP4 format. Pretty cool new image viewer, eh? If you’re JavaScript-phobic, you probably just saw those images open in your browser. Yawn. People with JavaScript enabled saw the web page dim, and the images appear on a new layer, resized to fit your screen resolution. It’s fucking amazing. You know how I know? Because it’s fucking amazing!

Enough cock waving. By the time we got through Everett and Marysville, we were in a full-on blizzard. I’m not sure, but think we may have been experiencing whiteout conditions… but what the fuck do I know? The snow was coming down so fast and heavy, the headlights were reflecting off it, making it near impossible to see the roadway. The snow was also starting to collect on the slush between the lanes, which meant it was getting colder outside. Our speed wasn’t very fast. This picture of the car radio shows the average miles per hour we were traveling from downtown Seattle to Marysville, and the outside temperature. Pretty fucking swift, eh? I think we broke 25 miles an hour once or twice before things got worse, and they did get worse.

There’s a point where there so much snow that the highway eventually gets completely covered. We reached that point around Smokey Point, and it was not fun. The road was eerily free of traffic. It was us, a Subaru about 200 feet in front of us and a pack of other slow moving vehicles a mile behind us. Previous knowledge told us there was a highway under the car, but we couldn’t see it. “Where’s the lane? Shit!” We were literally driving by braille! As soon as we’d drive over those little bumps or reflectors on the center lines, we’d steer back into the lane until we hit the rumble strip. It’s funny now.

Several dickholes in 4×4 SUVs thought they were impervious to bad weather. Many were wrong. There were vehicles galore that had slid off the Interstate and were now stuck. One Dodge Durango driven by some old fuck sped by us faster than a priest leaving Chuck E. Cheese's with an 8 year old in a duffel bag. A couple minutes later, a cop pulled onto the highway, and his lights came on. Tardboy had spun out, and was now on the side of the road pointing the wrong direction. It appeared that there was a tow truck pulling a station wagon out of a ditch, and the Durango had to avoid the obstacle, and over corrected, spinning himself around.

A couple miles after that spinout, the highway was just wet, and we were back up to 70 miles an hour through the Skagit Valley. All that fucking snow was caused by the Puget Sound Convergence Zone, which we drive through twice a day. By the time we got back to Oak Harbor, it was 9:30pm. Ninety seven miles in 4½ hours. That’s an average of 21½ miles an hour. Fucking snow! We were home just in time to grab a bite to eat and go to sleep to do the whole goddamned thing over again in 6½ hours. Pass the melatonin… and the antacid.

Today was the day we picked up a former co-worker for a trip to the Westin. He had a convention to go to in the hotel. Yesterday’s wintry boot to the coin purse almost put a damper on things, but the powers that know nothing north of Everett forced us to make the 97-mile trip anyway, in the face of sure death on icy highways… and they were icy until Lynnwood, where they were just wet. It was good to see Jake/Di-Tech again, even though we suffered partial hearing loss from his maniacal, Ed McMahon-esque laugh. Good times, though. Made the commute seem shorter, and that’s always a good thing.

It’s a video game console. Video games were invented for entertainment and for the fatass fuckers who can’t actually play football, baseball, basketball, hockey, or drive race cars, jet skis, motocycles, or shoot people, aliens, monsters, et cetera, et alii, ad nauseam, so on and so forth. Game-playing Americans have prided themselves on sitting in front of the TV while eating Cheetos and improving their hand-eye coordination. Who the fuck told Nintendo they could make a game console that requires the user to stand up, let alone exercise? Goddamn, I’ve been sitting in front of a computer all day long. When I get home, I don’t want to play a video game that requires, you know, physical fitness. Fucking Jap bastards, what the shit, man? The only thing gamer geeks should be exercising is their thumbs… and their right arms during certain other activities (if ya know what I mean).

