I’m still putzing around working on things. Sold my Wii and got a 360, liking it much better. Working at Pemco is pretty meh, not really learning anything new and don’t really feel like anything I’m doing is really making a difference. Doing the exact same thing everyday, sitting at a desk and answering calls.  Hopefully this feeling of futility will fade and I’ll find myself doing productive things again, probably after I finish all my Cisco coursework.

Job at Pemco started out okay, and pretty much stayed there. Never really got any better. Still do the exact same thing every day, answer phone calls and create tickets. My supervisor gave me a project, which is recategorizing all of our existing documentation because right now I can’t find shit in it.

They are looking to get some sort of IM system for our department, and I took charge of that since it’s something I actually enjoy. Currently looking at Openfire, and it looks like it will fit the bill.

Otherwise, started Cisco class again, don’t plan on freaking out this time around so I’m actually trying. Learning a bunch of stuff I missed last time around. I’ve decided that I’m going to head over to Cupcake Royale after work each day and study (when I don’t have class that is) since I don’t study as much when home.

so, quick recap:

• Moved from Field Systems to end user computing


• Created web application for EUC.


• Got laid off


• Got a job with Pemco (PCCS)


• Leave Alaska today


• Start new job Tuesday

After awhile though I got tired of walking to the laptop now that’s it is across the room instead of next to the bed. I bought a Media center remote off someone for 20 bucks and hooked it up so it’s easier to control. Unfortunately my laptop sucks and I can’t do the super cool power it on with the remote, only power it off. That’s pretty much it for now. I’m going to start building my actual media center sometime this month (still waiting for Intel to release the motherboard). I was originally planning on going with linux. The big deciding factor will be whether or not I can output video over hdmi to the tv. If I can’t, I’m going to scrap it and go with windows and load mediaportal on there. I’m really hoping I can use linux since I want a remote shell so I can move all the services I run on my desktop over to it.

I also finally got a usenet account. Downloading via torrents works, but the speed varies too much. Plus I’m on a 6Mb connection that limits the amount of seeding I can do. I grabbed a 4GB file last night and it took about 1.5Hours, as opposed to a couple days. It’s only $12/month, so it is definently worth it. I’m looking into a seed account on a website someone told me about, I’m doing a trial right now to see if I like it, and right now it’s pretty sweet. The biggest downside I can see is I have to wait for the download to finish, then when it’s down I download it again to my computer, fortunately it’s at full speed.

Armed with this knowledge, I came back on Sunday to get it. The first rep who came up asked if we wanted anything, I pointed to the Toshiba and said “I want that one”. I’m guessing he wasn’t expected someone to be so decisive, so he said he’d be right back after pausing for a second. Unfortunately, we he came back, he told me they were out of stock

But! Instead, he gave me the Samsung LN32A330, which was ten bucks more, for the same price. I was really antsy about getting something else on the spot, since I haven’t gotten an LCD TV before and wasn’t sure what the big differences were. I decided to go with it since I could just bring it back, and Helens parents had a Samsung and it was damn sexy.  After we picked it out, we went up to the front with the guy, and they rang us up. I got the 4 year service plan (I get the extended one with expensive things), so it was 679+199, a total of $878, take off 10% to make it $790.2, and then another 25 off that, $765.20. Which was a damn good deal.

We took it home and set it up, I put it on the dresser so I didn’t connect the cable at the time. I hooked up my laptop and we watched Banlieue 13, in 720p. It looked so damn good

More later, as it’s dinner time.

He said that while you may not enjoy working for a large corporation and supporting thousands of people, it’s an important, if not vital, experience that everyone needs to have. You can tell when someone has worked for a large corporation, their work ethic, how the interact, plan, and work, is different. He didn’t really elaborate on this. However I think I get what he was talking about. The company I’m at has many different systems, lots of internal applications and services that I’ve never seen before. Working with all of them, I have to think on my feet. In order to do that, I can’t just go off the same old check X settings. Now it requires I have an actual understanding of the system itself and how it works. I need to see what’s going on, what’s different, and what I can do to fix it.

Sometimes it requires I call up other people to ask a question about a specific function of an application. I’ve run into a lot of roadblocks with this, and actually had some people complain about me asking questions. I didn’t quite grasp the concepts of going through the proper channels for asking questions. I do now, and still think it’s stupid. I’ve run into situations where I’m needing to know how to configure a citrix application, going to the man who works on that, I have to speak to another tech, then speak to the lead, then the manager, and finally the manager refers me to someone in the application support department. After that, I speak to that person, who refers me to the man who works on it.

