Back in the saddle; writing serious

So I kept thinking about coming back to actually blog, but for a while my life has been in a very turbulent place and not always given to introspective reasoning. I’m continuing to work in theatre, which gobbles up large sums of time for not particularly great cash payout. I’m in a place where I may be looking for another industry soon, but we shall see what becomes of my current state at the end of my new 7 month test period.

Somehow, in all of this, I managed to find time to start writing again. This year, I wrote for NaNoWriMo. Due to a tech I was in, I started on November 16th, and at the end of the month was only 6,000 words short of the limit. I had decided to really try to power ahead on my conflicted love child, whose working title was “Peregrine” up until this point. F0r some reason, the draft began to come out incredibly well, and I forced myself to pay attention and not mess around with video games and such, to just get some real time dedicated to putting this thing together. And it worked.

For more than a decade, I have been struggling with this story. I have succeeded with several drafts, and others fizzled out. This last draft I completed last month was the most complete ever, and encapsulates a very interesting progression. Thanks to my experiences over the last ten years, I have grown as a writer, and it shows.

In high school, I had a high schooler’s mentality. While I was told I was remarkably mature for my age, things are still very simple, very cut and dry, very this and that, in high school. Drama is always present in its explosion of unseen variables and irrational reactions, but as we can only write about what we know about, you can only really write about your experience of the world in high school.

Like most kids, high school me was entirely supported and guided by my parents and school system, and thanks to the homogenous and safe nature of my home town, my experiential bracket was very limited. The only thing I knew about violence and dissatisfaction was what I saw in movies and games and how I felt when I went from being in a committed relationship to dead single.

I then went to college. With greater freedom, you can experience more. You understand what it’s like to budget your own time, to feel independent and build a schedule for yourself. You expand your boundaries. Suddenly, you start to see the world for what it is a little more. The high school mentality of “this versus that” begins to fall in favor of “wow, people do bad things for reasons, and not just because they’re Bad, or Misguided, or Evil.” Misguided in high school was only really a reskinning of Evil. You can label someone as misguided or misunderstood, but unless you explain why, there is no greater expansion on it.

And, of course, it allowed me to paint a better picture of a college girl who is genetically altered. My grasp on history and social psychology improved, and the halfbreeds, who had once been a faction of purists who had just been beset upon by moralless Neo-Nazis, started to have a real story behind them. Some of the mystery of women was also revealed to me, both in that I saw one naked for the first time in person, and that my varied friends started to paint a new picture of logic that I had once written off as “simply irrational.” Just plain saying, “Women are crazy” is like a scientist going, “Oh, the ocean is deep and dangerous. Don’t go near it.” The statement may be conditionally true, but you have to try to understand it better.

I also want to quickly elaborate on why seeing an average woman nude is important. If you base body culture on what you typically see, which is in porn stars who are more plastic than a Saturn sedan and in magazine glossies that have been painstakingly altered to be more pleasing, you lose track of what a person really looks like. What you are seeing instead are living dolls, constructed to suit an ideology which is flawed. Then, you look at a real person, who is really there and has had nothing done to her, and go, “Oh, that’s what they really look like?”

All of a sudden my female protagonist lost her oversized breasts and perfect figure in favor of something more streamlined and suitable to her athletic nature, something that was more her, something that cooperated in making her as much as she helped sculpt it. At the same time, another character who had always been particularly well-endowed suddenly was tasked with dealing with the gift-curse of having large breasts, and I was amazed to watch her embrace the issue.

Moving along…

I then graduated from college and landed in a shit economy trained in an industry you did not go into to make money. I love my work, but the stress of not getting paid on time, or not getting paid enough to cover expenses incurred by having to relocate, living in places where there were no kitchens, or merely being inexperienced in running a tight budget, is a very taxing thing. I found myself tasting desperation as well as frustration, and working in the very different place that is a city taught me a new facet of life. Nothing ever happened in my town. At college, people broke windows and screamed at each other across parking lots, got belligerently drunk and swore at people. In Boston, men and women who are suffering from mental handicaps lurk in strange places to scream and beg for money, and any dark corner becomes a place a man might suddenly step out of and demand for my wallet.

And now, the truth about misguided characters was revealed to me. I always knew that they had to have their own point of view that led them to “evil” decisions, but only now did I realize that sometimes they even realize that they’re being bad, but believe they have no other choice.

I saw how different demographics both had their glowing virtues and severe drawbacks. And I took the story thematically out of my high school naivety.

Once, Peregrine was about a girl who was enslaved by a dude just because, who was part of a species that had been attacked because people were scared about how awesome they were and they struggled to just get on with their lives. She eventually joins a group of super-secret mercenaries whose basic goal is to be the best super-secret mercenaries in known space. The original climax had to star a random baddie who had never ever showed up before, who had to be just so thickly evil that there was justification for killing him. But there was no satisfaction in that, and a lot of people weren’t as thrilled about my mercenary clans’ flawed philosophy, especially in that all of the clanfolk were blindly single-minded about their flawed philosophy.