When I did a little reading on the Wii, I found that people are complaining about soreness in their extremities after playing the Wii for long periods of time. This just proves my point, people; video game consoles are for flabby wastes of humanity, and that’s the way your Higher Power intended it to be. I find it hilarious that Nintendo responded to the many complaints of sore necks, shoulders, and joints. You know what their response was? "Work out more, fatsos… If people are finding themselves sore, they may need to exercise more." Slanty-eyed dicks! That’s what they’re doing while playing your console! That’s what’s causing their pain! If it wasn’t for your console, they’d be enjoying a pain-free evening while eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts. These poor people… arms flailing like the Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man from Family Guy or an epileptic waterhead on crack, their Wiimotes flying out of their hands and smashing into their two thousand dollar plasma television screens… and all Nintendo can say is, “exercise more.” American gamers don’t want buns of steel, motherfuckers, they want buns of cinnamon! Sonofafuck, am I the only one that sees this as a pandemic? It’s only a matter of time before James Sokolove starts advertising on late night television. “Have you or a loved-one suffered serious or even minor injuries due to the use of the Nintendo Wii? Call the law offices of James Sokolove. We can help get you the money you deserve.” Those motherfuckers are lining up at the courthouse. By the way, Wiimote? How stereotypical of them. I know Japanese have a difficult time pronouncing their Rs, but that’s just ridiculous. “It’s fried rice, you plick.”

I’m writing this update in email before sending it to the server. Spry, the company that hosts my VPS is doing maintenance from nine tonight until five tomorrow morning. I doubt the server will be operational by the time I finish if I typed directly on the blog. All these goddamned Wikipedia links take for ever! I’m a little disappointed about this maintenance, though. I checked the uptime on the server this afternoon, and I had over 208 days.

wafwot@yavang:~$ uptime
  14:48:03 up 208 days, 3:45,  1 user,  load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01

Try that on a Windows server, bitches! It’s next to impossible unless you run Linux. Thanks a lot, Lyle, for killing my uptime! I keed I keed! I know they were moving servers to a new data center, and there’s no way to do that unless you unplug shit. The people at Spry are awesome, and I’ve never had a problem since I’ve been with them… Especially in the past 208 days! They’re rock fucking solid, baby! (hehe, let’s see ‘em use that quote on their web site.) As you can see, the server is back up and my quest for long uptimes begins again.

Tonight, we stopped at the Swinomish Indian reservation for gasoline and cigarettes. I paid for gas at the pump, but had to go inside the store for a carton of cancer sticks. I stood in line while two Indian cashiers (casino Indians trying to act all Slurpee Indian) chatted with a customer about puppies. I was standing there for about 25 minutes before I finally got my turn. I could be wrong about that time, it may have only been one minute… but hell, why should I (and the others behind me) have to wait at all? There is a silver lining though. I learned the ancient meaning of “Swinomish.” It’s a native American word for “Land of Postal Workers.”

Yesterday, I received an email at work, with the subject line, “Too much penis is never a bad thing.” Normally this type of junk goes straight in the Trash folder, but I think this particular email came from our Sales Department. No, it couldn’t have. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Ho-ly crap, what if it did? Somebody please hold me, I think I’m gonna cry.

Recently, people have berated me for talking too much about crap in my blog, like I’m a coprophiliac, or some shit. Oh, goddammit! I assure you I have no such fondness for crap. Poop is just funny, like farts, and it makes people laugh. I strive to make people laugh at this ridiculous fucked upness, and turds are an easy laugh. But to prove to those of you (Tina) that don’t think I can do it, I’ll go 10 posts without resorting to toilet humor. That’s at least two months worths of blogging. But, if I fall victim to some restroom antics like the phantom door shaker, or a barking co-worker, I will write it down. You may just have to deal with an entire update about dookie…

This is a picture of a Washington State Ferry underway. I shot this on the 7:00pm sailing of the westbound Mukilteo-to-Clinton run. We were on a detour from our normal commute route due to a fiery fatality accident that closed all lanes of northbound I-5 during our normal nightly soul-crushing ass pain. The accident occurred around quarter after three in the afternoon just north of Marysville. A southbound driver of an SUV apparently broke through the controversial cable barriers in the median and entered oncoming northbound traffic, colliding with an empty motorcoach bus. The SUV burst into flames, killing the driver and burning the vehicle to a charred metal shell that only slightly resembled an SUV. The driver of the bus was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in serious condition. Since someone died in the accident, the Washington State Patrol and WSDOT conducted a lengthy investigation, and didn’t have all northbound lanes of the Interstate opened again until roughly eight in the evening.

