Could someone put my brain back in my head?

Oog. I ate way too much dinner.

I need to start bringing food to work. Ordering delivery and takeout every other day is inexpensive. And the restaurants around here aren't all that great anyways.

Work, however, has other ideas. I don't think I've ever been so continuously stressed out and exhausted from that stress as I have been the last eight months or so. Holiday was an insane time for me; I think I had to drive more critical issues than any one other member of my team (not sure about that), and I definitely had to drive more critical issues solo. Since then, we've been under a constant wave of pressure as the company churns out one major code release a month, including a massive re-architecting of our backend. The problem? Not nearly enough testing, not nearly robust enough of a testing environment, not enough support. If I'm going on an dropping unconscious from sheer exhaustion every night, I don't even begin to understand how the engineers in some of our engineering teams are handling it. Our web platform guys, in particular, never get a moment's rest. I know, because I'm one of the guys who has to call and wake them up at all hours.

I can handle high pressure situations. Honestly, I thrive on them. This job has taught me that. But I can't handle a non-stop grind of mind-numbing adminstration, repetitive code tasks, and constant "we need to step it up another notch" from management when we've already stepped it up umpteen notches. The team we have now is pretty good. Lots of smart people with strong work ethics. If this group is constantly on the verge of a major implosion, maybe it's time to consider that there is something else wrong. Maybe it's time to increase head count. But when the entire engineering department has taken a noticeable and significant hit to morale and work quality compared to a few months ago and compared to this same time last year, maybe it's time to reevaluate our workflow and release schedule.

...haven't I gotten into Counting Crows before.

Whywhywhy?

I think I may have just written the best creative piece I have ever written.

I think I may have also just written the most fucked up, awesome character background I have ever created for a tabletop game.

I have no idea where it came from. Apparently, I have a dark side.

But it's so good, I actually enjoyed proofing it. This is highly unusual.

I gave up booze.

It's going to be a long Lent.

Finally, someone has put into words exactly what I've been trying to for weeks. Obama's first actions as president and the comportment of his staff have only confirmed most of my fears about him, including what's contained below. I find it telling that my first encounter with this sort of sanity in the media has apparently come from outside the US:

Copied and pasted from here:

"The Daily Mail (UK) wrote this editorial about Obama on 1/6/2009. (confirmation, Google "London Daily Mail Obama's Victory")

Obama's Victory--A British view

A victory for the hysterical Oprah Winfrey, the mad racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, the US mainstream media who abandoned any sense of objectivity long ago, Europeans who despise America largely because they depend on her, comics who claim to be dangerous and fearless but would not dare attack genuinely powerful special interest groups. A victory for Obama-worshippers everywhere. A victory for the cult of the cult. A man who has done little with his life but has written about his achievements as if he had found the cure for cancer in between winning a marathon and building a nuclear reactor with his teeth. Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising over reality.

A victory for Hollywood , the most dysfunctional community in the world. Victory for Streisand, Spielberg, Soros, Moore, and Sarandon. Victory for those who prefer welfare to will and interference to independence. For those who settle for group think and herd mentality rather than those who fight for individual initiative and the right to be out of step with meager political fashion.

Victory for a man who is no friend of freedom. He and his people have already stated that media has to be controlled so as to be balanced, without realizing the extraordinary irony within that statement. Like most liberal zealots, the Obama worshippers constantly speak of Fox and Limbaugh, when the vast bulk of television stations and newspapers are drastically liberal and anti-conservative. Senior Democrat Chuck Schumer said that just as pornography should be censored, so should talk radio. In other words, one of the few free and open means of popular expression may well be cornered and beaten by bullies who even in triumph cannot tolerate any criticism and opposition.

A victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than the family, for those who prefer teachers' unions to teaching and for those who are naively convinced that if the West is sufficiently weak towards its enemies, war and terror will dissolve as quickly as the tears on the face of a leftist celebrity. A victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation.

A victory for intrusive lawyers, banal sentimentalists, social extremists and urban snobs.

Congratulations America!"

So I'm terribly flushed at the moment. And by that, I mean the capillaries in my face are fully opened.

I look like Rudolph, only my entire face could light Santa's way, not just my nose...

It probably has something to do with the super-high-end Scotch I've been measuredly sipping for the last two hours to keep the creative impulse pulsing unfettered. Without it, my mind would wander into unwelcome territory, and I'd resort to mindless video games to prevent the impotent rage instead of doing something creative... Like designing an entire RPG campaign setting from scratch.