I’ve noticed there are a lot of processes in the company that are out of date, and it requires jumping through a lot of hoops to get those changed. There’s a lot I want to do there, and I’ve tried to get the ball rolling on some things, but despite what I’ve tried, I won’t be able to do anything. There are a lot of things that are preventing me from doing so, the biggest one of all is that I’m a contracter. Despite the day to day interactions I have with everyone, the relationships I’ve built, at the end of the day I’m still a contracter. I’ve tried to get employed direct, however they have their own internal employement process which is geared more towards hiring existing employees then outside employees (which it should be).

I’ve become a bit jaded by all this, and despite my desire to keep working there, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to stay at a company that won’t give me a real career path. It is really frustrating when I come to a company looking for real employement only to be tricked into accepting. When I decided to join this company, I was told by my agent that there was a good chance of being hired direct after 3 months. But this is incredibly unlikely. The reason this company hired contractors was because several people were promoted out of the department. They needed to hire some people to help with the workload while they found replacements. I was one of the contractors hired to help with the workload. Since then they have found replacements. Right now I’m just treading water.

I’m essentially just waiting for my contract to end.

I sorta forgot to add a flag and exclusion to the full backup script. I didn’t tell it to ignore symbolic links and the backup directory. On the account site, it backs up all the directories in the home directory. There are a couple links to logs, cache, and then there’s also a link called www that points to public_html.

So not only did it backup public_html twice, it also backed up the backups.

I noticed this last night when I started the weekly backup on my machine that pulls down the backups and the full backup was 27GB.

Friday after work I went and took a look at it real quick. I opened up the url to the board and it wasn’t functioning at all, php errors all over the place. At right about that time I got a call from Helen asking if I could pick someone up from the bus station and give them a ride down to tacoma for a board meeting they had this weekend. Faced with the decision of what was obviously going to be a long process that would stretch late into the night vs hanging out with Helen and the Circle K district board, I opted to go hang out with them.

Saturday morning rolled around. I got up extra early to work on it, I remoted into the server and started poking around. Files were moved around, odd names were all over the place. A quick check of the bash history showed they hadn’t gotten the password for the account. I changed the ftp password on the board account just to be safe. Right after that I got a phone call. Was an odd one, the number was 12 digits long. I answered it anyways. Turned out to be the man who ran the forum, he was in the UAE. I spoke to him briefly, he had a database backup from May 9, he was going to upload it so I could do a restore. I emailed him the new password (not very secure, but what the hell) and he started
to work on uploading it. I had a full site-backup from April 27 that I had made for kicks, since we didn’t have anything really backed up, it included logs, built-in mail account, site backups, databases, everything. I considered using the database backup in that one, but didn’t, since he forum admin had a more recent backup.

I continued to poke around the files, everything was in complete disarray. I restored the board files using my April 27 backup, so all that was needed was a database. I poked around a little, then bummed for a bit while I waited. I got an email from motasim, he was having trouble transferring the file up. the ftp client kept timing out. I recommended a few clients and he tried them all with no luck. Finally I suggested he compress it with winrar. He grabbed the client, compressed and uploaded the file quickly.

This is where the fun began. Everytime I tried restoring the database, I would get a duplicate line error message from mysql. I spent literally 2 whole days trying to get that database to restore. Finally Sunday night I grabbed my April 27 backup and tried that one.

Worked flawlessly.

Suddenly we had a perfectly functional forum. But motasim wanted to have the most up to date backup, so I tried merging the two databases. It sort of worked. The threads were all there but there were more php errors caused by incomplete tables and entries. Finally, I restored the April 27 database, uploaded it somewhere motasim could get it and let him play with it.

He finally settled for the April 27 backup. I posted on the forum softwares support site, contacted their support, after speaking with them it was apparent that Motasims May 9 backup was corrupt, there wasn’t anything we could do about that.