Of course, all this death and destruction makes the commute about as painful as how your perineum repeatedly snapped with a large rubber band might feel… which is why we opted to for the ferry route. Am I an insensitive dick for thinking someone else’s tragedy is fucking up my evening? I think not. That just makes me an ugly American. God bless the USA.

I’m usually home by 7:30pm on a normal day. Tonight, I was home by 8:15pm. The ferry added forty five minutes to our typical time, but people who didn’t take the ferry didn’t get home until after 9:00pm. Is a boat ride that saves almost an hour of driving time worth fifteen dollars? I say yes it is. When you only have two and a half hours of free time before going to bed, those 150 minutes are very valuable. Fifteen dollars was a blue light fucking special!

The weather lately has been quite mild. We’ve had several days where the high temperatures have been in the mid-fifties. It feels like we’re on the back side of winter, and it’s warming up to spring. Not a day too soon, either. I like winter and all, but freezing my ass off in the cold and suffering with the typical colds and flu bug is no fun. I welcome warmer weather, and always look forward to spring. The trees start to leaf up again, flowers start to bloom, birds are chirping… who am I kidding? I’ll be in a climate controlled skyscraper all day, living off the recycled air conditioned stench of swamp foot and crotch rot, soaking up the greenish glow of fluorescent lighting. Welcome to corporate America, motherfucker. Pass the bourbon.

Things are getting busier at work. We just rolled out new virtual private server plans, and so far, I feel like a retarded orangutan fucking a chihuahua. The salespeople are selling this shit, and I’m not fully trained in it. It’s enough to shrink my balloon knot so tight, only dogs could hear me fart. I guess I’ll learn it when I need to. Trial and error, baby! The only way to learn. Not that I need much training — there’s not much support that goes into VPS. The customer’s supposed to know what the fuck they’re doing.

On top of the new VPS service, we’re also becoming a domain name registry. Not a reseller for some other registrar, but we’re becoming a registrar ourselves, selling domain names like Go Daddy. This is yet one more thing that the company is throwing at my department, and I haven’t a clue how it works yet. I was told we start doing the registrar dance sometime next week. Fucking excellent.

On top of all that (do you see a pattern here?), I still have my normal “hey-change-this” and “oh-setup-that” hosting duties. Shit, man, I still have the migration of sites from an old retired server to a new server left to finish. Fuck! I’m going to be busier than a set of jumper cables at an Indian wedding. Not Slurpee Indians, but casino Indians. Was that too mean? Okay, here’s a nicer simile: busier than a one-legged man playing Dance Dance Revolution (yes, it's possible). I wonder if I can talk the company into a comical Super Bowl ad with half-naked women? Maybe? What? Stop laughing! A man can dream, can’t he?

Okay, that’s enough of that. I’ll Wikify this bitch tomorrow at lunch and publish from there.

Before leaving the office this evening, I took a trip to the head. It has become a daily ritual to take one last piss before heading home on our 150-plus-minute commute home. I hate doing the pee-pee dance, especially in the seat of a car. And I definitely don’t need all the burning love of a fiery urinary tract infection, or the excruciating pain of kidney stones.

