There Are No Laws

Laws are typically rules created by humanoids in response to a perceived wrongdoing.  Sometimes they are proactive, but I think those days are mostly over in this country.  No matter where the law applies, I think you will find that it would be totally unnecessary if people were just a little bit nicer. Yesterday the Groundhog and I discussed the late Pope Carlin’s unimaginably wise words that the 10 commandments could be broken down to just a couple of rules.

Our memories did not serve us correctly on the nature of his revisions but that isn’t the point of this blog post anyway.  The point is that all legal (and customary) rules are constructs of man and thus primarily arbitrary.  To demonstrate this one only has to imagine a world without humans and, to some lesser degree, the other forms of higher life found on this planet.

If everyone were to die tomorrow (including all non-human people), then who would care about things like theft or murder?  Without anyone left to own things nobody would be left to steal from and nobody would be left to kill.  Other silly rules such as spitting on the sidewalk, moving at excessive speeds on a paved surface while operating a locomotive apparatus, and making digital copies of a musician’s work would be issues the remaining forms of life would care very little about.

Rules, laws, customs, and just about every idea that humans hold themselves rigidly to at the moment are all influenced by our perception of the way things are.  I think the problem is that humans, even the smarter minority, don’t perceive things all too well.  Whether or not this is an artifact of having not enough (or too many) eyes and ears is a subject for another debate but the bottom line is that the human mind and body was designed to live in one type of world governed by the laws of nature and instead now lives in a world ruled by the influence of man. I’m not suggesting we go around poking people’s eyes out because I just can’t see how that would help people perceive things any better.  You probably didn’t think that was my point anyway, and it wasn’t.  My point also isn’t that the world would be a happier place if we went around gluing extra eyes to unsuspecting people, because that is a subject for another day and it wouldn’t help them see things any better anyway.

The thing to keep in mind is that we live our lives day to day following rules that are (mostly) the result of something stupid that someone else did.  It was probably something you would not want to do in most cases.  Sometimes, though, it is simply the side effect of some anal retentive upright hairless monkey who didn’t know how to relax and have a good time.  Their feelings got hurt because one thing or another didn’t jive right with their own over-inflated sense of self worth* and they vehemently sought some means to prevent it from happening again.  As a result, you are now their innocent victim.  I could suggest tracking them down and killing them but fixing them up with plastic googly eyes and super-glue might more fun.  Plus, that isn’t yet illegal.

We only have the laws that we do because we choose to acknowledge them.  Some things which are crimes are by no means ethically or morally wrong.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with their own examples since each of us operates on a partially incompatible set of software libraries and everyone is in dire need of a system update.

The question I’m actually presenting to the reader is this: At what point will humanity say enough is enough?  How long will it take before a large enough group of hairless apes get sick and tired of being told what they can and cannot do and violently lash out at the mindless majority?  Is it happening as we speak?  Is that what’s wrong with people?  Has common sense been unintentionally outlawed as a result of the intentional criminalization of the very acts which separate the average chimp from the gorilla that believes that he or she is somehow entitled to more or better?

When shit gets really bad (and it’s already getting there) nobody is going to give a pair of disembodied lobster claws what bloodline your family comes from or how large your bank account was.  Nobody is going to care how much the clothes you wear cost you at your favorite designer boutique and fewer yet will care where you went to school or what kind of grades you made.  What’s going to matter to them, when that day comes, is whether or not they should kill or steal from you and whether or not they’re going to rape or eat your corpse afterward.

None of us were really given much of a choice by which laws we are forced to live by.  It doesn’t quite seem fair, then, that most people won’t have much of a choice whether they live or die once those laws no longer apply.  In the end, when the grid has fallen and when wealth is exposed for the fraud that it is, everyone will realize that there really are no laws. FNORD

So, uhm, yeah. Well, the laws of nature and physics will probably always apply.

(*Nobody is really worth anything. Nobody is special. Not them. Not you. Get over it. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.)

