chaz720.net - journal

June 03, 2001

geez, what an interesting couple of days it's been. I've learned quite a bit but the most prominant being that karma is most definately not a force to be reconed with. When I was younger, and basically up until this very year, I recall playing outside all the time. I spent a lot of my time outdoors and had a great days as a carefree youth. I always lived in the same general area and perhaps my senses had grown accustomed to living in that area. I then live a year down at school and now I return along with springtime to my home, and I appear to have developed an allegy towards everything. Now I know a lot of you crazies may feel a bit stuffy-nosed upon inhaling a draft of ill-directd pollen, but I assure you it holds neigh a candle to my current situation. I seem to be allergic to trees, grass, plants, shrubbery, flowers, many small woodland creatures, and I think, I can't quite back this up, some types of wind gusts. Mayhaps I shall se my doctor and get some allergy medicine and fake my way to a healthy summer.

My job seems to be getting better and better as I go along. In a nutshell, here is what I'm doing. There is this new device that my team is helping design. We have about a dozen or so simulated instances of the device running on linux and AIX rack-mount computers in a computer lab. Each instance has a hard drive, a processor, some ram, and a network card. We also have about half a dozen rack-mount typical looking number crunching machines, as well as about half a dozen work stations. As of when I started, all the machines we haphazardly connected both phyisically and by means of retarded addressing. What I am doing is first designing, then recabling, reconfiguring, documenting, and presenting to my group what is to be an almost entirely new network setup for the machines that serves as a more functional testbed. This includes all the new software they will need, as well as a means of backup for the software they right, and the appropriate documentation so that someone can follow what I did when I leave at the end of the summer. I don't really have much along the lines of a deadline (aside from the obvious stand point that I am only going to be there for a couple months) so I will come up with the schedule on my own. And, of course, I have to consult many people to make sure my re-configuring doesn't mess up anyone's work, and to make sure that when I get done, my team has what they need. If I have time left over at the end of the summer, I will probably help my team with the scripting. I like it because I am learning a bunch of fun stuff about Unix networking, and I get to show off my m4d c4b|ing s|<illz.

I got both my iPass and my liscense plates... the iPass affixes quite nicely out of view above my rearview, and my liscence plates read "Y 332 448" I think as far as vainity plates go, I might apply for "CHAMPU" and see if I get them. despite early thoughts, I don't think I really want "CHAZ720" so If I don't get champu than I will probably just keep what I have. There is just this one problem with that. My dad says having a liscence plate of champu would suggest that I am gay, and my mom said she doesn't want me having those plates because someone will think the car belongs to a fag and they will key the car. I'm sorry, but what the hell... yes, champu means "shampoo" in spanish, and there is the whole hairdresser-homosexual stereotype, but need I bring up the point once again that that name was cooked up by none other than two, in my humble opinion, rather attractive women. Now far be it from me to criticize my mother's intuition that my car is going to vandalized based on the scripture that is my liscence plate, which, argueably screams homosexuality but perhaps one can chew on this... Hans's old Ford Exlporer had the liscence plate "P KABOO" and it never got messed with. And If that doesn't say "I'm gay" I would love for someone to tell me what does.

June 07, 2001

well it's been on my mind a while and I figure I may as well just spill it. As I remember, that was the point of creating this thing in the first place.

Everyone always told me that living with a friend in college was a nightmare, that we would grow to hate each other and just generally not be all that happy. And I always said, "bleh, that's usually just when girls room together, guys don't let that shit get to them." well, I don't hate Hans now, far from it, but we may have been better friends before the year had started. I know he thinks that I am comprehensively an asshole (plus marci could care less if I live or die, more on that later) and I know that I think that he gets a hard on when I screw up in some way or another. And I also know that this didn't just happen overnight. I'd like to put down my side of the story and see what people think of it... am I human? ...am I conceded? or am I the giant asshole that marci and hans think I am.

