in 2000, i couldn’t believe that anyone would possibly vote for an idiot like g.w.  determined that my vote wouldn’t make a difference in the election anyway, since there was no chance gore would lose, i gave my vote to the green party in an attempt to help them get 3% of the vote and a real shot at the presidential election in 2004.  both plans failed.

in 2004, it was so glaringly obvious that kerry was the better choice, and i felt like people obviously wanted a change, i didn’t think it was possible that the country would vote w. in for a second term.

this year, i was afraid that even though obama was the best candidate — and not just the lesser of two evils, but a man who would stand as a president for the people rather than in spite of the people — some unknown factor would cause the vote to go wildly in the other direction.  even the “maverick” (read: insane) tactics mccain used in selecting an inexperienced hockey mom from alaska as his running mate — so obviously a desperate cry for help — could have swayed the impetus toward him.

i watched the blogosphere and the twittersphere refreshing msnbc.com and cnn.com for updates on the polls obsessively, refusing to get my hopes up in case something went horribly wrong.

today, i wake up, and i can breathe easy — like a weight has been lifted.  for the first time in my life, i can be proud to be an american.  and i’m proud to live in the age of the first black president.  the age of change.

history starts now.

so i was really aggravated last night.  we just had a major reset done in the cheese department, and i was focusing on the case, figuring out what i should cut.  there was some chocolate that i needed to deal with and my big, pretty display i built a couple months ago got pulled down and replaced by rolling racks.

 that was annoying, but because our regional analyst person talked to me about it, i was expecting that.  i was annoyed because i thought it looked good and i had it somewhat organized the way i wanted it, and the new set had stuff mixed together and the tags were all mixed up.  plus there was stuff everywhere.

more annoying, however was when our marketing guy — who was doing a demo in front of really big windows letting in the afternoon sun, came over and said “hey, chris, i thought you should know…your chocolate is melting.”

wtf?  i go over to see the halloween display had been moved in front of the big windows since i last worked, with all my specialty halloween chocolate and, in fact, the chocolate had been melting.  hi, chris, you need to do a chocolate reset.  so i did.  the result looks pretty good, but it was annoying to have to come in and deal with some scruffy-faced nerfherder’s brilliant idea to stick the halloween chocolate in front of the frickin’ window.  i mean, seriously.  whose brilliant idea was that?  so far i’ve had no answers (not that i think anyone would take credit for it to me, considering how pissed i was).  so here’s the new chocolate set, halloween candy included:

beyond the annoyance of having to do the reset, that’s $65 of lost chocolate now, that’s unsellable, and while that could have been a lot worse and we generally make a pretty big margin on most of the chocolate, it’s still lost sales and our department hasn’t been doing fabulous with the change in seasons, the economy, etc.  not to mention the fact that my whole day was spent on that instead of other things.

so i came home and made myself feel better with an herb-crusted fleur de france brie and yummy cambozola (a german cross between the italian blue, gorgonzola and the french camembert brie) on la panzanella croccatini which, in my opinion, is the best cracker for cheese.  they’re big flatbreads and kind of unruly, but they’re awesome and crunchy and not too thick like some other croccatinis.  the cambozola was a bit more -zola than cam- having sat in our fridge for a few days, but still tasty.  the evening was capped with some hornsby’s crisp apple hard cider which, i’ve decided, doesn’t suck.

i feel like steve jobs is playing a cruel game of punk’d on me.

so here’s the deal.  i have a macbook.  many applications that i want to use don’t work or don’t seem to be entirely supported or have weird issues in tiger (such as the bizarre instance of photoshop not being able to open .psds).  plus, spore requires 10.5.3, and spore on the mac would be awesome.  so i finally decide to try to upgrade from tiger (10.4.11) to the latest leopard (10.5.5).  

that’s when i started reconsidering suicide.  or at least technocide.