After having dealt with all of that, I started reading up on creating backups. I setup my own backup procedures overnight and implemented them. I quickly found out that bluehosts cron doesn’t like the $ $(date). I posted on their forum and someone helped me whip up a perl script. I’ll post it here in case someone stumbles upon this post devastated by their website having gone down without backups:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $fileOrFolder = $ARGV[0] or die “You forgot to specify a file or folder name!”; #The name of the file or folder provided during execution of the script
my $upper = “U$fileOrFolder”; #Convert the file or folder name to uppercase for the label

my $date = `date +%Y_%m_%d`; #Store the date in a variable
chomp($date); #Remove the new line that gets added at the end

print `tar—cvvzhlf “/foo/backups/$fileOrFolder-$date.tar.gz” /foo/$fileOrFolder—atime-preserve—label $upper`;

Unfortunately, one side-effect I hadn’t considered was that when these backups ran, they created gigabytes of backups. Our account was on a server that had a 50GB limitation. We had setup this account several years ago, and Bluehost had since upgraded the plan we were on with more generous limitations. The most recent being unlimited disk space. If we had wanted, we could contact bluehost and have them move us to another server.

The disadvantage of that would be downtime, so I never bothered with that. However, apparently when the backups ran, they got an alert of some sort. So without any warning, they moved us to a new server last night around midnight. All our domains went down for a good 8 hours, and when they finally came back up, php wasn’t functioning properly for another 4.

So the moral of this story? Schedule your backups, and make sure your host doesn’t decide to randomly upgrade you without warning by making sure you don’t randomly create gigabytes of files in the course of a day.

I got a couple sweet things. I got some fabric for random uses, a bookshelf, some plant stands and a couple pots, and a coast strawberry plant. There was a lot of stuff. After I picked up Helen, I took her back to the first place I went to, which was this woman selling a bunch of stuff because she was moving to Morocco, I grabbed a couple organizing bins from her and Helen found a really kick ass backgammon set with glass panels in wood frame. I took her to pegasus pizza where we had some really tasty pizza. While driving back we spotted another garage sale so we stopped there. I found some bindings that Helen could use on my spare board, so we grabbed them. I also spotted an Atari 2600 which I almost bought (had been reserved).

My room now looks a lot better since I put the bookshelf in, I unpacked 3 of the boxes I hadn’t unpacked yet (still have one buried in the closet) and we discovered that I had an outlet above the dresser. For the past 6 months or so me and Helen had been wondering why they didn’t put an outlet up there. Well it had been there, I just had a box sitting in front of it for the past 6 months or so.

I’ve also decided to start a little fruit/veggie/herb garden too. I’ve currently got Cucumber, basil, strawberry, and tomato. As you can see, I have no idea what I’m doing. I used a really cool little soda crate I got from a garage sale for the plant bed. I’ve since moved the tomato plant to a larger pot that Ann gave me when she and Cal found out I was starting my own garden.

So far, I’m not very good. For some reason I had figured that the recent rain was enough, so the leaves near the bottom of the tomato plant starting going yellow. I moved it to the big pot and since then it’s doing a lot better. Before it was sorta leaning to one side, not it’s growing really strong and straight up. Someone from something awful linked me a bunch of pdf’s for each of the plants I’m growing, so I’m reading them and learning how to care for them all. The native coast strawberry plant in it’s own little pot doesn’t bear fruit, it’s sorta there for play I guess. I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do with it. Probably have another little garden for random play.

I also realized that I should really start backing my config files, as I had to setup samba all over again at least 3 times, which really sucked. So without further ado, here’s another random how to:

Configuring Samba for Public Access

Change the security permissions:

in a terminal, type sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

hit ctrl+w, then type “security =” and hit enter. This will take you directly to it, the first line it finds will be a blocked comment about using it. Scroll down a little until you see

;security = user

Delete the ; and change user to share. It should look like this:

security = share

Next we need to configure how samba accepts authentication. This is the part I always miss, so even if you setup the share properly, you’ll always get a prompt for a password. hit ctrl+w again, and type “guest account =” and hit enter. This should take you directly to the line we need to edit. It should look like

;   guest account = nobody

Delete the ; so it looks like this:

guest account = nobody

This tells samba that there is a guest account, but there is no user for it. Effectively disabling the password prompt.

Now it’s time to setup a share! Go to the very end of the config file, and enter something along these lines, this is what my share is:

[Share]

path = /home/Share

public = yes

guest ok = yes

guest only = yes

guest account = nobody

browseable = yes

I personally prefer to just create one share, then link folders into it, to simplify things.

