The Empirical Manifesto

Random Notes:

Wednesday 060322

Snowed on the way to Wichita. My son asks, "What's that white stuff?"

Thursday 060323

Dreamed of BSG Season Three last night. Funny enough, it took place in Boyd?

Bought the Firefly series on DVD. And Serenity. I can't wait. First on the list for Carla, Lori and I when we return! Hooray Carla!

Try to remember how to set up a modem in Win98. Yeah, I know. Replaced my mother-in-law's 15" burned out monitor with my 17" Sun CRT. The IE Browser was too old to support windowsupdate.com, so I had to download IE 6 SP1 (10MB) over a 24k connection. Fun. An hour and a half for that, and two hours to download updates. Wanted to eat a bullet.

Went to my new favorite cigar store in Wichita, and, because I didn't have the kids, I finally perused the liquor store attached to it. I HAVE NEVER BEEN ANYWHERE THAT HAD THE QUALITY AND VARIETY OF BEERS I FOUND HERE. Couple that with the fact that I met the most knowledgeable beer lover I have ever met behind the counter, and well, that was a recipe for success.

The Czechs invented the pilsner. It's the best in the world and I praise them for it. Thier Klaster Premium Winter Lager however is...well, they should stick to the pilsner. Understand, it's 29 bazillion times better than Bud, for example. But not quite the full-bodied sensation Pilzner Urquell is. I bought it because it was on sale for $3.99 a six-pack. Unheard of.

I've had the Franziskaner before, both overseas and here in the states. Mostly their hefe-weizen. I felt comfortable in asking if they carried a krystal weizen (which they haven't carried in nearly two years) but was suggested this 'Club Weisse' as their best second. It isn't, but it's an honorable attempt.



Friday 060324

It was so nice seeing mom and dad again after seven months. I didn't want to let either of them go. The children were very excited, and begged to stay the night with Grammie and PapaDaddy - which was a good thing, because that was exactly the plan!

As we finally left my folks, we thought we'd drive by our old house. It was too dark to really see it by then, so we stopped by to see our old neighbors (neighbor #1)...who don't live there anymore! But our other neighbor's, (neighbor #2) who had moved two years ago, moved back! Into neighbor #1's house! My naming convention is confusing, because everyone is named 'Dave.'

Speaking of Dave's, David & Wendy, Tony, and my wife and I had dinner and drinks at David's Friday night. It was a fantastic reunion with plenty of hugs to go around. Then the drinking ensued. I provided a 6-pack (minus the one I drank!) of the Klaster Premium Winter Lager, David had a 12-pack of Michelob Ultra, and Tony showed up with a 12-pack of Coke because he'd left a bottle of Maker's previously. I was also eying David's brand-spanking new fifth of Crown Reserve ;) David gave Tony and I goodie bags filled with phone-geek accessories, and received from him, a beautiful plaque of Darth Vader and Darth Maul signed by the actors which portrayed them. The three of us spent the evening after the womenfolk went to bed playing Elite Force II, picking up where we left off seven months ago. Wendy gave me stern warnings to have David in bed before 0400. I believe he was in bed at 0358...I know I was! And David, yes we did kill your 12-pack if you consider the single beer I had from it. Dude, you drank the rest yourself!

Saturday 060325

Shopping with the wife all day Saturday - bought some ties, and this hat:


Expect nothing less.

Sunday 060326

Took the wife with me to my meeting Sunday evening for a dinner and a walk-through in preparation for the next day's meeting start. Wife was thrilled the ladies chose a snooty Mediterranean restaurant. They had a Chilean Sea Bass, but I turned it down because the Sea Bass weren't ill-tempered.

Monday 060327

It's 0715 and I'm at a conference table in the hotel with 9 women. I'm the only male. This has been my existence since I started with this new job. I've been the only man at Tupperware parties, but that was to be expected. Last week, all the women in the front office of my son's school were looking past me, as I was the only father which showed up for his parent-teacher conference.

A rather large bat was flying around in circles trapped in the rather cavernous ballroom. You don't see that everyday.

