I wasn’t feeling much better by Tuesday night, but waited until it was time to wake up and get ready for work. I was still coughing, my fever was better but still over 101°, and my head was turning out more snot than a school bus full of crying 5-year olds. I felt miserable. So, out went a couple more text messages saying I wasn’t making it to work… again.

I stayed in bed, covered to my neck in blanket with a roll of Charmin (ran out of Kleenex) and DayQuil within arms length, watching TV all day. After The Price is Right and news, television is teh suck during the day. Luckily my TiVo had recorded I Am Legend earlier in the month, so I watched that. Wasn’t impressed. I tried getting some sleep, but could only string together about 60 minutes worth before ol’ rattly would cause a coughing fit and throw out a slimy wad of lung butter. This went on for the rest of the day and night Wednesday.

Even though I was coughing to beat the band, I was feeling better. The fever was down to 98.9° (after being over 100° for more than 48 hours), and my nose was no longer teeming quarts of liquid snot. So, I thought I’d give going to work on Thursday morning a go.

Our normal carpool vehicle needs rear bearings, so I picked up LDriver in my newly-maintained, newly-braked F-150 and we headed to work. I was still coughing, but wasn’t feeling too bad. I spent the day at work eating Halls cough drops like they were M&Ms and answering all the “how are you feeling” questions. My manager asked if I’ve been to the doctor, to which I said no. He said go. I said okay, and Tina got me an appointment for the very next morning. In fact, the appointment was in less than 24 hours if you can believe that. They either had a cancellation, or I’m flagged as “near death” in their computers. Sweet.

In the doctor’s exam room, he couldn’t even get a good listen to my lungs. Every time he said “deep breath,” I’d start to cough. I’d be funny if it weren’t so true. Influenza and asthma don’t mix well, so when my lungs start filling up with Satan's semen, walking and breathing, taking deep breaths, even sleeping, take on a whole new complexity.

Doc said I have acute bronchitis. Yay, again? I’m still getting over all this happiness as I type this. He put me on Prednisone and Azithromycin to kill Fry's worms, and changed one of my inhalers when I told him the Qvar doesn’t seem to be preventing asthma attacks. He has me on Advair now. In fact, the picture above of that Ortho Tri-cyclen-looking diskus on steroids is my Advair inhaler, and is sucks! It’s a dry powder that makes my mouth feel like I licked a chalk board. I’ve done about 8 or nine hits off that nasty dust disk, but it seems like it’s helping a bit. We’ll see how it does after a month.

Sometime around the time several terrorist camel jockeys decided to land their hijacked airliners in buildings, I bought a 19-inch ViewSonic CRT. The price was $300, but 19 inches of glass was cheaper than 15 inches of LCD. ViewSonic makes great monitors, and my new 2001 CRT was awesome. Over time, however, that monitor started getting dodgy. By late 2008, early 2009, the focus was so poor, it was like trying to read the screen through a thick fog… or semen smears. And the contrast was crappy, too. It was time for a new monitor. Of course, I didn’t want just one. I needed two. I’ve been using two monitors at work for years, and it’s such a time saver. Although, ever since they upgraded my system at The Company, I haven’t been able to get my dual monitor setup to work properly. I can get the big desktop across the two LCD panels, and the mouse tracks in all of the 2540×1024 pixels, but the one monitor plugged into the analog connector bounces an “Out of Range” message, which is generated by the monitor, similar to the “No Signal” message when it’s not connected to the computer. Yay for run-on sentences!

Anyway, enough about work’s monitors. I spent many weeks looking over all the monitors and reviews at newegg.com. Did my homework on the type of panel, whether I wanted widescreen or standard, HDMI, 1080p, DVI, VGA, USB, E-I-E-I-O. It was tiring. I eventually settled on two Acer H213H 21.5″ widescreen LCD panels that had a lot of positive reviews, and were voted for a Customer Choice Award.

After three days of waiting, a guy in brown shorts plopped my new babies on the front step, like a stork from the Teamsters. It was just before lunch, and I was on my telecommute day, so I quickly set my jabber client to away at lunch, and disconnected the old 19″ ViewSonic CRT, and an even older 17″ CRT. I opened each new LCD monitor, and removed an assload of protective plastic from them, then plugged them in… and nothing. WTF, “No signal?” Great. I sat for 5 minutes thinking about it, getting a little frustrated. Then it dawned on me. Duh, X windows! A three finger salute to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, and xorg was reloading. Of course, my xorg.conf didn’t jibe with the new monitors and xorg wanted to reconfigure. That worked, kinda. At least I had ONE monitor working so I could manually run some commands. And, after about 90 minutes of trial and error, I finally got both 21.5″ widescreens working as one big desktop of 3840×1080.