Hit Ctrl+O to save the file, then type sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart to reload the config

I’m glad to finally be done with this place, My life has pretty much been at a stand still since I haven’t been able to really do anything with Helen since I started working here, during the week she is in class, on the weekend I’ve been at work. Next weekend we’re going to go to a Drive-in theatre to watch Ironman, which is going to be tons of fun for us! I’ll at long last be able to sleep in, and have a day off (haven’t had one at all this month).

I’m currently sitting at the desk behind the new guy with my laptop, apparently he didn’t quite comprehend what I meant be 15-20 calls max over the weekend :p

Oh, and we had an ice cream social on Friday at Alaska Air, was awesome.

Last week I wrote a script for running a general system maintenance. It’s just spybot, ccleaner, and jkdefrag, but everyone loves it. At first it was really basic and you had to copy it over, but I’ve been reading up and I customized it a little to where it works really well. I presented it at our staff meeting on Friday (which I was late too. The one day I’m late!) and the helpdesk manager basically went squeee over it. It was interesting having the meeting, especially since there’s no table, just a bunch of cushiony chairs which is pretty darn cool.

I’m starting to ramble a little bit since it’s kinda a late, so I’ll just leave the post at this for now. I’ll post more about everything later this week.

The Pudget Sound blood center just called me 3 times within an hour. I didn’t recognize the number so i ignored it the first two times, expecting them to leave a message. They didn’t so the third time I figured it was important and answered it.

I pick up the phone and they say they’re from the blood center. I do my usual answer and say that I’m not there and take their number.

I’m in class for fucks sake, Call once and leave a message! I’ve actually been turned off from donating because they constantly harass me with these phone calls. I like getting calls from them, but they are way too aggressive.

They should add cats to that warning.

I made the mistake of waiting to get peoples schedules before planning out the meeting time. I didn’t hear back from anyone from Richard, who only said he got classes registered. So I fired off a last minute email to Rudy reserving the room at the same time as last quarter.

Luck be with me, I get a call from King after sending out an email announcing the room and time saying she and two other people can’t make it. So I end up sending out another email, in a mad scramble to figure out what was the best day for everyone. I changed the time to Tuesday and it seemed to work for most people.

At the same time I was also getting the rooms reserved for the District board meeting, yay! That was pretty simple, Rudy reserved the rooms, and I got a confirmation email about it.

Sounds easy, right? Not quite.

As soon as I got the confirmation, Nora emailed Rudy saying she never got a Project plan for it. So I went up to Student Programs to get it. She was out to lunch, so I got the paperwork from the receptionist and sit outside to fill it out. The first page makes sense, when would you like to get the room, what day, time, etc. I turn the page and suddenly it’s asking me what the budget it, what I’m spending money on, and then a timeline for getting things planned out. I’m hella confused now, as this is totally not what the meeting is for, it’s as though she thinks I’m holding an event, but it’s just a freakin’ meeting. I ignore that crap and just fill out what is relevant.

Meanwhile I’m waiting for Nora to get back from lunch, so I wait 30 minutes and go back to check if she is there, no Nora. Wait another 30 minutes and go back, no Nora. Wait another 30 minutes, no Nora. So I’m getting a bit cranky, she then pops out of nowhere when I’m about to leave and I talk to her for a little bit, turns out that we have to pay for the room reservation on the weekend and apparently there are custodial fees, which is utter BS. I give her the paperwork and leave. Later on Rudy gets the confirmation, I forward it to Helen. Then she notices that the reservations are incorrect. Rudy did it Saturday 9am-3pm, when it should be 8am-5pm. I email Rudy, he tells me to check in with Nora. I go to Nora and get that taken care of. She gives me more paperwork for food and crap. Then I found out that they never actually got the paperwork for our re-chartering last quarter. Which I did fill out. I get another copy to fill out.

I’ve now got a funding request form to fill out along with a stupid food request form to do. Grrr!

To keep you entertained, here’s a picture of my Kitten:

I discovered a website awhile back called Silent PC Review while looking up reviews on motherboards. I’ve since then become addicted to their website, reading up on ways to silence my computer. The fan on my video card is obscenely loud (I tested this by stopping it, computer noise dropped quite a bit) as is the Power supply (I bought it while my other one is on RMA, should get back to me Wednesday). I bought a replacement fan/heatsink for the video card, and one for the CPU (It’s the stock one and doesn’t do a very good job at cooling, I got a ninja, which has the option of being passive, I’ve got a 120mm fan behind it so i think it’ll work.)