Here's SomeBritInMass just prior to his operation. He taped the note to his gut, under his surgical gown as a surprise for the doctors. It reads, "Docs, Just so we understand, it's my prostrate, not me balls! Ok?" When he awoke, the following message was beside him, "Sorry Mate, but we were laughing so hard we nicked your willy. Doesn't look like it will matter much though! Cheers!"



Sitting dead center over Houston Street in Fort Worth looking over North Side. It's a nice view, the hotel spans two city blocks. This is the largest hotel I've ever been in. I feel like I've walked 14 miles today. Well, I did walk to the Flying Saucer where I got a draught pint of Pilzner Urquell for the Monday-night price of $2.50. Can't beat that! Staying with David & Wendy tonight, as he's 5 minutes away, I'm exhausted, and I have to be back here early in the morning.

Okay, I gotta go again...

He's got the Eye Of Fatima, on the wall in his room

Woke up this morning with a song in my head and a spring to my step. I don't know why, as I only slept about seven hours last night. I guess Sunday night's 11-hour slumber has evened the score.

Two bottles of tequila and three cats and a broom

Our last class of "Redirecting Children's Behavior" was last night, and it ran long due to a graduation ceremony which was quite gay. Then, in a twist of bizarre irony, they serve cake and cookies to the children. At half-past eight! WTF are these people thinking? *sigh*

Got a 18 year old angel and she's all dressed in black

Users are dumb

He's got three ounces of cocaine tied up in a sack

It is true that my wonderful wife has made my lunch every day this week. It is also true that I love not eating pre-processed crap everyday during my lunch hour. True again that my guys have actually talked me into leaving my wonderful lunch in refrigerator overnight to eat with them today. How is this possible, you ask? ALL-U-CAN-EAT Mexican Buffet. Need I say more?

And this here's a government experiment and we're driving like hell

I kept referring to the 'self-calming place' (PC for time-out these days) as the 'self-loathing place' which was cracking up the students around me much to the consternation of the instructor, who thought I was saying it correctly from where she was standing.

To give some cowboys some acid, and to stay in motels

So I was telling my guys about Tony's new discovery, http://wheresgeorge.com when one of them pulls out his wallet and presents me with a $1 with the web-address on the bill by use of a red-stamp. Tony, I updated the site.

Gonna eat up some wide open spaces like a cruise on the nile

The VP over this account himself stopped by my office for a visit. That was a first. I braced myself for an ass-chewing, but instead just answered questions he was getting his ass chewed over. And the hits just keep on playing!

So take the hands off the clock we're going to be here a while

Took me four tries to remember how to use mailx today. How embarrassing. Hopefully, I'll get back in the saddle once I get my Solaris box from Texas. The first thing it's going to need is patching! (Hope I can remember how to do that!)

And I am the Eye of Fatima, on the wall of the motel room

OH WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS? A group of Directors stopped down! More activity than I've seen in six months! What do they want from me? Why now?

And cowboys on acid are like Egyptian cartoons

Lori dreamed last night that her and I were on Araakis. The Desert Planet. Dune. I was eating up all the spice, and trying to get her to eat some, but she didn't want to. Then the worms came after me, because I was eating all their spice. Honestly, sounds like something I would do. Perhaps she had the dream due to the mostly bland food we've found here in St. Louis. I need some Texas Gunpowder (dried ground jalapenos).

And no one ever conquered Wyoming from the left or from the right

The steam-table was broken so there was no ALL-U-CAN-EAT Mexican buffet. The proprietor generously offered us any item on the lunch menu for the buffet price. We ate chimichangas, and they were fantastic. Carla picked up the tab. What a sweetheart. And...that was the highlight of my day. It all just went downhill from there.

But you can stay in motel rooms and sleep all night...