I can watch a DVD on one panel in 1080p high definition, while working on the other monitor! There’s so much screen real estate, I honestly can’t fill it all. It’s totally balls! I spent the weekend playing with wallpapers, and making one that would work and look well across both monitors. Tina said I needed boobs, one on each screen. Those would be some big boobs. Not that I’m opposed to big boobs in my face all day! LDriver said I should have a desktop of some chick with a leg on each screen… and that was a pretty good idea. An hour search of some porn forums turned up a nice picture that would work out well. Of course, I didn’t want the small gap and the monitor frames between the two screen to make the chick look… “wide,” so I trimmed out a 100-or-so-pixel gutter down the middle and stitched the two halves together. Then, believe it or not, shrunk the width down to 3840 and cropped to a perfect 1080 height. A screenshot doesn’t do it justice, so here’s a photo of my two new monitors with their new wallpaper. Of course, the two screens are so wide, I couldn’t get them fully in the shot, but you get the idea. For those of you reading this at work, or some other semi-public location, the image is SFW, but barely. Enjoy!

Fuck the “Stealers.” That’s all I have to say about that. But I’ll write about another topic that’s near and dear to my past later in February… I promise.

I watch artistic gymnastics… oh, every time Halley,s Comet enters our solar system. Alright, every four years. But each time, I remember why I hate gymnastics. Besides the obvious reason of being flat-out boring as hell, the judging is done by bitter old crows that can’t even bend over to put the toilet seat down before they take a squat. Of course, these Olympics were no different, and there was an added bonus of an age controversy. Holy hell! I watched the prepubescent Chinese girls and wondered why the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique believed their passports were accurate. Are those French bastards blind? Gymnasts must turn 16 during the year of the Olympics in order to be eligible to compete. However, the Chinese girls looked like they were playing dress-up with their mother’s cosmetics before putting on a gymnastic leotard that was a size too big and stepping onto the world stage. While the girls of other countries were showing signs of puberty, the Chinese girls looked like 10-year old boys. For all we know, they may have been 10-year old boys! They had no signs of hip widening, no budding boobies, no curves at all. Hell, those girls still had deciduous teeth in their skulls! I defy you to find a 16-year old girl that still has her baby teeth. C’mon! Maybe girls that smoked five packs of Malrboros a day since they were 3 still have baby teeth at 16, but no one else… and definitely not 83% of one gymnastics team! Hey, maybe eating Chinese cuisine stunts your growth. Think about it. Maybe that’s why they’re so damned short. I think I’m on to something here. Stop scaring us with all the “weed will stunt your growth” rhetoric, and start a study on Peking Duck, dammit. Pass the bong!

Of course, the FIG says the Chinese have provided all the proof they need, in spite of the fact that several documents have been uncovered — even official government documents — that indicates several of the Chinese gymnasts were not old enough to compete. The Opening and Closing ceremonies as well as the 16 days of games prove that the Chinese government spared no expense and worked very hard at showing the world their best face… right down to forging documents that falsify age. Top that, London!

I call bullshit, and the US Olympic Committee should not let this go! The IOC should come up with some sort of radiometric dating-type test to determine age. Carbon-14, anyone? Although, I’m pretty sure the test would be inconclusive on living organisms that aren’t yet 16 years old. Maybe the only way to tell their age is to cut them in half and count the growth rings. Maybe.

Finally, the image for this update. I made a few, but settled with the best one you see here. A close runner up was a group photo of the Chinese Gymnasts for the 2012 London games, which you can see here. I made a third image that’s funny in it’s own right, but I wasn’t happy with it. Check out an early photo of a 2012 Chinese gymnast in this image. It could happen. It probably will!