Hopefully those will get to me Wednesday so I can finally shut up my computer in one fell swoop!

Class has started and it’s been fairly uneventful. The marketing class is kinda blegh right now, the instructor isn’t really all that clear when she hands out an assignment, so I tend to get confused about what the assignment is (but I just email brandon and he usually knows what it is). The IT103 class is pretty easy, It’s all online and I have to use this software that came with the book for the assessments, and it’s painfully easy. The only big gripe I have about it is that it doesn’t run in linux, and wine is going to take some tweaking to get it running properly.

Circle K is finally starting to pick up, I got a secretary this week! So far I have Me and King as The President (we’re co-presidents), Eric as the VP, and Cecilia is the Secretary. We just need to hunt down a treasurer and then we should be good to go for a full-board. Our meeting this past week went fairly well, Eric is going to come to S3 next week which is freaking awesome (I’ve been the only member to pretty much all of the past events, it kinda sucks), We just need to work on member recruitment (I’m going to start throwing up flyer’s on Monday, I was going to do it last week but I still haven’t unpacked the printer >.<) but I’m confident that we should be able to get some more members into our club and start working on Projects, I’ve asked Eric to get in touch with the JRC and see what they’re up to. Hopefully in the next couple weeks we will be able to visit the bellevue noon club (I might end up going to the sunrisers alone since it is so early).

So that’s basically everything that has been going on, it’s picked up now that school has started and I think it’s going to be a fun year!

Then again, apparently they had to do a new PO for me, since the old one would have run out about an hour ago.

I’ve also decided that I’m not going to live at the house anymore. After Alexs’ series of fuck-ups, I don’t really want to know what else he can screw up. I’ve since begun looking for apartments (spent the past week looking at a couple). I found a couple really nice ones. Found a great place up in Ballard (I’m really hoping I get it). The main problem I’m having right now is that everyone keeps thinking I don’t make enough to be reliable, when I am >:(

It’s really irritating how landlords tend to assume that because I’m young I don’t know how to handle money. I guess they haven’t figured out that if I don’t pay up, I’m out? Well, I have always consistently paid my rent on time and never had any problems with any of my landlords. The only time Rent has ever been late was when I gave Alex the rent checks for the entire house, trusting him to give it to Keyvan. Of course Alex then went on and screwed that all up. I make enough to pay for a place, gas, and food. That’s all I seriously need. Helen will also be paying a small portion, but that’s not really a neccessity.

What pisses me off even more is when landlords will go with people who have parents that pay their rent, but when I come along saying that my parents would be paying a portion, they think I’m too poor to be independent. What the fuck? double standards?

Anyways, I’ve got basically two week to find a place, which should be enough to find a decent place I suppose.

Haze came by yesterday to look at the rooms, totally didn’t think I’d be seeing him Was pretty cool to talk to him for a bit, although I don’t think he’ll take either room, something tells me they’re a bit small for his taste.

another guy came by today, he was pretty cool about it all. He plays in a rock band and sells cars. That put me off a bit as he came off as a guy who likes to drink a lot, but from when I spoke to him about get togethers, he keeps it responsible, so I’m fine with that. He was practically a positive yes about it all, so He’s going to take either of the rooms, preferably the larger room

I sent the girl a text earlier (had to dig through my numbers and ended up sending her a text first saying “Is this ?” to which she replied “Yeah….who is this?”) giving her first dibs on the place, although I’m pretty sure she found a better place as she hasn’t replied. If she doesn’t give me a call tomorrow, then I’ll give the larger of the rooms to the guy who came today. He’s going to meet Alex tomorrow and he’s bringing his girlfriend with him to if he can (she works a lot).

It got my clickin’ fingers D:

Let me repeat, facebook and myspace.

Who the fuck completely skips over Craigslist, which is a reliable source of roommates proven time and time again? Oh yeah, someone who thinks that craigslist is useless and that myspace is better, e.g Alex.

Apparently that was his last resort. Which is utter and complete retardation. We now have two weeks to find two roommates, which is going to be a royal pain in the ass. Had he told me a month ago about the situation, I’d have happily helped out. Now I’m just pissed off, he’s doing an incredibly pathetic job and handling things. The damn idiot continues to play leader, blinded by the idea of being in charge while idiotically stumbling through the brush, having confused the map for toilet paper.

