Sometimes the path within must be extracted...

  Sometimes we need to tear down and destroy what we are in order to make way for something new, or something better...

  
cemetery gates

  I don't like myself very much anymore.

  I think it's time to totally back away from everything and completely re-evaluate my situation. I know I have a long road ahead of me. I know that I have to walk down it alone. I need to prepare myself for that journey.

  I have a NASTY lump on my head from an accident today. I was plugging my laptop into an outlet in my living room to charge it up. The outlet is behind a bookcase. On top of the bookcase are books, with stone gargoyle bookends pushed into either side of the row. One of them fell on my head while I was plugging the laptop in. Dude, they're friggin' heavy! It damn near knocked me out when it hit me. My head still hurts...

  I have a really hard head though...

  I bought a new camera on Saturday, a Kodak Z650 SLR deal. It's got an excellent 38mm 10X zoom lens on it. It's the best camera I've ever owned. OfficeMax was doing an inventory, and they had it marked down to a hundred bucks! I couldn't say no. It was marked down from two-hundred and forty dollars. I found out that when Kodak released the camera last year, it was over three-hundred dollars. I'm thrilled with it. The image clarity is wonderful at 6.1 megapixels, and the clarity on the zoom is incredible. I think damnage might get a makeover soon. The quality of graphics I can produce using the new camera is much better than with my old Mustek. The night vision mode is wonderful. All the pictures in this blog were taken with the new camera, by the way...


taken with my new camera...

  I was at Wal-Mart on Thursday, and while I was there, I bought 28 Weeks Later. I watched it tonight, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. I thought it was good, not as good as the original, but good. I'm gonna watch it again before I go to bed tongiht.

  The Raiders lost again today, making them 2-3 in Week Six. Sometimes it's tough to be a part of the Raider Nation. The boys never seem to be able to get their shit together.

  Anyway...

  I think after this weekend, I might get my own shit back together, quit drinking again, and just hang out in the cemeteries on the weekends, taking pictures of angels like I used to. I think going back to the bars was a mistake. There's nothing left for me out there. I'm a dinosaur out in that world.

  I dunno...

  I might give it a rest, but I'll probably wander back out into it again. I literally have nothing better to do. It gets to the point where I want to go back to work on Monday because there I at least have a sense of purpose. When I'm given time to myself, I just wander around aimlessly, bumping into stuff without any sense of direction or purpose.

  It makes me wish we had overtime on the weekends again. I'd be earning boatloads of money, and I wouldn't have to think about everything that's wrong in my life. I could just be behind my saw, cuttin' up rework, and all would be right with the world...

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  Yeah...

  I'm keeping the blog-post-song-quote thing goin'...

  Anyway...

  Can anyone say...

  VACATION???????

  YES! And dammit, I've earned it! I put in like fifty hours this week! The kaizen deal was considered a success. I made a few new friends, and pro'ly a few new enemies, but I came out of it pretty well.


angel eyes...

  Me messin' around with Photoshop again...

  I got my laptop, notebook, whatever ya wanna call it:


my new Toshiba Satellite Pentium Dual Core...

  No, it's not the one I originally wanted to buy. I was having the WORST luck finding one until I ran across this Toshiba Satellite at Circuit City. It was six-hundred bucks, five-hundred after a rebate. By the way, Best Buy sucks. I haven't trusted them for years. Not since they tried to sell me a big screen TV with an eight inch tear in the screen. I tried to purchase two laptops from them on two different days, two different sales, both times they were "sold out" - ummm... bullshit? I mean, yeah - they pro'ly had like two or three of 'em at the ridiculously low price they advertised, but it's just a scam ta get ya in the store, methinks.

  Anyway...

  I may have to rethink my previous attitudes towards Windows Vista. I couldn't get Linux running right on the thing to save my frickin' life. I gave up and put the OEM Vista Home Premium back in. Once I tweaked it to look like Windows Classic, it was familiar enough for me to use. I haven't had any compatibility issues with it yet. It IS a pig on memory though, I may need to upgrade the one gig of memory it came with to something higher. I'll need to get some specs on the board though...