I've had this setting bouncing around with a lot of pretty firm detail in my head for few years now. I'm jotted down occasional notes here an there, but haven't really felt terribly creative for a long time. After a meeting with M today to discuss possible systems for my mecha combat, I guess I returned home firing on all cylinders... or some other cliche.

No, this isn't really creative writing. Not yet, anyways. I'm just writing up specialized systems and hammering out concrete notes, in outline form, for the setting itself, and some ideas for the campaign I'd like to run in it.

I'd be more specific, but... Who knows? I might actually publish someday, so I can't go giving away industry secrets before I've slapped a copyright on this bad boy.

Anyhow, the combination of creative outpouring and scotch have kept me in a pretty good mood. Once I run out of steam, though, I will log into Steam, and perforate spies repeatedly with Natashia (That's a Team Fortress 2 reference folks).

TF2 and Half-life 2 (and its episodes, mostly ep. 2) are by far the best/most enjoyable gaming experiences I've had since Star Wars: KotOR I.

So far, I prefer to play, in no particular order: Heavy, Engie, Medic (only when I can latch onto a halfway decent heavy or soldier), and Pyro. Yes, I've turned into yet another Pyro-whore. Soldier is okay... but I think that, without a good Medic kritzkrieging you on a regular basis, Soldiers have too many drawbacks.

...but at least I'm not one of these guys.

Though I wouldn't mind showing that blond elf my magic wand.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x32cxf_yuri-bezmenov

He's right, though. Some people are so far gone, they'll never be able to accept the truths that he is offering.

George Orwell was right.

No, it's not about she and I. But it's about something I believe she can appreciate. A lot.

( Lyrics, of course... )

It's a good song.

I don't hate my job.

I should. I really should. I have frequent objections to the way I and some of my coworkers are managed by people younger and clearly less life-experienced than I, but I don't voice them. Why? Not because I've accepted my position. Not because I have some self-defeating perception that this is just the way corporations work...

It's because I enjoy my job enough not to want quit right now. It's because I have a strong work ethic and a personal desire for personal and intellectual challenge, and this job still manages to provide that with sufficient frequency to keep me happy (see previous sentence). But, most of all, it's because I like working towards a career, earning a salary, and being involved in a business.

More than anything, though, it's because I'm occasionally placed under high pressure at this job. And, based on multiple, recent experiences, I really, really like high-pressure situations. Keeping in mind that I am basically at the lowest point on the totem pole in the engineering department at wm.com, I have earned the status as "folk hero", according to my director based on my solo performance during an emergency site down a few weeks back. To sum up in insufficient detail: I had the site back up in under a half hour, and I've watched teams of 3+ in my own department take longer than that in my nine months there. A couple of weeks later, during a Release I found boring mostly because I didn't have much pressure on me (having been relegated mostly to handling issues that had been preempted by a new Release procedure), I went to grab grub that had been provided for our department in thanks for their long hours. My director basically complimented me in front of several engineers, saying, "How does it feel to be the folk hero of WebOps?" as I was spooning out surprisingly excellent Thai basil chicken onto my paper plate. I responded, "I must be sick in the head, but I thought that was kind of fun." He just pursed his brow, nodded, and said, "Yeah, you must be sick in the head..."

Keep in mind that, during the off-season, every minute our site is down equates to tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales lost, depending on the time of day.

So, yeah... maybe I am sick in the head, but I FUCKING LOVE THAT. In fact, after handling an emergency sitedown solo, I'd say I love nothing more than being the pivotal person on whom all other things depend. I really, truly, honestly THRIVE on it.

Now I just need to expand on my tech skills, and I think I just might have found a career that will keep me happy. Maybe.

Then again, based on my last post, I might have a preference for something more overtly, explicitly, and self-honestly political.

Wow.

Talk about a left hook coming out of nowhere. After Obama, who has been criticized relentlessly and appropriately for his appalling lack of experience and refusal to vote on anything remotely controversial, chooses a seasoned but extremely vanilla, party-line Democrat as VP pick in the form of Joe Biden, McCain hits back by inverting the Obama ticket, selecting someone young and energetic to offset the "old geezer" image of him the mainstream media has quietly but relentlessly reinforced (which is terribly ironic, considering McCain often seems more like an energized gas molecule than a man in his early seventies -- I wish I had even half as much vigor at 30 as he has at 72). Certainly, her youth and inexperience could and will be used against the McCain ticket in the same way Obama's nigh-complete lack of the same has, but there's an important distinction here: Palin is running for Vice President, Obama is running for President.

