Dark room nights
when phosphor meant something;
electrons flowed from cathode,
magnetic fluxes to deviate beams
serial flow to parallel screens.
Alone at terminals,
each character changed flyback hum
colors changed with programmed tone —
music of the transistors underneath,
and whine of local parts
was sound of distant hearts.
Dial tones began the laughter
play time on the line,
that magic place without face:
i spoke i, you spoke you.
In the middle, telemediated
we laughed, cried, winked
modem lights blinked
big thoughts thinked
on every drink.
Drunk by remote control
telepresent love extol
tribe without turf and means
but glowing phosphors and dreams.
Enter Title Here
It was a weekend. A span of time passed undetected, uninspired, uncaring, into the night. And now it is almost Monday. Almost time to sleep. 6am arrives too early. Beyond that, my first day on the phone. I am being pushed into it, face first; trial by fire, I guess. There’s really only so much I can learn on my ass; the rest, I have to learn on my feet, and I suck at that. The headache I’ve been carrying since Thursday will only get worse, and I’m going into the workweek with fear, dread, and stomach acid. If I had a sense of self, it would be destroyed by week’s end, I can guarantee that. I cannot wait until I come through the other end of the gauntlet and have enough breath to laugh about it.
This weekend has been blown on watching movies. Not even full movies; just pieces of movies. I’m transcoding my entire DVD collection to an all-electronic format to be served by the Plex media center running on my house fileserver. As each DVD is ripped, I have to do QA on the output file to make sure it plays fine, has all the proper audio streams, has closed-captioning, etcetera, before I transfer it to the fileserver. I’ve watched almost all of these movies shortly after I bought them, obviously, so I don’t have to watch the whole damn thing. But there are a few in my collection that I’ve never watched, so there’s that.
If I offended anyone this weekend with my foul mood or glazed stare, I’m sorry. Take it with a grain of salt. I’m a little pent-up and alone these days, more so now that I’m working full time. Bedtime comes earlier than society allows, so I drop into the cafe immediately after work, have a cup, maybe talk with anybody I recognize, and then I’m off to my apartment to do whatever it is that I do before bed. It’s a quiet, soulless existence. My job really is eating at my headspace, occupying my passing thoughts. Perhaps I’m still trying to absorb new data and my mind is too preoccupied at the peril of me not looking like a human. Feeling really fucking awkward lately, and that’s why.
I hope it all gets better soon.
Oh, I got a note from my webhost that they will be transferring my websites to another server, so there may be an outage some time this week. I certainly hope it runs faster; these 30-second page loads are making me angry. But at $100 a year, I get what I pay for, right? The upside of my current job is that down the road I have the option of grabbing a scrap server and hosting my own websites on my own dedicated system. That sure is a tasty-looking carrot on the end of that stick.
Host
Well, I reckon it’s safe enough to finally announce to you fine folks that I am gainfully employed. I have been working at Hostway Corporation for the past two weeks doing Enterprise-level support for managed servers. What that means to you is that I work at the Internet. Not on the Internet — AT the Internet. Every time you look at a website or send an email or have a chat, your computer is making a connection to some physical server that’s sitting in some warehouse at the other end of a wire. This is one of those places at the other end of that wire.
Our customers are generally large companies or private individuals who run a bunch of websites. We own the equipment, we keep it powered and cooled, we make sure the wires aren’t crossed and everything is secured, and then the customers lease that equipment from us to do whatever they need. My job is to answer calls, emails, and trouble tickets from customers who need something changed or have a problem with their server.
Since the Internet doesn’t sleep, it’s a 24/7 operation, so someone has to be on staff in the datacenter at all hours of the day and night. I’m not thrilled at the prospect of shift rotations, but my application to the job was completely voluntary; I knew this going in. The past weeks of getting up at 6AM and filling my head with a wheelbarrow of new knowledge are wearing me down, but I’ll eventually get used to it. I think once the first paychecks start coming in, I’ll be a little more grateful. Until then, I’ll keep plugging at it. It’s a heavy load to take in, but I expect that with a new career.
Clutched
The horse I ride in on is a 14-year-old Honda Civic with 147,000 miles. It is completely bought and paid for, and completely mine. And it has problems: old mare problems.