  Anyway...

  This is gonna be a short post. I'm anxious to begin my vacation in earnest. I'm taking a powder out to the bars early tonight to see what I can see. My tarot card spread looked pretty good for the weekend, and I can't wait to get it started...

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  I'm seein' nowhere through the eyes of a lie...

  ...or something like that.


the beginning of a bolt of lightning tonight at work (out back)

  This week was tiring, and I'm glad it's nearly over with. Next week though...

  Next week should be pretty interesting...

  I was chosen to take part in a kaizen event at work. I get to discuss (for ten hours a day, for four straight days, Friday we get to have breakfast and leave early! ) improvement of work cells in my department and whatnot. I'm actually pretty jazzed about the whole thing. I've never taken part in one of these, and I'm always anxious to try something new.

  It'll be weird adjusting to a day shift schedule for a week, but I'm flexible, I think I'll manage...

  I'll get out early, presumably late Friday morning sometime, and then I'll have Colombus Day Weekend off! Actually, I took the following Tuesday off as a vacation day, so I'll have, what for me will be a five day weekend!


mikey's conception of mikey on vacation

  ...which, considering how broke I am right now, means I'm gonna lay around for five days an' be a total bum.

  I dunno...

  I might take my loan back up tomorrow and get some work done on my car over the weekend. I might even buy the cheap laptop I've been drooling over at Wal-Mart for the past few weeks.


"hmmm... lay around an' be a bum? or... DO stuff?

  It's a helluva tossup for me...

  I know, my life is incredibly BORING. Garden slugs get more out of the universe than I do, but you know what?

  I dig it that way.

  I HATE it when my life gets complicated. I like to just go to work, come home, and just BE.

  It's times like this when I LIKE the fact that I never got married or had any kids. This weekend, I'll wake up Saturday afternoon to the quiet hum of a fan and wonder "hmmm... should I get out of bed? lay here some more? sleep some more? or... maybe get some energy together and lay on the couch an' watch a movie?" Some people might be disgusted by my off-work slothfullness, but man - it's just delicious to have problems like these! I'm thirty-five with NO commitments, NO responsibilities that I can't handle by working at a good job every day, NO obligations (other than a wedding I have to attend next Saturday - then I'm free an' clear for an indefinite period of time), no wife, no kids, no worries, no hassles...

  If this is contentment, I'll take it.

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What do I mean by that?

  hmmm...

  Nothing in particular, I guess. I've just had the Three Doors Down song rattling around in my brain all weekend for some reason (I'm listening to it right now). I love the idea of Superman having a dark side. I've been a fan of the DC character since I was a kid. I religiously read the whole Doomsday storyline when it came out in the nineties. In fact, I'm buying the graphic novel (again, I sold it years ago) from Amazon.

  I also dig Tarantino's astute musings about him in Kill Bill Volume II...

  I saw Superman Returns not too long ago, too. My mom bought the DVD for me for my birthday. I liked it. I thought it was pretty good. Kevin Spacey really lived up to Gene Hackman's portrayal of Lex Luthor.


mikey's growin' the full beard back...

  I've been pretty busy lately...

  Mainly with work...

  I did manage to get out this weekend though. As a change of pace, I gave Whiskey Business a skip and went to Ol' Time Charlie's for their Saturday Karaoke thing. No, I didn't sing, but I ran into a guy I work with and spent the night bullshittin' with him an' slammin' down some Molson Canadian.

  It's different not having my best friend to hang out with in bars anymore. After the aneurism, he can't drink - and nor does he want to, which is great. I have a wedding to attend in a couple of weeks, and I'm giving serious thought to quitting again myself after the wedding. Boozing is basically all just a stupid waste of money when you come right down to it. I'd always felt that drinking was a sign of weakness on my part, and anyone who knows me knows - I despise weakness. Vices are just expressions of flaws in a person's character.

  I have few vices...


caught myself in the middle of blinking...

