So I’m trying to buy a new Macbook.
I have X dollars in my bank account. I want to debit Y dollars. Y is substantially less than X. No charges are pending. However, even with that. WaMu in their infinite wisdom won’t let me debit anything from it because, according to their rep, my maximum transaction dollars per day is $2509. No more, no less. Y is exactly $70 more than that. I ask if I can change it. I am told no, but conveniently they can send me this Gold debit card that has a $3009 limit. It’ll get here in a week. Oh, and it costs money.
I was fine up to that point. It’s a ludicrous set of rules but shit, considering who I work for I’m used to ludicrous, arbritrary rules that make no logical sense whatsoever.
So I say “fuck it,” and call Apple and tell them to up the dollars charged to my actual credit card. I don’t have a lot of credit, am coming pretty close to the “oh shit” mark on it anyway, and they charge me a fuckload of money if I ever go over. (I’ve never done that, but I actually read that page of bullshit that comes with the card…) Apple changes the numbers, attemps to charge my WaMu card again (for less than $2509) and zap, declined again.
Seriously. Fuck Washington Mutual, I am changing banks this week. There’s no good goddamn reason I should not have access to my money. This is bullshit.
- I get a very cryptic mail from a dude who used to post on our forum a lot about how he’s reading something or another, I don’t know what.
- I check my blog and all the posts are showing up FUCKING BACKWARDS, like it’s sorting oldest to newest somehow.
- I poke around a bit, don’t really change anything, then suddenly everything flips itself around and starts showing up correctly.
Fuck it, i’m outright losing my mind at this point.
I don’t know why I’m typing this, nobody ever reads this shit. And I don’t know why I’m sharing this, because it’s nobody’s problem but my own.
No matter what I do, I always feel like a failure. Beta says I invite this on myself. I guess I don’t know how to un-invite it, because I would really like to. But on rare occasions, the failure rushes over me like a wave and I feel like I’m going to drown in it. When I get into a situation that I know I’m not going to be able to get myself out of, I start to feel ill. Scared, like all the bad things that could ever happen are about to. And intimidated, like everyone around me is pointing and laughing even if I’m surrounded by friends. Alone, like nobody’s there to help me. (That’s not so far removed from reality.) But I feel all those things, even while my brain is telling me that it’s completely irrational to feel any of them. And all I want to do is run back to myself and hole up in a dark corner, or hit something. Either way, the solution is usually to excuse myself from the situation as quickly as possible, because when it happens I just can’t think right, so that’s what I did tonight.
I’m going to have to go back to work tomorrow and tell the really nice people I’ve been trying really hard to help that I have managed to totally fuck up their Exchange store (thanks to gross incompetence on my part and almost complete lack of training and assistance) and since I have no one who will help me un-fuck it, that they’re basically screwed. It makes me feel just a little ill to type that.
When the feeling comes over me, it’s terrifying. I sit and shake in my seat and try and deal with it, and in one very rare case many years back I started sobbing at my workbench like a little kid with a skinned knee. I don’t know what it’s like to feel normal, but I really wish I could.
As many of you know my venerable portable Snow Crash is almost two. Now, it works great, and under normal circumstances I would not have replaced it anytime soon.
These are not ordinary circumstances.
MacBook Pro - Core 2 Duo. 2.33GHz. 2GB RAM. 160GB SATA HD. Dual-layer DVD burner. Integrated iSight. Front Row. X1600. Backlit keyboard. (Still the coolest goddamn feature ever.) All in a svelte 15″ package that weighs 5.5 lbs. And it will be here next week.
It will be the fastest computer I own. It will also be the smallest computer I own.
Life is good.
I passed the 70-290 with a score of 900 out of 1000. I can rest assured that the hellI have created for myself will be here for me for a few days.
Yay me.
Why do I feel like I just joined the Galactic Empire?
This Friday is trial-by-fire day for me. My 70-291 is scheduled for 11:45. I am scared shitless. Having never done one of these before, jumping in to a really tough exam was a Bad Idea(tm). On top of that, my boss has been bugging us about which exams we have done - which means that somebody up the chain is probably looking for somebody to get rid of.
Failing exams is a pretty goddamn good reason.
And here I was hoping I could get my mom a car.
Ars Technica says that it would be a good idea to wait before panicking about Microsoft’s Vista licence changes, specifically the one that says licenses are only transferrable once. I disagree most fucking vehemently.
First, the ’single transfer’ clause is in the EULA. So that means even if you transfer your license twice and ‘get away with it,’ you’re still not legal. Microsoft can now revoke your license at any time due to the EULA violation you have committed.
Based upon the erratic behavior exhibited by Windows XP’s activation and the even more worrisome Windows Genuine Advantage, I find it hard to believe that this single-transfer issue won’t come back to bite us all in the ass. Remember, a system board upgrade invalidates your OEM license - is Microsoft going to consider a motherboard upgrade a transfer? Once Windows decides you’ve upgraded your motherboard because you flashed your bios (yeah, this has happened to me) and requires reactivation, does that count as a transfer?
PC enthusiasts such as myself have often resorted to cracked versions of Windows, leaving our retail copies to rot on the shelf, because activation and WGA often don’t work properly for those of us who reinstall a lot. (Don’t believe me? Examine the Microsoft newsgroups, they are littered with issues like this.) If you lock one innocent person out of their system, congrats, you wasted a buttload of time that you could have spent making your OS have a proper user rights model. I’m sick of this shit, and that’s why I’m so sick of the industry in general. They can’t figure out ways to make product people will actually buy, so they license us into buying more shit.
Fuck Microsoft. I don’t give a fuck how fucking cool Ray Ozzie is. When you hang out with fucknauts like Gates, you’ve got a long way to go to prove yourself a decent human being.
The last few days have seen an increase in really, really shitty things happening in the biz. Let’s recap:
- Vista is massively restricted in VMs, restricting installation at all to only Ultimate and Business and making it a violation of the EULA to play any DRMed media inside a VM. If it wasn’t obvious to everyone that Microsoft doesn’t respect us, it should be obvious by now.
- The dipshits that run Spamhaus totally boned themselves legally so the rest of us may drown in goddamn spam.
- If you needed a reason to never use fucking proprietary bullshit software, Linux nVidia drivers can fucking 0wn your box.
- And my favorite: Some bunch of dumb cocksuckers invented a way to fuck DVD over, much like they did to the audio CD. I guess I’m gonna have to quit buying DVD’s, too. Once again, if there’s money to be had in fucking people over, somebody will invest in it.
I came home tonight (after eating a looooooooooovely dinner with Pat and Furb) and decided I was going to take a practice exam and see if I could smoke it. Well, I did - 912. I fucking schooled that motherfucker.
Why do I feel guilty about feeling good? I’m so fucking confused.
I found the Tech Support Anthem. (Furb will love this shit.) Because if you don’t hate everyone, you just haven’t been in support long enough. Here it is, Arch Enemy’s Silent Wars.
Continue reading ““We have chosen to suffer, feeling nothing but hate””