Eating and Tweeting At Work

Since I have had the Jaws of Steel installed, I have restricted my diet to mostly SlimFast.  I have on occasion tried solid foods with limited success.  Today I figured I would kill two birds with one stone.  I would give these shredders a good shake down against a pizza and I would use the idiotic little gift card that the welders of 8823 were given for being accident free for so many consecutive days. FNORD

Well, actually, we haven’t exactly been accident free.  We’ve been mostly injury free, though. So sorta-free pizza it is.  I say sorta free because the gift cards they give us are only worth $6, I think.  I wouldn’t actually know what they’re worth because the Little Caesar’s near my workplace won’t actually take the card.  The store is located inside a K-Mart and as such seems incapable of scanning gift cards, credit cards, debit cards, or in fact taking payment in any form other than those mostly worthless federal reserve notes which nobody actually carries anymore.  In order to use the card we have to take it to the K-Mart service desk and have it exchanged for a gift certificate.

It’s worth noting that the gift certificates also are not federal reserve notes but since they’re also worthless and printed on paper they somehow qualify as cash.  Either way it is quite a bit of trouble to go through when one is attempting to buy a pizza on a pathetic 30 minute lunch break.  Naturally, being pressed for time, I bought my pizza with cash so that I could return back to the smoke filled dungeon that pays me to perform various highly skilled services.

When I returned to work and ate the pizza my worst fears were confirmed. If I’m going to be consuming anything other than SlimeFeast at work, I need to start packing a tooth-brush.  I was picking cheese out of my teeth for hours.  All that trouble over a crappy $7 pizza.  Let’s face it.  Little Caesar’s is popular because it is cheap.  It by no means should ever be mistaken for a reasonably good pizza.  It’s more like a cheap round piece of bread with cheap cheese and some kind of sweet tomato sauce than an actual pizza.  Faux pizza, at best.  Cheap pizza facsimile, to be more precise.  I don’t particularly enjoy it any more than, say, a frozen pizza.  And we all know that frozen pizzas aren’t really pizzas, don’t we?  We do, right?  Right.  Moving right along….

Much of these antics were discussed via Twitter today. This brings me to the subject of tweeting. It was recently brought to my attention from some folks at Twitter that I do not tweet enough from work. They say I do not reply in a timely fashion, I do not reply often, and I frequently ignore twitter for almost the entire day. I find that worrisome because the people at work certainly would beg to differ.

To hear them tell it, I spend all day on my iPhone.  Never mind the fact that I rarely browse the web or actually talk on the phone at work.  I do not listen to music (since it is not permitted) and it isn’t as if spend all day pretending to drink beer from my phone or feeding my digital fish.  The fact of the matter is I probably use my phone LESS than most of the people who talk on their phones because there are only two things I can really do on it at work: Read messages and check the time.

Since talking on the phone takes a considerable amount of time, it’s reasonable to assume that just a couple of phone calls per day can consume several minutes.  In the case of a few people I know, it could easily add up to hours.  Reading messages on the other hand, even as many as twitter tends to generate, is a rather quick action.  Click - Read - Click - put away.  It takes less than a minute in almost all cases.

Then there is the question as to whether or not I’m actually WRITING any messages.  Now, I realize that as a general rule my co-workers are not exactly web or tech savvy, but it doesn’t take a technorati to figure out that if you check my twitter status at Twitter.com you will see that on most days I only post a few tweets.  If you check the timestamps you will see that almost all of those are posted while I’m on break.  They can talk their crazy shit and make their retarded jokes but the fact of the matter is the tweet-stream isn’t going to lie.

Today, of course, I had to make an exception. Yesterday akaMonty posted some particularly amusing tweets related to being fired for tweeting.  Since this has been quite a hot topic at my workplace it pushed me into thinking that if I’m going to be accused of tweeting all day then I might as well be guilty.

I’ve added a whole metric shit-ton of new people to my device updates.  Before, I limited it to mostly people I knew in the real world.  But now, I’ve extended the range to include most of my favorite tweeters.  Surrender?  I have not yet begun to tweet!  FNORD

So, uhm, yeah. Any accident that doesn’t cost the company medical expenses or lawyer’s fees is worthy of a free pizza payoff.

They think I’ve been on the phone a lot in the past?  They haven’t seen anything yet.  