I actually received a comment on my last blog update that gave me compliments on my writing, but criticized my abundant use of the word “fuck.” My first thought when I read the comment was to do a rant, something like from Eddie Murphy in RAW. He was imitating Bill Cosby saying, “yooooouuu can’t say filth flarn filth flarn filth… in front of people.” He called Richard Pryor and relayed Cosby’s incredulous criticism, and Pryor says, “Next time the motherfucker calls, tell him I said, ‘Suck my dick.’ … I don’t give a fuck… Whatever the fuck makes the people laugh, say that shit… tell Bill I said, ‘Have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up, the Jell-O pudding-eating motherfucker.’” Funny shit, but I thought better of it. The reader is right. I don’t need “fuck” to make my writing better. So, I’ll take his fucking advice and cut the fuck back on the gratuitous fucking use of the word ‘fuck.’ Seriously. I had fun overusing the word in this paragraph, but I appreciate the reader’s candor and will take his advice. Really. Stop laughing!

I was watching the Olympics last weekend, like I said, and my TiVo died. Some of you may know I have two DirecTV TiVos; a Series 1 and a Series 2, both hacked, both with additional storage space. A couple years ago during a sweltering Whidbey Island heatwave, the Series 2 stopped working. My first thought was the weakest link failed — the fan — and the system got too hot and triggered its self-preservation subroutine. Okay, maybe TiVo isn’t that smart, but it still stopped working. Since the Series 1 unit was still going strong, I just pulled the Series 2 from the rack to look at later. Later ended up being last weekend. Michael Phelps was swimming his eighth final for a gold medal, and both my TiVos were DOA. Worst. Timing. Ever.

My spidey senses were telling me it was a power supply problem. My Series 2 TiVo was originally a one-drive system, but my storage upgrade added a second drive (and more heat and more power load) to the system. As a last-ditch effort, I pulled the cover and looked at the power supply. I could see a bulging capacitor on the board, which confirmed my fears of a bad PS. Anyway, I yanked the drives, removing the louder and smaller drive. Using InstantCake, I turned the larger of the two drives into a brand new 6.2a single drive OS and slapped it back into the TiVo. My thought was one drive would be less of a load on the power supply than two drives, and it might power up. I hooked up my ailing TiVo to the TV, plugged in the power cord and… was disappointed. I had power; the case fan was spinning, albeit as fast as a dreidel on January 2, but the drive wouldn’t spin up, and there were no lights lit up on the front. Tha case fan wasn’t slow because of low voltage. The fan doesn’t spin freely when the power is off. It needs to be replaced.

To make a long story even more painfully long, after being plugged in and “dead” for 45 minutes, I was surprised to hear the Series 2 TiVo spin up! It acquired satellite signal and I was watching the Olympics again… although it was now 11pm, and the prime time show was about over. While watching, I did some Googling and found a site that detailed how to fix a TiVo power supply. They replaced the exact capacitor that was bulging on my power supply, so I ordered some capacitors on Monday morning.

Fast forward to this past weekend. I received my mail-order capacitors on Friday, and Saturday morning I pulled the TiVo from the rack again. With my trusty soldering iron fired up, I unscrewed the power supply, and replaced the bad 2200uF cap. I used 25-volt low impedance cap instead of the stock 16-volt cap, and I added a second 25-volt at the C31 position, which was left empty by the factory. It was an easy task, and I couldn’t help but think of my paternal grandfather who taught me how to use a soldering iron.

I carted the TiVo back to the rack, hooked it up, and was disappointed again. No lights, no spinning drive… but that retarded fan was spinning. The bulging capacitor was not the problem. I may have to spend the $69 for a replacement power supply. Of course, $100 will get me a new TiVo. I should go HD, but that shit’s expensive and I have a truck to pay for. What will I do?

On a side note, I won an eBay auction for a Series 1 power supply. Fourteen dollars and 8 days later, I swapped the power supply in my old Series 1 TiVo. Again I was disappointed. While the power supply worked perfectly and powered up the TiVo immediately, the video signal has no color, and when there’s motion on the screen, I get many lines of magenta interference. I thought it was the video cable, but swapping out cables didn’t change the poor image quality. I’m thinking the Series 1 TiVo is dead. I think I’ll wear black and mourn the passing of a 7-year old friend.

That’s all I got for you now, kiddies. I have to go. I have to do my part to conserve energy and properly inflate my tires. See ya next time!