And if McCain and Palin's people can manage the public's perceptions of her inexperience correctly, adding Palin should help heavily undercut the only real weapon Obama and his people, including the mainstream media, have against McCain right now: their bulldogged, oft-repeated, and completely bogus assertions that McCain is just another Bush, that a McCain presidency would be little more than "another four years of the same." And, yes, Barack Obama and his people have certainly had the presumptive arrogance to assume that even if McCain were to be elected, he certainly wouldn't be able to get himself elected for a second term. Much like Slick Willy's two campaigns in the nineties, Obama's has been run mostly on arrogance and condescension, his public comments on McCain rife with Clinton-esque dismissiveness in tone and language.

Palin is, therefore, an intelligent choice exactly for this reason: her record, short at it is, is chock-full of examples of her going against her own party for ethics violations and poor management of funds. With Obama trying to claim that McCain is nothing more than another Bush and that Obama is the only truly "maverick" choice, despite any hint of such in his record, Palin seems to be an indisputable maverick who veers from the party line to keep her party in line.

Moreover, McCain selected a woman, which not only should help him pull in women voters, one of the most powerful and competitive voting blocs in this country (calling women "one voting bloc" always seemed a bit strange, backward and weirdly sexist to me, but the media insists...), but should also help steal some of the thunder of Obama's history-making nomination and his formal accceptance of that nomination 45 years, to the day, after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech. Of course, that little bit of clever planning on the DNC's part really does not reflect anything about Obama himself, other than the arbitrary color of his skin. Rather, it highlights how far this nation has come, without Obama's help or influence, that we are now nominating black men, even inexperienced, unproven, and genuinely unprepared black men, for the presidency. And there are certainly black men and women who are better qualified to lead this nation than Barack Obama...

And, finally, putting up a dynamic woman for the VP job should help the McCain campaign overcome the Republican party's reputation, inaccurate or not, for elitism and sexism, especially given her family ties to blue collar America (just look at her husband and parents).

Perhaps I'm just being optimistic, looking for anything exciting from a McCain campaign that has largely been lackluster and uninspired until recently. Certainly, I've already been accused of optimism over this pick, but I genuinely believe Palin will energize McCain's campaign and draw voters in a huge and much-needed way.

For the sake of this nation, let's hope I'm right. If nothing else, this at least shows that McCain still has a lot of fight left in him.

P.S. - A caller on the Neal Boortz show this afternoon aptly state of Palin, "She has bigger man-berries than most men I know!"

My brother has always, always, always been there. He has always had my back, as long as I can remember.

No matter how much he's pissed me off, at times, "borrowing" my stuff... It's just stuff. When the really important crap has come into it, he's always been no less than my brother in all the best ways. I couldn't be more blessed...

(I'll have to explain how my sister completes my blessings some day)

OMG! THE CUTENESS! *keels over and dies*

(be killed by the cuteness here and here)

(and, don't worry, they're both well over "legal" age, despite their appearances)

Rhonda and I are no longer an "us".

In retrospect, I saw it coming, even braced for it. We've grown apart, we have different needs, and/or the same needs at different times and speeds. We're parting on good terms. We will attempt to remain friends. We will both survive and, I believe, be better people for the three years we have had to together...

Some part of me anticipated this, but I still wasn't prepared for it to hurt this much.

When the hammer dropped, I felt intense, free-floating anxiety for a while which was slowly replaced with numbness. The numbness is good. I'm hoping I can get the idea of being without her to sink most of the way in before the numbness is gone. The anxiety comes from the sudden, painfully startling realization that I have just lost the most reliable and best routine currently in my life. No, I'm not calling Rhonda, herself, routine. Nor am I calling our relationship routine, though it was starting to go that way. I'm talking about my ability to rely on her to get me out of my room and out of my head at least every weekend, something I didn't fully appreciate until confronted with its stripping away. Thus the anxiety stems, clearly, from the fact that I am suddenly untethered, released back into a wild that I have grown to dislike, from a "home" that I had come to love.

Still, I say, this is the best thing for both us. People sometimes grow apart even as they are growing, together.