Ten years later. I have read things I love and read things I hate and learned smaller tricks, and after ten years of beating my head against the universe, I figured a lot of things out.

The halfbreeds became douchebags. There had to be a real reason why they were attacked, and that reason was primarily because humanity felt threatened, felt like they were about to become obsolete, but the halfbreeds’ general dickishness wasn’t helping. It seeded the thought that if they did come to power that they were not going to be particularly nice to their creators afterward. Now that there were two near holocausts, they definitely aren’t in the mood to be nice, but are assholes to a fault. They certainly aren’t helping their own state.

The Clans embraced their flawed philosophies and figured out why they were mercenaries and how to be edgy without being unrealistic or particularly unlikeable. They began as the original refugees of the last holocaust, who were so paralyzed by fear that it would happen again that they made everyone a warrior, so any fool who kicked in their door would have to fight an entire family, from an eleven year old carving people up with a kitchen knife, to an old man who is still hardened and skilled enough to shoot a man without blinking. Over time, however, the refugee theme snowballed, and they became a society of people who were all thriving on a second chance that they would not have been given if one of the Clans had not shown up.

Imagine having your entire life torn apart by the gestapo or rival gangs or something, everyone you know now dead and your home burned to the ground, and a bunch of people show up, save your life, and then ask for you to come with them. You might feel somewhat endeared as well.

But lastly, the mechanical principles of writing are much clearer in my mind. It used to be all organic; I just wrote as I thought and that was it. Now, the first draft is certainly that, but by the time I’m done with it, characters have shown themselves in ways I didn’t expect, sometimes in ways that are not consistent with their earlier behaviors, and I have to go back and change things. I discovered it was very important to go back and with every scene attempt to feel out my characters’ thoughts about what was going on. Sometimes, they would answer with, “no, my younger self wouldn’t have acted this way,” or, “eh, I don’t really know if that’s what I would do.” Sometimes, I seed something that I thought would be significant, but instead of being a compelling or relateable aspect of the story, it ended up just getting in the way, with me forgetting about it half of the time, and I finally decided that it was not lending anything to the story. It’s important to trim the fat. Some details are important for a world, but there are plenty of times when you thought something was going to go somewhere and then it didn’t. That’s alright. If the aspect didn’t end up fitting in the story, you can go back and cut it back out.

I want to give two minute details that both did different things.

My main character takes a blow to the head and ends up needing glasses to fix up her eyesight, thus expanding her emotive landscape to include said glasses and perhaps alter the way people saw her.

She also understands how to speak Spanish, because large sections of her continent can speak both.

The glasses thing I ended up mostly forgetting about and there was only ever one person who was even affected by her wearing them, so I decided it was adding nothing and cut it out.

The Spanish fluency I had added on a whim, and suddenly another character, whom I was struggling to get a connection for her, busts out that he can speak Spanish and just like that, they’re bonding at a boring cocktail party. He ends up becoming quite important later on.

I often have no idea which of these ideas are going to show up and run when I put them in, but that does mean I have to accept that some of them never went anywhere and snip them back out later.

I was talking about this approach with my friend and she sort of grinned and said, “I wish more authors would do that.”

The slew of Windows 7 Tunnel Adapters

So we’re in a state of transition where our networking technology is literally halfway between IPv4, the only xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx address architecture (often looks like 192.168.1.1) and a loooong string of hexadecimal. The reason is because our network environment has become so full that we are about to exhaust the number of numerical combinations available under the original system. There are some other infrastructure reasons as well, but they’re more complicated.

My Windows 7 laptop gets around. Because it has connected to an untold number of public and community networks since it was initialized, I ended up with such an enormous mass of defunct network adapters that I could not use [ipconfig] because it always overflow command.com’s display cache. I literally had 83 tunnel adapters.

Their purpose is to convert outgoing IPv6 protocol data to the legacy IPv4. However, every time I connect to a new network, it spawns a new one. This includes that weird glitch where every now and then it connects to my home router and creates a new network by the name [Home 2], though now I’m up to [Home 5] for no reason.

Other instructions recommends disabling the IPv6 protocols in the network adapters themselves, but it didn’t clear the enormous cache of defunct adapters. However, I did find out how to delete them, and let it start all over again.

~Go to [Device Manager]

~Expand the [Network Adapters] tree.

~Go to [View] and enable the viewing of hidden devices.

You should see all of them now, called [Microsoft 6to4 adapter]. The list will include not only your physical adapters but also a few other protocols, including all of the [WAN Miniport] the [Teredo Tunneling Pseudo-Interface] and the [Microsoft ISATAP Adapter]

Be careful in here. Deleting the wrong thing will leave you without your networking adapters and you’ll have to find a way to reinstall them. The aggravating thing is that you have to delete each of the 6to4 adapters manually, one at a time, because Device Manager doesn’t let you multi-select.

But now I’ve cleaned it out and I can actually use [ipconfig] again. Yay!