  The Oakland Raiders actually won today - first game this season. Yeah, I've been hangin' out with my buddy on Sundays since he got back from his hospital stay in Philly, and he watches football religiously on Sunday. So I watch it with him, and I'm actually finding myself getting into it a bit.

  Somewhere in there I managed to upgrade the memory on his computer to one gig...


mikey at three years-old

  The people I work with will probably enjoy the picture above. It's like, "He's been wearing that hat for HOW LONG"?

  I dunno...

  I got to talking about sports and it occurred to me that I had this picture on one of my hard drives...

  Anyway...

  I finally got a data cable for my Nokia cell phone. It was like three bucks on Amazon.Com! Well - with shipping, it came out closer to ten, but I was expecting to pay more for the thing. NO ONE around here had the damned thing - not even T-Mobile, and they're the ones who sold me the damned phone! Unreal...

  Just in time, too...

  I have the Nokia 6133 - which, by the way, is an EXCELLENT little phone. If you're thinking of buying it - do it! It kicks a Razr's ass!

  Anyway, I was saying...

  Without the data cable, I had to come up with an interesting way of getting music on to the phone, and getting pictures out of it. It has a microSD card, which is KICKASS. I mean, the thing holds a gig of stuff - dude, I can remember when HARD DRIVES held that much. Anyway - the microSD card came with an adapter for a regular SD device. I have one - my camera. My camera was pretty problematic at best. It would crash my XP installation anytime I'd hook it up, so I needed to use the computer in the kitchen to transfer files. Long story short - I accidentally dropped the camera while performing this little operation. It's dead.

  So now I have to get myself a new camera...

  I'd love to get a Cannon Rebel, but they're expensive as hell. I'll have an extra paycheck in November, and if I quit drinking in October...

  hmmm...

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  It's been a pretty interesting week thusfar...

  Today, for the first time in my life, I got certified to run a forklift at work. What? No fanfare? It's a big deal for me! Actually, it's something that'll make my life ten times easier at work...

  I'm not gonna go totally wild and be like Cryptie, or anything (also try this link ), but still...

  (if you followed the links - was THAT fucking WEIRD or WHAT??? )

  My supervisor put me through one HELLUVA obstacle course, too. The guys watching me take the test were somewhat surprised at how much I needed to do to prove my skills. I passed - thirty out of thirty questions and tasks completed successfully!

  
mikey on his birthday

  I've been window shopping online quite a bit these days. I've been seriously thinking about purchasing a notebook computer. I just keep running into the wall of having to purchase one running Windows Vista - which I DO NOT want. I could run off on a bit of a tangetized rant here about how much that piece o' shit OS sucks, about how PATHETIC it is that Bill Gates and company want to imitate Apple, and how digital rights management is a violation of civil liberties (and how enforcing it on a machine is a total PIG on memory speed and processor power), but I won't. Anyone who knows anything about computers knows enough to stay away from Microsoft's latest blunder.

  Anyway...

  Wal-Mart has an interesting little machine I'm thinking of buying. It has Vista, yeah - but a quick format and an Anaconda install later and it would be running under Fedora 7. I've got like one third of my network running under Linux right now, and I'm looking to get the whole thing running under Linux by the end of the year. I just don't dig the way Microsoft is trying to cram Vista down everyone's collective throats.

  Okay...

  I'm back on Vista again, aren't I?

  Actually...

  I'll probably set the laptop's hard drive up to run under a dual boot scenario - I'll split the drive into two partitions and be able to choose between booting into either Fedora 7 or WinXP. It's not often, but sometimes I need to make house calls on people's computers (mostly, when a 'puter is sick, I have its owner drop it off with me and pick it up in a couple of days), and plenty of times I'd wished I had a good notebook PC to get the job done quicker. I can pick up an OEM copy of WinXP Home for $89 from Tiger Direct (Pro for $139).

  There're so many ways I want my money to go though...

  I mean...

  I want to buy GOOD servers for this network...

