Why My Life Sucks

We got court papers served. Just another step in losing the house, but it starting to add up.

On the plus side, I can tell my meds are working, because I’m not a freaking mental wreck right now.

Haven’t done one in a while, so here is the tabby hanging out on The Darling Wife.

UPDATE: Both kittens, hanging out, being cool, doing that kitten thing.

1. Got lost looking for repoed trailer sales place
2. Found out how bad Redheaded girl and Art Dude’s fire damage was
3. Had car wreck
4. Found out that most of the lugs on the drivers side front are cross threaded.
5. Got about a million ticks on the three of us
6. Had the emergency spare tire blow out on the expressway

And that was just Saturday. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the week is going to be like. It is, however, official, I’m not 18 and I can’t take sharp turns on a dirt road at 60+ MPH any more. I’m just glad it wasn’t worse.

Is a festering pile of festering crap, at least in the server mode. I “upgraded” $WeSellUsedMacs server to it, based on what I had read, which indicated it was a general security and functionality upgrade, not really touching any server programs.

What I read was a lie.

OS X 10.5.7 on server breaks the Apple DNS server in a rather violent way. I ended up rebooting off the un-upgraded back up drive then cloning the database and PHP on to it. That fixed it.

I’ve just about decided that 10.5.x is broken just in general. 10.5.6 seems to work, but all other version are broken in strange and fucked up ways, depending on which version.

Bleh.

As you might guess from my last few posts, I’m re-reading some PG Wodehouse. Go, my friends, and do the same. What Ho, pip pip. etc. Wodehouse, is in the style of Bertie Wooster “The Grand Old Man of English L.”

Stupid now and then, 2nd in a series of rants

Consider this person: Graduate of Oxford, quotes classics in day to day conversations, has an extensive written and spoken vocabulary, speaks 2 languages, seeks and takes the advise of experts on subjects that he is lacking in. Can do complex probability calculations in his head.

Sounds like a pretty bright guy right?

I, of course mean Bertie Wooster, the touchstone of “stupid” of a bygone era. Yes, lacking in common sense and needs that first cup of tea in the morning, but all in all, a bright fellow, by modern standards.

When I had my moment of clarity it also came to me that Bertie, despite what Jeeves and his Aunts say, isn’t dumb, he’s just not devious and, to be truthful, missing a bit of common sense.

It’s a sort of sad moment in your life when you realize that you are more Bertie than Jeeves.

I just found my “back up” bottle of Amdrine.  Had 6 pills. This means I could have avoided a lot of the migraine drama of the last month.  Damn it.  However, I most likely would have been out when I had the one that took 4 to break, which would have been a trip to the ER any way.  Still, damn it.  I’ve got a total of 18 pills, which is enough for at least 3 migraines (max of 5 pills in 12 hours,  go to ER if you still have it past the 5th pill), however I have no refills, so I’m going to ask the shrink if he can write me one, failing that it’s a regular doctor visit.

Did I mention “damn it”?

Haven’t done one in quite a while, mainly because all I get is variations on “my life sucks”

• “wife says im the reason why life sucks “ Dude, that’s harsh.
• “epidrin get high and can you get high off amidrine ” Yeah, but don’t. It’s got some nasty side effects. On the other hand, it’s a freaking life saver if you are having   a migraine.
• ” box stores suck ” Yeah, they do.
  

  BestBuy, please don’t have your “geek squad” people challenge some one why they say they can set up an anti-virus program and properly secure a Windows machine. All it does is piss off a repeat customer.

• “29 and my life sucks” My fair heart bleeds for you. Talk to me in 20 about what sucks at 29.
• “vga compatible M-life ” Ah, what?
• “craptop server “ No, it’s a laptop, not a server. More or less.
• “i’m 18 and my life sucks ” You talk to me in 30 years.
• “oak pollen migraine “ Thank all the small ghods I haven’t had that quite yet. The allergies are bad enough.
• “i hate thunderstorms ” Wait until you get hit by lightning.
• “jackals in waistcoats, men in sheets”+reference “ “If he thinks were the devil, let’s send him to hell” Best political song by a non-political band ever.
• “how many pristiq does it take to kill myself ” More than you are likely to have at one time.
• “Budweiser American Ale sucks” Why, yes, yes it does, and not in the good way either.
• will amidrine make you feel weird Yes, but it’s much better than the migraine

Both of them are walking, sort of. A little unstable but trying real hard.

