Russell & Kimmy

So Kimmy and I went out with our friends Friday night; are costumes were fraking awesome. Nick does make a wonderful two face, and I’ll take Kimmy dressed up in black vinyl any day of the week. Leslie made an authentic Harley Quinn, Sam a sultry Ivy, and John a convincing Joke. I of course looked super awesome in tails as Penguin; I curse the San Antonio Zoo for not loaning me a few of their aquatic Artic fowl. I learned two very important things while on 6th street; first I am much to damn old to hang out on 6th street all night and second UT kids don’t know how to party. Actually I learned 3 important things, 3rd monocles are a pain to wear. Sadly 6th street was a lot less fun than I remember and more like a barbed monocle; not a lot of costumes and a ton of jackasses. Evidently dressing up for Halloween offers the jackasses the invitation to verbally harass you; as if a jackass needs an invitation. Personally I think since they are already in the street, strip them naked and shoot them in the mouth. Where is a good frenzied mob that is into mouth shooting when you need one? At least one annoying blond chick came to our rescue, but no Bat Man.  I don’t remember Austin being so full of jerks, I blame migration from California, maybe I just don’t go out enough anymore or maybe America is going to hell in a hand basket. If traffic is any indication America has already gone to hell and people who drive white Lexus SUVs are the devil; yes I am talking to you dumb lady on a cell phone who almost hit my perfect car twice, my anger toward you is not amusing.

But what is amusing and is perhaps the most entertaining thing I saw on 6th street involved a group of “Spartans”; I use that term lightly. Three frat daddies were walking around 6th street in golden briefs and red capes. I have to admit that they had the abs to pull of Spartans; I was a bit jealous as was my ab. But that is not the amusing part; all right I admit that three half-drunk frat daddies are amusing but it gets better. The amusing part was wearing heels, panties that were 4 inches longer than her 4 inch skirt, and a little top that did not have enough structural integrity to contain her heaving bosom; her friend was dressed undressed in pretty much the same way. You know you are getting old when a girl is already half undressed and you think it is funny; maybe I just need a good challenge. But that is not the amusing part; I lied earlier when I said it was. The funny part was that these two “ladies” did an about face when they passed the Spartans and started following them. It warms my heart and brings laughter to my soul to know that women are just as shallow as men. While we are on the topic of female anatomy, I wanted to plug this save the boobies poster that I found on Deviant art.

Perhaps the best costume that I saw was at a party we crashed. The party sucked, the crowd was enormous, the beer was flat and the conversation sucked more than Larry Craig in an airport bathroom. There were some rather funny costumes though; I am torn between drunken Pooh Bear and the Censored Lady. Drunken Pooh Bear is pretty self explanatory; censored lady however was actually pretty clever. There was a young lass wearing a flesh colored body suit (we all though she was naked there for a while) with a black box over the chest and a black box over the crotch. Witty and clever; it gives me hope that the younger generation is not as stupid as I fear; but hope is like a double bladed light saber …. Sure it cuts through the bitter and dim future but in the end you are falling down a continently open industrial shaft in two pieces.

So I had to drag Kimmy out of bed this morning very early. I was rewarded by loving glances full of hate and a punch to the face; nothing says I love you like a punch to the face. So I did the chivalrous thing; I yanked the covers off and turned the AC on. Since Kimmy isn’t quite sure how to work the AC she got up, wrapped herself in a blanked and plopped down in front of the desktop. The normal 30 second boot time on my computer was delayed some what so she called me over right as the oh so lovely non system disk error graced the screen. There was that painful sinking feeling, a lot like a punch in the gut, as I rebooted; had my Maxtor hard drive of over 5 years finally failed me? It appeared that it had, couple that with Rick Perry’s endorsement of Rudi Giuliani and the day looked like it was going to contain a lot of suck; plus I had to wear nice clothes to work. I really loathe wearing nice clothes to work, they are hot and get torn on vicious server racks and are expensive. I really detest, no hate, listening to Rick Perry talk; it constantly amazes me that some one with that much brain damage could be governor of Texas. Its even worse that 39% of Texans voted for him, that means there are roughly 7,757,568.39 idiots in Texas (most of them are probably from California). I have a standing bet with my evil blond almost a lawyer sister that she could do a better job than Rick Perry while piss drunk; she has yet to take me up on the offer something about not wanting to ruin Texas’s habit of electing the village idiot. Well enough Rick Perry bashing, who am I kidding I can never get enough of that but there is more to babble about.