leopard installed okay the first time around. in fact, better than — it was more responsive and had a faster boot time.  so i did the software updates…which proceeded to kill everything.  after the 10.5.5 combo update, the laptop would no longer boot.  ultimately, i had to start over from scratch — erase everything i had installed and do a new install.  here’s the summary:

for some reason, every install directly from the 10.5 disk failed.
trying an archive & install (that keeps all your old settings and applications) didn’t boot after it got trashed from the update.
which means i would need to install 10.4 first and upgrade.
the 10.5.5 combo update, according to various mac forums, seemed to have issues for some people, so I did each incremental update separately, but I only got as far as 10.5.1 before i started having more issues.

so here’s my dilemma.  i love osx, i really do.  if i had a choice, i’d use it as my de facto operating system.  but i don’t want to spend another 2-3 hours hacking away at the laptop to try (and possibly fail.  again) to get it up to 10.5.  i thought about running time machine, and making a backup as soon as i have a successful install of 10.5 so at least i have a restore point when it fails, but that just means that i’m expecting to fail when i install the updates.  i’d rather not just expect to fail.

so my options are:

install tiger again and leave it.  possibly funky-acting programs and no support for current/next-gen applications (making the laptop dated).
install tiger again and sell it.  possibly using the money to buy one o’ dem fancy schmancy asus eee pc’s which i read have had osx86 successfully installed on them.
install something completely different.  i downloaded and was this close to installing the google linux distro, gOS — the biggest detractor was, a) no app support for what i wanted, i’d have to find possibly lesser-quality equivalents of what i want and expect the adobe suite to not work 100% (so back where i started with that), plus, what’s a google OS without chrome?  seriously.  considering waiting until they finish chrome for linux and inevitably release a new gOS with chrome out of the box.

ultimately, installing something completely different doesn’t solve anything, but the install process would be like 15 minutes vs. 2 hours.  and my sketchy cd-rom drive just keeps getting worse everytime i do this, so by the end i’m kind of expecting that it won’t accept any cds anymore at all, which doesn’t help things.

so i’m at a loss.  what do y’all think?

watched obama’s speech yesterday.  here it is, if you haven’t seen it yet:

watching this not only makes me an obsessed obama groupie (he does seem to have that effect), and go out and buy some obama stuff on his website, but also makes me realize that this election is huge.  it’s not even about the issues.  it’s about the future vs. the past.  obama is a politician who i believe can really lead this country into the 21st century, and as a techno-geek, i’ve seen lots of pie-in-the-sky solutions for a variety of environmental and economic problems.  but what all of those plans need is someone who is willing to take a risk and shake things up.

d00d.  mccain is not that person.

i think obama could be.

i was just reading a wired article about electric cars — yes they’re back.  and the program is being developed by someone with a realistic plan to get us off oil.  meanwhile, i’m watching obama talk about getting america off our oil addiction and i’m thinking, this could be the guy that gets the ball rolling.  and i want, want, want a f’ing electric car!

and i thought it was a key moment when he brought up all the hot topics that everyone debates about, abortion, gay marriage, and says, look, we might not agree on these things, but we can at least come to some middle ground – downplaying those issues because that’s not what this election is going to be about.  it’s not.  it’s about the future, and someone who can lead us there, and the past, and someone who will continue what reagan, bush #1 and bush #2 left off.  personally, i’m ready for the economy to not suck anymore.  i’m ready for new renewable energy.  i’m ready to live in a country that i am proud to live in, and not feel embarrassed about if and when i’m abroad.  (”yes, i’m american, but i think our president is a douche, too”)  a lot of politicians talk the talk, but few actually make me believe.