Always have a backup plan, pt 1

So about an hour ago, on this lovely 11 degree F night, I wander upstairs and notice a smell, a smell that says “something is burning.” After some quick inspection, I deduce that it’s associated with the forced-hot air vents.

Well, I walked past the furnace on my way upstairs, so it’s not actively on fire, but this is still wrong. I stumble across my sleepy dad, who woke up smelling it and he tells me that the furnace blower has sounded cranky all day.

I get the thing to fire up and watch it and listen. It’s always done two things. The gas generator whirs and growls, and if you’re standing next to it, you can hear the shuddering rumble of a fire, and after a minute or so, the blower kicks on. Another minute, the gas generator shuts down, and the blower hangs out for another minute more, then shuts down itself.

No blower. Huh. Well, that’s not a good sign. Flip the emergency switch. Have to call the service guys in the morning.

Meanwhile, it’s chilly outside. And yes, the service guys are on 24-hr call, but I worked 24-hr on-call before and I’m not that cruel. Time for plan B.

We put in a wood-stove fireplace insert a few years ago. It’s part of a plan to save money and be a little eco-sensitive (and politically responsible, if reducing our oil dependency is any incentive). The thing gets crazy hot and heats most of the house when it’s up to temperature. We light it up, and now I’m on late-night fire watch to tend it into the wee hours of the morning. We’ve never really figured out how to bank the thing. Supposedly, if you get it REALLY hot and stoke it full of wood, you can slam the damper shut and it will be so starved for oxygen that it’ll sit and smolder, but be too hot to go out. It’s sort of a fine balance, I guess. Too closed, and the fire goes out an hour later. Too open, and it burns all of its fuel off in two. Really too hot, and the fire escaping the flue lights our chimney on fire (potentially).

Whatever. I’m up anyway. But it makes me stop and think. I might be too much of an (ex)boy scout, but I seem to have this obsession with the “Be Prepared” thing. I’m the guy people come to when they need something in a hurry, from sharpies to a spare tire jack. I carry a pocket knife at all times, because you just don’t know. Most often it’s used to pry something open (gently) or cut open a box or envelope. I wouldn’t often think of using it in a fight. Thankfully, I’ve never had to.

It’s also been part of the way I was brought up. We always had an answer for things. Power outages. Flat tires. I can’t say if it’s just the way my family is, but there were so many times I’d be out as an AAA driver thinking, “There wasn’t someone you knew who could help you?” I end up wondering, “How many things do I have a contingency for?”

Unless I need to have my truck dragged to a shop, I’m in pretty good shape. My family has brought me spare keys and helped me with flat tires, and I’m sure they’d bring me gas too, if I was ever that unlucky. I suppose it’s this inspiration that’s let me turn around and throw a few tools and a charged air tank in the back of my truck to go help a friend change our a spare. It was a good thing I brought the tank too; we weren’t planning on the spare also being flat, but it happens.

And of course, I drive a 4×4, the “No, I’m not getting stuck in the snow.” There’s a pair of tow chains in the back, and one of these days I’ll get enough money to put a winch on it. Gotta be careful with the chains, though. I have training. You can mess things up really well if you don’t know what you’re doing and what to pull on.

So I guess what I’m really trying to do is be an example, I suppose. Take a second and think things over. Think of what you have, and who’d you’d call, if you ended up getting stuck.

- Extended blackout; how do you get light? How do you cook food?

- Furnace quits in the winter; how do you stay warm?

- You slid out and got stuck in a snowbank; how do you get yourself out?

- You locked your keys in your car; how do you get in (without breaking a window? [if you only have one key for your car, you might wanna change that.])

- Your space heater set a carpet on fire; how do you put it out before it spreads?

- You busted a valve on your sink and it won’t shut off; do you know where the other shut-off is? (even in an apartment, there’s at least one)

I’ll answer all of these in the next post.

 

 

Out of state driving

Not out of state drivers, mind.

It’s always interesting traveling and seeing how things are different.

For reference, I am a Massachusetts native, and after driving a tow truck for 5 months, very much a Massachusetts driver. I’m aggressive, I move quick, and stop signs are only a suggestion. On the other hand, I also have been a very safe driver with no moving violations or any accidents of any sort.

So the first thing I noticed upon entering South Carolina is that none of the cars down here have front license plates. Shortly thereafter, I realized that no trailers here have any sort of registration at all.

Also, apparently SC doesn’t have motorcycle helmet laws. I feel like galavanting around a highway on a motorcycle without a helmet is merely inviting disaster, but on the other hand, Darwin would be proud, because if you’re that much of an idiot, then dying because of it wouldn’t detriment the gene pool much, would it?

South Carolina drivers are interesting. No one speeds in this state. In the grand city of Charleston, you can get hung up pretty quick behind people who just aren’t moving. I blame the tourists, unfamiliar with the layout, because if Boston is a commerce city, Charleston is a tourism city. Holy crap, people window shop from their cars down here. And I literally saw a Chinese fire drill between two cars in the middle of a city street. People will sometimes just stop for no reason, too.