Firefox runs. Gimp 2.6.6 run. Open Office 3 runs. Second Life doesn’t run. The ATI Radeon drivers for Godzilla’s video (X1550 series card) don’t run. (This is why second life fails, FWIW) There is no way, or no obvious way, to show file extensions. Cygwin seems to work. ETA: Cygwin X windows stuff act very flaky, enough so as to render it not useable. MinTTY and the “normal” cygwin shell work just fine, or seem to.

Another irritating thing is it seems to keep losing the icon for Firefox. Just Firefox. Things that make you go “Hmmmm”. There is still a link in the tools folder I created, however it’s a generic icon, not the fox and globe icon. Odd.

The Redheaded Girl sort of tagged me. I’m assuming I’m the Mike. It’s possible she means some other Mike, but I suspect not.

I’m not playing the full rules, but I’ll do the 7 things

1. I’m bipolar. This makes life, well, special.
2. I have Asperger’s syndrome. This also makes life special.
3. I’m a geek. This sort of is assumed with item 2, but it’s official, I’m a geek.   My geek code, as of today is:
   GAT d+ s+:- a+ C+++ UL++++$ P++$ L++++$ E— W+++$ N+ o K+++ w+++ O- M+$
   V- PS+ PE++ Y PGP t+ 5 X R+++$ tv– b+++ DI++++ D G+ e+ h— r+++ y+++**$
4. I’m a wannabe game designer, for d20, 4thed and Traveller.
5. I’m a fairly good cook, when I can find the time for it.
6. I read way more than normal.
7. I really don’t like doing lists of things about my self.

I installed it on Godzilla.

1st report. It installed fairly fast and seems to have seen all my hardware right. It’s also pretty and makes nice noises.
It also, out of the box, doesn’t allow secondlife to run, plus trashes your MBR, which I more or less expected, despite being told it wouldn’t. This slightly changes my opinion on the non-Windows skills of one of the geeks at $WeSellUsedMacs. They may not be as good as he thinks they are.

Ikill

Originally uploaded by ncr_mo_145

Need to use this some time at $WeSellUsedMacs. Week of Nov 11th,
perhaps.

stop

Originally uploaded by iteration1

I want this sign at the end of my street.

It seems that there is no ATI GLX drivers that work out of the box for Ubuntu 9.04, which means I’m “stuck” with 8.04 LTS version on Godzilla. Yeah, I know, lazy, don’t feel like making special half assed version of software geek. I know that I need the drivers on second life and that the open source version crashes and burns. Snarl, etc. I think this weekend I’m going to down load and install Windows 7 on Godzilla’s Window partition, if nothing else to make it where I can tell the young geeks at $WeSellUsedMacs that I’ve tried it.

They both have their eyes open, can’t quite walk yet, but are cute as all get out. Mommy cat, Daz, wasn’t really happy about me taking them out and putting them next to her, because she had gotten out of the box to take a short break. Oh well….

I’ve got a newish monitor attached to Godzilla. It’s wide screen format, which I’m not sure if I like or not. 1600×900, I think. While the width is nice, I sort of miss the “tallness” of a normal scale monitor. Yes, I know it so you can watch wide screen format DVD with out letter boxing, but that’s not what I use Godzilla for most of the time.

The Dellbook, on the other hand, is more or less officially dead. Between the broken screen hinge and it’s latest thing of only running in 600 Mhz mode, it’s now my worst laptop. Tinybox is better on every thing other than screen size.

Over this weekend, I started reading over all my WWII and modern rule sets, to get an idea on where I need to go with OPFOR. Because I want it to integrate with Mongoose Traveller, I suspect that this is more or less a waste of time. I suspect I’m going to re-read the MGT SRD combat and skill section several times and use that as the base, plus my new concept of target fragility, being based on both the size of the target as well as things like training etc.

Had the worst short term migraine in several years last night. Took 4 doses of Amidrin to break it. Was so bad I was doing everything to remove lights from the house, even turning off computers and monitors, plus doing every thing I could to reduce smells. Truly horrible headache, however once it broke (or was broken by the Amdrin) at 1:30-2:00 AM , I was able to get to sleep. Enough sleep that I was an hour late to work. Opps.

A random rant, first in a series.

Arthur Laurents,Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim are responsible for the crack drug disaster of the late 20th century. László Benedek and Stanley Kramer also have a lot to answer for.