September, Sausage, Starvation, and Spore

It’s the last 3rd of the last month of the 3rd quarter of the 8th year in this 3rd of the decade.  For those of you who do not know what this means I will not waste any time trying to explain why it means absolutely nothing at all.  Because of this, or perhaps not in any way related, I have resumed working on my ArCab.  I have laminated and trimmed the dashboard in the past week and I have begun shopping online for the various bits of hardware I still need.

While doing this I have also been researching the art of rolling my own Linux.  I plan on putting together a minimalistic install geared exclusively towards emulation.  The idea is to have a system that boots right into a multi-emulator front-end which will make game selection easy to do with the spinner knob or track ball.  Anybody who has experience doing exactly this can feel free to e-mail me with links or tips.  You could also mail me large amounts of money, but I really don’t see why anybody would do that.

Keeping busy with things like this are helping me ignore the fact that on the whole I’ve been going pretty much hungry the past two weeks.  Any attempt to eat has been interrupted by the general discomfort caused by having had spacers between my molars.  This week I’m getting used to my braces and any attempt to eat solid food is thwarted by the general annoyance of getting stuff stuck in between them.  It’s kind of shitty living on slim-fast (slime-feast) and noodles.  It isn’t that I don’t like noodles; I love noodles.  It’s just that eating ramen every day gets old quickly.  At this point I’m opting to simply go hungry because I find hurrying off to brush the shit out of my teeth somewhat annoying.

I have attempted to eat sausage with very poor results.  Cutting it into very small bits is essential but chewing it is still a nightmare.  So, for some time I will be doing without bratwursts and hot dogs.  That’s quite a shame, too, because I have grown to really enjoy my Friday morning Extra Long Chili Cheese Dogs from Sonic.

Now that work has eased off of the overtime and my dental work is far along the way I have been able to better manage my time for other projects.  This includes a renewed enthusiasm for my physical training.  In a few minutes I’ll be getting ready to head off to the dojo.  I’m going to start making an attempt to attend class three days per week starting next week.  I’ve been going one or two days per week for the past month and while two days is fine, one day is simply not enough.

I have been doing a good job forcing myself to spend time on the elliptical, though.  I think I might start forcing myself to do the full 20 minutes every day.  Between that and living on slime-feast I should either be in really poor health or really great health soon.  Maybe it won’t matter one bit.  Who knows? Who cares? That’s what I’m doing. FNORD

As for video games, I’ve been playing a little bit of Spore lately.  On the whole I recommend the game.  It isn’t perfect, by far.  It is, however, a fun little toy.  Would I say I’m let down by it?  Yes and no.  The procedural aspects of the game do not cover all of the areas I had hoped for but there really is a large amount of control given to the player over the evolution of their critter.  There are some things that should have been given some more attention (such as the evolution of entire ecosystems based on your choices early on in the game) but I realize there are limitations which are imposed by things such as processing and memory requirements.  Also, I acknowledge that the fundamental purpose of game development is to make the game fun to play and if attention had been given to such specific details it could have taken away from the overall enjoyment.

Either way, if you’re looking for a fun time-waster Spore does a pretty good job wasting time.  Mac users should also take note of the fact that the game is a PC game that uses Wine/Cider out of the box to run on OS X.  This isn’t a bad thing by far, but it does mean that since it is running through an emulation layer you’re going to need a pretty beefy Mac to play it.  Dual Intel cores and a gig of ram are required on the Mac compared to the P4@2.0 ghz with 512 megs of ram on Windows XP.  The positive side to all of this is that finding the game is as easy as finding the PC version.  They both ship on the same disc.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get ready for class.  After that I’m spending the day doing yard work.  Anyone who wants to come play with my newish weed-eater can feel free to come over, but I don’t see why anybody would do that.

So, uhm, yeah. I’m going to get in shape and lose weight even if I have to die on the elliptical and rot where I fall in order to achieve it.

Jaws of Steel II

Well, the braces have been in for a few days and my face is finally starting to feel something close to tolerable.  The tension in the front has eased off quite a bit and I don’t know if this means the teeth have actually or if I’ve just developed a tolerance for the discomfort.

