Category Archives: happenings

back to the grind

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So it’s been a couple of weeks since my sojourn to Chicago and life in Atlanta hasn’t changed much since then. I still go to work every day and wish that I could have almost any other job in the world.  I still walk a few miles in the mornings and take longer treks on the weekends.  I still have rehearsals on Tuesdays, still listen to my friend Robin play his guitar and sing on Wednesdays, still feed the feral cats most mornings, still have lots of jobs that need to be done around the house.

I guess about the only thing that has changed in the last two weeks is that I’ve been a happier guy.  And yeah – that’s pretty much a direct consequence of my Chicago trip.  Amy and I have had several long talks in the last two weeks and, though we don’t know exactly how things are going to work, we’re both pretty sure that they are going to work.  That makes me happy.  And that’s all I’m going to say about that for now.

Work really has been a complete drag since I switched to DLSO.  It’s bad enough that I really don’t understand what it is that we’re trying to accomplish.  What makes it worse is that the other Atlanta guy – the one who I was actually sort of looking forward to working with – doesn’t seem to have the capacity to shut up. Today, for example, he decided to spend twenty minutes reciting to me all of the company acronyms that he could think of – knowing that the over-abundance of acronyms in my job is one of the things that really pisses me off.  He’s a nice enough guy, but sheesh!  STOP TALKING ALREADY.

With that notable exception, today wasn’t all that bad.  I got volunteered to write the procedures for some failover testing that we’ll be doing tomorrow and it was the most useful I’ve felt in a month.  Nothing huge – just filling in some server names and determining in what order they should be shut off or turned on – but I was doing something tangible and it felt good.  I keep telling myself that if I can just hang in there until the actual technical trials start, I’ll be okay.  Time will tell.

It is currently pouring down rain for about the third of fourth time today.  I don’t mind, as it’s keeping the temperature down and it always sounds nice to me; but every time we get big storms I have to wonder what’s happening to my roof – and I have to wonder how fast my grass is going to grow.  I just mowed the lawns last Saturday, and it’d be nice not to have to do it again really soon, particularly as my next two weekends are booked and I’ll be going to Canada for three weeks after that.

Booked weekends?  Yes!  This coming Friday, I’ll be heading for Gettysburg, PA, immediately after work.  Amy will be playing there with the Athena Brass Band on Saturday afternoon, and that seemed like a good enough excuse to make the trip.  I also intend to kidnap her on Sunday and bring her back to Atlanta until Monday night.

The following weekend, the Georgia Brass Band will be playing at the International Euphonium Institute’s grand finale on Saturday night – and plans are in the works for a certain red-headed friend of mine to fly to Atlanta on Friday to take in the Saturday show and learn a bit more about my adopted city on Sunday.

After tucking her back into a plane on that Sunday, I’ll have one more day of work to snore through before putting my happy ass in the Audi and heading to Vermont, where – on June 28th – the GBB will play a benefit concert for the Sheldon Museum, and from there I’ll make my way up to Magnetawan to spend 10 days or so at glorious Ahmic Lake before picking my way southwestward between two rather larger lakes in order to spend another two or three days in Waukegan.  Then it’ll be, yet again, back to the grind.

I think I’ll still be pretty happy, though.

TWD

yeah. i’m mr. fix-it

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Got home this evening and decided to tackle the knocking noise in the automatic litter box that’s in my bedroom.  It’s a pretty remarkable device as litter boxes go.  I can see the lot of you rolling your eyes at me, but it’s true.  Basically, this is a large round bowl with a conveyor belt sticking into one side of it at an angle.  A small electric motor spins the entire bowl about once every hour, and the poop and solidified chunks of pee are carried up the ramp and dropped into a plastic bag.  No muss, no fuss.  Really.  See for yourself:

So the problem has been with the small motor that rotates the bowl.  It’s a tiny little thing about the diameter of a fifty-cent piece; and, for whatever reason, it has developed a very slight knocking.  Unfortunately, that slight knocking is passed from the motor and amplified through a series of four gears (the last one being the bowl itself) and has become rather loud.

After spending 30 minutes ripping the entire setup apart, I managed to get to the motor, which was caked with litter dust (no surprise there), but otherwise seemed to be completely clean.  I’d been hoping that a good cleaning would be all it needed, but after blowing it off and putting some magic oil on the gear, I was unable to stop the knocking completely.  It’s a bit better, but still annoying.

So I moved on to Plan B, which consists of putting the stupid thing on a timer so that it only comes on for 1 out of every 8 hours.

After solving that problem – at least at much as I’m going to solve it without buying a new motor – I turned my attention to my old laptop, which continues to irritate me because I’m easy to irritate and because it isn’t perfect.  So far I’ve tried to install about 5 different flavors of Linux on it (with limited success); but, since Linux can’t play Netflix, I really need for it to be running Windows.

It’s a fairly old laptop.  I think I bought it in around 2004.  For some reason, its wireless hardware is not recognized by Windows 7.  Though I’ve managed to install Win7 on it twice, I have not yet been able to get the wireless up.  To anyone smirking and feeling all superior, YES, I’ve looked for drivers all over the place.  It’s not the software, it’s the hardware.  Eventually, I may pull the wifi stuff out of a busted HP that’s sitting on my desk and see if it’ll work with the Dell.

At any rate, Win7 isn’t going to work.  So tonight I put Windows Vista (Ultimate) on it.  Everything seems to work fine, but it may be a bit too much for the processor.  When I tried watching Netflix at full-screen, the video was choppy.  This may have been because AVG (anti-virus) was hogging all of the cpu cycles or it may not have been.  Whatever.  Tomorrow night, I’ll put WinXP on it and see if it’s happy with that.

Stupid Netflix.  If they’d just come up with a player for Linux, I wouldn’t have to deal with all this crap.

Took this at Chattanooga last season and have no place to use it.  Might as
well throw it in here.

TWD