On top of that, they’re not the greatest team ever, no matter how much ass felching Madden, Collinsworth, Michaels, Buck, ad nauseam, does. The Colts in week 9, Eagles in week 12, Ravens in week 13, and Giants this weekend showed that the Patriots can be beat. The Giants played a really good game Saturday. Did you watch it? Fuck, it was simulcast on three networks like a goddamn Presidential speech, and had six hours of pre-game coverage (no kidding) on the NFL Network! That matches the longest-ever pre-game coverage of a Super Bowl game! Collinsworth and Gumble were fawning all over themselves, clearly biased towards New England. You could almost hear their gagging as they gobbled up Brady’s cock and caressed his coin purse like a five-hundred dollar whore. I so wish I could have muted the television and listened to a New York radio broadcast. Everyone in broadcasting and the NFL brass wanted New England to go undefeated for the season. Most fans wanted to see justice for spygate. The almighty dollar wins again. I’m hoping they suffer a meltdown in the playoffs; the Patriots are due for a loss…

On a completely different subject, but one that still pisses me off, is Washington State’s new cell phone laws. During the holidaze, the WSP has been running television ads about drunk driving and seat belt, calling it their “emphasis patrol,” which is a politically correct way of saying “you will comply or we’ll rape your ass.” I’ve ranted about seat belts before, so I won’t cover it again. This time I’m peeved at the incongruity of the State in which I live. A new cell phone law, RCW 46.61.668, which goes into effect January 1, 2008, states that you can only be busted for text messaging as a secondary offense. This means that you have to be breaking some other traffic law before you can be fined for text messaging. This is completely stupid when you compare it to the seat belt law which is a primary offense. Somehow, the State feel that text messaging isn’t serious enough to make you stop doing it, unless you kill someone… then they’ll only fine you $124. How can Washington make text messaging a secondary infraction, but putting your arm around someone while driving or not wearing a seat belt a primary infraction? The logic escapes me! I personally watched a woman text messaging in stop and go traffic roll right into the back of another car on Interstate 5. LDriver and I busted up laughing because we watched the whole thing happen. I even directed LDriver’s attention to the impending incident as the woman was coasting; “Hey, watch this… {crunch}”

Let’s put this in perspective, shall we? If you’re not wearing a seat belt, which is not putting anyone in harm’s way, you can be pulled over and fined $124 in Washington State. However, some teenage twat, continually taking her eyes off the road and risking the lives of everyone in her immediate area of the highway (in both directions) while she text messages her slutty girlfriends about Ryan Seacrest, or some such shit, is perfectly acceptable? Great googly-moogly, man! How does that make sense to anyone? Only if Miss Snottybitch is going too fast, or swerving in her lane, or not indicating a turn will she be pulled over, then she be ticketed for both infractions. Yeah. This makes total fucking sense. Thank you RCW 46.61.668, I feel safer now. U R my BBF, LOL.

Even Washington’s new hands-free law (effective July 1, 2008) is a secondary infraction. Why is the harmless act of not wearing a seat belt a primary offense, but threatening the lives of others with a Scion xB hurling down the highway at seventy miles an hour, with a Hello Kitty cell phone glued to your head a secondary offense? Stupid retarded lawmakers. Maybe if Governor Mudcutter's Continental gets broadsided by some jackoff on a cell phone both new laws will be changed to primary infractions.

This very blog update is the 28th update in 2007, and the 158th since January of 2005. Actually, there were a few updates in late 2004, but when I upgraded to WordPress, I left the 2004 updates out. This is probably the longest and most active my domain name has ever been in its 10 years. It started out as a cock-waving novelty. In 1997, not many people had real domain names for their home page. Most were stuck with a home page at theirisp.com/~username. Having your very own domain name roxx0r3d, and was an indication of your l33tness! Okay… maybe that was all in my head.

I was working at an ISP (Galaxynet) at the time, and hosted wafwot.com on their servers. I eventually moved the domain name to its own dedicated server at Galaxynet before moving it to a hosting company in Florida, a virtual private server (VPS) in Renton, and finally a VPS in Seattle. Now I own wafwot.net and wafwot.org, along with wafwot.mobi and several other domain names.

Yes, wafwot.com turned 10 years old this month. I registered it on December 17, 1997, back when the only domain name registrar around was Network Solutions and domain names cost $35 per year. Today, Network Solutions still exists, but there are almost 900 different domain name registrars and domain names can be as low as $5 per year. This got me to thinking about how far things have come since I registered wafwot.com.

