Rant

Sometimes backups just create additional problems

Two friends that I hung out with last week texted me in the last few days to tell me that they’ve tested positive for COVID. I’ve taken two antigen tests since then and so far I’m in the clear. But I am working from home this week and avoiding crowds just to be safe. I can’t help thinking how much of this might have been avoided if it wasn’t for people’s carelessness when it all started. ...

I’m no bibliophile, but I’ve read a lot of books and recently while discussing the “book was better” trope of horror movies, we talked about how it is pretty common knowledge that Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick’s take on his story of “The Shining”. Not because it was better, but because Kubrick fundamentally changed the story. I was asked if I’d ever heard about Stephen King being upset over other screen-versions of his books, and I admitted that I don’t know. I’ve read a lot of Stephen King, but not everything. It’s rare that the movie duplicates the flow of the book, and in some cases there are elements of a book that just do not translate to film and have to be either forced via creative effects and bad CGI or eliminated altogether. ...

This morning I was plagued by repeated robocalls in the car on the way to work. I just kept rejecting them (they were interrupting my audiobook!) Not until I arrived did I see the voicemails I got. It turns out these calls were not robocalls - they were my old job trying to get a hold of me. There’s a SEV-1 (production outage) at my old office and apparently no one told the help desk that I don’t work there anymore.

I have named my office “Fort Impostor” and this is my…manifesto. “The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of ‘real’ grown-ups who you believe – at some subconscious level – are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying: We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away, and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.” Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help ...

I found out after the fact that my bully from grade school died. He was not well liked by most people, if I remember correctly, but I was surprised at the outpouring of emotion online when his death was announced. A lot of years have passed in the interim and in hindsight, I suspect there were other factors at play. Perhaps he’d changed. Perhaps he didn’t grow up to be the insolent prick I knew him as. But that doesn’t change my feelings. His treatment of me (and others) affected my self-esteem for years. ...

Gotta Catch ‘Em All!

I walked away from the counter, and ordered the items from my phone for in-store pickup, at the advertised price.

In November 2009 I started a journal to help myself deal with yet another car problem. Since then, I have added other writings to the journal and tried to make it a more full compendium of my digital journaling. But it started with a car problem. Not just any car problem, but, at the time, the latest in a long line of car problems that was slowly squeezing my sanity. Hell, re-read some of these blog posts and see how often the car is the subject of any particular entry. That damned Saturn stole a lot of my life over the last 13 years. ...

Ever have a really bad day? Or a bunch of bad days in a row? Me too. I’ve masked the names to protect the guilty. For a very long time I have been aware that stress can take a toll on your health. But in my experience, it’s never been immediate like it has lately. It started this past weekend with an on-call nightmare: I got two calls about Asterisk, (not my specialty) on Saturday. One guy just needed it started. He had rebooted his machine and now it didn’t work. Easy fix. But the call ruined my lunch. By the time I was done my frozen pizza was almost frozen again. ...