Russell & Kimmy

So I got an annoying virus on my laptop. So in an enraged fit I did what I do best, Russell Smash!! Actually I just figured that I would just wipe the stupid diseased laptop and start fresh. I learned a few important lessons doing that:

So after suffering through crap like McAafee, MSN Messenger, and the prodigious amount of crap that computer makes decide to bloat your laptop with; I finally had my laptop back to pristine condition. It wasn’t easy. I have discovered that having a Tablet PC combined with Gateway’s crappy restoration software creates several interesting scenarios. Did you know that the Tablet PC has an on screen keyboard that functions like a regular keyboard except that it will interrupt the installation process of whatever happens to be loading. Including files that are necessary to finish the installation of Windows. Needless to say by the 3rd time, I was a bit … peeved.

The drive home today was also an unpleasant task. UT and AISD have finally started school, so all the morons were out on the road. Normally I wouldn’t let it get to me but well I am an impatient jerk. Well after fighting with the laptop, servers at work, space aliens, and traffic; I have the need of some mindless entertainment. Normally that would be the Simpsons, but Kimmy is stronger than me and switches the TV to Friends. Normally I am not to fond of friends but a recent rerun was actually quite interesting. Joey (the dumb one) stated that there can not be any self-less good deeds. The act of doing a good deed brings a sense of satisfaction/joy/superiority to the do-gooder, making the act selfish. A rather Kantian statement and one that I have argued time and time again in philosophy class; in the end we are all selfish jerks ….

Nuclear powered paper airplanes would be awesome; unfortunately this post has nothing to do with them. Instead I am going to talk about work. I actually left work today feeling satisfied; I accomplished much, was only stressed a little and got a $50 gift-card. I am still a bit confused about why I got the gift-card; technically it was for doing my job … I thought my paycheck was supposed to cover for that put I have decided it is best to not look a gift horse in the mouth. The satisfaction of a good day at work almost wiped out the bitter memory of no benefits, almost but not quite; it didn’t help when some one at work told me I could really use a vacation.

Warning, political rant ….

It did however wipe out the incredible anger I had toward the President’s proposed changes to government funded health care. I need to stop listening to NPR in the morning; it is destroying my faith in humanity. It did teach me that President Bush hates poor children; although let us be fair, no one likes poor kids. To screw over the children of the poor, the White House proposed several ridiculous changes to the S-Chip program. The most ridiculous proposal was in regards to families that quite private insurers to migrate to the S-Chip program; this is known as crowd out. I like to refer to it as the choice between (either food or private insurance) OR (government funded health care). To avoid crowd out any family that drops a private insurer will be required to go with out insurance for one year before being allowed to register with the S-Chip program. Since I know the President is not a moron, I must conclude that this is diabolically clever. People with out insurance go the emergency room, after all hospitals are required to treat you, seek treatment and are discharged. Please notice that no one is getting paid. The HMO that is running the hospital is going to take a financial hit, which goes on the books, to cover for this they charge people who have insurance more. Insurance premiums rise and people have to pay more; generating more cowbell profit for insurance companies. Clever, diabolically clever; plus you get to screw poor people and everyone hates poor people.

political rant is no over…

I also found out at work today that I am pretty anal. I never realized how much of a stick I had stuffed up my posterior till I was re-writing a Genesys strategy. As long as Genesys has all the dots connected it is happy; you can even stack all the icons on top of each other to create horrible icon-stuffed blue line spaghetti. However Mr. Anal (aka me) can not stand a sloppy Genesys strategy. All the icons have to line up, they have to be spaced exactly the same distance from each other, must be labeled and the labels must be the exact same size. I spent 15 minutes writing /modifying a strategy and 45 minutes making it look pretty. I am sure someone will appreciate it farther down the line, probably right before they delete it to make room for a new strategy.

Today was also Kimmy’s first day back to class. I asked her how it went and she told me it was going to be a busy class. I tried to feel sorry for her but I did have to get up and go to work this morning; there wasn’t a lot of sympathy. Plus I know I am going to be helping her with our homework; yes our homework, evidently when you get married her homework becomes our homework. If I could draw (and had a sense of taste) I would be an awesome interior designer.

