(Phaysis)

Quick joke. You’ve heard this before.

A man dies and, due to his decisions through life, gets sent to Hell. After entering, the Devil takes him on a grand tour where he’s shown three rooms from which to choose his torture for eternity.

The first room is full of people standing on their heads upside down in an ankle-deep pool of shit. The man curls his nose and asks to move along.

The Devil takes him to the second room, where everyone is standing on their hands upside down in a knee-deep pool of shit. Desperate, the man asks about the third room, and the Devil takes him there.

Inside the third room, everyone is standing upright in a hip-deep pool of shit, milling about and drinking coffee. “This doesn’t look so bad,” says the man. “I choose this one.”

The Devil nods and ushers him in, points to where he is to stand, and then rings a bell, telling everyone in the room, “OK, break’s over. Everybody back on your heads.”

Keep this in mind when you go back to work this week.

So how you guys doing? Good? You folks comfy enough? Grab a chair, pull up some floor. Me, I’m doing swell. Just dandy. Got a short story from last year I’m retouching, chapter by chapter. Also reviving some old songs for posting at my Glass Door site.

To do that, I revived my old desktop PC and am trying to remaster some of that music for posting, and lemme tell ya, it’s not so easy. I honestly can’t see how I got anything done with that old piece of shit. But I got it working, sorta, enough to tweak some music. I’ll have to wire the PC into my actual recording gear to record the audio, since the computer is too old and ill-maintained to record its own audio without dropping clicks and pops into the recorded waveform. [frowny-face]

Actually, the only thing I really need that PC for is the Yamaha S-YXG50 synth software which was written so long ago that it won’t work on modern systems. I have a few songs whose sound depends on that software, so as soon as I record those tracks, I can transfer all the files, mothball the PC and move on. (If none of that made sense to you, just lay down on the floor and close your eyes until the confused feeling passes.)

Let’s see…what else? Ah, yes, against all better judgment and wisdom, I signed a 6-month lease extension on my apartment. It’s an OK place, but my neighbors suck. I’ve reached a point where I don’t care how much noise I make, because obviously the McStompy’s upstairs and the pasty-white soul screamer next door don’t care, either. Last weekend, I cranked up the bass box on my sound system and turned on the music just to prove to them how thin the walls are. Maybe they got the message, I don’t know. But there I am, living there for another 6 months. Here’s hoping I don’t lose my job anytime soon, eh?

Speaking of job, one of the managers in my department, a decent guy who’d been there for most of his professional career, gave his two-week notice. I was chatting about it with another coworker, and apparently he’s leaving the company to pursue a new career. Which I was fine with until I found out what he’s looking at doing: going into researching Creation Science. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute.

Now, I can’t fault someone for having a passion. Hell, can’t fault someone for making a conscious decision to change their life, lifestyle, and career to explore their faith. But Creation Science? Why not study UFOs or something else instead? It’s just as factual. It just gets my goat, a perfectly sane, technical man deciding to look for data to support his religious claims. It’s like a drunk man using a lamp post more for support than illumination.

Even when I was a dyed-in-the-cloth Southern Baptist evangelical youth, I could still find a way to reconcile the creation mythos with evolutionary science. They fit perfectly. Did I think the earth was 6000 years old? No way. I knew the universe was eons old, broader than consciousness, and that it could still fit in God’s pocket. I carried with me the understanding that the physical processes that govern the universe are the tools that god used to create everything. It made complete sense that all life on Earth would start from the simplest forms and evolve up to the high forms we exhibit. That was the real design. Even our nation’s founding fathers, who were die-hard Deists, held this opinion. He wrote the rules, and we eventually happened, not the other way around.

I just cannot fathom the leap of logic necessary to believe that dinosaur bones were placed inside the ground by the Devil, with permission from God, in order to test our faith in the Creator.

Bought a new UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) this weekend. The one that’s been powering my network equipment for the past 7 years crapped out on me Wednesday night. Not the first time it’s shut down unexpectedly.