  A GOOD camera for my little Route 309 webcam deal (I found one with an onboard Linux Debian OS that runs its own wireless thing)...

  I actually want to break the cam off into its own domain, seperate from damnage. I have a name chosen for it, and it's available. I'm not going to share it yet 'cause that's just DUMB. I'm still pissed off at the little prick who scammed up damnage.org. I wanted to buy that up again, too, dammit. I owned it back in 2000, and gave it up.

  Anyway...

  It's late, and I should try and get some sleep...

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  Okay...

  I'm definitely not bored anymore...

  My first day back, and I dunno...

  It was pretty interesting.

  I came home pretty sore and worn out. It was a good worn out though. I love factory work, actually. Things change enough every day to keep it interesting, and they're mundane enough to give me a sense of routine. I dig that balance. I never realized how much I missed it until I got back into it.

  By the way...

  I know people are actually READING this stuff. Server logs don't lie. Don't be shy - gimme a yell so I don't feel like a duck quacking in an empty void here! Actually, it's okay if ya don't. Sometimes I think I write this stuff more for myself than anyone else.

  I forgot to mention before that my best friend, who had the aneurism, is home from the hospital in Philly - which is great. He got home about a week ago and he's doing well.

  Damnage is doing well. The computers that run it survived their little freak-out from the power surge. I really do need to get that redundant power supply, don't I? Uptime is EVERYTHING for a server, and NOT buying one is pretty much neglectful on my part.


damnage.com from the outside

  Okay...

  That's actually an older picture of damnage. My desk is almost never THAT neat. Actually, that picture is about a year old. Damnage is on the other side of my desk now, and it has a bigger monitor. It's still a Compaq Deskpro EN though. It amazes me that that little box does so damned much. I can't wait until I can scrape some money together to get the Systemax tower servers I want. Damnage was built on a severely tight budget. I paid (after a one-hundred dollar rebate) ninety-nine bucks for that little Pentium III deal. True, I sunk a few hundred more in for a better hard drive, optical drive, memory, and a monitor, but its level of efficiency astounds me sometimes. Linux is a wonderful thing, isn't it? It allowed me to take an otherwise fairly useless computer and convert it into a very powerful server.

  I'm dying for the chance to build another one for damnage.net...

  Which yeah, I'm not totally sure about what I want to do with d-net just yet.

  My hope is to build d-net into a top-level domain name server where I can rent gigs of space and bandwidth out to people. I have the level of expertise to accomplish it - I just need some cash to put it all together. I would also like to build a DNS machine and test it out. I know the principals behind one, but it's all just theory to me. I won't really learn about it all until I actually get to BUILD one and run it.

  All I can say, after years of dealing with hosting providers and free servers (like Tripod and Geocities) - runnng the show by myself is KILLER. I wouldn't trade it for ANYTHING.

  Oh well...

  This is more of a ramble than a blog/post.

  I should probably get some sleep...

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  Wow...

  Four days off and I didn't really do much...

  After my somewhat limited birthday festivities subsided, I basically just laid around the house, doing nothing - and I had a wonderful time doing it. I used to always say "doin' nothin' means a lot to me..." (I got it from Bon Scott - sue me...), and it does. I spent a lot of time thinking these past few days. I've mostly been thinking about the direction I want to take this network in...


mikey bein' a bum

  What does one do when they own infinite possibilities on the web? I can build my own machines. I now have six static IP addresses. I'm in a position where I can say or do anything I want. The whole thing with web hosting keeps dancing around in my brain. I'm perfectly capable of putting it together. It'll just take some money, basically.

  hmmm...

  I've been looking at some Systemax tower servers - they're very reasonably priced, and seem as though they were just MADE to run under Fedora 7.

  I found one mistake I made with attempting to set up my personal machine under Fedora - I left the chosen hard drive on a RAID channel - dumb! But that's what I get for setting the thing up while I was loopular. If I'd set it up using IDE, it may've gone differently. I might try it again tonight.