Microsoft Internet Exploder 4 and Netscape Communicator 4 were in a browser war, and Windows 95 was the OS that most of us used. Windows 98 was only in beta testing in December 1997, and my i486DX-33 was running OS/2 Warp 4 for the “superior” multitasking capabilities. Yes, I hated Windows even in 1997.

Speaking of wars, modems were king of Internet connectivity in 1997 (for consumers), and USRobotics and Rockwell/Lucent were in a battle to break the 33.6k barrier and deliver 56k speeds over a copper phone line. I was running a Bulletin Board System (which is why I ran OS/2 Warp) in 1997 on that old i486DX with a 33.6k modem. The fastest CPU available was the Intel Pentium II, which ran at a blistering 300 MHz, and an 8MB x 32bit SIMM of EDO memory was over $100. Those were the good ol’ days!

Many people had no idea what an MP3 was in 1997, but thanks to a new program called Winamp, we all learned quickly. No one knew what an iPod was, and in fact, Apple was in serious financial trouble in 1997 before Steve Jobs stepped (back) in to save their happy gay rainbow ass… and look at what the MP3 did for Apple!

There’s plenty more Internet and computer history from 1997, but I’m tired of typing, and should actually go to sleep. Four in the morning is only six hours away. I’ll Wikify this nonsense at work, which better be a short day. If you remember your computer or the Internet from 1997, tell me about it in the comments section. See ya next year!

The image here is a screen capture from a new page on wafwot.com. My new cell phone has a GPS chipset in it, and I’m running a cool little program that automatically uploads my current position to a database on my web server. The web page then plots the points using Google Maps or Google Earth. It so totally kicks ass! You can view my latest trip, or previous trips, or even see my current location! I don’t always have the program running on the phone, however, so the web page may not always show my latest position. The program is called TrackMe, and was written by Luis Espinosa. The web interface was written by jcleek/Slacker, also of the xda-developers forums, and I’ve even contributed a tiny bit to the web code. Check out my GPS tracking at gps.wafwot.com. If you have Google Earth installed, load up my KML file at http://www.wafwot.com/gps/routes/wafwot.kml. It’s pretty damn cool.

As I mentioned, I got a new phone. I’m such a technology whore when it comes to phones. My last new phone was only April of this year, but I was using it for so much, I was getting frustrated at the slow speed of the phone and the Int0rn3ts.

My new phone is an AT&T Tilt. Here’s another picture. This bitch smokes! It’s got more gadgets than Sean Connery and Roger Moore combined! Windows Mobile 6 Professional powered by a 400 MHz Qualcomm processor, a 65k-color tilting TFT touchscreen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 802.11b and 802.11g Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth 2.0 with support of up to 6 simultaneous pairings, a 3 megapixel camera with 10x zoom and autofocus, built-in GPS, quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3.6 Mbps tri band UMTS/HSDPA (that’s right, 3.6 megabits per second, baby), 256 MB of flash ROM, 128 MB SRAM, and a microSD expansion slot with support for 32 GB memory cards. I currently have a 4 GB card in the phone, because they don’t make 32 giggers yet. (My god, look at all them Wikipedia links!)

Oh, and it’s a phone, too! Imagine that.

The GPS chipset and large microSD card lets me run TomTom Navigator on the phone for voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation. I was amazed at how accurate TomTom is, at least on roads that have existed for more than a few years. It’s the dog’s bollocks, man! Of course, we drive the same route day after day after day after day after… but it’s nice to have for those trips around accidents, or the rare time I get lost. I’ll be fucked by starving Pygmies before I’ll stop and ask for directions! I’m a guy, damn it! We’re not supposed to ask for directions or the monkeys will fly out our asses, and we can’t have that.

It’s a beautiful thing when I can be secure shelled into work via VPN, chatting on a jabber server, live tracking my journey on Google Maps for the world to see, and surfing the web at DSL speeds — in the palm of my hand — while doing 75 miles an hour northbound on I-5. Don’t get your panties in a knot, I’m a passenger at those times. If I was driving, I’d be text messaging, too! Ha ha!

Okay, enough about my geek toys. What else has happened? I had some work done on my truck. Early in November, I had Les Schwab put on four new Wild Country tires. I bought the truck with the old tires on it, and they were getting a little thin in the tread department. The new tires are nice and quiet, and with winter on the way, it feels good to know my ass (and LDriver’s ass) will safer… because we all know how I worry about LDriver’s ass.