My next appointment is on October the 30th, and if having the braces adjusted feels anywhere near as bad as having them installed I’m glad it’s so far off.  In the mean time I’ll be preparing for a couple of extractions (a wisdom tooth and an impacted canine).  It should be interesting to see how they manage pulling teeth when I have a mouth full of steel, but they wouldn’t be pushing for me to have the teeth pulled right now if they didn’t know what they were doing, right? FNORD

More as more develops.

So, uhm, yeah. I trust them. I really do. Just not very much.

Jaws of Steel

So as many of you know I’ve been having a lot of dental work done. There’s been a lot done from fillings to root canals and there’s still a lot more to go. Last week I went to the orthodontist to begin work on the biggest project:  Braces.

There’s a lot of work I need in that area because not only does my bite not line up, my right canine is impacted. I openly admit that I don’t know much about dentistry other than the fact that teeth are what you use to grind your food up before you swallow it. Therefore, I won’t try to give some fancy  explaination about the jacked up situation of my teeth by using terms that I either had to look up or only happen to know because they were explained to me by my dentist and orthodontist.

The situation looks bad enough on the outside, but it begins to look even worse when viewed through x-rays. In the words of my dentist, my case is a very complex one, but it is workable. 30 months from now and very possibly a couple of oral surgeries later I might finally be ready for an implant (and possibly two or more if some of the existing teeth don’t want to move.)

Today little plastic ring thingies were placed between my rear molars to space them out so that some kind of metal bands could be wrapped around them. Those will be some kind of support for the rest of the steel. There’s only a mild discomfort right now, but I imagine it is going to get worse.

Next Tuesday is the date I am scheduled to go in and get the actual braces installed.

Pictures? Hah. Yeah right.

Tattoo: What, When, Where

I’ve been planning on getting a tattoo for a while.  I keep coming back to the same few basic ideas.  I am certainly getting The Holy Chao, but the rendition of the art is the only question remaining.  Do I use one of the many available on the web or do I create my own?  This question is still one I must tackle along with the ultimate decision of where I will have it placed.

Today, though, FriskyKitty was showing me her new hardback copy of The Principia Discordia and I saw a bit of artwork I’ve never seen before.  It was a depiction of Eris and I immediately fell in love with it.

Now the only question is, where will I have this awesome piece of art placed on my body?

So, uhm, suggestions?

Public Intox - Self Humiliation

Friday night after class I went out with Groundhog and his wife, Kat, a Buddhist and his girlfriend, and some other people I knew (most from work.)  The drinks came pretty regularly and I proceeded to down them on a mostly empty stomach.

Needless to say I found myself trashed fairly quickly and continued to make things worse for myself.  Most of the night is pretty blurry, and I do not remember much but I do remember saying a lot of shit I would never say while sober.  I was making a total ass of myself and I know that happens when I get that drunk.  I normally control my drinking because I hate The Evil Side of Fuse!, Yog Sothoth.  The demon I keep trapped inside is normally pretty well contained.

As Groundhog said, I was in very rare form that night.  It’s best I probably do not remember most of the bullshit that spewed from my mouth that night.  This is my second day after that night and I still feel sick.  I still feel hung over.  I just spend 10 minutes on the elliptical and I’m about to try out my new bicycle.  I’m going to redirect the humiliation I feel into working harder on the projects and self improvement I’ve been ignoring as of late.

Maybe by keeping myself productive the demon I work so hard to keep inside won’t feel the need to get out like he did the other night.  For a while I have felt his eagerness to show his ugly face, and if I’m not careful I might allow him to habitually make an appearance.  Let’s not let that happen, m’kay?

So, uhm, yeah.

(Oh, and uh, if you happen to be privy to anything said or done that night, please, keep it to yourself.  kthnxbai.)

Seedless

When I was a child I used to hate the seeds that you found in oranges, watermelons, and grapes.  They were just a major inconvenience when trying to enjoy a piece of fruit.  For the longest time this put me off to many types of fruit that were not organized enough to keep their seeds in the core, where they belonged.

Now days I’m wanting to grow my own grape vines, and without seeds in the grapes this means I’m going to have to go buy vines at a nursery somewhere.  That really doesn’t bother me, even though I prefer to grow everything I grow from a seed.