Luckily, I was there to witness the shutdown this time (I was 2 minutes away from bed). A brownout made it trip, and since the battery was three years old, it just gave up. I put everything on a power strip, pulled the battery, and the next day picked up a replacement. After shoehorning it into the case, I plugged the backup into the wall and heard a distinct pop inside the case. Yes, I made the Magic Smoke. So, until I can have it looked at, my faith in the backup is gone. I returned the battery yesterday and picked up a new UPS.

Did some swapping with my other functioning UPS by installing the new one at my desk, and now my audio workstation in the bedroom has a UPS. What a relief. God forbid I’m working on a piece of music and the power goes out before I can save my changes.

Speaking of music, I picked up a decent mid-level studio mic a week ago. I’ve set it up, but I haven’t taken a chance to actually use it yet. I’m discovering how loud my walk-in closet (my makeshift isolation booth) actually is. It shares an outside wall with a busy neighborhood street. Another wall is shared with the neighbor. The third is a wet wall, so every time somebody showers, flushes, or runs a sink (which is often), the mic can pick it up. Plus the air conditioner is mere feet beyond the wall. So yeah, it’s noisy. I can find periods of relative quiet; the problem is that they’re later in the evening. And if I’m going to be singing loud enough to drown out the environment, I’ll probably be heard by the sleeping neighbors.

On second thought, they don’t give a damn about keeping quiet for me. So fuck ‘em.

The song I’ve been working on for the past two months (and now it’s starting to feel like work) is at a standstill. I’d like to say I’m taking a week-long break to chase some other projects. If I say it loud enough, I might believe it. I do enjoy doing it, elsewise I’d…stop. Hmm. Seriously though, it’s fun, but the writing part is rounding towards the end. Now it’s the recording and mixdown stage. Mixing sucks, and I suck at mixing. I think I need some skilled help. Y’know?

The problem I’m finding lately is that I’m trying to do too much by myself, and it’s setting me back. From my projects, to my hobbies, to my job, I keep attempting to keep it all hidden until it’s ready for the world, keep from having to bother anybody else with my problems. Nobody’s got my back, because I’ve not been calling for backup. And as a social creature among social creatures, that thinking is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

I’m no Atlas; I don’t have the strength to keep carrying the weight of my world. I’d like to say that I’m a pragmatist instead of an idealist, but this way of doing things confesses my highly-principled view of my life. I’m trying to prove to the world that I’ve got the skills and ability to do things on my own better than everybody else. To sneak my activities into the shadows of attention and toil away in private until viola! I bring it out into the light and everybody goes, “Ooh! Aah!” That’s bullshit thinking.

The goal is not to prove myself by doing things the right way on my own. The goal is to get the goddamn things done.

I live in a big city and work at a big company; I’m surrounded by people who are experts in their field. All I have to do is ask and navigate the crowd until I find someone willing to help. I don’t have to carry the world alone.

Right now, it’s unbelievably cold. We’ve already hit our freezing mark this winter, but today’s bluster from the north has me chilled to the bones. Bundle up; tonight’s gonna be a cold and lonely one.

Currently listening to VAST’s album “April”. Mostly stuff done on a side-project and some demos. I wish this band would put out something that’s a top-notch production with polished surfaces like their first two albums. The intimacy of imperfection is fine, but please, wow my socks off again.

Speaking of not wowing my socks off, this upgrade to Debian on my laptop hasn’t been all rainbows and puppies. Luckily I had the forethought, back when I first put Ubuntu on this, to set aside a separate partition for my /home directory, because that allows me to keep all of my files, customizations, and configuration settings between OS installations. That allowed me to practically hit the ground running with minimal time configuring the new install. It’s a nice ideal.

But, be that as it may, some of the config differences between Ubuntu and Debian left me with some very weird problems. The Compiz compositor isn’t installed by default on Debian Squeeze (weird, I know), and my Xorg user config was configured to use it. This comically resulted in windows with no GUI chrome (titlebar, status bar, menus, etc), because the compositor draws those; Xorg only draws the window contents. I installed Compiz and its config tool and all was fixed. Also, the Debian variant of Gnome doesn’t provide GUI options to force passwords on resume from Hibernate or Standby, which is a damn handy feature from the Ubuntu version. A few minutes in GConf (at /apps/gnome-power-manager/lock) fixed that.