  The server got knocked out yesterday. Thunderstorm? Power surge? Voltage spike? I don't know - I was asleep. Actually, from what I can see, it happened about an hour after I went to bed. I work second shift, I sleep all day, so the problem didn't get corrected until I woke up. Actually, my mom sent me a text message on my phone telling me the network was down and' everything. One of these years I'll get some spare change together and buy a redundant power supply for damnage. Nothing fancy - just something that would allow the network to have uninterrupted power for a minute or two.

  I decided to enter this blog into a topsite list deal, and I found myself in a position where I didn't have a 468 x 60 banner for it. So on the fly, I made this thing up:



  I'm looking for a good thumbnail gallery post script for this blog. I basically want to integrate all of my photographic stuff into this blog and move it out of damnage.com's main site. I dunno, it makes more sense to have it here. Doesn't it? I dunno - it does to me.

  I've also added a new shoutbox to this little site - you can find it on your right...

  Anyway...

  Back to work tomorrow afternoon...

  I don't mind though. I actually like my job. I work with some great people...

  I just wish I had time for everything. There's so much I want to do...

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  Yeah...

  I'm thirty-five years old now...

  What's strange is that I feel a lot better now than I did, say, ten, or even fifteen years ago. I guess a lot of it has to do with all the weight I've lost recently.

  I don't talk about it much, but I've lost about eighty pounds. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Not off my frame. Standing six feet, seven inches tall (202 cm), I can carry a lot of weight. My job at Sealy is highly physically demanding, and weight dropped off of me really quickly when I started working there. Now I have a bunch of clothes that don't fit me.


fun with my camera-phone thing...

  Case in point:

  I have a wedding I'm attending early next month, and I was going through dress shirts to wear. They're all like COMICALLY too big for me. I must've lost about three inches from my neck. Shirts that I used to have trouble buttoning the top button with, well - I can get two hands inside the collar now with the top button buttoned.

  Don't get me wrong...

  I feel great being so much lighter an' everything.

  I dunno...

  Anyway...

  I had a nice, quiet birthday this year. I spent Saturday night out at Whiskey Business with a few friends from work, and my mom came over Sunday with a nice chocolate cake and some presents. If this is thirty-five, I'll take it. Actually, as far as physical appearance goes, I'm pretty good here. If this is as old as I'm gonna look, I'd be more than satisfied. It's weird...

  I can see the people around me, the people I grew up with, getting older, but I basically look the same. I just shaved my beard back into a goatee - mainly because I was curious to see how much weight I lost in my face - it turned out to be a LOT. Anyway, looking at myself being as close to clean-shaven as I get, I dunno...

  I look the same as I did, say, ten years ago. Actually, I look basically the same as I did fifteen years ago. Although, back then I DID get mistaken for being older than I was. Now, I always get mistaken for being much younger. I still get carded in bars. Hell, if I'm clean-shaven, I still get carded for cigarettes.

  I dunno...

  Life's an interesting thing sometimes, I guess...

  Anyway...

  I have a nice, four day weekend I took for myself this weekend. I don't have to go back to work until Wednesday afternoon - which is great. I can use the rest. I might take some time and make some improvements to damnage.com. I've been messing around with Fedora 7, which I downloaded and burned to disk from BitTorrent. It's neat, but they're still having bugs with AMD and with multiple monitor support. I can get two of my three monitors working though, which is an improvement over Fedora Core 5 for me.

  I think for tonight though, I might just go and do some grocery shopping at Wal-Mart...

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Dude...

  After getting the living SHIT kicked out of me at work tonight, I decided I needed to have one of those after-work deals where you remind yourself WHY it is you go to a punishing job every day to begin with...

  Wal-Mart anyone?

  The Wal-Mart in Wilkes-Barre can get a bit weird for me after the sun goes down, so I trucked my little Tracker down to Hazleton (a much mellower Wal-Mart incarnation) to see how the store's renovations are going and what-not.

  Okay...