When I walked to the stall, there was a post-it note on the door with the words “NAGIOS CHECK” at the top. Nagios is an open source network monitor program that we use to ensure network services on our many servers and routers remain working at all times. I took this pitiful out-of-focus picture of the post-it note on the shitter stall door with my cell phone. The lighting in our bathroom is not the best. Not like we need stadium lights to pinch a loaf or anything. I had to get really close for the writing to show up, and that’s why the photo is so shitty (if you’ll pardon the unintended pun). Besides, I don’t need to spend huge amounts of time composing pictures in the little boys room. I’m pretty sure the president of our company — who was taking a leak when I snapped this photo — thinks I’m obsessed with mookie stinks. Pass the Charmin, m’kay?

Scatological references aside, I tried my best to clean it up and make it readable by adjusting and sharpening the image with GIMP. Just in case you can’t read it, I’ll try to snag the Post-it note if it’s still there in the morning. In the meantime, I’ll type it out below so you can at least “read” the text. This little post-it note was a clever little notice (probably left by one of our admins) that notified the next occupant that there was no more toilet paper in that stall. I couldn’t help but wonder if some of the less-than-technical (for lack of a better description) men in Sales and Accounting figured out what the notice meant. Too fucking funny!

NAGIOS CHECK
  CRITICAL
/dev/rolla
     0 blocks free
/dev/rollb
     0 blocks free
[ ] Acknowledge
[ ] Silence
[ ] Schedule Next Check

In a couple of weeks, we’ll be picking up a former co-worker who has a seminar to attend in Seattle. He needs a ride into the city, and since we’re nice people — and just happen to have an empty seat that day — he’ll hitch that ride. We gave him conditions, though. He had to pay $10 for gas, which is a bargain if you consider the cost of fuel these days and the price of parking in the garage. He also had to agree to the constant barrage of ridicule that we’ve been building up since he left the company in September of 2005. He agreed, and it is so on! It’s gonna be a fun day with the “Di-tech Soy Boy!”

And here we go again. I had a couple more topics to cover, but it’s getting late and I can’t remember what they are. Besides, I’ve completely lost the desire to continue typing. I spent far too much time trying to get the CSS just right for that faux post-it note. Ho-ly-fuckin’-Christ, wotta a pain in the ass. What I have already is probably not XHTML strict, and it’ll eat at me like necrotizing fasciitis. I’ll remember what those forgotten topics were as soon as I click “publish,” I just know it. Pass the ginkgo biloba.

Let’s start with a little story. A friend of mine related a tale that I find somewhat disturbing. He works for a Bank in Portland, and they’ve had some commotion with a fellow co-worker. He tells me that this co-worker (whom I’ll call Pam for reasons of anonymity) has performed her duties satisfactorily, but her reliability is in the porcelain funnel o' shit, as evidenced by this list:

• One time, poor Pam slept off a bender in the bank (with the alarm off) because she was too drunk to drive home. Ho-ly crap!
• Another time, Pam requested time off because she needed to cry over being dumped by her boyfriend. I guess Pam isn’t known for crying, or shouldn’t cry because she’s the manly type, or something. Sweet Jesus.
• While talking to co-worker, Pam called a customer a “cunt.” It wasn’t in earshot of the customer, but the female co-worker was highly upset. Poor misguided Pam was called to the bank president’s office for an ass chewing.
• Pam also messed up a customer’s bank account which ended up costing the bank about $1000.
• On more than one occasion, Pam has been caught sleeping at her desk. Could it be all that crying that’s keeping her up at nights? Maybe. I don’t know.
• And twice, Pam didn’t show up to work on time. No big deal if she was only five or so minutes late. Poop occurs. But my friend said it was four and a half hours one time, and just recently it was more than two hours! Apparently, Pam has a position at the bank that requires her to take… loan application calls from the East Coast starting at five in the morning. If she’s not there, a loan may not get processed, and the bank can’t have that!
• She went to a customer’s house to help them with their banking needs, and was dressed like it was laundry day in Pamsworld™. Instead of going in banking attire, she was wearing a t-shirt with a worn out Trans-Am iron-on. Her ratty jeans were held up with a length of sisal rope, and she was wearing sneakers!