Just before Thanksgiving, I took the truck to Hilltop Texaco here in Oak Harbor. The soul-crushing commutes to Seattle on Fridays were taking their toll on my engine. After doing a hundred miles — forty of which are at 70+ miles per hour — the truck was running rough and felt like it needed a good tune-up. So, during lunch on one of the three days of the holiday-shortened week I worked from home, I took my F-150 to Hilltop. I sat in their waiting room for nearly four freaking hours, tortured by FOX News and watching people shovel popcorn down their esophagus like their name was Moses and they just got back from his little pow-wow with God in the mountains.

Anyway, the mechanics at Hilltop put in new spark plugs, new wires, a new distributor cap, a new rotor, a new serpentine belt, and tuned and scoped the engine. They also checked the electrical system and the brakes. The truck passed all it’s tests, but still runs rough at idle once it’s up to running temperature. Damn it all to hell, I hate vehicles, sometimes. Nearly five hundred dollars, and I still have the “trouble” I took the truck in for. It rides much nicer, sounds better, and even shifts gears smoother… but what the fuck, man?

Speaking of Thanksgiving, Tina and I had a nice holiday. We didn’t go anywhere, or do anything special. We’re boring like that. But, I had a nice nine-day span of being at home, coupled with turkey, stuffing, cranberries, and football. It was a relaxing weekend work-from-home four-day weekend string of days. I wish I could do that more often! Like once a month! Fuck, think of the gas (and money) I’d save. As it is, I spend more than $90 a week in gas.

Okay, there ya go. Not so great, but it catches you up a bit and prevents me from going the whole month of November without an update. December should be a little chattier.

If you’ve been a long-time reader, or gave up masturbating one weekend to read through past entries of this horse shit, you’ll remember I tried SunRocket's service in January of 2006. I wasn’t too impressed. I talked a couple of former Kwik-E-Mart employees who apparently couldn’t hack it in the cut-throat Squishee industry, and they kept asking me to spoof my MAC address. I eventually sent their Gizmo back to Virginia after canceling service.

Well, in May, I got an email from SunRocket asking me to come back. The email said they had improved their service and technical support. It offered me service for $19.95 a month, free setup, a free Gizmo with free shipping, and the first two months free. That’s a lot of goddamn “free,” people, and SunRocket had a richer feature set than Vonage. I figured, “Why not?”

I got the new Gizmo, and the service worked flawlessly right out of the box. The Gizmo was a newer Linksys device, and it was a simple drop-in replacement for my Vonage adapter. The service was stable, too. There were no dropped calls with crystal clear audio. Things were as perfect as a virgin’s puckered balloon knot.

Apparently, though, SunRocket’s ass was about to fall out, because they were laying people off left and right. The final blow came Monday when they laid off over 200 customer support techs and put a “fuck off and die” message on their phone number. I’m paraphrasing here, folks. Their web page also has a big fuck off on it (at least at this time).

I have to apologize to Tina. I tried calling her four different times within 10 minutes on Monday evening. There was no answer despite having four (yes, four) cordless phones throughout the house, including one in the shitter. I came home and bitched at her for not answering the phone. She said it didn’t ring, but when I called from my cell phone in front of her, the goddamn phones lit up like I was at a PBS pledge drive. I now know that SunRocket’s demise was the reason why the phone didn’t ring. So, to Tina: I’m sorry for being a grouchy little bitch.

Luckily, I was never charged for service by SunRocket. They closed the doors before my two month trial was over. I also never canceled Vonage. All I had to do to switch back to Vonage was walk Tina through swapping the Gizmo for the Vonage adapter… and she did that with little instructions via jabber. Other people I work with, who were also using SunRocket, weren’t so lucky. They have to find a new VoIP provider.

On a completely different topic, I really hate the west coast for its selection of good food. I grew up in Philadelphia, where food is food! The east coast is where good food was born, apparently. I think I’ve talked about this topic before, but it’s really pissing me off, lately. Cheesecake… why is it so difficult to find a good, deep and rich New York-style cheesecake with graham cracker crust out here on the west coast? Where I work, they like to celebrate your birthday by gathering up the employees who aren’t up to their asses in alligators and sing Happy Birthday to You over a cake of your choice. This Sunday is my birthday. When the “birthday committee” asked me my favorite cake, why wouldn’t I say cheesecake? However, the cake they got was not cheesecake. The girls of the birthday committee do a good job of getting a cake and a card signed by everyone. I’m sure they’re limited by the bakery as to what they can purchase, and I really am appreciative of the effort… but cheesecake does not have yellow sponge cake in it! The cake they got had sponge cake on the bottom layer with raspberry jam between a cheesy cream topping that had the consistency of soft margarine. It was tasty, but it wasn’t cheesecake like I know cheesecake. If you really want to try a good east coast cheesecake, take the time to try my cheesecake recipe.