Spent the night in the new house last night for the first time. We haven't moved yet, we're still in the hotel, but last night was a good trial run. Lori had a mess of beans cooked up for dinner, and Carla joined us. The kids were going absolutely ape-shit, running and screaming throughout the house. The only things we have in the house actually, are Carla's. Her table and chairs, coffee table, a single stuffed chair, and her black & white 13" TV (with woodgrain finish). Oh, and our new $2500 bed which was delivered yesterday. Carla left, I read a book to each of the children and put them to bed, and crawled into THE BED. It was magnificent! Such a wonderful, blissful place to be. I started giggling I was so overwhelmed with it's comfort. The wife and I laid in bed and read for an hour or so. Then I put my book away and laid down. THE BED sucked all the tension and stress of the day out of my body. There's a lot of technology in this mattress. The pillow-top is almost indescribable. It's supple and enveloping, yet underneath it's firm and supportive. I rolled over and fell right asleep between the flannel sheets.

A cacaphony of noise drew me from my slumber some hours later. It was my cell phone! Why was my cell phone ringing in the middle of the night? Eventually, I reached for. So much time had passed since it first awoke me to my actually reaching for the thing, I was surprised it hadn't stopped. "Call" the display read. That could only mean one thing: 24-Hour Help Desk Operations. I answered. The 3rd shift guy started apologizing right away. My secondary office was offline. No servers could be reached by ping. He'd already contacted the oncall staff, and they told him they would contact me, but according to his escalation, he was required to notify of a Severity One outage. "NEVER..." I said probably too loudly, "...hesitate to call me, no matter what time it is." He was thankful for that. The oncall staff member notified me, he was an hour away. I remember those days. I was four minutes away. I rolled out of bed and got dressed. It was 0515. Two full hours stolen from my time in THE BED.

Good morning.

Yes, I enjoyed my time away from the office, no, I did not do anything special during the New Year holiday, and that made it perfect.

Lost a circuit here at the office this morning. Severely limited network connectivity across both buildings I am responsible for. Just the thing for 300+ users syncing their data for the first time in two weeks. Lovely, lovely, lovely. The good news is I only work a 4-day work week this week. The bad news is its going to feel like seven.

Some asshole backed into my car sometime this weekend, damaging the trunk. I hate people.



Ate lobster fried rice, spinach couscous, bermuda peppers, drank a tonne of gin, and settled on a local Missouri wine made in the tradition of Auslese. Now, it's not Spatlese, but at $6.50 a bottle, I'm a new Missouri wine fan. Watched The Dukes of Hazzard and The Skeleton Key.

Lori turned 39. Again.

Having a bad hair day.

Brought fried-turkey sammaches for lunch.

I've been reading this vampire series by local author Laurell K. Hamilton. I'm on book three. Last night I went to sleep and dreamt all night about several vampire gangs all vying for control of the city. Some I supported, some I did not. I was pivotal in getting key players in each gang to support or destroy other gangs, while simultaneously bringing only the champion of each to a specific location, on time, in order to not appear to have been playing both sides against the middle. "A dream about vampires?" I was asked, "Was it scary?" The answer is no, but it was a logistical nightmare! I awoke exhausted.

I wear a coat and tie to the office everyday. We don't have 'Casual Friday' here, nor are any denim items allowed on site. Being the troublemaker I am, I have seriously considered finding a denim tie to wear to work, but that's just a fantasy of mine. Nonetheless, the week between Christmas and New Years, they allowed all employees (there was like, 4 of us in the building that week) to wear jeans. What bliss! What comfort! Alas, no more. I need a hair cut.

The girls counted my gray hairs last night. I verbally heard, "20" before they declared there were too many to count. Nice.

Saturday evening at Galinda's Lori drank half a bottle of Coconut Rum, creating a situation where she was WIDE AWAKE ALL NIGHT. So we stayed up late and watched Scary Movie 2 which turned out to be much better than 3 but not as good as the first one. "What's next?" My wife asks. That lead us to watch Scream, which neither of us had ever seen. "What's next?" She asks after that movie. Scream 2. Finally, at 0300 she announces, "I'm going to bed." At which point she passed out. Frankenfurter stopped by for a visit, which was nice since I hadn't seen him since Thanksgiving. Lori had lunch with him early last week, however.