Worst. Employee. Ever. The only thing Pam hasn’t done is play Windows Solitaire all day long when she should be working. Wow. If we had an employee like that in the company I work for, she would surely be fired. That type of behavior simply doesn’t fly in the IT industry. Our managers won’t stand for such piss-poor work ethics, and you would be shown the door. I’ve seen it happen to several sysadmins. Funny thing however, Pam still retains her job at the bank! Can you believe it? Color me dubious, goddammit! If that list of shit is true, Pam works for the most lenient company in all of Oregon, possibly the entire West Coast! Can you imagine the perception other employees of that bank must have? “Hey, we can dick off without fear of being fired, because Pam’s still here.” I wouldn’t bank with those people if you paid me. Who knows what would happen to your life’s savings?

Continuing on the line of co-workers… If you’ve read this collection of nonsensical bullshit in the past, you know that I’m in a carpool and we have a soul-crushing 200-mile-a-day round trip commute. In our carpool, we worked out a simple solution to buying gasoline: rotation. We each take turns buying tanks of fuel. This has been working well for us, until recently. Yesterday, when it came time for one of our carpoolers to fill the tank, he complained that he only had $25 in his account. Jesus-fucking-Christ! So, an arrangement was made where I would pay for this tank, and he would buy the next tank on Monday. I may be a cranky motherfucker by nature, but I’m flexible and understand being strapped for cash.

We stopped at Costco in Mount Vernon for gas, where I spent thirty dollars even. As we left the gas pumps, we made a detour to EB Games, where the carpooler — who claimed to only have $25 in his account — chasséd his rotund keister into the store and bought an expansion pack to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. What in the Spic and Span hell, man? We can buy games, but not gas? I didn’t throw the bullshit flag until today, ’cause I was too busy stringing an unnecessary number of angry exclamation points together in my head. That shit ain’t right. Gas, grass, or ass, bitch! Nobody rides free! And trust me when I say no one wants any of that ass.

My segues are working out well tonight, as I have another nugget about ass. Have you ever had one of those moments where you suddenly have to shit? It happened to me yesterday, and I’m here to tell you about it. I was at work yesterday, as I frequently am, and had just come back from lunch. I was doing just fine at my desk, when all of a sudden my body said, “hey gallbladder, we need some bile,” and sadly there was no response. My gallbladder went AWOL in 1998, and this behavior is normal at times. Any-way… I clenched my whale eye tighter, and beat a path to the rest room down the hall. I’ll be a sonofabitch if both stalls weren’t occupied. Screw this! With my colon in distress, I headed for the elevators to use the toilets on the third floor. Ten fucking minutes passed before the elevator doors opened. It may have been closer to 30 seconds, but the space-time continuum gets all fuckered up in situations like this… so I just don’t know.

Two floors down, and in unfamiliar surroundings, I start bombing. Then, I hear the restroom door open. I don’t know about you, but I always cough a little fake cough or clear my throat to let the newcomer know that they are not alone. I don’t need some whackjob baby talking to his “little man” at the urinal, or whistling a little tune while taking a piss. “C’mon lil’ buddy. Time t’come on out and do your bidness.” Goddamn I hate public toilets.

Back to the story… In mid-drop, the intruder decides to try the door to my stall. But it’s not a simple little tug, or a knock. No. It’s full-on yanking and rattling like he’s trying to un-stick his garage door after it jumped off it’s tracks. The attempt startles me, causing… the bomb bay doors to close prematurely. Motherfuck!!! I shouted out “Occupied,” probably loud enough for the people at FiberCloud on the 19th floor to hear. All I heard back was an irritated sigh. Excuse the shit, literally, outta me! Holy shit, man! What makes a person think that a closed shitter stall is an invitation to rip the door off it’s hinges? I listened as Mr. Door Shaker used a urinal to take a piss then leave… without washing his hands. I spent the next five minutes going through half the roll of paper to return my sphincter to some resemblance of it’s pre-shit self.