Most people have never heard of a hoagie on the west coast. They’re called subs here, and only seems to be sold by chain stores, like Subway. On a side note… how cool is Wikipedia for having a separate article for hoagies? I thought for sure they’d lump it in with “submarine sandwiches.” Anyway, Subway sandwiches are not hoagies. I can make a better sandwich with hot dog buns and pre-packaged, pre-sliced, vacuum-packed cold cuts from the grocery store… and I so wish I could punch that faggoty-ass Jared Fogle in the throat. If you make a hoagie the way it’s supposed to be made, you’re not going to lose weight. Processed meats high in fat, oil and/or mayonnaise, and cheese — glorious cheese — make a good hoagie. It’s not supposed to be good for you, which is why a hoagie is so goddamn delicious! Jared’s corporate-paid ass is eating lettuce and tomato sandwiches with a turkey condiment; no cheese, no oil or mayo. Let’s call a spade a spade, eh?

A good Philly cheesesteak is even more difficult to find on the left coast. I went to Arby's last night for dinner, since I got home so late. They had a Philly beef sub advertised at the drive-thru squawk box menu, so I thought I would try it. Big mistake. It was very small for a “sub.” The meat was roast beef, instead of steak. I mean, c’mon… roast beef?! And worst yet, it was loaded with mayonnaise. Mayo? What the fuck is mayo doing on a cheesesteak? It tasted like, well, it tasted like a roast beef sandwich with mayo, not even remotely close to a Philly cheesesteak. Shit! In today’s litigious world, maybe the city of Philadelphia should look into suing anyone that makes a “Philly” steak sandwich that doesn’t use steak and white American cheese or cheez whiz. Roast beef and mayonnaise does not a Philly cheesesteak make!

This isn’t rocket science, people. There’s quite a few million east coast transplants on the west coast that would love authentic (or at least close to authentic) east coast food. I’m not saying you can’t find a decent sandwich out here. There are a few places that have carved out a niche business for themselves, making food that passes for east coast food, but it’s never convenient, and always too far away… Of course, if you want some Taylor pork roll, or Scrapple, or even some Tastykakes and Herr's potoato chips, you have to place an order on the Internet.

Where’s my credit card?

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?

Two thousand and four started out okay. Galaxynet had just finished building its new Internet Cafe, and celebrated by having an Open House with the local Chamber of Commerce. By the beginning of 2004, I had been working for Galaxynet for nearly 7 years. The addition of an Internet Cafe was a big deal. There were at least four new employees, and management “reorganized,” (for lack of a better word).

By the end of the first month of 2004, the year had turned to shit. On January 26, my Dad wound up in a Casa Grande, AZ hospital. In addition to End-Stage Renal Disease and dialysis every other day, he was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis (MG), a nuero-muscular nerve disorder. Things weren’t good. He was placed in a medically-induced coma, and air-lifted to Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix in early February.

By February 7, I was on an airplane from Seattle heading to Phoenix to help take care of Dad’s house. I spent nearly two weeks in Arizona, paying Dad’s bills, talking with doctors and nurses, and driving the hour each way to visit Dad in the hospital. By the time I left Arizona, Dad was getting better and stronger. But he still had rehabilitation to go through. It was early April before he left the Hospital in Phoenix and got back to his home.

On leap day, Februay 29, 2004, my paternal grandmother passed away. I was really saddened by this news, but knew her health wasn’t the greatest. I had been talking to her while in Arizona with my Dad, and struggled with a decision to inform her that her remaining son was in the hospital. I eventually told her Dad was in the hospital, but only after I knew he was out of his medically-induced coma and would be okay. It’s my opinion the old girl just gave up. She lost her husband of 40 years in July 1979, her first son in January 1998, and I don’t think she wanted to survive her entire family. Telling my Dad that his mother passed away while he was in the hospital was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do.