At a critical point in American recent history, when drug gangs were starting to make their selves felt on the inner cities of the both the rust belt and SoCal, a large part of White Bread America heard the term “Youth Gangs” and instead of thinking “this is some thing that needs to be done about RIGHT FREAKING NOW” thought “Westside Story” and blew it off. At worst they though “The Wild One“, regardless, they didn’t take it seriously. The result? Millions of lives destroyed, large parts of American cities made “No Go Zones”, not to mention rap music and the whole hip/hop culture, a target of a future rant.

In real life the cycle of violence was not broken, in real life Maria would have pulled the trigger over Tony’s body and the two gangs would not have ended their blood feud because of one crying woman. In real life their would have been a major gun battle. In real life Lt. Schrank and Sgt. Krupke are, or should be, the heroes, not a bunch of murdering thugs. As much as I would like to blame this one on boomers, I can’t. They weren’t quite in charge when the youth gang crises started. This, like a lot of other things, can be laid squarely in June Cleaver’s lap. Why I said June, not June and Ward is also the subject of another rant.

The Darling Wife’s knee went out, again, leading to another trip to the ER. Waiting on the pharmacy to open to get her medications. She is in a lot of pain and hasn’t slept yet today.

UPDATE: Got the meds, she is sleeping now. Side note, waiting on a pharmacy to open in a supermarket, while hungry, isn’t real fun. I keep wanting to open up a box of crackers or cookies and pour them down my face. This sort of activity is frowned at in these parts.

Just some random photos I took this morning. The kitten box is a bit harder to take photos in, so I had to dink around with it first. The Darling Wife seems to have broken out in critters this morning as she tried to take her medications.   The tabby kitten has her eyes open, but the tuxedo’s eyes are still shut.

I don’t deal well with kernel panics that lock up the machine and make the keyboard lights flash. I also don’t deal well with frame rates under what I know this machine can do in Second life. I really don’t deal well with lock ups in Second Life. The net result of all if this is that I’ve removed 9.04 and gone back to 8.04 Ubuntu LTS. Yeah, I know not cutting edge KDE 4.2, but I’ve given my opinion of KDE 4.x already and nothing I’ve seen on a machine that does real work has made me change my mind. It’s still to much flash for too little good. Plus I don’t like the basic UI. Yeah, It’s changeable, but I like the stock out of the box UI on KDE 3.5, so why dink around? 9.04 running the default gnome setup seems to run just fine on tinybox, but I don’t ask a lot out of that box. It runs badly and kernel panics on Godzilla when I put it under any stress. I’ll look at it later, maybe.

The good news. The migraine from hell seems to be over. 4 fucking days of more or less constant head ache is enough to make any one’s life suck. I still need to refill some of my meds, but I got samples to replace the important ones lost when I went to the ER.

Next bit of good news, I found my glasses.

Bad news. We broke the last key to the car, and it’s taken 3 hours for the lock smith to show up. Still hasn’t shown. Starting to piss me off.

We also got a nasty gram from the city about the back yard, so I’m going to be doing that this afternoon. There is no end to my joy and happiness.

Yesterday, we had some sort of accident while The Darling Wife and I were out of the house, and the ginger tom kitten was killed.

Run with Bast, little Trey.

I re checked the kittens. I’m 95% sure we have 2 boys and 1 girl. The boys are the ginger and the tuxedo, with the tabby being the girl.

I should have gone to my regular doctor. I know this, but I thought it would pass, like migraines normally do.

It hasn’t and I didn’t think I could take another night like last night. So I’m in the ER, hoping they can do some thing.

I suspect this is going to be a rather expensive headache.

UPDATE: Headache is GONE. They gave me a big old bunch of IV drugs and I’m feeling fine and in no pain. Bit loopy, but no pain. Doctor also said he would write me a script for Amidrin, so double word score all around. Not sure I like Daladid, broke the pain, but I’m not liking the loopy.

Sunday, Daz decided to bring the kittens out of the box for a while. Coco is still acting as the kitten guard dog. It’s really cute watching her and Daz. I think Daz knows she guarding, or something like that. Coco is by far the animal most interested in the kittens, aside from Daz, of course.

I have got to get more Amidrin some how.

The still suck.     They really suck with out good drugs.     I’m at home in the dark, with a mild case of the shits and a major headache.

Bleh

I thought that the half naked photo of me holding a beer bottle was scary. I know better now. This photo is scary. I had no idea my eyes did that when I raised both eyebrows. Now I know why so many people back off when I do that in a work sort of place. I also know why they think I may be an ax murderer waiting for the right moment to strike as well.