At school there are some character flaws that become rather apparent very quickly when it comes to your roommates. A couple of hans's (and really the rest of us at times but I mostly took it out on hans) were leaving garbage around, doing whatever he could to not have to clean a dish, including but not limited to eating out of touperware (very clever actually), certain flatulant habits, and snoring (the latter not being his fault at all, but when I got up, went over to his bed, kicked him over so he stopped snoring, only to have him roll back over and continue snoring as little as 3 minutes later, he may as well have been doing it on purpose :P) And over time as these things didn't get better after mentioning it (he usually just made some kind of joke out of it that was funny, albeit only the first few times) I started nagging him about it, and that lead to joking insults. Then of course, as one would expect, we started trying to one-up each other with the making fun, and I think at some point or another it stopped becoming friendly. Eventually, my casual mentioning of something hans screwed up while in front of anyone would result in a verbal barrage of attacks on all fronts about my character and what not, and likewise, the slightest screw ups on his part would result in me cutting him down pretty hard. I think both of us developed some knee-jerk reactions to eachother's actions and words and it wasn't long before we grew numb to it, and I didn't particularly care, and I figured hans didn't either.

Then we came home from school...

Marci's presense in town really took a toll on my sanity. I don't think that I really changed my actions towards hans when we got back but the response to them was all differnent. Hans started taking everything to heart and any doubts that he had about me being an asshole, truely and wholely, were swept off the planet by marci who only saw our interaction as of late and decided it was all one sided. I tried to continue to joke with hans, but everytime I said something even mildly sarcastic about something he did, he would start off on his speach to everyone present which went something like, "yeah ryan, cause I can't do anything right, and I'm a total fuck up and I know nothing I ever do will be right for you and I'm just too dumb to know any better", and after he said that for the umpteenth time I started getting really frustrated with him, it was as though he thought I was incapable of making a joke and everything I said should be interpreted as an attack. I also felt that in these situations everyone took his side and negated the fact that what I said was, in fact, just a joke.

At that point I hardly felt comfortable hanging out with the rest of the group when he is a part of it, because he (and everyone else for that matter) had made it quite clear that I am not allowed to make jokes related to people we know in any way shape or form, as doing so would be a personal attack. Meanwhile, I have Hans casually pointing out that every thing I own, have ever owned, will ever own, think about owning and/or look at, is inferior to, uglier than, smells worse than, is slower than, sounds worse than, and is less appealing than anything and everything in any class it is in, above, below, or next to. And that anytime I strive for perfection in a category, he could have produced a solution that would have taken less effort, less money, and less time to complete, and probably would end up working the same under most conditions.

I guess now I see what's it like to have a completely negative source of input about yourself, and how you can grow to resent it.

So I offer this, even though Hans doesn't read my journal anymore as he thinks I spent too much time making it overly elaborate and could have done it with less- sorry, I digress... I offer an apoligy, for being an ass for the past 3 weeks we've been back, and possibly for farther back than is clear to me this second semester. I hate bickering and tension in general and just assume be rid of it.

June 14, 2001

So open up your morning light, And say a little prayer for I. You know that if we are to stay alive, Then see the peace in every eye... She had two babies, one was six months, one was three, In the war of '44... Every telephone ring, every heartbeat stinging, When she thought it was God calling her. Oh, would her son grow to know his father? I don't want to to wait for our lives to be over, I want to know right now what will it be. I don't want to wait for our lives to be over, Will it be yes or will it be...sorry? He showed up all wet on the rainy front step, Wearing shrapnel in his skin. And the war he saw lives inside him still, It's so hard to be gentle and warm. The years pass by and now he has granddaughters. You look at me from across the room. You're wearing your anguish again. Believe me I know the feeling. It sucks you into the jaws of anger. So breathe a little more deeply my love. All we have is this very moment. And I don't want to do what his father, And his father, and his father did, I want to be here now. So open up your morning light, And say a little prayer for I. You know that if we are to stay alive, Then see the love in every eye...

Today I am playing the the Hickory Putter Invitational for mydepartment at Motorola so I am writing this this morning because I'm only going to be here for a short while.

I seem to be getting into golf again this summer, after I had taken a break from it for about a year and a half. I guess my dad is really fond of my interest in golf, as I'm sure any dad would be of a pass-time that he and his son share, so that's cool too. This is definately why I started playing golf in the first place, probably why I got pretty good at it, and, unfortunately, probably also why I stopped playing for a while. As my dad has always shown a bit of impatiance on the course. It kinda made golf too stressful as it seemed his current attitude about how I was doing was based almost solely on my most recent shot, not how I was doing as a whole. But I think I just needed to play some other courses with some other people and I seem to be enjoying the game much more than I used to. And it helps if you're not bad at it too :D

I use a trackball at home, not because I think mice are generally bad, I just think they take some personal offense to my choice of directoinal movement. They'll follow my orders for a while, maybe two weeks or so, and then when I drag them across my desk they spin their wheels like little bastards and refuse to move the cursor for several inches, they don't listen until I bang them into the desk to confuse them while I use them to do my, apparently, evil pointer manuvering.