Oh, and to perk things up, the power supply in my desktop computer died on me, currently stuck with my laptop.

I got to play a whole bunch of games that I had sorta heard of but never really played, I got to check out Lost Planet, Tabula Rasa, and Stranglehold along with a few other games for the wii. I got Lost Planet and have been playing it, Tabula Rasa is currently in closed-beta and i got beta keys! I registered one, gave one to Chris, and I’m going to give the third one to my brother. The game is so far pretty awesome, the story is pretty strong and you can actually play it by yourself if you want to, most other mmorpg’s will force you to play with other people by making creatures rediculously powerful and what-not. I’ve had fun with it so far and I’m certain it will come out to be a great game when completed.

I got a new job too! I’m working at the Corporate headquarters of Tommy Bahama as their weekend Tech Support rep. I went in yesterday for paperwork and an overview of the systems, I start this coming weekend and there will be someone there for the first two weeks, then after that I go solo. My boss Glenn wants me to come in during the week so that I may familiarize myself with everyone and so that I can read up on docs before I really do start. There is a bunch of stuff to do so I’m going to do my best to learn the ropes and the system, this is an actual job too, not a contract position so I’m finally at a job That works for me with upward mobility!

Over the weekend me and Helen went up to B-ham to visit friends, we went and saw Ashley, then went to a party at the mint, wasn’t too interesting, we left after about 2 hours. We went back to Ashleys apartment where we were staying and played Mariokart. I got a hold of Mantis and he came over and hung out for a bit too, we had to go back to his house to grab some more controllers for the N64. Was pretty damn sweet (although I kept getting distracted while playing, and Ashleys tv is hella tiny).

As for the job search, I haven’t really given it much effort. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I shouldn’t work this coming quarter. I have to get Circle K off the ground, and the only jobs I can find are full-time and that wouldn’t work out since I’d have to have meetings during the day, a couple classes I’ll need to take are in the middle of the day 4 days a week, and I’ll have to take them eventually. Plus my current job ends in september, so I can just work till then and afterwards have my parents pay for everything (they’ve kinda been wanting to do that for awhile).

All the interviews I’ve gone to have gone fairly well, but I haven’t gotten a job offer yet (would be getting a lot if I change my monster profile to looking for full-time jobs, but I got tired of answering phone calls from recruiters about jobs in nebraska), had a couple interesting ones, one at a web host and another for a small vc. I suppose I should write up a new cover letter and send out my resume to ads on craigslist, but I don’t really have the motivation.

Sarah is in Town and it is awesomness! Yay for hanging out bunches!

Right now I just need to work through college and get my stupid AA. As soon as I have that out of the way I’ll be able to focus better on finding a job, for now I’ve begun applying to tier 1 jobs that are strictly help desk. Although I’m not going for the call center jobs, those just suck. The campuspoint site seems to have a few good IT jobs. I applied to a couple that were pretty appealing, although they show up as full-time (at the firststep interview one of the managers said I should still apply for it, since it was a position he was in charge of). Just applied to another that may just work, although it’s a short 2 month job :/

I guess I’ll poke at craigslist a little more and hope I get lucky. Another week and I’ll start looking for an apartment.

I’m just hoping the whole be completely honest and say you won’t leave until you finish your project thing pulls through, because if not, I may just be sounding like a pompous ass to them.

And Friday is ICON

The Proximity to Pullman is disturbing.

I’m also looking into moving to Seattle, since I currently work there and plan on going to UW next fall (however, I’m not so sure about moving to Seattle if my job ends in October and I have no idea where I’ll be working next). I’m hoping to spend no more then 700 on rent, from the looks of it I may get lucky with a place that includes utilities. There are a bunch of places available right now, but I’m currently broke after having had to pay a bunch of bills, rent, and ICON all in the same week (In other words, a little over 1,000 bucks, and I make about 1,200 a month). I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to continue going to events this pricey since they tend to screw with my budget quite a bit, plus Eric sucks at managing the bills, leaves them to pile up and then asks me to pay them all at once (I paid bills for may, then 2 weeks later I have to pay for june, he already has the one for July but is sitting on it). Richard is gone too, so the bills are even more right now. The gas bill should be a lot less though, since I shut off the heater last month as it would turn on every 15 minutes even when the house was plenty warm. But I’m looking at paying around 100 for gas, no idea what the other stuff will be yet.