What bothers me is that as an adult, I’ve started to realize that these food stuffs SHOULD have seeds in them.  The watermelons not having seeds just doesn’t seem right.  Oranges and grapes have been seedless forever, and I guess I’ve just grown used to it.  But since when have watermelons been seedless? Has this been going on for a while and I just noticed it?

Is this some kind of conspiracy to keep people buying their produce rather than growing their own or do the famers really just care about what their customers want?  Do they really think they’re helping you by saving you the trouble of having to spit out a seed?

A small amount of research indicated to me that all of these fruit (and possibly others) are in some way a mutation.  Seedless grapes are all grown from cuttings of other seedless vines.  Seedless watermelons are essentially mules of the watermelon world where the offspring come in three varieties; regular seeded, seedless, and a sort of mixed seedless/seeded type from which next year’s plants are grown.  Naval oranges are all derived from one original mutant tree and each tree from that point on was spawned asexually from a mutant parent.

They’re feeding us mutants.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

So, uhm, yeah.

The Holy Chao goes “MU”.

I am a Discordian.  Pope Jace of Fuse!  Pope of the Fifth and Final Cabal of the Popsitostle Disassociated Discordians.  The Groundhog and I have been having a lot of discussions lately about whether my belief in a higher power automatically defines me as believing in God.  By his, and probably by most’s, the answer is probably yes.  Though I believe the Chaos from which all order and disorder come I couldn’t tell you if it is either unintelligent but natural, such as the law of gravity or the speed of light, or if it is so much more vastly complex than any sort of system we can comprehend that it not only qualifies as God but also we cannot comprehend what it actually is.  We are limited to understanding within the “system” (the Universe) and are completely incapable of understanding the mechanism by which the system even exists.

In a Buddhism sort of way I would say that the system exists as it exists and understanding how it exists is not as important as how we choose to exist within it.  But I believe The Highest Formula, Chaos, Eris, whatever you choose to call it, will either judge us or it will not. The question as to whether it will or will not judge us is answered with Mu. “Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions”. Since it is very likely that we can never understand the specifics and are therefore only making assumptions then it is also very likely that Everything We Know Is Wrong.

Whatever the case may be, I certainly believe in some higher power.  This place we call The Universe is some pretty weird shit.

All Hail Eris! FNORD!

So, uhm, yeah!  All of my prayers end in Fnord! Yes, I do pray.

August Agenda - I Need A Vacation

I’ve not been sleeping well.  This isn’t exactly news.  It’s the norm for me.  I operate on average with less than 4 hours of sleep per night.  Ever since high-school I’ve been something of a night owl and except for the few years I spent on the night and evening shifts at work I have generally been the sort of person that just accepts the fact that sleep is a luxury I am not allowed to live with.

My attendance at work has never been stellar.  I would have probably been shit-canned a long time ago if I weren’t in a union.  The rules laid down at work are very specific on what is tolerable and what is not and I push the envelope so far it normally arrives with postage due.

To make matters worse, I have been neglecting house work and video games.  I have a paid WoW account that I never log into, I have Diablo II characters which I log into only long enough to keep them from being deleted, and I haven’t powered on my Wii or 360 in over a month.  A few weeks ago in the midst of heavy overtime I even missed a few days of class because the only thing I wanted to do was come home and be lazy while the robot mowed the lawn.

Now I’m faced with a few more tasks.  I’ve dedicated myself to cleaning out my garage and computer room by getting rid of everything I don’t want or need.  I’m determined to have this house looking spotless, tidy, uncluttered, and devoid of all the junk that takes up precious space.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been in the middle of reorganizing my finances and as of yesterday that was final.  For the first time in years I will now have an acceptable amount of disposable income each month and it couldn’t come at a better time since the dental work I’m having done is entering into the stages where it could start to get expensive.

On my immediate agenda are a few items which require immediate attention.  Storms earlier this year did some minor damage to my roof which will I will have to have fixed and that will be one of the first things I work on getting done right along with buying a bicycle.

Tomorrow, Friday, I have class.  Saturday and Sunday will be spent lounging around the house and setting up a new computer that my father purchased online this past Sunday.  It’s a very sweet quad core system and naturally it will only increase my desire to spend money on my own computing habits.