I’ve been having issues where my transmission was taking too long to shift between gears when the engine is cold. For a year, I played ostrich and pretended it was an easy fix. But with the cold weather this past month, that was no longer the case; it was just refusing to get in gear. Found myself staying home instead of taking the risk. So I bought the materials to jack up my car and flush the transmission fluid. That effort and expense proved fruitless; performance didn’t improve. So that following Monday I took the car to some shops for quotes.
On the way back home, my transmission practically refused to shift into 3rd gear and threw a code, so my hand was forced: I reached home, moved some of my remaining money around, and went back to the shop. $475 was the quote to pull the transmission and take a look. Two days later, $2260 was the final determined cost to completely rebuild the unit. At that point, I couldn’t say no unless I wanted to tow the car elsewhere.
“You should have your car back on Friday,” they said. So my only transportation for the week was bicycle and foot. Damn, am I out of shape.
Friday came and the shop called. “Well, the rebuilt torque convertor we put on there doesn’t work; we’ll have to source another one and install it. You’ll have your car on Monday.”
“Monday? Can you at least knock a couple hundred off the cost?”
“Uh, we’ll see what we can do,” he covered.
I got a call on Saturday that my car was ready. Good, good. I walked over, paid, and felt like I got punched in the gut. Manager gave me the key and receipt, and mentioned that he was hearing a noise coming out of my front left wheel, asked if I’d heard of it. I didn’t, in fact. So I drove off and took a test drive around town. After exiting the highway back to my neighborhood, I heard the noise: a grinding, scraping noise that happened only when I turned the steering wheel while driving. Something in my brakes was going bad. Dammit, dammit.
I pulled into a parking lot, lifted the car, and removed the tire. What I found was a scored brake rotor and a little stamped metal clip that was getting pinched between the brake caliper frame and the rotor. This is, as you can expect, not supposed to happen. So I limped out of there, picked up a new pair of clips, installed them at home, and took another test drive. It was still grinding, so the new clips got damaged as well. Something was drastically wrong with the wheel.
Sunday, I took it to the brake shop. The mechanics typically remove all four tires to inspect the brakes; this time, they left the bad wheel mounted because they didn’t feel comfortable with removing it. The damn thing was about to fall off. The problem, they said, was that the CV axle was damaged and had to be replaced. This is probably related to the damaged strut that I had to replace back in November. They rocked the wheel back and forth to show me the amount of play in the wheel. So, already hurting from the expense of the transmission, I had no choice but to agree to the repair. $350.
After a few hours, I sulked out with a functioning car. But it’s not over yet. During my test drive, I heard a new noise out of my right rear wheel, a clicking that happened once per revolution. Just great. So I went back to the brake shop to make them fix it. The problem was that the mechanic accidentally moved the adjustment that controls the clearance between the brake shoes and the drum, so everything was too tight and rubbing against the drum. An easy fix, for once.
Now I have a usable car. Damn.
It’s funny to me just how many people have an opinion to voice when I have a train of problems like this. “You should’ve done this.” “You should’ve done that.” “You should get a new car.” “You should’ve done regular maintenance.” “You should sell your car and only ride your bike.” It’s like their own philosophical vanity is at stake, and here I am, the one directly affected by the problem, deciding that paying for repairs as they come is a hell of a lot cheaper than taking on new car payments. I still have plenty of good years left in this horse, and I’m not ready to send it out to pasture just yet. When that time comes, I hope it’s a well-earned life.
Moonshot
Now here’s a pleasant surprise: Amazon Instant has a copy of the Georges Méliès 1902 classic film “A Trip to the Moon” fully restored with special soundtrack by the French electronic music duo Air.
This 16-minute film was shot in black and white in Méliès’ studio with practical effects, intricately detailed sets, doubled film exposure, and cutting during the scenes, really pushing the envelope of creative cinema for its era. Before distribution, some of the film strips were hand-colored; only a few of those copies survive to today. The restoration uses modern film technologies to clean up the ancient print and restore lost frames from B&W film stock. The result is a lot better than before, and the Air soundtrack adds to the ambiance of this ancient piece of pre-space-age science fiction.
Work was performed by the Technicolor Foundation.