  Not only did I get their LAST copy of Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects for seven dollars and fifty cents, I also got a new pair of steel toed Herman Survivors for like fifty-five bucks! You know what the best part about buying the boots is? They're actually FREE! I have a wonderful employer, Sealy Incorporated, who allows me a once a year allowance for steel toe work boots of sixty dollars! All I need to do is turn in my receipt to our human resources guy and our accounting department will credit my bank account for the money.



...and yeah

  I actually DID buy the boots for work...

  I dunno...

  I'm just sitting here, drinking a Molson Golden from the fine leather mug I purchased at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire a couple of weeks back, and I thought I'd share the Wal-Marting experience I had tonight.

  Lame, huh?

  Gimme a break...

  This blogging script is a fun new toy for me!

Hello...

  Welcome to my new blog...

  I was gonna go to bed, but I'm still working out some bugs with this thing.

  Anyway...

  I originally intended this blog to just be for myself, but it occurred to me that other people might like to join, which is cool. If you'd like to sign up for an account and begin blogging here, you can do so by clicking here. The previous link will take you to a registration page where you'll be asked to fill in a few lines of simple stuff, most of which you can either ignore or edit later. You'll be given a log in and small profile. You can even add a small picture (maximum 400 x 600 pixels) if you'd care to.

  I have four different categories set up so far - random stuff, technobabble, photography, and web site stuff (primarily for updates to damnage.com). My mind and my interests are both diverse and fractured things, so I'll probably be adding more categories as I think of them. For right now, random stuff has an actual post in it.

  I just hope that people who've read and commented on stuff I've blogged on about elsewhere are nice enough to follow me here and continue to read and make comments on me and my life...

  Don't worry about breaking any rules - I own this server, so basically, there aren't any rules! All I ask is that you don't spam this thing with ads for cheap Viagra and porn...

  Be good...

  Okay...

  So yeah...

  I got totally sick and pissed off with myspace. Gee, am I the ONLY one?

  People spammin' me all the time...

  I dunno...

  So anyway, I put this thing together, basically because I dig the whole concept of blogging. Actually, I dig pretty much ANY form of creative writing. It's all good.

  My life is a beautiful disaster right now.

  My best friend is in a Philadelphia hospital. He was taken there by life-flight. It seems he had an aneurism. I know, the guy's thirty-five years old, it makes no fucking sense. I had tears in my eyes the first time I went down there to see him last week. No one, and I mean NO ONE should ever see their best friend the way I saw mine - buried under all those tubes. Things've looked up somewhat, and they're saying he'll be able to resume a normal life once he recovers. Damn, I hope so...


a philadelphia street scene outside the hospital

  I've been pretty well occupied since I last posted at spam.com...

  In other medically related news...

  A gentleman who was working in my department had himself a heart attack last night. Being the lead guy in my department, I'm also the trained first responder. He was telling everyone from the time he got in that he was having chest pains. Everyone, that is, except for the people who could DO something for him. One of my guys finally let me in on the fact the guy was bad off, and after ascertaining he could walk okay, I took him to the cafeternium to rest. Then I got him help. Well, me, one of the other department leads, and the gentleman acting as a supervisor (ours was on vacation last night). He called 911. Turns out the guy WAS having a heart attack, and has three blocked valves in his heart. The man is in for triple-bypass surgery this morning. Everyone's saying that I saved his life - that's BULLSHIT! The guy who told me what he was being told about chest pains and shooting pains in the arms saved his life! I just responded accordingly to the information I was given. Had I gotten it sooner, I would've acted sooner...


my saws at work...

  I finally got my raise for being a department lead...

  I also, subsequently, purchased five additional static IP addresses for damnage. As my grandfather would say, "Now we're cookin' wit' gas!"

  I have a couple of routers and a switch, so I've broken the network in two. One router's public. The other one's private. I feel a helluva lot better knowing that my personal computer no longer shares a network with damnage, believe you me...

  Anyway...

  I'm beat ta shit (another advantage to runnin' this myself, I can use profanity at will)...

  I worked some nice overtime tonight, and the rest of the week promises to bring more.

  I'm gonna heat some pizza up in the micrwave an' crash...