Mike Doughty talked in his blog about this being the first time he’s been politically excited about something rather than against something.  seriously, obama has the commanding presence of malcom x, he’s just, you know, not as angry.  and i was really digging kucinich, even though i knew he had no chance.  with obama, it’s like, the little issues don’t matter as much, because that’s not what he’s going for.  and since high school (when i declared myself an anarchist), i have been firm that the only way to fix the system is massive, radical change.  hell, that was why i voted green instead of gore.  it wasn’t that i didn’t want gore in the white house — i did, and i honestly thought dubbya had no chance of winning…which, you know, he didn’t.  it was that i wanted there to be a third option.  it was that democrats and republicans were two sides of the same worn out coin and neither represented me.  that’s what has made the myspace generation apathetic about politics.  how can you get excited about anything when it’s the same old stuff?  repetition isn’t exciting, not even when it’s techno — what’s exciting is when something gets thrown into the mix that’s different (this applies to the techno metaphor, too, and gee i’m just throwing around metaphors today, aren’t i?).

i feel like i need to be a much more active supporter of obama, which is kind of weird to me.  i feel like i need to tell everyone i see about him and make them part of the obsession too.  i don’t want this to be like the 2k election again, where no one really believes the crappy candidate really has a chance of winning and then he does by stealing florida.  even when mccain’s running mate looks like a blatant grasp at straws, i feel like it’s too dangerous to feel comfortable, because the alternative is another 4-8 years of destroying the environment, drilling holes in alaska, pumping more CO2 into the air and making the cities unlivable.  more economic depression and cold war-era “trickle-down” theory.  as much as i agree with the sentiment, i don’t want the bumper stickers that say “dissent is patriotic” to define my political views and outlook on the country.  we need someone to shake up the system and lead us into the technological future because otherwise, we need to get moving on our martian colonization program because this planet isn’t going to hold up for another generation of pillaging.  i’m ready to move into the future, not the Terminator future, or the Battlestar Galactica or the Matrix dystopic future of creating artificial life that proves its’ superiority and attempts to wipe out humanity for being inefficient, but the future where, you know, we still have ozone.  where the water is still blue and falls from the sky.  where there’s still animals.

there’s an episode in BSG where they’re crashed on Kobol.  Chief Tyrol is sitting by one of his knuckledraggers’ side as he’s sputtering blood and probably isn’t going to make it, and Tyrol says “How’re you doing?”  “Just listening to the birds,” he says.  Tyrol looks up for a second and notices the sound.  and the look is like “wow, I never thought I’d see the day when…”  and it’s terrifying how realistic that alternate reality is — that we could live in a world that has been without animal life for so long we’ve completely taken it for granted.  where we don’t even know to miss the sound of birds in the trees.

i feel like there’s a real momentum toward real revolutionary change and it’s an exciting time.  but i feel like we need to hop on the bandwagon because if we miss the window, it might never happen.  so i’m voting for obama.  you should too.

(by the way, i’ve enabled a new subscriber feature which emails alerts when i write posts.  if it bugs you, you can modify your subsription from the Subscribe widget in the sidebar, or you can email me.)

in my last post, i expressed my woe at the sudden upheaval of my computer.  today i woke up excited because my hardware was coming.  now i have a history of always forgetting something.  i get a new motherboard but the processor doesn’t match.  i get a motherboard and processor but don’t have the right ram.  i get a SATA hard drive but my power supply doesn’t have a SATA connector.  or enough SATA connectors.  or i don’t have a SATA hard drive cable.

so this time i swear i’ve got it covered.  the board specs say it can take up to 4gb of ram, so i max out and get 4 sticks of 1 gb.  i know my older power supply doesn’t have a SATA connector so i think ahead and got an adapter.  i’m getting a mainboard, ram, and a hard drive because i don’t want to swap the motherboard and ram and find out the drive died, too.  or vice versa (but i’m pretty sure something on the board is shot at least.  could just be a dust short, but still…)

well, time to throw in my hat because it turns out my power supply is a 20-pin and the new board requires a 24-pin.  oh, and since i went the cheap route and got a micro-atx board, there’s only actually 2 slots for ram.  so i have 2 extra sticks (which i’m sure will come in handy at some point, but not so much right now).  i could always swap the 4 for 2 2gb, but then i’d have to wait and there’s a restocking fee and i’m sure i can use these eventually.