Luckily the day got better; Rick Perry was silenced with duct tape and I was invited to attend a Microsoft Live Event; basically a really nice Microsoft Representative tries to convince you that Microsoft is awesome, that their brand is good and that there are probably features that you are not fully utilizing. This Live Event happened to cover SharePoint. I love SharePoint, we use it at work for document collaboration and project planning; just thought I would get that out of the way because I won’t be bashing it. I love the fact I can load documents up to our SharePoint Server, track updates, coordinate meetings and be productive. It would be even more awesome if CSC finished upgrading our Exchange Servers so that we could attach all the really cool bells and whistles, like instant voice and video conferencing or enhanced document management. Soon I shall have access to Exchange 2007 and that kidney that I need; I would rather have the server upgrade kidneys can always wait but you never know when you can pry money out of corporate executives. So after the 4 hour live event, which included free sodas, I only had 3 hours of work left.

After work I waded home through horrible traffic (again thank you California) and started work on my hard drive. After dis-assembling my beautiful case I pulled the hard drive out and powered up the computer. Got the same damn non system disk error. Devastated I rebooted the PC and put my ear to the hard drive. There was the tiny whirling sound of something not quite in gear, no it wasn’t my mind, so I gently tapped the hard drive. My awesome powers of computer repair some how tapped the hard drive in just the right spot and the damn thing now works. Luckily I had backed everything up recently (as part of my haphazard yet comprehensive back up plan), so it wasn’t a life or death situation. And it is great to know that despite all the technical complexity in the world I am awesome and hitting things occasionally fixes the problem; if only we could apply that to politics.

P.S. Oh yeah, sorry about missing the post on Tuesday, I was re-learning that painful lesson that I am not as young as I think I am.

Warning: Russell throwing down his 2 cents

Today the House Foreign Relations Committee voted to condemn the mass killings of Armenians during World War I as genocide; Turkey recalled their ambassador in protest. President Abdullah Gul (President of Turkey for all the confused out there; yes other countries have presidents too) criticized the vote and warned that this could work against the United States. The military needs Turkish airspace and desperately wants to keep Turkey from attacking the Kurds in northern Iraq; both of which Turkey is implying that we could loose due to the House Foreign Relations Committee’s vote. Now the US is in an interesting position, do we down play the murder (such an ugly word) of 1.5 million Armenians OR do we stick to our moral high ground and call a spade a spade.

Kant laid down the rule for a moral action that I am particularly fond of; an action is moral if it is performed out of duty and for no other reason. There is a lot more to that but the key word is duty. It is an interesting position to be in; do we (as a nation) condemn genocide because it is a truly reprehensible act and is our duty to condemn such acts or do we placate our friends and postpone our moral duty. It is especially interesting because we are at war; we are not at war with terrorist, Iraq, Iran, the axis of evil, the enemies of freedom or any one else who loves to hate America, thought I needed to clear that up. We are in an ideological war that I have no doubt we will win (we can wipe out almost all the life on the planet); but increasingly I feel it will be a pyrrhic victory and winning will cost us our ideology that we hold so dear.

Glad that is over;

So scuttlebutt has it that Kimmy and I are some sort of social butterfly (I blame Kimmy it is entirely her fault); isn’t it weird how a married couple becomes a single unit? Once again our Google Calendar is booked solid; if you haven’t tried Google Calendar yet I recommend it, it doesn’t have the functionality of Outlook’s calendar but it is free and is a web app. We have a wedding shower, role-playing, a baptism, and I think I have to go to work some where in there while also visiting Grandma and Grandpa who are crashing at my parents’ house this weekend. I wanted to go and see the Maker Faire that was in Austin this weekend but I don’t think I can squeeze it in and tickets were $25.00 (a little pricy for having to get up at 9 AM and leave by noon). It is probably for the best that I don’t go; the last thing Kimmy needs is me trying to convince her that a trebuchet would be an acceptable lawn ornament and an artistic expression. I’ll just have to find another way to express my inner evil; preferably with something that is steam powered. Personally all this sociability is hampering my NWN2 game play. I am only on Act II and I desperately need to finish it so I can switch to the expansion Mask of the Betrayer. Hopefully Mask of the Betrayer will tide me over till Star Craft 2 and Fall Out 3; Fall Out 3 has a really nifty contest going on right now if you are interested (it makes up for the game not coming out till Fall 2008).

There are also rumors that Al Gore might be winning a Noble Prize for his work on global warming. I know this probably irritates a lot of people out there (like Republicans) who believe global warming is a bunch of hooey. Personally I hope he wins it. Global warming (now also a problem in SIM City) may or may not be a fact (like evolution is just a theory and so is Creationism) but you can not deny that humans have changed the Earth; and it isn’t for the better. It reminds me of an old adage, don’t crap where you eat or piss where you drink.

Speaking of drinking what did I drink? Creationism a theory, yeah right and I am the pope.