I’ve started selling off stuff I don’t need, various computer parts I’ve collected over the past year I no longer use. Hopefully that’ll get me enough money to pay deposit on an apartment. I started looking last week, but I stopped since any place I would find I wouldn’t be able to have since I can’t pay for them. I’m going to wait until I have at least 800 on hand first, then I’ll start looking (probably next weekend I guess). As long as no surprise payments come up I should be able to make it though the month and have enough to move out in the end of August. Only problem with that is my current lease ends in September, so if I’m lucky, Alex will find someone to move in when I leave. I think he has  a friend who said he would move in when I left, so that should take care of things.

Classes start in September too, my dad wants me to meet with an advisor so I can make sure I’ll transfer to UW easily. I’m guessing I won’t since I’ve been working on a useless AA in Tech Support for the past year and a half that will just fulfill the stupid AA or 4 year requirement recruiters put on job listings. I’m still not 100% sure why I’m in college, BCC is total suck, starting a Circle K there sucks (gotta get time off to recruit for that damn club), hopefully I’ll get it rolling this fall.

I’m still a little clueless about what I’m doing right now, I’m working for an awesome company, I’ve got a few projects going there right now and I more or less control my schedule, when I leave it’s going to be a pain finding another job that will work for me, as I’m going to be going to college so I’ll need a part-time job.

Was driving home on the highway, traffic jam and all, was on 520. I was behind an SUV, the guy in front of him hit the breaks hard, he hit the breaks, and I did too. My tires blow ass, so I basically slid straight into him. Lucky for me, car tipped forward so the end of the hood hit them. They took no damage so I don’t have to worry about police report or insurance, just about my car.

The Hood is bent out of shape, grill is fucked up (fasteners broke so it’s useless), passenger headlight vertical adjuster is stripped and so is part of the fastener near the grill, so it just wiggles around now. The big bar on the vehicle ( behind the fender, has the radiator connected to it) is slightly bent, to the point of when I bent the hood back into shape, it wouldn’t lock. Other then that everything else looks fine.

In other news, work has been going fairly well. Chris is over in Europe covering for the IT guy who’s on vacation. I’ve gotten a few projects at work now. I did an upgrade of the antivirus server today and yesterday, didn’t really have any major issues with it. I’m working on the test domain, going to hammer our a few servers for it tomorrow, the domain controller is more or less setup, just need to tweak dhcp a little.

The inventory project I’ve been working on is taking a hell of a long time. Logged about 14 hours working on the storage room, we have way too much stuff in there (will update with more info later, a little hungry right now).

/sarcasm

Had a presentation today in Business 101 for my term project. It went surprisingly well. I’m guessing that’s because for once I told my partners what we were doing, then emailed them the powerpoint and made them look at it.  I didn’t think we’d do very well (today has been a fairly shitty day) but judging from everyone we did pretty well. People asked questions about the presentation, and we answered

I also had my Lab final for the linux class. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. I was actually a little dissapointed. The final had 3 parts to it.

• Compile and install rdesktop-1.5.0 from source.


• Install rdesktop-1.4.1 from rpm


• Setup a printer using the gui

That was pretty simple. What dissapointed me though, is that it had instructions for how to do the first, two. So it was like reading a tutorial. I wasn’t too happy about this, so I got it all done fairly quickly. There were questions on the end, and i got them all done. Overall, it probably took me about 15 minutes. After I finished, I helped other people with the Final (Instructor was going around answering questions, so I checked with him and he was fine with it) for a good 30-45 minutes, then went home as the triple shot mocha I had before class was wearing off.

And with that post, I shall now go die.

Turned out he hadn’t sent out either of the bills for last month. Yup, those bills were due May 18. He said he wasn’t sure if he had gotten everyone elses share (me and richard since Alex was out). I checked with Richard and he had given it to Eric. So I went back and told Eric that both me and Richard had paid him already (I checked my bank account prior to this, so i knew he had deposited my check). He said he would call and pay it. I figured he meant both bills.

Well, just got done talking to Alex. Turns out he only paid the electricity. He said he isn’t going to pay the wsg until he gets he paycheck. It’s been about a month, so he’s gotten at least one paycheck since then. So what does this all mean?