I instantly observed also that SC drivers have this weird relationship with the stopline at an intersection, which is to hurtle at it at cruising speed and then jack on the brakes and come to a screeching halt about two feet over the line. It’s worse when they’re coming in from a parking lot.

And another thing, I have heard more bad exhaust systems in this state. And while I expect it from the shitboxes, there are some legitimately nice cars with growling exhaust. I couldn’t figure it out. Until I then noticed that none of these cars have inspection stickers and it hit me. SC doesn’t do state inspections, so there’s no way for them to tag anyone driving with a busted exhaust. Because in MA, you’d get failed for less than these.

I have a feeling I’m going to be glad to be back in MA.

Advice

So I was talking to a friend tonight, driving endlessly in circles trying to hash out some bad perspectives and general listlessness, when I recalled something my dad had told me over breakfast years ago. It pertains mostly to romantic relationships, but I feel like it’s general applications are limitless.

In all relationships, it is absolutely essential that you retain your individuality

This may come as common sense or a total no-brainer to some, but for anyone who feels intrigued, read on.

We are separate people, with separate, unique desires, motivations, mentalities, and concepts. It is natural for these pieces that we hold to fit with some people and not fit for others. When a lot of pieces mesh, you move from being casual acquaintances to friends, and depending on genders and lifestyles, even more. However, you are still two people holding your puzzle pieces between yourselves. You may notice that when you assemble this picture, both you and your partner have pieces that are not being used. Remember that.

We all are guilty of a certain amount of what I will call “Shadowing” for this rant. This a behavior where we inadvertently or deliberately morph ourselves into paragons of our partner’s desires. In an extreme example, I once witnessed a close friend completely alter his behavior and even physical appearance for his girlfriend. While I respect a suggestion such as “I would like you to dress a little nicer,” it becomes especially bizarre when someone starts to dye his or her hair and talk about piercings or tattoos he or she has never entertained having before. Often the pretense of “oh I’ve always wanted that” shows up. Be wary of this, as it is often a shielding lie.

This happens to all of us. Sometimes, it’s a parent-child relationship, or a boss-employee. They expect you to be this THING. And in order to be the most desirable, super-bestest person in their sight, you completely conform and become this THING.

There are several problems with this. As much as becoming the perfect knight standing inside the picture frame of their desire would seem ideal, it is paradoxically incredibly boring for the other person. They won’t realize it right away, because you’ve captured all of their ideals, but suddenly you are no longer appealing. Maybe they caught onto your insincerity. Maybe it was because you no longer leave anything to be desired. You are a candy bar they have finished eating. It may have been a fantastic candy bar, but it’s all eaten now. And now the cheating begins. The aloofness. Suddenly your partner becomes irritable because everywhere they go, they have this stupid Shadow that’s following them around. It does everything they want them to, but at the same time your unhappiness destroys them, even if its for unrelated reasons. They start to nag at you, begging you to tell them what they can do, and when you were only angry because you’ve been standing for the last ten hours, it becomes all the more frustrating having some yappy Shadow begging you to be happy and looking positively miserable that you aren’t.

Leaving someone else the sole keyholder to your happiness is a bad idea. It’s a lot of responsibility and no one wants that, nor can anyone really handle that much responsibility on top of having a job and family.

Let’s look at the puzzle again. You have become a shadow, holding only your partner’s pieces and forgetting all of your own. All of a sudden, you have half of a picture. Your separate but complementing abilities are lost.

Worse yet, you are now overextending yourself into being a Shadow that you are not meant to be. You cannot support this ruse forever. You can lie to yourself and say “I’ve always wanted to be like this,” but your spirit cannot constantly support an unnatural state of being. Some of us may argue that we can adapt to whatever state we wish, but I argue that we as creatures have certain ways that are hardwired into us, by genetics or childhood environment, whatever. Eventually, the charade starts to crack as you become bored with your mask, but are so afraid of being alone that you don’t put it down.

Paradoxically, giving your partner everything leaves you both with nothing.

My father came to realize something after a particular cataclysm that will go undescribed. A couple or a group is a unit, yes. A team, yes. But it is a sum of individuals. When their abilities and mentalities overlap, complement, and coexist, a true relationship is born. They become a team, better than before because they each bring something unique to the table. If suddenly three of the four people decided they would mimic the fourth but without the same set of core skills or beliefs, no matter how hard they tried, they would be impostors at best, and the team would suffer for the lost contributions of their once unique perspectives.

Not wishing to be pessimistic, we must also look ahead. We all have to come to terms with one day, we will be alone again. Something will come between you and your partner(s), whether you eventually just can’t come to an agreement and separate, or a freak car crash steals your partner from you, or mere age eventually takes its toll. The only way you’re squeaking out of this is if you die first, and that’s a pretty bleak thing to hope for. You are perfectly allowed to mourn for a friend lost, to cherish and long for the wonderful times, but all in all, you are still a person. Were you to remember that you were your own person, you would have a moderate list of hobbies and friends that were not your partner to bring you happiness, and help you move on. It’s okay. We’re sorry, but it’s okay. You will stand on your own two feet and feel the sun on your face again.