Okay, that’s all for now. All that talk about coming up with a title, and I stuck to work-related topics, and managed to slip in a little bit of corporate toilet humor, too. So, I changed the title from “Miscellany” to “Work Strife.” You probably don’t care, do you?

Yesterday and today, the carpoolers and I worked in the Oak Harbor office. The last time we worked at the Oak Harbor office, the Island was sans electricity. It was a nice change of pace. No need to wake up at 4am. That’s fucking earlier than dairy farmers, dammit, and it’s simply not human. I was able to “sleep in” until 7am, shower, dress, drive to my manager’s house and pick him up, and be at a keyboard before 8am. It’s a beautiful thing. If we had to drive to Seattle, that same process takes three and a half hours.

I really miss working close to home. The commute home (including “stop and go” traffic near Wal-Mart) took me a whopping six minutes. Can you believe that shit? It was still light outside! There’s also the benefit of being so close to a 7-Eleven, and all the fast food joints. Hopping in my truck, driving to 7-Eleven for a Snapple and cigarettes took all of five minutes. In Seattle, it also takes five minutes for a Snapple and cigarettes. Oh yeah, there’s an Asian taking my money as there is in Oak Harbor, but there’s no motor vehicle involved. Hell, I’m not even leaving the building! The store is only a two-story elevator ride away.

But with all the pros, there’s always some cons. The “better half” (and I use that term loosely) of the two previous owners of Galaxynet operates from that building — from that office — and I got to enjoy avoiding his bald ass today. He was there to meet with the president of the company. It’s probably some long, drawn out saga that’s really not worth the time to type about, but I got the impression he was whining about not having actual office space in the Oak Harbor office. Boo hoo. I so wish someone would have asked me my opinion before we jumped into bed with these two questionable individuals. Oh well, you know what they say about opinions. I knew my ass was fat, but had no idea my asshole was so big.

There’s also the people that probably figured I dropped off the face of earth. When I used to work in the Oak Harbor office, I worked upstairs which was not an area that the public was permitted. That sheltered me from all the Galaxynet customers that thought I was their friend. I still talk to a select few former Galaxynet customers, but when I run into the others at Albertsons, I simply offer a cordial “hello” and go about the grocery shopping task at hand. Why is it people feel the need to chat you up in the store? Can’t they see I have coffee, milk, and shit wipe to buy? Leave me alone! Anyway, as I said, I used to work on the second floor. During the past two days, I was working on the first floor and in clear view of every swinging dick that came in the door. Twice I had to glad hand someone who was happy to see me. I shook their hands, but gave them my “go away, I have work to do” vibe in order to reduce the typical questions regarding Tina, Christmas, and the new year.

I’ll bet you were wondering what the hell the picture of the dog had to do with working in a different office. Well, let me tell you. One of the carpoolers brought his dog to the office on today. His name is Trip, and he’s a great dog! If you know me, you know I think small yapping dogs are no better than rodents. Unless the dog has enough strength to pull you when you go for a walk, it can’t be called a dog. Trip has enough power to do that! He’s really friendly and loves everyone. I remember when Trip didn’t even have a name. This picture and this picture show Trip as a puppy in August 2006. As you can see by the picture above, he’s much bigger now… but he’s still a puppy! All these were taken with my cell phone, so the quality isn’t that great. Here’s another picture of Trip that really shows how big he’s gotten.

One final thing. I removed the captcha code for posting to the comments section. I upgraded the WordPress software to a brand new version (2.1), and the captcha code no longer worked. I had to modify the WordPress code after each upgrade, and I was getting tired of that bullshit. I also received complaints from folks with color blindness who couldn’t read the captcha image very well. At first, I had no sympathy. But, with the addition of several spam filtering plugins, I no longer need the captcha. So, without the extra hoop to jump through, I expect more comments, motherfuckers!

Okay. That’s enough for now. See ya next time.