I plan to be working on a little quiz thing I want to start on the site. Something that might bring my interest back to it a little bit. It's going to be called "Practical Joke? or Terrorism?" where you see various examples of situations or occurrances and you have to tell me whethere it's a Practical Joke, or an act of Terrorism. Get enough points and you win a happy surprise, however, I can't gaurentee that the surprise is anything but an inflated sense of self-esteem... ...or a car-bomb.

June 28, 2001

oh my god he actually posted again!?!

My posting this summer has been rather thin, and I know right well why that is. Today I had three people mention this to me and I figured I'd write something today, just to keep from falling completely out of habit. I work, as many of you know, at motorola. There I deal with machines all day, that either have problems, or need something added/changed about them, or some code written or god knows what. Not just windows machines, but AIX and Linux boxes as well. Each OS with it's own set of idiosyncracies. After a whole day of doing this at work and I get home, I'm usually a bit stressed out, and at the very least, sick of looking at computer monitors. So the last thing I want to do is even wake up my machine to check my e-mail, much less sit and write a whole update. Believe me when I say I enjoy keeping this journal, but I just need to get away from these cursed machines when I'm not at work. I assure you that when the summer is over and I am back at school, all the things that you loved to hate about the site will be back in all their glory, and the peasents will rejoice.

Oh, and I almost forgot, another reason that updates have been hard to come by, I just recently installed Windows 2000 on this machine, and since a few days before that to the present I have not had a modem that actually worked. The one Hans has been letting me use seems to do nothing more than prevent my system from booting, so I just kind of gave up on internet access all together. Today I dug up an old external modem that, if my memory serves me well, my sister bought in florida to run her 486 machine off of. But hey, if it connects and can send some text to my posting script, well then, it's doing it's job.

Today I went to go see a Cubs game for work. It was fun although we didn't win. The Cubs started out well but I think they shot their load a little early if you know what I mean, and ended up losing 5-4. Oh, and we parked at the airport and took the L-train into town, and not 5 minutes after getting on the train, some guy was trying to sell us weed, even after we told him that we didn't smoke. Some people just don't understand salesmanship, tisk tisk. But other than that today was a lot of fun, and as rosie brought up, the best part was... we got to go to a Cubs game while on the clock.

For my birthday in about a month I was looking to go, along with a few people, to Skydive Chicago to go skydiving. I think that skydiving has become a safe activity that, although it is "extreme" can be fun, and you shouldn't worry about as much as people do about things going wrong. I am also of the opinion that skydiving is given a bad rapport by stupid shows in which people are trying to do something ridiculous whilst skydiving. I don't think that tandom skydiving (where you jump while strapped to a professional skydiver who handles the details) is nearly as dangerous as people make it out to be.

Let me try putting it this way...

When you get in an airplane, it is controled by the pilot. He is in charge of a number of controls to fly the plane you are on. These planes are inspected by people who inspect dozens of planes a day, none of which's airworthiness is any more a concern of his than he is getting paid for. These planes have hundreds of critical parts, manufactured with care, but put under incredible strains of flight after flight after flight. But most people don't think twice about getting in a commercial airliner.

A professional skydiver that would take someone sky diving is also in charge of controls. (3 to be exact, one to open the parachute, and two to steer) The parachute is inspected and packed by himself, and he is just as at risk during the jump as you are, so his incentive is just the same as the one person who has to trust him. He is well aware of the functionality and operation of everything used during the jump, and would certainly not attempt the jump if he wasn't sure that it would go smoothly.

This is why I have a hard time seeing eye to eye with someone who simply claims it's too dangerous cause they know of incidents where something bad has happened. Well, you can get hurt/killed doing a lot of things, but I believe you can put enough forethought into doing just about anything and achieve a very acceptable level of saftey.

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