And so you gather up your puzzle pieces. Your partner’s pieces are mostly gone. Maybe he or she left a few with you, and maybe you’ve lost some of your own pieces that you weren’t using, or maybe you even found a few new ones in your travels. You start fitting the pieces with others, and someday, a new magical combination will be born. This time, it’s a different picture. Instead of really synching on your love of American football and red wine, you harmonize on rock climbing and fried food (something your past love hated). So your new partner has no taste for wine, and that piece gets set aside, and the whole thing begins anew.

Take this all as the ranting of a young college graduate who took maybe one or two psyche courses. I’m not a psychologist, merely observant. You are allowed your own opinion. But this is mine, and I wished to offer it, perhaps as a beacon shining to people who may have lost their way.

Phobias

I don’t know why, but for some reason talking about this sort of thing makes me feel a little better, so here we go.

We all have phobias. Some of them are more crippling than others, and some of them are stranger than others. Mine has a relatively unique architecture, and I am not sorry to say I actually saw someone once to help out with it.

I specifically have a fear of fire alarms.

I would say fire, but it’s not true. I don’t mind a good campfire. My house is heated by a wood stove. I’m not overly bothered by fires in movies. I’m also stalked by fires, but this is perhaps because of my hypersensitivity to them. For example…

I am 23 years old. In my life time, I have: watched a church burn and its steeple fall, seen a brilliant utility line electrical fire from 50ft away, seen a Chinese restaurant and a warehouse go up in flames, and happened across exactly four gutted buildings and two burned out car wrecks. My current job has a relatively high exposure to potential fires because theatre sets are built from untreated wood and theatrical lights are insanely hot, and on more that one occasion I’ve located overheating cable connectors and failing dimmers before tragedy occurred (and come to recognize that “burning fish smell” instantly).

When I was a kid, I had a dream. I dreamt that my parents knew the furnace was on the fritz, and their method of preparation was to hang an extra smoke detector in my room to warn us if it did actually ignite. And in the way that dreams go, it did, and I fought my way down a burning hallway and staircase to the front door.

Any time a fire shows up, my heart rate does jump quite a bit. I get vocal tremors and become incredibly jumpy. But it’s nothing like those stupid white and red boxes.

So forever, I’ve always been very jumpy around fire detection systems. They sit on our walls and ceilings, inert, some of them with blinking or steady status lights. Even in their calm state, they for some reason induce panic. If I’m alone and paying attention to one, I get that intense drive to leave the area. When I’m with other people, the effect is dramatically lessened. Also, daylight helps. Walking in a dark room with a flashlight, turning the corner, and catching one sitting on the wall brings tears to my eyes.

But even more is the sound. I mean, they are hellishly loud, but that’s not really what bothers me. When they trip, they convey to me a screaming voice that says “GET THE MOTHER-LOVING HELL OUT OF HERE! NOW!” And it’s all sounds, too. A lot of them have different, distinct voices. Residential units have a steady screech or rapid beeping. Commercial and public units vary between the steady grind, ascending whoop, triple-beep, single beep, and triple-buzz. I’ll even get shakes from whining fire trucks or air raid-style fire horns in the middle of the night. It’s usually worst when its quiet, when my brain doesn’t have something else to insert.

It doesn’t even have to be real. The “State of Emergency” siren in SimCity 3000 or the little fake flames and smoke detector beep when a Sim sets fire to the stove in the Sims. My old computer used to hang a second while it loaded the flame animation and smoke detector sound file, and that freeze would instantly bring tears to my eyes.

The worst of it are the two times I was awakened by them. The first time was in middle school on an extended field trip, our hotel’s fire alarms went off at 4am on the first night. I slept maybe 20 minutes for the rest of the night, on the bathroom floor with my headphones on and the lights and fan running. I had a second night still. I watched the sun rise with panicked tears in my eyes.

I was living in a single compartment of a 4-person dorm-apartment. Each compartment had its own fire horn complete with warning strobe. One night at about 2am, the system was tripped. I was awakened by a deafening buzz and my eyes snapped open to my room being illuminated by terrifying pulses of blue-white light. It took me hours to stop shaking, and from then on I had trouble sleeping in that room. Until I moved out, 6 months later, I had to sleep with a box in front of the horn and a bunch of Christmas lights illuminating my room. This was the event that sent me into therapy, because I was seriously not sleeping.

But it’s to the point that I can’t relax when I see that little glow on the ceiling. I’ve slept in people’s basements and had to look away or cover my head. Focusing on it makes me freak.

It has triggered a bizarre hypersensitivity and awareness about fires, however. I have come to understand systematically where pull boxes will be located. When working in a space for enough time, I come to memorize where all fire extinguishers are. I know whether a building has heat or smoke detection systems, or just a public warning horn that must be tripped by the occupants. I know about Class A (water), Class ABC (dry-chem), foam, CO2, Class D (metal), and class K (wet-chem)  fire extinguishers. I know about water sprinklers, R-102, and Halon 1301.

