• One view on poly terminology.

    Found on the private website of fellow Pooligan, Kim:

    Polyamory talks about terms like being “primary” and “secondary” in relationships, but those don’t really make much sense to me, at least not most of the time. Those words are for talking about how you schedule someone in to your month, not for how much you love them, or how long you expect them to stick around. It’s not a meaningful distinction, in a lot of ways.

    Sometimes I feel exactly the same way. Sometimes not. It’s food for thought, though…

  • Adversity is the test for strong men.

    Went to lunch at Chang’s Mongolian Grill with Wendi, and the title of this entry is what the fortune cookie I received had to say.

    Hell, it’s not even funny with the “in bed” addendum.

    So the current estimates range from three months to a full year before I regain some semblance of stability and sanity (okay, enough with the annoying alliteration already) after moving away from the only real family I’ve ever known. Of course, once you start getting depressed over one thing, all of your other depressive triggers start to fire… Unworthy, Incapable, Clumsy, Inadequate, Pathetic, Irresponsible and Ugly. Yeah, those are the Seven Dwarves of my negative ego. Gnarly old buggers.

    So, what do I have going for me? Friends who refuse to let me beat up on myself. If that many people care so much, maybe I’m not such a bad person after all.

    Right? Right.

    To wrap this up on an appropriately positive note, on the way to Chang’s we saw something cute: A pickup with black lettering across the tailgate spelling out, “Clifford The Big Red Dodge.”

    Hey, I thought it was funny…

  • A roadmap for the open source world.

    Perhaps this is only amusing to geeks like me, but I’m going to share with my reading public anyway. This one’s from the folks behind Gaim, for all those folks who get hung up on the idea of a magic “version 1.0” release for the various software we rely on day in and day out…

    Gaim release roadmap

  • Gifts From Afar

    So today hasn’t exactly been the best day ever, but there is one bright spot: I got prezzies!

    I arrived at my office to find a plastic replica RAF compass on my desk, courtesy of our Production Director. (It’s actually rather nifty… I amused myself a few minutes ago by checking out the magnetic fields in my office.)

    Even better, a box from Seattle was delivered today. Inside I found towels and soap, all in a rubber duck motif, as well as some flavored Hershey’s Kisses! Awww… I think she likes me, what do you think?

    So maybe today’s not so crappy after all.

  • Eighteen Hours In A Nutshell

    I was tired by nine o’clock last night. Very tired. I almost went to bed… but then it hit me: I needed to listen to music. These cravings come to me less often now than in years past, but they’re no less powerful when they do. So, on went the headphones.

    (I’m guessing that my mind needed settling after spending a couple of hours visiting the rugrats. Yeah, this separation thing is hitting me a lot harder than I thought it would. Ugh.)

    I finally rolled into bed around midnight-thirty and conked out.

    My phone woke me up sometime shortly after two in the morning. There was a major network problem that required my presence at the office. So, dressed and out the door I went, can of root beer in hand to give me a sugar boost. Turns out the central 39-port ethernet switch that runs the office network had gone on the fritz. Power-cycling it did the trick, and I was back home and in bed by four AM. It took me a bit longer to get back to sleep, of course.

    The alarm went off at seven-thirty like normal… and I finally got up to turn off the alarm when, a few minutes later, it chimed again. Nope, I certainly wasn’t getting up right then.

    My phone woke me up, yet again, at nine-thirty. Turns out the Welchia.D worm was running rampant within the company network, and one of the high mucky-mucks had set a two o’clock deadline for having it eradicated.

    Oh, that’s two o’clock east coast time. So there I was, with an hour and a half to complete a high-profile job, still completely naked and unshowered. Whee! And they were sending a car to retrieve me ASAP!

    Into the shower I went, post haste. I threw on some clothes, grabbed my jacket and phone, but forgot my umbrella until after I was halfway to work. Whoops. Have you seen the weather out there today?

    Thanks to the power of Novell’s ZENworks, I was able to “push” the Welchia removal tool to almost all of the PCs in the building. Getting it to run involved a bit of social engineering, but when you have the weight of the general managers on your side it’s not nearly as difficult as usual to get the rank-and-file to do your bidding. (Bwahahaha. Ahem.)

    The damned worm turned up on three computers, which is two more infected machines than I thought we’d find. Argh. Once I was comfortable with the reduced stress levels, I took off for lunch.

    Because, dammit, that much stress and having my sleep schedule totally screwed up and still dealing with personal emotional crap, all on an empty stomach? Faugh!

    Near as I can tell, though, life has returned to whatever passes for normal in our office building. Maybe tomorrow I can get some real work done.

    Yeah, I doubt it too.

  • Faster Is Better

    You may have noticed this website taking rather long to load, lately. I finally got to the bottom of it: Turns out the PHP version of the Blogroll display code was adding eight full seconds to the processing time for the journal script.

    Well, to hell with that, eh? So I switched to the Javascript version. Voila!

    Oh, this solution also fixes the exact same problem with Lil’s blog. Imagine that.