One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

70-293: finished. Thank fucking god.

The score, if you care: (passing = 700)
Elective: Done, security+
70-290: 985
70-291: 900
70-293: 895

To go:
70-294
70-297 or 8, depending on which one is the best to take - haven’t found out yet
70-270 (freebie)

I figure I’ll be done around the end of May or so. But for the next four or five days, I’m going to take a break. The neat part about the crazyass weekend rotation shift is that I have Monday and Tuesday off too, so I’ll have my birthday off for the first time in a really, really long time. Neat. I’ll probably spend it with my grandma - my grandpa got sick, and ended up in transitional care, and will probably be there for a while so she’s really lonely. Fucking family drama. If only I could punch in the face those whom really deserve it.

On Thursday I take test 70-293, 4/6 (+1 gimme.) I am so ready for this MCSE bullshit to be over. I spent the better part of today studying the same useless bullshit I’ve been studying off and on for the last several months. I’m dedicating my existence to this shit until it’s fucking done, because I’m desperately tired of this and of computing in general. It’s amazing how uncreative it is. At the end of the day I feel somehow cheapened because of it.

I’ve become all that I hate. My cousin told me some years back that I would grow to hate computing, and boy howdy was he ever correct. Much later in life, Doc would answer my question about why he chose to be a history major by telling me that he enjoyed computing way too much to do it for a living. These people were smart. I am not. These days, I get calls from somebody wanting me to help them with a computer problem, I want to rip their fucking head off. I don’t know why. These people are my friends and family. It’s entirely reasonable for them to call me.

I’m far too afraid to try and find another career. Not only am I afraid to ruin another hobby by trying to do it for a living, but I have this feeling that somehow I’ve got to keep the evil where I can see it. Can’t see what you’re not a part of. Besides, if life really is the search for the greatest good, in these modern times is there anything out there that functions as a greater good than computing? The downside, of course, is that these days it is used far more as a source of control than empowerment. It’s really sad.

So I watched Shawshank again. If you’re ever in need of inspiration or hope, watch Shawshank. If you’re still down, watch it again. I’ve seen it so many times I can quote it line for line - for a number of months I used to just watch it every sunday. I’ve seen it no less than a dozen times, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if you don’t get a little misty at the end you’re a horrible monster. In my lifetime I have seen many movies, but none have ever given me hope like Shawshank does. It is my favorite movie.

New schedule tomorrow and I should have been asleep half an hour ago.

Every day, the same thing: I got Vista and now all my shit doesn’t work. What do I do? What do you mean, Vista can’t do X or Y or Z? I PAID MONEY FOR THIS OS, WHY DOESN’T IT WORK?

When I hear things like this, I immediately lose all respect for the customer. Not only do they obviously not consider it important to understand anything about how the ridiculously complicated TOOL they just bought works, but they don’t pay any goddamn attention to history. History is important. Those who don’t learn from it are doomed to repeat it, and it’s more than just a cliche phrase. It should be a way of life.

My upgrade resume, on the Microsoft side of things, sits somewhere around here:
DOS 3.3 -> 4.01 -> 5.0 -> 6.0
Windows 3.0 -> 3.1 -> WfW 3.11 -> 95 -> 98
Windows NT 3.51 -> NT 4 -> 2000 -> XP -> Vista

By my count that’s eleven upgrades from three major chains. Not a single one of these went off hitch-free. We were wrangling DOS apps back in the day that wouldn’t work on 5 correctly. And every single Windows upgrade, period, caused all sorts of havoc of this nature. This is not even remotely new. So let’s investigate some truths.

Your Hardware Manufacturers Don’t Give A Fuck About Your Needs. HP doesn’t care if your three year old Deskjet doesn’t work in Vista. Canon doesn’t care about your scanner, and the modem manufacturer that made that generic piece of shit you bought on sale at OfficeMax is probably out of business, and sure as fuck wouldn’t care about you if they weren’t.

Your Hardware OEM Is Paddling Up Shit Creek In A Boat Beside You. Hardware OEMs buy parts from hardware manufacturers (see above) and similarly are at the mercy of the aforementioned hardware manufacturers (see above.)

Microsoft Doesn’t Give A Fuck About Your Needs. They’re in it to make money. Their own software may or may not work on Vista. I haven’t tried installing a copy of Office 97, but I’m betting it isn’t going to work. In addition, it is inevitable they will have added many features to the OS that sounded like a really good idea at the time, but have zero to negative effect. In particular, with Vista, they have added many features to the OS that benefit only the copyright control cops, that provide you with no tangible benefit whatsoever (but will conveniently provide you with lots of handy problems.)

Software Companies Don’t… you get it by now, right? OS upgrades are a guaranteed chance to make money, because you can just say “Your version doesn’t work with Vista, here, buy this upgrade for $299.99.” It’s like Christmas. You could steal City Hall.

Your Existing Desktop Would Have Worked Just Fine, Fuckass. Seriously. Unless you live on the cutting fucking edge, you communicate by consuming electrons and shitting them into nicely organized packets, and you know more about the physics of CS Source’s Arctic Warfare Magnum than you do about your own cock, your old OS is working just fine right where you left it. Tried Windows 2000 lately? It’s surprisingly functional, save of course for the lack of DirectX (which you hardly need if your primary application is Quickbooks) and it’s also surprisingly stable. Oh, and dear fucking Christ is it ever fast. If everybody’s talking about how snappy Aero Glass is with hardware acceleration, wait until you see 2K fly on a Geforce 4. It’s like a rabid badger on PCP, and that’s still 3 year old hardware.