My counselor once remarked how strange it was, that I was afraid of something that was supposed to make it safe, supposed to protect us. Without them, fires could kill thousands of people in their sleep as smoke fills their rooms and suffocates them. I suppose it’s the link that brings the terror home. These devices are supposed to warn us of horrible impending doom, so if one is yelling at us, then obviously horrible impending doom is nearby.

But that’s my shout out, and that’s what scares me.

Soap box time

Okay, this is really obnoxious.

If you call in for AAA service in the middle of the night and then decide to be a man and fix the flat tire (etc.) yourself, you HAVE TO CALL BACK AND CANCEL IT!

This is not a matter of common courtesy or just being nice. People who do this just pulled a driver who works 60 hours a week out of a very well-deserved sleep in the depths of the night to drive across the service area (that’s a 50 minute drive, one way) just to arrive on location and find out that the stranded vehicle got up and walked away. It’s incredibly disrespectful and I think downright cruel. Would you like to be woken up in the middle of the night to drive somewhere to find out you were brought out for nothing? I think not.

The fact that I still get paid for it is beside the point. When it’s the middle of the night, I would rather take my two hours of sleep back than a $15 commission to drive across the region. Seriously. That’s just mean. It’s like people who hit the crosswalk button and then cross anyway, leaving the drivers furiously stuck minutes later while the traffic light fruitlessly flashes walk signals to empty sidewalks. If you’re going to press the button, have the decency to wait and use the service.

I don’t know if this is people’s ways of getting back at us or something. Is it, “Oh, I broke down in the middle of the night but this jack-hole from AAA took too long, so I’m just going to change the tire myself (like I should have to begin with) and just let him chase ghosts around for twenty minutes.” Or do people think we don’t show up to things. News flash: We Always Show Up. It’s our job. Your job is to at least have the decency to be there.

And then probably tip us for coming out in the middle of the night to help you. Because we’re not night drivers sitting around picking our noses waiting for work. We’ve been working all day, and will work all day tomorrow too. And you, sir, are going to burn in hell.

Have a pleasant night.

Going a new direction

Well after years of hard work and grinding my molars, pushing my way through college (which is not easy, I came to find out), I landed on my butt with no job.

This is not ultimately my fault, and I know thousands of other college alumni that are in the same boat. At this rate, it had better be an awfully big boat. Engineers graduating and unable to get a job in engineering, etc. The synopsis of my post-college story is not much different. Graduate with a bachelors in technical theater. Wait with baited breath. Pound pavement for months, sending emails everywhere like a putrid spam-bot.

Nothing. At the beginning of the summer, there was promise, and I went to an interview, talked with people, was almost sure I had this down. Never was called back. Not even a polite “we’re not going in your direction.”

In the rest of the two months, I received one response email. One. Out of probably hundreds. I’m told that it is my fault for not moving out of MA. The theatre scene is dead here. Not to mention the scene is usually very slow at the beginning of the archetypal school year. But I was stuck and running out of time. I did not have the necessary funding to relocate to a city where I could possibly find work, a big risk considering I could spend all that money to go down there and get one job, and then hit a huge dry spell for months. My student loans are in deferrment until December, but I also have my credit cards and some other outstanding debts that need to be resolved so that I can face my student loans without other creditors leeching my money.

So I quit. I feel a little like a sellout, but I feel like its the right thing to do. Instead of finding a part-time job to scrape together a living and wait for the theatre scene to maybe pick up, a scene that does not pay well until you’ve clawed your way into the upper-echelons anyway, I quit. Maybe this is just temporary. As my friends can attest to, I am atrocious when it comes to sticking with something that does not captivate my interest in some way. Homework? Are you kidding? I’m lucky I graduated college.

So a career change is not unnatural or even impractical. I might wind my way back to theatre sometime later, if the timing feels right, but I’ve landed myself a secure full-time job in roadside assistance and recovery.

Benefits. Good pay. Fun job.

My last few paychecks have evaporated, which is frustrating when you’re working 60 hours a week. I’m dropping money on tools I need to do my job and also throwing as much as I can into debt lines per week to drive the principle down before the interest sinks its fangs any deeper. But I’m getting somewhere. I certainly don’t hate the work. I’m not being abused by my superiors or waylaid by their incompetence. Okay, so changing a tire in the rain is unfun. But otherwise I’m fixing things. I fix things for a living now.

Ultimately, I don’t regret going to college. I do not think “I wasted all this time; I should have gone to a vocational school and hopped right into auto mechanics.” School did not only teach me how to focus lights and draw groundplans. It’s a huge social lesson, a class in independent living where someone is not watching you every step of the way. It gives us a chance to fail, to realize consequences and figure out how to pull out of the fiery tailspins we get into, sometimes without crashing into a mountainside in the process. My going to school is actually a topic of interest to a number of my coworkers, who are my age or younger, and many of which went straight to working for an auto shop out of high school.