House hunted the next day and found another one to put a contract on. However, our realtor is in Rome. Hmmmm.

So tonight is (hopefully) 'Sleep Night.' The night we don't do anything but catch up on sleep. I say hopefully, because I've already fielded a call from the on-call blackberry. Speaking of, my blackberry guy needed someone to test his new BEV server. I, uh, volunteered. So now I'm carrying three devices. *sigh*

The kids are on my Dell X1 on the hotel wireless playing on http://pbskids.org/boohbah. Garrett's getting good at the touchpad.

So it looks like we may be getting a couple of Bengal's. One cat looks like a snow-leopard, the other, a tiger (if you're familiar with Bengal's.) astro (of TSS fame) is rescuing what sounds like more than a handful of Bengal Cats and put the word out he was looking to offload what may turn out to be TWO LITTERS of kittens! Lori and I answered for two. Hopefully, we'll have the house by then as this will make 5 cats. Of course there's no guarantee we're going to get Speedbump back :( David may fight me for him.

Drank a metric ton of gin this weekend. Good thing tonic's so inexpensive here. Hell man, liquor's inexpensive here, and no blue laws!

Well, time to put them young'uns to bed...

Sleep Night was a failure. Rec'd an Exeuctive Support call about 2100. User's DSL modem reported a virus, wouldn't let her past the router. Had her run a virus scan. Nothing. Suggested she use Trendmicro. An hour later, she terminated the troubleshooting. It's late, she offered. Grrrrr. I was hungry so I ate turkey...had a scooby-snack, and logged onto AIM.

Also, oddest thing, I heard the soundtrack to Broken Arrow in Scream 2. WTF? When I got home I looked it up. Apparently I wasn't the only one to notice. Wes Craven was using the soundtrack to Broken Arrow as fill music during the filming. Apparently, he liked it so much, he asked for, and was given permission to use it, bumping original score music written by the composer - which really pissed him off! Well, I guess I can't use this now as a trivia question on TSS.

Good night.

Stardate 051220.0907:
I also made my lunch for the next day (which I subsequently left at the hotel this morning). Since the night before was NOT a Sleep Night, and I slept on the pull-out sofa with little girl that night, I was surprised that I felt well-rested when I woke up yesterday morning. Funny thing is, I wasn't. I didn't know this, however, until I jarred awake after a dream of skydivers with beautiful, colorful chutes making landings on a beach...in the middle of a server meeting! So I inadvertently hit snooze 6 times this morning (I remember distinctly hitting it only once) and, taking a page from the blog of jw (of TSS fame), I awoke an hour late. Fortunately, I had showered the night before, so all I had to do was roll into my clothes, slick my hair back, and hit the road. I have a feeling it's going to be one of those days...

Drinking rum and Coke at the Drury Inn with Galinda and Lori's cousins & aunt. What a wild ride it's been. Thanksgiving - I won't even comment on that. Lori and I arrived at our hostess' house Thursday, and didn't leave until Sunday. 15-hour days at work, mystical nights...all blended together. Got a room overnight Saturday night in Kansas City. 80+ mph all the way from St. Louis. So much fun, so much everything. I wouldn't change it for the world.

Silence.

SomeBritInMass: Rec'd the "care package" today. Thanks dude. You're too good to me. It brought back memories of when I was last in Bristol, heading back from the fish & chips shop smoking one as I was walking back to my hotel. And of course I was waiting on the packaging to send yours over! That will go out shortly. BTW, the front desk of the hotel doesn't notify you that you have a package with a blinking light on the phone or anything. In fact, they don't notify you at all! I had to ask - glad I did :) As for the little baggie...Should I put that in the freezer did you once say? Thanks again, and speaking of that little baggie....

drax0r: Will get the tranq delivered to the place of your choosing, pay for your gas here and back, as well as keeping you well stocked in the beverage and quantity of beverage of your choice, and fed, fat and happy if you deliver said package personally. You'll want for nothing. For security measures, you can provide me a list of your requirements and I will provide photographic proof of such, for insurance purposes. Please consider my offer, and request.