/sigh

so another couple days before i get the new system running and i can actually figure out what was going on with the old system.  color me lame.

so there we were.  playing guildwars.  trying to get some new characters to a high enough level that we can beat the mission which will unlock the ability to go from the nightfall campaign back to the original prophecies campaign.  we’re running aroung collecting XP from the quests we just finished, when, all of a sudden, click, my computer shuts off.

at first i think it’s the monitor.  i have this old 19″ from when we were at college and the color is going which has caused us to a) shop for new lcd flatscreens (cuz I can’t just get on and then be jealous!) and b) swapped monitors so i have the big, but slightly off-color monitor and erin has the color accurate monitor (she seems to do more interesting things with color in graphic design — choices for specific colors when i would go more basic. i decided she needed accuracy more than i did).  so i fiddle with that a bit, and eventually i’m staring at the monitor test thing bouncing across the screen saying “your monitor is working correctly.”  no it’s not, i tell the computer, but it doesn’t listen.

in reality, it is working correctly.  well as correct as it can.  because as it turns out, my character drops off the network in her game and when i try to reboot the computer it does…nothing.  literally nothing.  no happy little beep saying it booted or anything.  i start to get concerned.

first, i try using an ubuntu live cd — i figure if the hard drive went, then i should still be able to boot off the cd.  but after powering the box on, i can’t even get the cd tray to eject.  nothing happens.  i don’t get the pre-operating system self test (POST) screen up, even.  that means there’s something fairly serious wrong along the main brains of the system, the motherboard/processor.

good thing we have the media center, i say, and proceed to pull the new computer that was being used as media center over and swap hard drives.  i figure, the hard drive should still get me into windows and i can just rejoin the game as soon as i swap drives.  but as soon as i swap drives and boot up the new computer with the old drive, i get a bluescreen flash and then reboot.  flash of bluescreen, reboot.  it’s not even up long enough for me to read the error.  so now i’m looking at a bad mobo/proc and hard drive.

so for now the media center is acting as my backup computer until i get new hardware.  i put the original hard drive back in and installed the software i need to do my work.  the only thing lost in this fiasco is just the apps i run, since everything, all my files and everything for web design work, is saved on my server.  ’cause, you know, that was the whole point.  and the server has backups done weekly, so yeah, no harm no foul, just an annoyance, and you know, money.  money that was previously going to my macbook.  /sigh.  i really think the fates are against me in getting this laptop.  i’m going to perservere, though, if it takes every piece of electronics in the house out in the process of getting the laptop.

in completely random other news, however, damn this is a nice machine i built here.  vista runs like a charm, which, you know, is ironic since when i last installed it, it completely trashed my hard drive and led me to vow to never install that piece of trash ever again ever.  this is a much better machine, of course, and newer, and probably really built to run vista (actually, it was precisely built to run vista because the original remote i had only ran on vista, but i ended up having to reinstall it and replaced it with a stripped down vista which didn’t include the requisite driver and i couldn’t get the requisite driver from the manufacturer).  still, it never fails to surprise me to see vista running the way it should.  and fast, too.  so i’ve perhaps changed my mind that it is the spawn of satan.  perhaps…

on wednesday erin and i went to a concert i’ve been looking forward to for months: saul williams’ the tar spangled banner tour.

this is a big deal for several reasons:

1. we don’t leave the house. ever. (well except for shopping, takeout, and work)
2. we rarely have a night off. let alone a night out.
3. what, no kids? what madness you speak.
4. etc.
5. oh yeah — saul williams kicks a lot of ass and is, i think, one of the most interesting, underrated, amazing poets and musicians today who also happens to be black.