My one gripe so far is that, now that I’m back at the origin, I find myself staring at a wide void. Past friends who ran with me every night for years in high school are hundreds of miles away, or drifted out of contact. I feel alone now.

But time is change, and I’m sure that things will continue to improve as the months tick by. All I know is that I don’t dread the coming days anymore, putting off sleep knowing that once I surrender, I will have to wake up and deal with tomorrow’s BS. I sleep well. I enjoy my days.

And in all, I think I’m doing right.

Loss

It’s surreal and unsettling, how quickly things can change. My 19lb snowshoe cat, an adorable and loving feline who has been a part of my life for six years, was attacked five days ago, and over the course of the week slowly succumbed to internal injuries until he was put to sleep this morning. It is stunning, chilling, to see how quickly it can change, how something can be alive and healthy one moment and then half-shaved and wheezing through flooded lungs the next.

It’s also really weird to see how much a pet can become a part of your life. I feel sort of numb now, a reaction I suppose to feeling sad. When I found out, I cried off and on for most of the day, trying my best to keep doing my job until we quit late in the evening before racing home a few hours to see him. It put me at ease to pet him one last time and say goodbye. He was a part of my family.

But time marches on. Somewhat sleep deprived, I’ve continued on and am back at work. They were nice and let me sleep for a few extra hours while we should have been working, and i feel alright now.

He was a good cat. He’ll be missed, and I pray the elders will harbour his loving spirit for all eternity.

Dusty, May 2003- Aug 2009

Vista

So I have a new laptop now, and it has Windows Vista on it.

Oh yes, everyone’s favorite problem child. I like that Windows decided to release a Mac clone but include with it all the inherent problems that come with being both Microsoft and the open platform. I say this knowing that the more open platform is Linux. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu. It’s like a “choose your own adventure” in OS form, and once you’ve gained enough code proficiency/know enough about what you’re doing to actually craft Linux into submission, it’s a beautiful lightweight operating system with only the features you care about. This is why I can’t get behind Mac OS: almost everything included is a waste of my time. But this is also my personal user style. I like customization and streamlined functionality. Mac is supposed to be pretty and unbreakable (which is a myth that shatters the moment you get a kernel panic of any kind. Trust me, I work IT, you can’t fool me by claiming that Macs are invulnerable. They crash harder core than most Windows when they finally go tits up [as the Brits say] and require reinstalling the operating system in a lot of cases).

Back in Windows Vista land, I have come to terms with the OS and really, it’s not bad. I’m presently using a 64-bit Vista Home Premium, which is different than my 32-bit Business I was running on my tower once. Different functionality. It’s weird that the different OS versions are like this; with XP, you had Windows XP Idiot edition, and windows XP for big boys (Home and Professional respectively) where home was basically pro only more slimmed down and missing some media center things that could be reinstalled anyway with an hour of your time. With Vista, Home Premium is a media center monster, whereas Business knew its way around network workgroups and all the rest of that. Then there’s Ultimate which boxes everything together. At last, someone got the idea at least mostly right that different versions should be DIFFERENT instead of skeletal varations on the ultimate product. When I heard about the XBOX 360 bs, I figured that the real reason was to dupe retailers out of another SKU slot [oh yes, so retailers have this thing called an SKU, it's a number that identifies a product, and some whimsical math major once figured out the optimal number of SKUs to make a business the best money based on demand and product variation]. Instead of releasing only one magical white box that had 18 spots on a shelf, they released two versions with 18 spots each for the magical grand total of 36. Yeah, thanks guys.

So before everyone goes Vista bashing, calm down a moment. Out of the box, it’s a trippy mess that’s so tangled in its own junk it has no idea which way is actually up. It requires a little patience and some tricks to get it to work.

Issue 1: Would you like this program to continue?

Okay, so in UNIX Land (that’s Linux and Mac OS) the machine is built on a system that has an innate permissions structure. Every file has read write and execute permissions for three levels: user, group, and all. The highest user in the system is the one named Root. Inputting the password and login of Mr. Root will permit you to do everything short of bake a cake. What this boils down to in the world of graphic interfaces is every so often you try to install something or change a system setting and it goes “FOOL! Enter a password!” to make sure that you are actually you and not some punk kid sitting at your computer when you went to get a soda. It’s also effectively a “are you sure you want to do this and potentially frag your entire system?” step, and much less absent minded than clicking an OK button.

Okay, great, that works fine. Microsoft said “HEY! We wants that!” and tried to implement security measure 300041, the windows Defender and Vista’s permissions tree. Only one problem. The NT kernel doesn’t do permissions. In NTFS, files are not assigned an owner, and the system doesn’t strain the file structure with queries as to whether this user has permission to edit this file. This is because Windows was designed from DOS originally, an operating system designed for single user practices. In the day, when a system engineer wanted to make a computer with multiple secure log-ons, he used UNIX. But no, Windows wanted a piece of this pie and so now you get bothered every three steps by this stupid button that doesn’t even ask you to enter a password and is a little more rabid than the Mac or Linux password boxes.