Why do we let Microsoft do this to us over and over again? Why do we suffer through all this shit?

(well, other than those of us who are perfectly happy with our Macs and/or Ubuntu installs, and love to point and laugh at all you poor Windows suckers struggling to get a simple day’s work done)

Well, partially, because in the end we really hope it does live up to the hype, and that somehow it will make our lives easier. And in an odd way, it does. Speaking as someone who’s come up through the ranks, I can say unequivocally that it’s a half-truth. New OS’s have always been two steps forward, one step back: lots of features that are awesome, and some that leave you scratching your head wondering how many idiotic committees it took to think this horseshit up. I wouldn’t want to go back to NT 3.51 by any means, but I’m still going to laugh at the fools that venture forth to tread on Vista’s beds of hot coals. Hope you can run fast.

I told David earlier tonight that with what little free time I have left I watch movies, because they keep me from wanting to seek out a screaming death in fire. Then I watched Stranger Than Fiction, which is without question my new favorite movie to watch when life pisses me the fuck off. (Which is basically all the time.) It’s a feel-good movie that doesn’t feel like a feel-good movie.

There’s one quote I won’t share due to the fact that it’s a major spoiler, but basically the end of the movie is one really long awesome quote. Here’s the best part, which doesn’t really spoil anything (I hope:)

Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies, and fortunately, when there aren’t any cookies we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or a subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys, and nose-plugs, and uneaten danish, and soft spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days are in fact here for a much larger and much nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange. But I also know that it just so happens to be true. –Helen Eiffel, Stranger than Fiction

Run, don’t walk, to see this wonderful movie.

An hour or so ago, I was kickin’ back after a long night of reading MCSE material, surfing PalmGear’s freeware section for cool quirky shit I could throw on my Treo, and I just so happened to stumble upon this: some crazy Russian guy wrote not one, but two mod trackers for Palm OS!

What is a modfile you ask? If you were an antique like me, or you’re an antique tech lover, you alrady know, and you probably feel a little warm and fuzzy just reading that first paragraph. If you don’t, learn yourself some history goddammit. There was a time before MP3.

So naturally, despite having no musical talent whatsoever, I had to grab it if only for the anomaly that is playing mods I acquired back around 1995 on my Treo, 12 years later. And it was cool. And then I realized that shit was from twelve fucking years ago, and started feeling really old. I remember logging on to BBSs and ‘borrowing’ internet connections for irc so I could trade mods. I remember staying up all night and sucking down megabytes of data.

(Then I copied 20 megs of mods to the memory card in my Treo in a couple seconds or so.)

I remember one fateful day when the son of a customer/friend of mine came down to visit from Moscow, bringing along his *nix box and galactically huge mod collection. It was so big, in fact, that the only media we could think of that was common to both of us and big enough to move the files was quarter-inch tape. I mean, after all, it was something like a hundred fucking megs of files. I couldn’t even restore the whole tape at the time. A couple years later, when I got a 1.2gb (holy shit!) hard drive I expanded the whole goddamn thing, and the rest is history… it’s still part of my data archive, after all these years.

Electronic music, illegal sampling, illicit file swapping, we did all this shit 15 years ago, way the fuck before it was trendy.

Scheduling assigned me training from 8-12. Closing’s basically an impossible shift to trade. That means 12 hours in a row minimum today. And about four hours sleep. Yay.

AHAHAHAAHA HAHAHAHA AHHHAHHAHAH HAHAHhahahah ahahha… whew
OpenOffice.org Tries to Woo Dell
Guess you can add John McCreesh to the list of People Who Don’t Know Shit About Dell. Plus, I know one person that would shit .net framework CD’s if it ever happened. <3 java

Microsoft admits outright to the great software conspiracy I’ve believed for a long time: that Microsoft leverages pirated software to expand their user base. Remember, just like crack dealers, the first one’s usually free.

Last night’s P-Funk show was absolutely fucking awesome. I think myself and Furb were the only ones really prepared for just how long it was going to be - we ended up leaving about 12:30 or so, after P-Funk had been playing for about 4 hours or so, and they were still going. Frankly, I was still totally into it, but the Boise curfew for people under 18 meant the security nazis were throwing anybody who didn’t have their ID on them out, and a few of our party members made that mistake. Fuck.

Still an awesome show, though. It’s hard to describe, because it’s not like a traditional show. There are many members, and they just start playing music, and people rotate on and off stage and play different shit at different times. I’ve never been to a show with 30-minute jams between songs, and a ten-minute guitar solo, although the guitarist was fucking incredible. Everybody looked like they were really enjoying themselves, George Clinton is a consummate showman, and watching people who are truly talented and have been playing their respective instruments for decades is an amazing experience indeed. If you ever have a chance to see them live, go. Even if you’re not really big into funk. Even if you can’t stay for the whole show. It’s amazing.

If they come back to Boise again, I’m definitely going. And I’m going to arrange to stay overnight, because I bet they didn’t stop playing until 2am. It would have been awesome.