monkeyplus1

Today’s drink of the day:  “Hennessy Paris”:

• 1.5 oz Hennessy (cognac)
• 0.5 oz lemon juice
• 0.25 oz Cointreau (triple sec)

Shake over ice, strain over your favorite glass.

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We are finally, 100% moved into our new house. It’s fucking beautiful. A lot of stairs, though - it’s 3 stories tall.  We still have a ton of things in boxes, many things left to find.

We weren’t at the apartment very long, a few weeks, but long enough. There was a Burger King nearby, and the cancerous stench of grilled cowflesh, that gray cloud of dioxins, could be fucking awful when the winds were just right.  I think even a carnivore would get sick of the smell.

A house party is on the horizon, but for now, unpacking, resting.  Aggravated an old back-injury, gawd I feel like an old fuck sometimes.

The music room is getting set up. When the boy is a couple years older, this will be his room, and I will turn the garage into my studio.

I have looked up nearly all of my neighbors within a one block radius.  I know the names of all the owners, when they bought, how much they paid, how much square footage their house is, when it was built, what type of construction it is.  I have a lot of names of past residents who have lived in the area.  I know some of their health conditions, their prescriptions, their allergies.  Some of them, I know their occupations, I know their hobbies.  There is a glass artist, some musicians, a teacher, some business folks, some retirees.  There are a couple sex offenders, too. In their case, I called up their parole officer, who kindly gave me 30 minutes of her time to go over their case history, status, etc.  I have kids, so I’ve got a special interest in watching out for those kinds of monsters.

I am a resourceful motherfucker.

One thing I’ve noticed - the older people are, the harder it is to find out anything about them.  At least, through free, publicly available (and legal) means.

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Google street-view car captures crack deal in Chicago.

original

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so ja, never rains, but ho, it pours.

I practiced my entire live set for next week, actually made a recording of it -start to finish-, in case I forget to record it when live. it is good.

i’m sitting here, editing this post the morning after I wrote it. needing some coffee, feeling a little un-well… yarrrr

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so, let’s say you’re not so smart at some things.

no problem, everyone has their unique strengths. just gotta find it, why so hard?

that cursor’s blinking in your face, and because the screen is blank, you pound furiously at the ENTER/RETURN key on your keyboard.

your filthy, snot-encrusted laptop, tries to pretend that you didn’t just jab it in anger. fuckin computar? fuckin lady! shit! leave it alone, it’s prolly got windows, that shit takes time to boot.

i quote the ex-soviet union repair tech that replaced my cable modem yesterday, and his english probably sucked, but he easily conveyed a shrug of:

“hey, it’s the broken. We replace. No problem.”

Then my muthafawkin cheap router goes titties up, whu????

provided, I didn’t have a chair for this guy to sit on, my room was gutted when he showed up, I was writing code in the dining room, and staring out the window.

didn’t matter, he just sat on his haunches, not quite Chinese-style, but simply alternating between one knee on the ground. almost.

he says we should reboot our machines. he shuts his dell laptop down, ok, well,… it starts to shut down. I’m thinking it’s ridiculous, I’ve already logged in and out, but not reboot.

why the fuck not, this guy doesn’t seem to be in any kind of a hurry.

this attitude came through for me today. a saw gravy’s girl type friend ish at the coffee shop I went to get some wifi. pulled her hempskirt, smiled, O HAI!!

hey. eyes over to my screen, full of code (beautiful, artful and elegant)

whachu doin here?

workin. from home, but other places. like here.

I probably look ridiculous, in comparison to other people who go to coffee shops to surf teh intArwebz on the laptops. I have a slim, but full-sized keyboard, on my lap and under the table, where my hands lie.

With great reluctance do I reach up from the table to move the cursor with the mouse. I’m so old, computer mice are only a recent invention.

“Keyboard shortcuts, boy. Keyboard shortcuts.” The white-beareded teacher sits on one foot, defying gravity on a misty boulder.

“Yes, master,” searches his face, waiting for a pause, realizing none was coming. The teacher had disappeared once again into the mist.

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yes, I said I wouldn’t help people with their microsoft problems anymore. yes, I have two macs, and save the xp machine on loan from work, to do the job “securely”.

I’ve got a story to tell you about that, about solving a ridiculous computer problem, for a dreadlocked mommy of two, neighbor friend…with a flashlight.

so, I was gonna write this story tomorrow, right? but you just couldn’t wait, could you? fine enough.

where was I? Dreadmommie.