So evidently those incredibly smart people at Vanderbilt figured out how to make a bitchin bionic arm. Rather than go with the traditional battery power source; those crazy scientist decided to make their arm better and by better I mean rocket powered. Rocket power makes everything awesome and this arm is no exception; it is 10 times stronger than a regular prosthetic arm, 4 times faster and able to go 18 hours at a steamy 450 degrees (who wouldn’t like to go 18 hours). To cool this hot bad boy down they use some special plastics and have it sweat; that is right a sweating bionic arm.

It is amazing what you can do when you explode hydrogen peroxide in the name of science.

So I would like to apologize for not actually writing for almost a whole month; there went my goal of bi-weekly posting. Kimmy and I have been slammed by one event after another. The first major event of August that left us breathless was our lawn service quite on us after not mowing for more than 4 weeks. Normally that wouldn’t have been such a huge deal, the hot August sun usually scorches the green out of any living plant; usually except this August has been fraking wet. The lawn was wild and didn’t mow down with out a fight. It took $200, a lot of raking, a broken lawn mower, a broken weed eater, some dehydration, starvation, and two loving parents before the thing was semi tamed. Luckily we found another individual to provide lawn service; hopefully he won’t quite. That consumed a good chunk of my time, then we had a wedding in Houston. The wedding was beautiful but I forgot how much I dislike Houston. It is a fetid arm pit and I am thankful for not living there. The last big strain on my back and my time (apart from general apathy) was helping one of my friends move. Granted that only took one day but it was a really long day; okay it was only 4 hours but it was a really long 4 hours. We finally got LW moved, her old apartment semi cleaned, and extracted a promise from her that she would keep her new apartment clean. Kimmy and I are going to go check on her later this week and make sure she hasn’t relapsed. Keeping her clean and organized is a lot like an AA meeting, except there are no cookies.

My other big gripe, work, is going well. KP is actually back at work, except he is pitching for the other team. It is nice to see a face there that understands my anguish and lets me abuse them like a free therapist. We are both doing grunt work for our respective tech overlords. Genesys has been a real joy in my life. I got our 3 new Genesys servers rack mounted and well that is about it. Did I ever mention how much of a pain rack mounting a server is, there is no standardization between different case manufactures. I hate them all. I would have them powered up and running except the UPS decided to commit seppuku and there are no free network ports. It is the small joys in life that make me wonder why I haven’t shot someone yet.

To make it worse I am cutting down on my C8H10N4O2 intake. I am trying to limit myself to one coke a day. So far it takes a few bottles of water and a few cups of tea to keep me sane during the day.

You knowyou love some one when they almost throw up on you and it is no big deal. Kimmy and I don’t have cable so we rely on the networks to entertain us; it is eerily similar to trusting a two year old with a loaded gun …. sometimes it is interesting but usually you just end up shot in the ass. We had just sat down for supper and were flipping through all 5 of our glorious channels when I stopped on E!. The wretched show had just finished some craptacular reporting on the View, which I despise loathe hate with the burning passion of a thousand suns, and started a special on Tammy Faye Baker. A picture of Tammy fills the screen and Kimmy gags on the bite she had just taken.

She made that cute little face that said I am fixin to spew, for good measure I moved over a few feet and asked her if anything was wrong. She muttered something about her appetite going the way of the Dodo and pushed her plate away. She then turns to me and cries “Why would E! show that during dinner” followed by “I am going to call them and let them know they should warn people before they do that!” I wisely said nothing; I was to busy laughing. It hurt and I think I pulled something, but it was funny.

Dinner for the record was pretty good. It was some sort of sheppard’s pie; strangely enough there is no sheppard in the sheppard’s pie. Evidently HEB does not sell ground sheppards and gives you a really funny look when you ask why not. I mean come on its Sheppard the other white meat!

Segwaying from pie, Matt Groening and David Cohen announced last Saturday at the Comic-Con Convention that they are going to sheppard 4 full length DVD movies of Futurama from their awesome minds straight to my TV. The plan to psionically beam them to my TV failed, evidently David Cohen and Matt Groenig do not have psionic powers despite being able to magically determine what I want to see on TV. Now I have to continue watching crappy network programming till November 27th when Futurama: Bender’s Big Score is available for me to waste my hard earned money on. I tried to make a time machine to leap over the next 115 days and ended up fighting some really ugly Morlocks. The got a severe beating and I decided it was probably for the best to wait (what a horrible concept) till November 27th.

I really do detest waiting, but I detest Morlocks even more (almost as much as lawyers and politicians).