On my list of things to buy:

1. Roof repairs
2. Bicycle
3. New wireless N router with 1 gigabit Ethernet
4. Ethernet enabled 1 terabyte drive
5. New monitor for my PC
6. Sausage

There are other items as well but those are the items that require immediate attention.  The Mac Pro is still on the list as well as equipment to help me with my plans on pimping out my yard with cool shit like flower beds and fruit trees. FNORD

Most of the stuff I will only buy once I have saved enough money, so progress will be slow.  For the time being I will just work on things a little bit at a time.  Having said that I think it goes without saying that my offworld vacation will have to wait for another year.  Tickets for transport on a charter Starship are difficult enough to get and they can be hellishly expensive.  It doesn’t help that I’m out of vacation time at work.

So, uhm, yeah. The flowers will be plastic, of course.

Manga of Fuse!

Okay, so I created one of those silly manga icons. I’m kind of thinking that I’m not going to wear it out in public.

Unwired

I have spent the past few days in a slightly different mindset than usual.  Since I’ve been in the middle of redoing all of my finances and getting myself squared away I’ve also taken it upon myself to sort through stuff in my house that I want to get rid of.  ( NOTE: If you want old computer junk, NOW IS YOUR CHANCE…)

Throwing away old things has never really been easy for me. I’m something of a pack-rat and in recent months my various losses have left me a little unconcerned with most of my physical possessions.  Ideally I’d love to live my life in this house with a somewhat minimalistic decore.  I’m getting there, but I’m working my way from the small to the large.

Since I dropped out of Blog365 (Sorry Rachelskirts, that’s just the kind of fail I’m made of) I’ve written very little. No blogging. Little twitting. No novel writing. Very little of anything. I’ve even been paying very little attention to the wired world from my iPhone at work. No Dot, no Digg, and even though I have both AIM and Twitterrific on my phone I haven’t really been logging into them.

So does this mean that I’m entering a new era of disconnectedness? No. I can’t honestly say I see myself drifting too far from my digital identity. After all, I’ve been online quite a long time and I know a lot of people exclusively online. I just expect that my time spent in front of a computer in general has slowly become so minimal that my digital presence has suffered and I really don’t miss it all that much.

In the end though, I’ll still be here tweeting, blogging, and posting images to flickr. I promise not to go insanely huge amounts of time without some kind of update through one of the three mediums. As you no doubt know by now this site, JaceFuse.com gives you a quick peek at all of those mediums. On the side bar (currently to the right [subject to change without notice]) you will find both my FlickR and Twitter feeds. Couple that with blog entries and my many daily logins to MySpace (thanks to my iPhone) I’m an easy person to keep track of.

Do know, though, that I have been sketching out some ideas in my head (and on paper) concerning my novel. Writing a book with such a convoluted time line really has been difficult for me. I don’t consider myself an outstanding writer to begin with, and relying totally on creativity doesn’t help much when I’m intentionally creating a story that is supposed to be both twisted and seemingly self-contradictory. The novel is still a top priority.

Right now I’m about to get ready for class.  I’ve actually missed a few classes lately and I’m not very happy about that.  I’ll be focusing more attention on class, though.  No need to miss any more.  I’ve been doing so good (in my weight loss) and I would hate to interrupt my progress now just because I’ve become apathetic about everything else in my life.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to shower.  You can contact me me through the normal channels if there is any old junk you might want to inquire about.

So, uhm, yeah.

Another Perpetual Motion Machine

I don’t see any reason why this should work.

Wireless Sucks

For years I’ve had a LinkSys 802.11b router.  It’s worked well enough that I have never bothered to replace it.  When I bought the router it was new technology and there were relatively few wireless routers around.  I had the air all to myself.  Since then wireless has become ubiquitous and using a wireless router at all means sharing the airwaves with a dozen losers at one time.

I use my wireless for my Wii, Nintendo DS systems, my PSP, my XBox 360, and up until today my Macbook Pro and iPhone.  While attempting to play Own Your Friends on MySpace I was noticing serious lag and my wireless signal was jumping up and down for no good reason. I quicky became sick of this and decided it was time that my stationary laptop actually have a chance to use its built in Ethernet.