listening to saul’s lyrics feels like going to an african american literature seminar. at least, it does for me. it’s thick with not only genuine emotion and reactions to growing up in the ghetto as a black teenager, but also genuine emotion and reactions to growing up period. “black stacey” is a song about prejudice about the darkness of his skin but it’s also about being awkward and self-conscious and learning to love who you are.

saul williams is also vehemently political. he’s outspoken about the war. in fact, the first song i ever heard was “not in our name”; an anti-pledge of allegiance which begins:

“we believe that as people living in the united states it is our responsibility to resist the injustices done by our government in our names. not in our name will you wage endless war. there can be no more deaths. no more transfusions of blood for oil.”

the show was in kilby court, the tiny shack amidst a residential area that nevertheless hosts some of the most interesting indie acts that come through utah…okay, the most interesting indie acts. i think i remember something about shows having to end by 11pm due to being in a residential zone, which suits us with kids fine, and i think also makes the site better for an all-ages venue.

it’s tiny, hot, sweaty and close. we get there, see a dry erase board saying “SOLD OUT” and start walking away, lamenting missing saul williams when erin gets a text from her sister saying “where are you guys?” we find out they aren’t in fact sold out and 180 it back to the show and get inside the grounds about 5 minutes before the band comes on — long enough to hit the stuff booth and listen to a very dumb conversation between a hipster and saul’s booth girl (”where are you guys from?” “well, all over. saul’s from brooklyn, his dj is from ny. the guitarist is from long beach…”). i have time to notice that amethyst rock star is missing from the stuff when people start charging into the building (the stuff booth is located in a little hut-like gallery outside of the main building, which appears to be a large studio-sized gutted house).

we follow and end up in the back, behind many large people. the music starts (”break” from Niggy Tardust) and the crowd goes nuts. saul comes out and the music changes (this becomes a recurring theme — starting out in one song and then breaking into another). i’m able to snap off this shot on my phone which i still don’t know what it is (well i know what it’s supposed to be, but that’s not what it looks like) but i still think is pretty badass:

the show was awesome (even from the back of the room). saul seemed to really enjoy the closeness of the venue — there really isn’t a stage in this place; it’s more of a 4″ platform that is only separated from the audience by the speakers and a large support beam on one corner. he frequently climbed on speakers (which resulted in us being able to actually see him) and walked into the audience to start a pogo/mosh pit. he played much of his first, self-titled album, and the NiggyTardust material, and ventured a couple times into amethyst rock star.

a couple times he took a break from rocking out to talk to the audience about the NiggyTardust moniker. About the call and response from the title track (”When I say Niggy, you say nuthin’. Niggy. (silence) Niggy. (silence)/When I say Niggy, you say nuthin’. Niggy. Nothing! Shutup!”), he said “I can say ‘Niggy Tardust’ and y’all think ‘wow, what a clever name,’ but when I say ‘nigger’ the room goes silent…but the truth is we’re all one…hybrids. Let’s bring it down to the lowest common denominator. Like Yoko Ono said, ‘women are the nigger of the world…’ We’re all niggers; we’re all limited by our experience.” much applause from the all white Salt Lake audience in which the only black member(s) left much earlier, saying “this guy is crazy.”

now’s the part where i get into my music rant:

so after the show, which was awesome, i head over to the “stuff booth,” as i usually do, and picked up his first album. and told the people around me: “support the artist, buy his stuff.” trent reznor, who produced NiggyTardust and also footed the bill for production, talked a while ago about the financial success/failures of the album. Of course I don’t remember the exact figures off the top of my head but he said that there were something like 150,000 downloads, so much that the server couldn’t handle the load. However, only about 30,000 people footed the $5 bill for the cd quality files and pdf booklet. which didn’t cover the $250,000 spent on making the record (which, trent admits, may have been partially his own fault having gone all out with it). still, that’s over a million ipods that are now home to saul williams which, if nothing else, gets his name out there on a scale that he never would have accomplished otherwise. trent said that he hoped that means that saul could recoup some of that cash by touring since now he’s a much more common name. and 30,000 copies (or whatever) is still more than his previous 2 records ever sold.