Make a long story short, girl lives right around the corner, about three or four houses down. Gravy found her at his newfound media school, love and bone-age. the works, no details necessary. Gravy’s the biggest fawkin stoner in ptown, far as I know, his bounds are something of legend. Anyway, somehow, he’s never made it with a hippie chick.

dreds should tell you something. wild-eyebrows should tell you something very specific. come on, don’t make me spell it out.

nice girl, says her LCD is burned out. thinking LCD soundsystem, losing his edge. not quite. literally, has some filth-encrusted excuse for a laptop, fans whining in pain, that has its monitor burned out. She changed some setting on her computer, where an external monitor was supposed to echo what her screen would otherwise show.

turned out, one checkbox, and a reboot (which SHE suggested), was the trick. lolz.

goddamn. she say thank joo. I think, doctors and lawyers must always get hounded in a similar fashion when you tell someone you’re a software developer and their ears hear ‘COMPUTAR TEK SUPPORRT DUDE, BE NOICE.’ sure, nice, nice, nice.

the lcd on her laptop is burned out, she had it configured (by accident) for a 2nd monitor to “extend” her screen. winblows xp, mind joo. so, the external monitor is just fine, default xp cloud desktop. nothing on it, screen 1 burned out.

by chance, I noticed if I shone a flashlight RIGHT AT THE SCREEN, I could spot the mouse. From there, I could check out the DISPLAY setting.

OH MY FAWKING… GAWD!!

getting a computer to work, using a FLASHLIGHT?!! is there some kind of award for this shit? NO????!!!

WELLSZ, FUCK there should be.

needless to say, I fixed her fuckin laptop.

She said, “what do you do? program? whut?”

“databases. stuff. right?”
“databases? I need a database! I need some technology!” this hippy girl said, enthusiastically.

pause. I know she has no idea what a database is, much less why she would need one. my silent response elicited an elaboration:

“I need microsoft publisher, don’t care if it’s stolen” she says.

No surprise, once I got her stupid XP computer working, it kept saying “YO THIS SHIT IS STOLEN, I’M NOT GONNA UPDATE SHIT TILL YOU BUY THISS SHIT, SO FUCK YOU. CLICK OK TO CONTINUE”

click OK, fuck you too.

I wave my hand in an empty gesture. Empty because I’m gesturing at the mac powerbook I’m using. No windows, lady. never going back, not till they pay me to believe they got their shit together.

say it wif me now:

SOLLY CHOLLY, NO GLOT, CLOM FLIDAY.

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There’s certain jargon within IT professionals that sounds like weird mumbo-jumbo to outsiders.  Being a software developer, there are other professional jargons that sound almost like nonsense to me, how people in marketing, business analysis, and project management talk.  (A “PMP”, in a few places openly pronounced “Pimp”, is a project management professional, though most often they’re just called PMs).

Overheard blurbs from the resident project management posterboy (this isn’t a word-for-word dictation, only the phrases that floated across the room into my cube, misheard or not):

Rejecting a level of structure, existing durations for existing tasks, resources required to do this, a given consideration, a dependency that requires a visibility, we need to make sure we don’t assume the level of detail, certain levels run higher risks, what I’m getting to is the flawed logic a lot of people use, we need consistency from a detail perspective. this is not intuitive, once you understand structure and the purpose.

Scope is verified, bought off on, knowing what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, who’s going to do what, scheduling, the whole exercise. the process of identifying these major dependencies, to the extent that we understand the specifications, requirements are a necessary evil. The mentality that if we started writing code three months earlier we would have been finished two months ago. With a level of visibility, when dependencies cause delay, that’s tangible, we can quantify that. This may not have been a well-informed statement, we’re going to have to let these things go, will it be painful? Yes. Why is he pulling this power struggle?

They’re not seeing what it means to not support that, then there’s this visibility in the requirements, my statement before was misguided. They don’t see that, they won’t have that…that grudge. We’ll be willing to work with you to resolve it. What is the time spent there and lost functionality if we go there?

Someone mentioned the priority of development instances, at some stage there’s no distinction between production and the project, whether or not it’s going to be an issue, I have no idea. All of our solutions are re-writes. Again, I don’t know what level of detail these guys have on the project, I got yelled down, I got burned.

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