Last Friday, we were tuned to KZOK during the commute home. They’re the classic rock station of Seattle, and they were playing some really good tunage. A block of Peter Gabriel was played after a Genesis trivia question. The songs were The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, Solsbury Hill and Red Rain. I didn’t think much about it, until I realized Red Rain was released on So, and that album was released in 1986. Holy slow-roasted hell! That’s twenty one years ago! I clearly remember the day I bought that album on cassette tape. I was attending an art college for photography in 1986, and still living at home. I’d take the 104 SEPTA bus from West Chester, Pennsylvania to the 69th Street Terminal, then take the el to downtown Philly. I was coming home from school on the 104, and got off at High and Gay Streets in West Chester. I walked to The Mad Platter record store and bought the cassette. I popped it into my Sony Walkman, and walked to work at Turk’s Head Pharmacy. Man, that seems like forever ago. Fuck. It was forever ago! Does decades ago equal “forever?” It does in my book. When the time period in question is more than half the time you’ve been alive, it qualifies as “forever ago.” I just made that up. Feel free to add it to your vernacular.

Hell, they say memory is the first thing to go. As proof of that, I offer this: While trying to remember the name of the record store in West Chester, all I could recall was the street. I couldn’t remember the name of the store for the life of me. I did a quick Google search and turned up nothing. So, I flipped open my cell phone and called my brother Steve, and explained query. Off the top of his head, like the fucker was in the store just 15 minutes ago, he rattles off “Mad Platter.” What the fuck? I asked how he remembered the name after so long, and all he had to say for himself was “I don’t know.” “I don’t fucking know?” Okay, Steve lives in Philly and our mother still lives in West Chester. He still has friends in West Chester. Since the store is still there, I’m throwing the bullshit flag. He had to have been by the store, been in the store, something. No way he just plucked that out of his gray matter. Either that, or I’m further gone than I thought. Shit.

My feeling of oldness doesn’t stop there. I TiVo the television show Jeopardy! and more and more of the clues given are not from things I learned in history classes, but from things that have happened during my lifetime, and I fucking remember them! Hell, Gerald Ford just died. He was the first president I was “aware” of as a kid. I was eight or nine years old, and I guess we were taught who the president was in school. Now the man is dead, and I feel so much older because of it. It’s only a matter of time before Carter and Clinton are next.

Maybe you think I’ve gone off the deep end, and I’m not really that old. I beg to differ with you, and I have one word to prove my point – underwear. Yes, I have underwear that I’ve owned since before I met Tina in 1998. It’s old, worn, and torn, but do I get rid of it? No. I keep it in the drawer just in case — just in case I don’t have any clean newer underwear to wear that day. Guys will keep underwear like it’s a family heirloom. Somewhere genetically coded in our brains; we cannot part with our ratty drawers. Why is that? Maybe it has something to do with our testicles. Come on now, our man panties keep our junk safe from the cold, and help prevent jeans from pinching. Perhaps there’s some weird connection on a cosmic level that keeps us from tossing our old nasty drawers. I don’t know. But us guys don’t save anything else near as long… except maybe rogue battery covers and keys to cars we no longer own.

Here’s another X on my scorecard of aging fuckupness. I still have the cold I talked about on the 11th. I go into coughing fits and hack up big wads of greenish-yellow phlegm like I’m some septuagenarian with an oxygen tank and a two-packs-a-day habit. It’s real pretty. Of course, all the inhalers, cough drops, medicine, and tissues aren’t helping a goddamn bit. As I start coughing up a lung to beat the band, sometimes little tiny farts simultaneously squeak out of my ass with each cough. Do you know how hard it is to cough and laugh at the same time? Tears are streaming down my face because I’m coughing so violently, and laughing so hard. I don’t care who you are, farts are funny… especially when they escape with each cough. Let’s just hope it stays as farts. The last thing I want to do is purchase new underwear because of some tragic coughing/crapping mishap.

It’s only a matter of time before I’m telling kids to turn down their so-called music and driving with my left turn blinker on. Pass the prune juice, and stay off my damn lawn!