i am against giving money to big record companies because i know that the artist — especially indie artists just getting started — rarely see anything from those sales. but i am all for going to the show and buying the same cd there. because that money pretty much goes to the gas tank, food, and/or whatever else they may be doing while on the road. i mean, the $10 i spent on his cd is not even going to fill the tank of the tour bus these days, but that goes to him, and is not filtered through marketing, pr, production, and whatever other cuts come out of a regular cd sale of which the artist generally gets something like $0.40.

so, the conclusion:

support the artists you love by going to their shows. if you really love them, buy their stuff. but if you have a choice, buy it from them, from their website directly or from the show as opposed to amazon or best buy. that way you know the money is going where it should — to the artist you love.

thank you, and goodnight.

ok, so i get a lot of forwards from my biomom. some are cute and worth reading and passing on, some are religious and worth deleting, some are racist and not worth my time, but tick me off anyway, and some are morally outraged at one thing or another. but regardless, i read them all, even when i probably shouldn’t. a lot of different people read this, including some of my family, i believe, so possibly i shouldn’t even write this here, but if she reads this, well, i don’t think it would hurt much…just, if you are reading, probably skip the rant…

so the most recent forwarded email has to do with the new $1 coin. BOYCOTT BOYCOTT BOYCOTT it decries. BOYCOTT THE NEW $1 COIN! If someone tries to give it to you, politely ask for a paper bill! Why? THEY REMOVED THE ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’!!!

so, okay, i’m not totally agnostic, but i still fail to share in the moral outrage. still, it seems surprising, especially under our current evangelically religious administration, that they’d actually pull out the ‘in god we trust’ bit, and at the very least, i was curious to see what the coin looked like. so i did what all web-savvy people usually do and googled it. and i found a page (and interactive flash tour) on the u.s. mint site about the new $1 coin.

here it is people. stop you’re whining and your ignorant f’ing moral outrage. because guess what: YOU’RE WRONG! see for yourself here. THEY DID NOT REMOVE THE F’ING ‘IN GOT WE TRUST’! and anyone who shared in my 2 minutes of research could also share in this revelation. it’s been moved, yes. possibly if you only saw the flip sides, you’d think that it was totally gone, but if you actually took the time to go to the source (i don’t know how much more direct you can get than the united states mint), you would learn that they moved the ‘E PLURIBIS UNUM’ and ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ to the edge of the coin. which actually is kind of cool.

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this just pissed me off. i mean, it’s one thing to get outraged about teaching the pledge of allegiance in spainish, or making prayer mandatory at public schools, or abortion. these are things i understand have two sides and are based on differing opinions. and they are polarizing hot topics that generate heated debate on either side. and i have my opinions on such, and i understand other people have theirs and i respect that. this isn’t about opinion though, this is a moral outrage about something that isn’t even based on accurate information. so now there’s this chain-lettered national ban on the $1 coin for what? nothing! because they didn’t do what you think they did, you ignorant morons. i know, i know, in this wide world of the internet with all of these “words” floating around, and each one sounds true, it can get confusing sometimes finding reliable information. but seriously, 2 minutes of research. not even that. learn to use a search engine.