The difference in internet speed was immediately noticeable.   Now, remember that my router is only an 802.11b.  This means it was slow to begin with and obviously it has been suffering from severe interference from the neighborhood scallywags.  The Ethernet was a HUGE speed bump for me.

I took it a step further by using the MacBook Pro’s built in Airport to set up another wireless point.  I connected the iPhone to the MBP’s Airport with OS X’s built in internet sharing and now my iPhone has witnessed a huge speed bump as well.

I just have to ask myself why I put up with 802.11b for so long when I’ve had the resources to do away with it for so long.  I really don’t know, but now that I’ve give it up for the MBP and iPhone I’m tempted to do away with it for all of my other devices as well.  The only problem with that is that using my MBP as the wireless access point means that my laptop has to be on for other machines to use the internet. Perhaps when I get my Mac Pro I can do away with the Linksys.  The Mac Pro will probably become my new web-server so it will be running all the time anyway.

That’s all I need, another reason to buy a Mac Pro.

So, uhm, yeah.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY FRISKYKITTY82!

Today was Friskykitty’s birthday. So if you’re on MySpace say hello to her and if you are on twitter, Follow her. Show her some love, will ya?

Preparing For the Party

This week was fairly busy, I would say. Fortunately the place had not had much chance to get messed up since I cleaned it well last weekend.  I had to get ready for a party though, so not only did I have to straight up what had been messed up but I also had to go buy things for the party; Paper plates, plastic cups, and of course sausage!

I got that finished before 5 and shortly after that Friskykitty showed.  Making her the first to show.  Last to show were the Groundhog and his Kat. Of those of there who tweet were @Blindsquirrel42, @Yamez4u, @AlericB, @Friskykitty82, and @ShortCircuit. I don’t think I tweeted too much last night, except to mention that every body really seemed to be enjoying the sausage.

What can I say?  I really am the Sausage Man.

I would like to thank everyone who showed up.  It was really a great experience having all of these friends (and brother and cousin) together at one time.  Most of them know each other but we rarely ever get together in such a large group.  I often how much fun I can have with a group this large.

I’ll have to do it again soon.

Righteous History

There was once a happy man…
He said “I seek the Sausage.”
He was searching for the sausage way.

 Looked low, looked high!
There was sausage in the ranks.
He looked.
And there was in fact, as they say,
Sausage “in the ranks.”

And all the fat FNORDS
and all the little FNORDS
and all the happy FNORDS
and all the ugly FNORDS
and all the stupid FNORDS
and all the lazy FNORDS
and all the human FNORDS
and all the monkey FNORDS

Came together in the ranks
and they were seeking
They were all seeking the same sausage way!

They never found it.

New Printer

I have been without a good printer for a long time so I decided to finally give in and buy a printer and scanner combo.  I went with a HP 6200 series because it had network connectivity allowing me to use it over the network without having to connect it to any one specific machine.  This works out really well for me since I do plan on using my laptop mostly for writing and the desktop that I plan to buy (a Mac Pro) for everything else.

A few test prints show that the printer actually does pretty good with photo quality and black and white and it is reasonably quick.

Picture follows…

The Great Work Fuck-Up of 2008

First, let me say that we build really big things where I work.  Take a look at one of those bullshit metal sheds that you buy at a hardware store then put together in your back yard. Then take from that a general idea for the size of an object which is still only half the size of our smallest product and you will know what I mean when I say we make really big things.  The shit we make is huge.

Today one of those really big things got on the recieving end of a piss poor count.  It was lost somewhere between what 3rd shift should have done and what we actually expected to have to do.  You see, part of my job when I do this particular spot in the rotation is to lay down the bottoms of the unit.  These “bases” are frames on which the entire unit is built.  The numbering system we use to keep track of units is actually a date in a format ending with the number of the unit built that day.  If we’re making 18 per day the highest any number could end with is 18.

Today we went from 2118 to 2201, only 201 was somehow not marked like the others. The bases were marked with numbers (that we go by to know what to lay down) and #1 didn’t get laid down because it wasn’t marked. Now, I won’t say it isn’t my fault entirely, because I should not have automatically taken for granted that the person who said “this is our first one to lay down” would have figured it all up right.