So today, the Republican presidential candidates once again ensured that I will not be voting for them. The Republican Presidential Candidate debate (hosted by CNBC) started off pretty good; there was talk of the economy, manufacturing prowess and military might (all things I like). But the 3rd question steered the debate off of the narrow path of my interest into the yawning chasm of my loathing/apathy; it was about taxes. Evidently the rich in America pay more taxes. That profound statement almost made me choke on my tongue; and since my health insurance is so crappy that could have been disastrous. Of course the rich pay more taxes, allow me to break it down in simple easy to understand terms.

Me: I make $30,000/year and we are going to assume a 20% tax rate which would equal $6000/year ($2,400 of which went to pork barrel spending) in taxes.

Über-boss: makes $1,000,000/year (not counting stock options and perks) and we are going to be equitable and assume a 20% tax rate which would equal $200,000/year in taxes.

Now for the scary part ….. $200,000 > $6,000; so a rich person would pay much more in taxes than I but the tax rate is equitable, not to mention a rich person should have an awesome accountant who should be able to defraud cheat swindle lower the amount of taxes he actually pays. Now I understand paying $200,000/year in taxes really blows but someone has to pay for the pork barrel projects that tax and spend liberals Democrats communist the Republican Party loves to feast on. The important part of this argument is that the tax percentage is equitable; everyone pays the same percentage for that slice of the American pie. So John McCain (and others) if you are going to obfuscate the tax issue please try making it a little more difficult to unravel. Maybe there would have been some redemption, but annoyingly enough the debate was at 4:00 PM ET; a time frame when most of us average Joes would still be at work.

Work is going well, share holder value is increasing and no one got fired this week (although several people were severely inconvenienced). I am still continuing to move; move servers, move desks, move the markets, etc, etc, etc. Unfortunately this move has made me more visible and visibility equates to accessibility an annoyed Russell. I have to retrain a few of my fellow co-workers and I have to dissuade their funny notion that their problems are Russell’s problems. Russell has much bigger problems than modifying pages and fixing your phones; problems like acquiring health insurance, world peace, and trying to figure out how a fraking snow speeder was able to bring down an AT-AT. My main problem is that the tables in the Genesys 7.2 stats database are different from the Genesys 6.5 stats database; which means that I have to find the tables and patch a bunch of stuff. It is going to be a long week; lots to do and I can’t get terminated.

As much as I would love to be terminated I actually feel the urge to work. It could be that I am growing up and leaving my adolescence behind and am finally becoming a man? OR it could be that Kimmy found her incredibly expensive yet incredibly beautiful Barbie dream house; luckily its more gray thank pink. I think I had already mentioned that we had looked at a couple of historic houses in Old Town; now I get to wait and see how badly Kimmy wants to be a home owner. I already got my recliner so I am ready to take that plunge and become a home owner; I don’t get to unpack the recliner till we have the space for it.

And for a fun little tidbit that I found while at work:  If you run a Windows machine, go to the desktop create a new folder and name it CON.  Let me know if you can actually name it CON or if Windows refuses your request for some wacky anti-competative reason.

So the little tech group that I am part of at work got kicked out of the loading dock that we called home and has been banished to the cube farm where they keep everyone else. Normally moving is no big deal, you pick up your crap walk over to your new empty desk and deposit said crap on said desk. BUT, and there is always a but, toward the middle of September you may remember me lamenting the firing of twenty something temps. And it has been my experience that people who are getting fired never clean out their desks. So I spent the last coupe of days cleaning out desks, lining up excess filing cabinets, gathering excess chairs and sorting random crap; the filing cabinets look sad and lonely when they are lined up in the hallway awaiting storage. They are like little tin soldiers who have no officers and are just lost. I would feel even more pity for them except I am the one who had to line them up and that does tend to build up a healthy dose of resentment. I also found new and creative ways to store the 50 or so CRT monitors that I can’t get rid of; policy dictates that they should be returned to surplus.

And shipping a few pallets of monitors to Pennsylvania is not cheap.

However I am, right now instead of reading the pile of books next to my bed or pondering the mysteries of the universe; I am watching Smallville. I saw last season’s finale and the first to episodes of this season and so far I like them. I am not to familiar with the DC Universe but so far they are playing a teenage Clark Kent pretty much how I would imagine him. I especially like the disappointment he feels when he finds out that the daisy dukes wearing Super Girl is his cousin; ahh teenage angst. Teen age angst is much better than the crappy angst that they have on Gray’s Anatomy. Kimmy and I are still watching it but pretty much it is exactly like it was last season. If you don’t watch it, basically it is a bunch of: i hate you, i love you, i screwed you, i hate you blah blah blah blah blah, let’s be friends. Hopefully it will get better or maybe my eyes will shrivel up like raisins and fall out; or they could cancel the show.

Oh crap, it is on and I am too lazy to change the channel, curse my laziness; too much potential energy and not enough kinetic energy. At least I am responsible enough to dress appropriately for work.