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so i took the freelance graphic design job. so t hen i was like “oh crap, i need to install graphic/web design stuff on my computer now” which i didn’t have because i had reformatted in the recent past. thus began my weekend-long frustration with my computer.i have a modded windows 2003 server os installed on my box. don’t ask why because i don’t really know anymore. mostly i think it was for performance and to try something new, and i still didn’t trust vista. however, i tried installing adobe cs3 on it and it won’t install under server 2k3. so, rather than trying to install and crack windows xp, i decided to try this legitimate version of windows vista i had lying around.

let me tell you now that was a huge error in judgment on my part. (more…)

i work in a hostile environment. it’s not hostile to anyone else, at least, not usually. just me.

don’t believe me?

how’s this:
i am a tier 2 technical analyst, which, if we are going to continue with the military metaphor, isn’t quite the first wave of infantry (read: cannon fodder) who are considered utter crap and useless, whose only job is to take most of the bullets so they don’t hit the (presumably) more “important” soldiers. tier 2 is the second wave. we get the job done. we are also the last ones off the field of battle — the ones above us never see the fight, they just make the decisions, the planning and strategy, but they don’t go outside, else they get potshots from the aforementioned snipers.

with me so far?

i have a bad habit of fixing things. one might not consider this “bad,” but where i work, it is apparently considered poor form. i fix things by figuring out what’s wrong and getting the job done. i annihilate the enemy. and, the tier 2 windows team that i am on is pretty much about figuring out what’s wrong and fixing it. other teams defer to their tier 3/4 as soon as they come across something out of the ordinary, but that’s not the way we’ve ever really rolled.

i made the mistake once of mentioning linux to the ones who call the shots. the context was this:
we have a problem with disk space on servers. there is a utility program on most distributions of linux which shows you graphically what folders are using the most disk space. this would presumably help our cause in identifying where the problem lies and escalating to the appropriate application team to see if there is anything they can do to make their application smaller. so i asked if there was something like this for windows. i was told “we all know you like linux. however, it is not helpful to the problem discuss linux.” period. end of discussion. several months later i find they are starting to roll out an application that does exactly what i was asking about.

since then, anytime i’ve said or asked anything of our tier 4 (we don’t have a tier 3), i’ve gotten a similar, hostile response. it is the reason i started looking seriously for a new job again. i’ve stopped going to them under any circumstance for anything, and even when i perform the exact same steps as other people on my team would (and do), i get burned for things they don’t get a second glance about.

(case in point: trying — and failing — to get a server online with 2/4 drives in the RAID array, and never getting it to come up at all. eventually, i wipe the drives to prepare for a reload, still working with the store, but the server’s cd-rom drive is bad, so a service ticket is needed for more parts. the server that comes out is bad and 8 hours later we get it back up and running on a (second) new server. “why did you initialize the drives?” because i spoke to another member of my team and that’s what he said was probably the next step. consequently, when he had a similar problem this last weekend, he did the same thing, calling the same person who gave me crap for wiping the drives whether he should proceed, or get a tech out with more parts. he was told to wipe the drives. the difference? he also didn’t require 2 servers.)

the latest volley came through no part of my own except, perhaps, communication. which, i guess, i should cut out too. i was working with a tech on a pc reload in which the scripted process to partition and format the new hard drive was failing. i got into diskpart, created the partition, formatted the drive, went on with my business. this was a process they used to be able to do as well, but the reload cds have changed and so some of the steps in the documentation they already have are no longer accurate. the tech (who was a lead) asked if there was something i could send them, so i sent their supervisor in that area the doc i had written on how to perform the steps i just did.

another member of my team, on a completely different issue, forwarded that email to our tier 4 (which, as an aside, is no longer really our tier 4 — they have been reallocated to other projects. in all reality, they are not over us at all anymore). he thought it would help that person who was using dispart at the time and apparently couldn’t remember the command he wanted. i then got burned twice — for doing this process, and for sending it to our field techs. i was called a “cowboy,” i guess for being, what? cavalier? fixing something on my own? not asking permission? this is not a new problem — we’ve been dealing with this and having to manually partition the hard drives since before these people were even involved with the cds we use to reload the pcs. the only thing i did was make a document and then passed it along so each time this happens — which is frequent — we don’t get a call on it.

so. minefield. snipers. hostile environment. if it wasn’t for the, you know, paycheck, i’d be walking out the door right now.

p.s.   hire me!  my resume is posted on the sidebar.