It’s an oversight that is easy to see happening, but also easy to catch in MOST circumstances. That is where our lady Eris had intervened.  Just the right amount of order was manifest in certain events to allow a following chain of chaos to come together so perfectly.

The units are all made so much differently because of the possible combinations of options from overall features to functions and sizes. Almost never do two units back to back have most of the same stuff. Normally you’ll see the sizes mixed in such a way that the larger ones are kept far from each other with mostly middle and smaller ones between them.  Today we had three fairly good sized ones of all the same size end to end which is something that never happens.

Because the last one laid down for work was the same size as both the one we accidently skipped and the one one we laid down in its place nobody paid too much attention to the fact that the one we set down was, for quite a lot of reasons, completely and totally wrong.  Being totally wrong didn’t stop the people in the first two work stations to go about their  normal routines loading up parts that were also totally wrong.

By the time it reached the 3rd work station, it was about 1/3 built and was just about to have the roof set on top of it.  Now, without getting into boring details, let me just say that all sorts of things had to be done in order to take something nearly the size of a school bus and strip it back down only to have to turn around and put its parts on a frame very similar but different in a few very important aspects.

Me and my partner were given a sort of “non write-up” called a PID. It’s really no big deal. It’s just documentation that shows we know what we did and won’t do it again. I really know that in reality we didn’t cost the company anything because the line was so saturdated that they couldn’t have run the full rate today anyway. But it was still fun to watch them figure out how the heck they were going to fix such a major fuck-up.

All this mess because someone forgot to write on a metal rail the number one with a piece of chalk.

All hail Eris.

Boredom and Fatigue

I came right home, cleaned up, chatted with a few people, then went to bed.  I woke up a few minutes ago but will be returning to bed here shortly.

I ended up skipping class because I’ve been way too tired for anything with all of the overtime we’ve been working at work.  Fortunately for me we’re off this weekend so I’ll be going to class Saturday to make up for missing today. I just hope I can get some energy soon, I have way too much to do this weekend to waste every day coming home and sleeping off the side effects of life’s bullshit.

Writing Tools…

I’d like to open up for discussion the following question to anyone I who might do any kind of writing (but especially fictional writing): What kinds of tools do you use?

I’m simply using NeoOffice at the moment, but I’ve considering looking at some of those thought organizing programs which keep notes and organize data in ways making it easily referenced.

So, then, who has experience with such tools and what do you recommend?

Family Visits and Union Meetings

My cousin and a friend of hers came down to Tennessee this past weekend.  They spend most of their time hanging out with my parents.  My parents are just cool like that.  After that, they came and spent some time here at my place.  It was your typical Saturday night for me.  Sitting on the back deck while watching the robot mow the lawn and firing up the grill.

Overall it was a fun evening, but since they obviously aren’t the night owl types they went to bed fairly early (about 2am).  This meant I too ended up in bed and I woke up early enough to go ahead and go to the union meeting.

The meeting sucked as usual. It was dull and nothing was really said that would accomplish anything.  It lasted about an hour.  After it was over I went back to the Groundhog’s house and sat and shot the shit for a few.

I came home to take care of some things but they went by quicker than I expected.  So now I’m sitting here bored.

So, uhm, yeah.

Yard Work Sucks

Yard work is a real pain in the ass.  Not only does it suck to have to weed eat in the first place but it is even worse when your weeds have vastly overgrown and your weed-eater is broken.  As I have already mentioned, I purchase a new weed-eater and did away with the only excuse I had to not tidy up my yard.

Even with the new weed eater the extra tall weeds were annoying to mess with, but after a few days I finally have things looking good.  I ate the weeds, cleaned up most of the mess, and swept all of the junk off of the porch.  I even threw away some junk that has been laying around on my front porch and back deck.

Between the unusually high amount of work on the yard and the house cleaning I’ve been doing the past week this house looks really great.  That’s just as well since my cousin and one of her friends is coming to visit this evening. I like having company, I don’t like having a big old mess here.  I guess that makes at least a couple of not so bad things about the past week.  Everything else about it sucked, though.

So, uhm, yeah.