I think I shall crawl into a bottle and spend the night there.

I'll be "fine" in the morning.

Reminiscent of a fictional character I helped to invent...

A song for Vivian (the fictional girl):

"True Romance"
I'm not here to judge you,
I'm just here to tell you what you have done wrong.
Beautiful girl looking her best, takes off a towel,
Puts on a dress.
Fixes her hair to look good for someone.
Waits in a car to go to a motel.
...to a motel.

I may not always be perfect.
But I'll always try.
Will you say your prayers, just to be honest with yourself?
Will you save your soul? Is this what you wanted all along?
Husband can't bear to just lie to himself.
Stock market falls and he loses it all,
He sleeps alone for the third time this week.
He's become numb, he just wants this to be.

I may not always be perfect.
But I'll always try.
Will you say your prayers, just to be honest with yourself?
Will you save your soul? Is this what you wanted all along?

Blood on the floor.
What have you done?
Heart in your hands.
What have you done?

I may not always be perfect.
But I'll always try.
Will you say your prayers, just to be honest with yourself?
Will you save your soul? Is this what you wanted all along?

Beautiful girl sleeps by herself.
Half the bed's cold, she knows it's her fault.
She's given in and admitted defeat.
She'll be fine.

Someone called into the NOC. and the new guy, who sits on my right, answered. He set the caller up on a conference bridge then leaned back to yell a question to our shift lead, "What's this guy's name? Chester. What's his last name?"

Without thinking, I immediately responded, "Copperpot".

Just awesome.

(if you didn't catch the reference before following the link, shame on you! Even if you had a deprived childhood, you should have shown yourself that movie a dozen times over by now!)

He keeps spitting out the intermittent song that I just can't bring myself to listen to (the Junk Flashover Mix is one), but, fortunately, these tracks are widely separated by oodles of music that I just can't get enough of:

Galaxia
Beautiful
I Love You
Kyoto
Fire
It's Time

...the list goes on. (...and on and on and on and on...)

Read the below list, then see what labels you can slap on me! Go ahead and post them in the comments section.


Sixteen Ways to Be a Good Liberal


1. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand.

2. You have to believe that business's create oppression and governments create prosperity.

3. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are more of a threat than nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Iran, China and North Korea.

4. You have to believe that there was no art before federal funding.

5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms driving SUV's.

6. You have to believe that the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal funding.

7. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th-graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.

8. You have to believe that hunters don't care about nature, but PETA activists do.

9. You have to believe that self-esteem is more important than actually doing something to earn it.

10. You have to believe the NRA is bad because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the ACLU is good because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.

11. You have to believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high.

12. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln.

13. You have to believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial quotas and set-asides are not.

14. You have to believe that the only reason socialism hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried is because the right people haven't been in charge.

15. You have to believe that homosexual parades displaying drag queens and transvestites should be constitutionally protected, and manger scenes at Christmas should be illegal.

16. You have to believe that this message is a part of a vast, right-wing conspiracy.

I'm really quite keen on the album version of "Lie in our Graves" from the Dave Matthews Band (on the Crash album). They, or more likely the genius who produced that one, mixed in some samples right as the music drops into a... well, I lack the musical vocabulary to describe what happens in the song, but it can't be duplicated live, and it makes me think every time of being in the midst of friends or other loved ones on a warm evening with drinks, laughter, and all the positive things that company like that should be associated with.

But I'm not going to burden this page with more lyrics. Suffice to sum up, the lyrics reflect Dave Matthews' preoccupation with the transience of life and his determination to enjoy what little time he has. It's hard not to agree with him.

This presents quite a contrast with my drive in to work this morning. My favorite talk radio shows (I've been getting wickedly political lately) don't air on the weekends, so I hit the "CD" button on my stereo and Stabbing Westwards' Darkest Days CD happened to come on. I turned into the screaming banshee driver from hell, singing at the top of my lungs (badly, as ever), the whole way there. It felt good.

And as long as I'm on the topic of music, I might as well plug one of the coolest things I've ever found on the internet: Pandora Radio

Seriously, for anyone that has any interest in listening to new music and/or being part of what is essentially a really interesting experiment in music and psychology (though they don't advertise it that way), check it out. My stations based on Ferry Corsten, Massive Attack and The Dave Matthews Band have all yielded a bounty of aurally delicious fruits.