Back in Washington, work had become a hostile place to work. Management, in my opinion, was micro-managing the cafe part of the business. Since I was in charge of Technical Support, the front counter, and the public computers (in addition to my duties as Network Administrator), I was almost always in the cafe. The new cafe manager and the employees were really unhappy with the way things were being run from “upstairs.” By late April, the cafe manager had resigned, and “upstairs” had taken over managing the cafe. Everyone seemed to be butting heads, and in my opinion, that spelled the beginning of the end.

In mid-May, I didn’t see any way I could resolve the differences between management and myself, so I started weighing my options. My best friends worked for a competing ISP, and told me that I should appy for a position. I did, and was offered a position working in the Hosting department. I was asked to not burn any bridges… to be mature and leave Galaxynet on good terms. I agreed.

I spent about 3 days writing my letter of resignation. It was a very dificult process, but after sharing my rough drafts with Tina, my friends, and my Dad, I was assured it was a great letter. I submitted it to Thom on May 25, 2004.

Things were quite cold at Galaxynet for the remainder of the week. By Friday, May 28, my keys to Galaxynet were confiscated. This wasn’t a good sign. I had given my last day as June 5, but taking my keys away after 3 days just told me I was being shut out. I was told that the girls behind the cafe counter would have copies of the keys so I could get into my office. I found this to be untrue.

On Saturday, May 29, 2004, I went to Galaxynet with a friend to gather my personal belongings from the office. The office was locked. There was no key with the girls behind the cafe counter. So, I made a poor judgement call. I forcibly opened the door to my office, putting a small hole in the hollow door just above the knob. I was able to get my belongings, but when management found out I broke into my own office, they called the police. I was arrested and charged with Malicious Mischief in the Third Degree.

Through July and August, I appeared in court, defending my actions. Since it became their word against mine, and my attorney thought that a trial by Jury would be bad, I plead guilty on September 8, 2004. My sentence was 365 days in jail, with 365 days suspended, $5,000 fine, with $4,700 suspended, and $305 in restitution for damages to the door. But, since Galaxynet put a stop payment on my last paycheck, and sent a letter saying that my final paycheck would be adjusted to cover damages to the door, a hearing was set for 6 months from September 8 for restitution. So, I’m on unsupervised probation until September 8, 2005. If I stay out of trouble, the charges should be expunged… at least that’s what the Judge said.

By the end of July, Galaxynet couldn’t manage the Cafe and the ISP customers on their own, and sold the customer base to the company I started working for after I left Galaxynet. It was bittersweet. On one hand, I hated seeing Galaxynet fall apart. I worked for seven years with two different owners to keep Galaxynet alive in the face of emerging technology and competition. But on the other hand, their failure to keep the company a viable ISP without my skills only puncuated the fact it was my efforts that kept Galaxynet going.

During all the court appearance bullshit, my Dad suffered an exacerbation of his MG. By mid-August, he was back in the Casa Grande hospital. He wasn’t as critical as he was in February, but once he was stable enough to be transported, he was moved to a long-term care facility in Mesa, AZ. While the MG wasn’t as bad as it was in February, his health was going downhill. His vision was gone, only being able to see for 20 minutes or so in the morning, before being completely blind for the rest of the day.

There was no way I could go to Arizona this time. I didn’t have the money, nor could I take any vacation time from work. I had only started in early June, and hadn’t accumulated any vacation time. A couple of my Dad’s close friends really helped out, getting a power of attorney to handle my Dad’s finances and taking care of things for him while he’s in the hopital. Mary and Michelle are angels, and I appreciate all their help more than they know.

The rest of 2004 was fairly uneventful. I did have some car troubles in September, and got a used 1979 Ford LTD from a friend. That car also suffered some troubles after six weeks or so, so I had to figure out how to get my 1968 Mustang back on the road. It needs a tuneup, but the ‘Stang is working again.

The start of Autumn brings illness. Two years ago, I had bronchial pnuemonia that I never really got over. Eventhough I had antibiotics and an inhaler, each winter since I’ve been stricken with a respitory problem that causes me shortness of breath. This year is no different. I’ll be going back to a doctor again as soon as my new medical insurance kicks in at work, because I’m still dealing with this respitory problem.

As 2005 begins, my father is still in the hospital since August 2004. I really hope he gets stronger soon, but I afraid he’s not going to be able to return to his beloved house in the desert if he’s blind.

So, fuck you, 2004… and let’s hope 2005 is a far better year.