However, somewhere along the way I may have installed a package or driver or flipped a config switch to cause Xorg to hang on resume. Like, I press the power button after a hibernate/standby, the computer wakes up and resumes, initializes the display, provides me with the Xlock login dialog, wherein I enter the password, then X draws the background image and halts. The mouse is movable, but the video is locked. Can’t even switch to a virtual terminal, but I can log into the laptop via SSH from another host. The only hint I can find is in /var/log/messages where it mentions “bonobo-activation-server cannot associate with desktop session”. Bonobo is a deprecated part of the Gnome GUI framework, but for some reason, some part of Gnome is still using it and hanging when trying to hand off control of the display from Xlock/Xscreensaver to Compiz. Kinda pisses me off, because this worked in Ubuntu. What did they do to make it work?

As a stopgap measure, I simply disabled the password requirement on resume. It’s insecure, but there it is. Why file a bug report? It works as designed!

Speaking of productive, this was a productive week at work. I’ll cap to actually putting my head in the game. If only I’d do that all the time, my life would be easier. At least it’d feel more fulfilling. I hate dragging my feet and/or ass; it’s half my issue with my life/job/hobbies.

So there’s my update. Maybe some time I’ll drop some mad science on you people to show that I can have deep thoughts on occasion. I used to do that waaaay back in the day. But like any muscle, if you don’t exercise it, it will atrophy. And boy howdy, it sure has.

Technically, I am in-between jobs. As of Thursday, I am no longer a contractor, and as of tomorrow, I will be a full employee. And it’s about time.

But not without a thrillride, first.

See, on Tuesday, the manager responsible for my conversion got a call from Human Resources, and the message was to walk me out the door immediately. They got the results of my background check and did not like what they saw. That caught him by surprise, so he called my manager and told him the news. My manager threw the time-out signal. He remembered a conversation he and I (fortuitously) had in passing last week about how there’s another guy with my name in this state who’s apparently a criminal. So they immediately grabbed a conference room and phoned the HR staff again to discuss his conversation with me.

Shortly thereafter, he pulled me into the room for a chat, and HR agreed to have the background-check vendor send me a copy of the results. The determination that day was to keep me on as a contractor until a formal dispute could be launched and everything discovered once and for all.

So, Wednesday, that’s what I did. I reviewed the background check and found four notes regarding the criminal record of a man with my name, my exact birthdate, in Baxter county (where College Station is), who apparently has a major problem with drinking and driving and is currently serving the last of his 7 years in state prison for his third conviction. Coincidentally, he’s been in jail during the entirety of my time as a contractor. So I brought all this up to the HR rep, and he prompted me to call the vendor to begin the dispute process.

I explained to the vendor’s operator that I was not this guy, that I’ve had difficulties before with his name, birthdate, and felony record screwing me over, and that I have never been to Baxter county, so she took down some extra info like my driver license number and my biometric info (weight, height, eye color, hair color) and said she’d forward the info to the researchers for reevaluation. They’d let me know in three business days. After the call, it became a sit-and-wait game.

Luckily, they did their work quickly (because it really should’ve been a no-brainer) because they contacted me the next day to announce the other guy’s record has been expunged from mine, and that there’d be a note attached to my record (should they have to do another check on me in the future) stating what happened. I also got a call from HR telling me the head of security reexamined my case and gave me the green light to conversion, that the company apologizes for any potentially embarrassing (read legally-actionable) inconveniences, and that Monday would be my first day as a fully-badged employee with all the rights, duties, and responsibilities thereof.

And it’s about time.

I kinda feel like celebrating, but with the roller-coaster of this past week, I think I’ll hold off until I get my first paycheck. Just to be on the safe side.