Eric used our money meant for the bills for something else, probably alcohol.

edit: Almost forgot to mention this. Went to china town with Helen, Alan, Rommel, and Jenny. Got Dim sum for lunch then we all went to an anime shop with awesome collectors stuff. I got 2 wall scrolls, one of Cloud on his motor bike from FF7 the game, and another of Cloud from advent children. Helen got two of Totoro. My room has suddenly because a bastion of anime geekness.

It’s now Thursday, 6 days after it was supposed to arrive

I called DHL on tuesday asking them whats up. I gave them my phone number, in case they needed to call me (it didn’t show friday, at the time I assumed it was because nobody was there to sign). Wednsday I sat around the house waiting for it between 4 and 6 (came home early because plumber was there to hookup new washer) and DHL never showed up and I didn’t get a phone call. I contacted Modchipstore.com to see if they can call DHL and change the address to my workplace (business to business tends to be more reliable). Until then I’m basically a sitting duck :/

He’s a really awesome guy, we talked quite a bit over dinner about various aspects of the Ubuntu teams along with vi (which I’m going to be playing with ). It was quite an experience to meet an actual Ubuntu member (to become one you have to be approved by a council, read more about the process here), he’s very knowleadgable in getting an ubuntu team started up, from what he’s said about us, we’re going to need to get the loco teams approved in individual states before we can really have an ubuntu pnw loco team.

I actually really want to get a loco team started up in Washington, which I’m sure is going to take quite a bit of effort to get going considering this is going to be on a state level. Despite this, I’m rather hesitant to take the lead and go with this. I’m currently trying to get a Circle K club chartered at BCC, which isn’t going to well on my part. I just don’t seem to have the motivation required to get this going. I’ve always loved taking part in Circle K activities, but from what I can tell, I don’t want to be a circle k officer.

I’ve been working with Circle K International for around 3 years now, but it’s always been as a member, not as an officer or anywhere near that level. Now that I’m the President-elect of my club, I’m surprisingly un-motivated. I want to get it done, but I just lack the drive. Even with Helen helping me, I know it’s going to take my willingness and desire to get things done to really get this club chartered. I’ve been using work as an excuse for not having enough time. That is partly true (How am I supposed to table when I work and 8-5 job?) However I could probably work something out. It’s difficult to change things when you truly don’t want to put the effort into it.

The Ubuntu team on the other hand. It’s been me the whole time who’s been doing everything. I truly joined the Linux community back in July after moving to Linux in May. I’ve been working with them for months, enjoying every little bit of it, even sitting in #ubuntu and #kubuntu channels for several hours just helping users. I joined the Ubuntu pnw group several months back and have been working with them since. Seeing them all at linuxfest northwest was amazing. Seeing the team together then was something else, It was fantastic being able to talk to another person who not only used Linux, but believed in it too.

I think that if I were to work towards getting the Ubuntu wa team created, I’d have more success with it, since I’m more familiar with the user base I’d be recruiting from and what it would take to recruit them. I’m fairly sure it’s much more complicated then that, but I’ve got the drive to learn and work on it.

For starters, I’m finally getting CKI underway. Helen has been tons of help, we had our kick-off party at the beginning of the quarter and things have been progressing. I’ve got two VP’s, still trying to get more members, but hopefully I’ll be able to get people motivated in the next week or so.

My washer has been broken for a little over a month, and the landlord kept saying he was sending people to fix it but that we weren’t home. So I called Sears yesterday (whom he said he was using), and scheduled an appointment with them, I also had them do a search on work history for our house. lo’ and behold, no work history, so either he hadn’t been scheduling, or Sears system sucks.

I had 6 wisdom teeth removed (yes, I did just say six wisdom teeth), and I was knocked out on drugs for 2 days and then I had a steady recovery for several days. I’m more or less healthy now, my back teeth hurt occasinally, but I think that’s from the teeth moved around because of the extra space.

I’m part of a Ubuntu loco team, PNW to be precise, we tabled at Linuxfest Northwest  last weekend, it was  a massive success. We handed out around 400 ubuntu discs. I’m also their team speaker, except nobody has really taken notice (I suppose I just need to be louder?). I’m hoping to get more people involved and get some more linux awareness projects going, but CKI takes precedence over Ubuntu, so I’m going to put that off for now.

There are a few more things going on, but I’ll leave those for a later post (In other words, I don’t quite recall what they are).