Sweetheart: DAMN! drp said I'd be busy, but I really had no idea what to expect. All that shit is now happening now, at the same time. I'll cope. In fact, as I get used to this level of.....non-unix type work, I'm hoping it gets easier. I don't see how drp does it. This is small fry compared to his daily load. I love you more than you know.

ProT: Lighten up on yourself already. If it makes it any easier, I know EXACTLY what you're going through, and this too, will pass.

AmyGirl: What? Have you abandoned us lj types? What gives? Again, congratulations. And if I were you, I would now put all this frivolousness behind you, start focusing on what's really important, and trust me, that's not us. I'm thankful for having met you and the few deep discussions which sprang forth. In time, perhaps again. Until then, enjoy!

Angel: WOW! Go a little easy on yourself! Apparently lots of people think you rox0r! Keep your chin up. IMHO, you appear to think that you're the only one that knows anything about what you're going through and no one else ever could because this shit has happened only to you ever in the history of life, but trust me, that's just not true. In fact, it's silly! We're all rootin' for you. Listen, I don't want to get all caught-up in your drama...I don't care about your mild-mannered alter-ego. If you say you're a super, fantastic dynamic wonder-girl...well that's ok with me. I'm good. I'm good....(ok, I stole that last line from The Incredibles!)

"The Neck": Dude. Heh. Listen, you suck at comm and so do I. You send me one email annual which I don't respond to. Ok, we're agreed. Fscking post on this here biotch and we'll see how it goes. Last night was too awesome to let slip away. Tell that deliciously gorgeous wife of yours, "Thanks for sharing." Oh, and the "care package" I rec'd from SomeBritInMass, is the same thing you've been promising me for several years now. I love you anyway.

LOGBOY: You know who you are. Is your new position as demanding as mine? I hope your raise was more than mine. Tell that wife HI and maybe, just maybe, because you can access at this page work, leave your comments here. SIgn in and create a login (I'll make you an icon if you like, just tell me what you want), or post anonymously if you must, but please DO POST YOU LAZY MOTHERFUCKER! Because with you and "The Neck" posting, my life truly will be complete (talk to you're her awesomeness, "Her Royal Hotness" to post too. That would rock - just like in our HTML 1.0 days on the geocities messageboard...) dude, just DO IT. My most constant poster recently has not because "I haven't had a lot to say lately." Grrrrrr. Go git her, cowboy! Yeeeehaw!

GRANGER-DUDE: You didn't get me hooked on Robert Earl Keen, drax0r did, but your...dare I say it, passion towards it was what I needed. I miss our beers and little chats, and I just wanted you to know for the first time ever, I actually listened to the lyrics of "...the party never ends." What a sad prose!

ROBIN: We don't talk enough. I've lots of new stuff to tell you. Read through my posts when you get time, then post. I am so strapped on time, but I assure you one thing: I reply to these posts. Please join in the fun. I look forward to hearing from you.

DANZIG: Get your lazy ass outta bed and post occasionally. I mean DAMN dude! C'mon. Get with the program!

User called yesterday, "I cannot access my blade100."
"From where?" I ask.
"From my PC sitting right next to it." He replies
"Telnet? SSH? How are you trying to access it."
I find he's trying to browse his share with Windows Explorer. "I think there's something wrong with samba." He suggests. I've been trying to get into his box remotely the entire time during the conversation. I offer this: "Is your box powered on?"
"Uh...no."
"I can guarantee you that 100% of the time you will not be able to browse your samba share when your blade is powered off."

...

My heart jumps every time I see a picture of my wife.

...

Rec'd an email today approximately 2MB in size with the subject line reading, "This will take awhile to download but is worth it."

My reply to him:

Thanks for sharing! Oh, and for the record, it took approximately 6 seconds from my OC-3, slowed only by the speed of my ISP which sustained 187/kbps with peaks of 213/kpbs!


...

Wife is driving down tonight! I took Friday off and made a hotel reservation! w00t!