Rant

I’m sitting in the theater getting ready to watch 5 Nights at Freddy’s on the day before Halloween. The pre-show commercials have been back-to back-Christmas. What the actual fuck?

You’ve amassed hundreds, or maybe thousands of (fill in the blank with whatever digital goodie you hoard - e-books, video files, meme photos…etc.). More than you could ever read, watch or enjoy. You want to delete half, maybe more. You want to feel less anxious when you see that directory. You want to believe that you can prune it down to something manageable. Something you could actually use. But then you realize that you may never find some of those things again. Plus, you’ve got tons of storage. Deleting will only increase the anxiety that you’re deleting the “wrong” thing. ...

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 spent two hours troubleshooting strange Apache behavior on a new VM before discovering SELinux was enforcing I always use CentOS in the cloud because it’s stable and awesome for server-grade applications (web server, webdav, samba…etc) I use Ubuntu or a Debian derivative on the desktop because the packages are more up to date and I don’t mind living on the edge at home. (Plus - interacting with CentOS and Ubuntu both on a daily basis keeps me sharp!) ...

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. ...

So we had a Pokémon Go incident a few days ago. This mother and son came to the office asking if they could catch the Pikachu that likes to hang around here. I didn’t see a problem so I let them in. Well the kid was super excited, running and jumping around everywhere. Well, he wasn’t looking where he was going, and he slammed his head into a shelf unit. ...

So we go to Best Buy to buy some computer stuff that was on sale. I get to the Geek Squad counter and show the guy my phone with the items I want, in stock at that store and the price. He gets them and tells me the price is $10 more than I planned. I show him my phone with the sale price. He is unfazed. He cannot sell me the items at the advertised price. I thank him and walk away. ...