However, this can be fixed by going to the cmd prompt (opened with admin rights) and entering the line net user administrator /active:yes which turns on the Root equivalent. You then have to go to the users pane and reset his password so you can log in as the administrator. This account is above your typical admin users and not bothered by any of this because every time it executes something, it’s the same as running the app as an administrator from the right click menu. He also has some other elevated permissions. Technically, this makes him also a security risk. This is why you don’t use this profile with SSH and make sure you lock your laptop’s interface when you go get that cup of coffee so this doesn’t freaking happen.
Issue 2: User Account Control- Tactfully named the UAC, I decided to go Doom’s route and pull the United Aerospace Corporation out of my computer as I don’t need Satan popping out of my laptop when it tries teleporter experiments. This is another badly-executed UNIX permissions clone that locks down other user accounts’ home folders. Having no other users on my computer, it actually didn’t make any difference because there weren’t other folders in C:\Users that I needed to get to on this laptop, but on the tower it was quite handy.

Again, if it wasn’t designed to do something, don’t do it!

Next on the plate is the system resources game. People tell me that Vista runs slow. Few reasons here.

You installed Vista on an XP machine. To date, the only computers I’ve seen that actually ran Vista well were ones that were designed for it. Not ones with that stupid “Vista compatible” sticker. Upgrading them is a sure sign of pain. Short story long, XP machines are from an era when having 4 GB of RAM was rare and mostly unnecessary because XP only needs about 256 MB when it’s really rocking. Vista, on the other hand, likes almost a full GB to run itself. Some people call this annoying. I blame things like “file indexing,” which is supposed to speed up the search function.

But here’s something too. File indexing is a Mac Spotlight clone. Find anything instantly. Great, when the computer has spare CPU cycles and some extra RAM to write the index file constantly in the background. But also, it can be turned off. Control Panel > Services, find file indexing, and shut it down. Done.

Windows Aero: Okay, it looks nice. Ubuntu has X11, Gnome, and Compiz that makes it look nice. Mac OS looks nice on its own. If you don’t want it to look nice, turn it off. It is a little annoying that Aero is so freaking bit hungry that it can stall out slower computers, but on computers with a dedicated graphics card to help out, it’s not generally a problem. I personally like that it looks nice. No, I never use that stupid cascade featurette, the damn expose clone. I noticed many years ago when trying to add expose-like add-ons to XP that windows has one thing that makes expose and the aero flip obsolete, and has since windows 95: The Taskbar. Oh look, a place where I can recall any window open in the environment. Mac doesn’t have one. You have to play with expose or alt-tab. Pity.

Also, slight gripe about Mac OS. What’s the deal about having the menus permanently affixed to the top of a primary monitor? Now I have the move the mouse cursor really far to open a program menu, and god help me if I’m running two monitors and have to go back to the primary monitor for the menus for a program open on the secondary one.

The “User Intuitive Control Panel” Okay, you’ve got me here. The control panel is the work of the devil. You open the Power Prefs pane looking to change something specific like what the computer does when you close the screen, and you have to navigate through two keystrokes in random ass hyperlink-style buttons to first a second pane, and then a third. And what’s with all the dead space in these panes? They’re completely inefficient. I want my checkbox lists and drop down fields back. The network diagnostics are sort of annoying too. I liked being able to look at a window with all of my network connections, past and present, instead of a window that says “you’re connected to the internet here’s a map” though that map can be awful nice, as is the field of switches to turn on and off the various network services. Points there.

And this is all in “classic view.” Oh, I hate the catagories view. I learned where everything was in the old operating system, which has been that way for several incarnations. Actually, since windows 95, pretty much. Don’t hide my functionality behind ease of use.

But in traditional fashion, if it doesn’t work for me, don’t use it. I stopped using windows Vista on computers that struggled with it, and this does happen, and laterally upgraded to Ubuntu, which provides the basics and straightforward useability, with some minor setbacks in the hacking and reprogramming realm. But once you get Ubuntu set up, it runs beautifully, and it isn’t attacked at every other turn by some Russian brain-child’s idea of a good time (some people just thrive on chaos and the pain of others. I personnally thrive on the well-being of others. Happy people make me happier). And personnally, I blame the hardware manufacturers more than Vista. It’s not Vistas responsibility to work with everything its plugged into; that job is for those who write the drivers for the hardware that tells vista how to use it. For example, if you had never ever seen a hammer before and picked it up, and the only instruction in the book was to put your head between it and the nail and bash repeatedly, you would be either very confused or quite hurt. And computer programs, unlike us, lack this thing called Deduction. We can look at a 7 step process, realize what the end result should be, what the tools are, and usually derrive a method of getting there without all the tools and steps that were originally provided. Computers do exactly what you tell them to, and if that’s to put itself between the hammer and the nail, then you should start shopping for a new computer.