somewhere in between

(Don’t worry. I’m only ranting. I’m not serious. Please don’t write into complain. This makes me feel better, really it does…:) I don’t want to start a war, this is just me after 48 hours of shit. Normal service will be resumed.)

Right, I’ve had enough now. I started install FC5 this morning, and some 12 hours later, I’m still without an Internet connection, NTFS refuses to work, I’ve had to edit a Xorg config blind to get my Nvidia card (that ran quite happily before), and I can’t boot into Windows. I entered a the boot config for my windows drive, and apparently that’s been ditched in favour of grub’s own.

Which don’t fucking boot Windows.

After close to twelve hours of trying, nonstop to get the fucking thing doing anything remotely usefull, I’ve given up. Six years, I’ve been using Linux, six fucking years, and in a day, it’s all come crashing down. I had to enter my soundcard settings by hand into modules.conf when I got my first copy of SuSE 6.2, and that a damn sight easier to set up that this clump of shit that passes for an OS.

I cannot do much more. I’ve messed around with speedtouch configs for the last four hours, and still nothing, not even a a flashing sync line. I start a connection, a connection is started. I stop a connection and I’m told that there’s no connection. What am I supposed to do?

Before anyone tells me to go and buy a decent modem, I can’t, okay? I’ve no money. I’ve no money to throw at new stuff. I have a mortgage and a life, and the things that I do have were working quite nicely till now.

Well done everyone at Fedora. If your main mission is to make life as utterly difficult as possible, then you’ve succeeded. You know why people use Windows? Because they don’t have to spend four fucking hours setting up a fucking modem that given the fucking optionwould fucking work *just* by plugging the fucking thing into the fucking USB port. And now, I’m going to have to spend another 12 fucking hours undoing all the pissing shit your discs have vomits all over my fucking harddrives. I have useless fucking computer now.

(Don’t worry. I’m only ranting. I’m not serious. Please don’t write into complain. This makes me feel better, really it does…:))

Hi Stephen

I would like to post an regular text ad on ESL for the following:

> The ad details should include an online recruitment for foreign teacher
> (preferably Caucasian) to work
>> in China.
>> 1) To work in Shanghai / Shenyang or Shenzen.
>> 2) $4000rmb per month with free accomodation and round trip air ticket
>> if sign 1 year contract
>> 3) Needs to have an experience working with young children. Cheerful
>> Submit resume to

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Mao decided that he didn’t have enough power, so he brougth the country to the edge of chaos in the sixties, everything was determined and set by whatever Mao decreed. Helped a lot by his wife, the stories of popular Chinese opera were banned, and new revisionist plays were made compulsory.

Here is such a revisionist play.

Spent most of this morning composing an email to the harpie who finds me work at the agency. By “the agency” I don’t mean that I’m a covert operative, but the agency that finds me work (or is supposed to anyway). After repeated emails and phone calls asking them not to get me jobs of a certain position at a certain company, they’ve had some success finding me work…in a certain position at a certain company. Helpfully the advice given to me by my “co-ordinator” was “Well, there’s no jobs available like that this summer that we can give you. If you want you’re money, then you’ll have to take it”. Blindingly, she’s managed to overlook the fact that I could actually tender a resignation, and go work somewhere else.

Never before have I been so incensed by a phone call that had should
have actually made me feel a bit better about things. I’m only
writing this email in the hope of making the reader feel as utterly
digusted with another human being as I did, and as I continue to do so
as the day progresses. I’m being a pain in the arse about because
when I do work here I get nothing but abuse, and very little in
the way of any thanks. I’ve been repeatedly hung out to dry and
blamed for things that aren’t my fault.

There is another way of me getting the money that I want, and that’s
for me to move to another agency, which is astonishingly easy. I took
this particular job at <COMPANY NAME> because I was told that it would be for
one week only, and for that short amount of time, I was willing to be
here. I am not willing to be here for indefinitely.

Been a bitch of a week. One of those jobs where you’re stretched beyond belief, burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. Physcially shattered, emotionally worn and intellectually arrested. I feel I’m just a big head with sunken eyes.

I’m reading through The Sum of All Fears right now. Co-incidentally, Ryan is going through a bit of a rough patch, drinking too much, not getting enough sleep…and his wife has just decided that she wants another child. Also, there’s a major plotline concerning dissident Isrealis and a nuclear bomb. There’s a lot of crossovers in the world, but sometimes things just strike you as being a little bit more than simple oddities of life.

I was rooting around a couple of supermarkets in Chinatown today, and managed to score four bottles of Tsingstao lager. Absolutely stunned that I could get it in this country, although they are the tiny bottles, and not the monsters that we were buying in China. Not bloody cheap either, three quid for four, which was taking the piss a bit since they’re about 13p (2 Yuan) for the big .75 bottles or something like that in Beijing.

Toying with the idea of going to Germany in August. I fancy seeing Auswitz for some reason, nothing more than I think that it would be important for me to do. There’s a whole history that I haven’t embraced in Europe yet. I’ve been too captivated by China’s recent history to see it, and I’ve got to get away there and see the things that are on the doorstep rather than heading out halfway around the world.

The spam filters are working well. I’m blocking at least 70% of my spam now, mostly with the words “VIAG” and “AGRA”, and I don’t get those bloody stock spams either, which is a relief. I’ve throtted back on Spam Assassin because I’m using keyword filtering, but that let 4 false negatives through today, so I need to tweak that. Good to be fighting the good fight though.

I must, must, must call Ida tomorrow, it’s her birthday, and I was supposed to be in Oslo for it. Events transpired through both work commitments and the lack of any ready cash at the time of booking a cheap flight to keep me from frolicking in the fjords. There was lots of swearing, and I think that if I call her out of the blue, it’ll be a nice suprise for her. Ida’s great, a Crazy Scandanavian in the truest sense. She sent me an email once telling me that she’d had “super crazy fun” at a music fest in Denmark. You gotta love that wild chick

Stateville Correctional Centre, Route 53, Illinois, USA
16th January, 2006

This routine had started in October, and they paid him seven dollars for his time. That’s all he knew. Admittedly, they explained themselves, having dropped out of school before he graduated, he was non the wiser. So he patiently sat there. From start to finish, the process took around an hour. It wasn’t like he had any wildly urgent appointments to keep.

Miedo looked down at the needle in his forearm. The irony that, among the many needles that he’d had stuck into him, this was the first one that was taking junk out, wasn’t wasted on him. He didn’t know why they were taking the blood – and he didn’t ask.

Three times a month, a warden would strap him into a wheelchair, barefoot and shirtless, and wheel him through to the old hospital infirmary. This part of the prison had lain derelict for forty-odd years, and the wasn’t a domestic in the country that was going to bother to clean a surgery that hadn’t seen action since Armstrong walked on the Moon
.
The fluorescent strip lights above him threw the details of the room into sharp relief. To the left, a gurney, the thin mattress was filthy and the thin rubber had split down one side. To the right, a washbasin, thick with grime and crusted over with lime scale. The tap still dripped. Outside, a single armed guard had his back to Meido – in three months, he’d never shown his face. Meido reflected on his situation. There wasn’t much to do apart from sit back and listen to the low mosquito hum of the fluorescents. An orderly would be back to relieve the guard, remove the IV line, and take Miedo back to his cell soon enough.

Sure enough, he arrived. A gaunt man with a thin goatee that rested on his chin more like a pelt than a beard. Thin, delicate fingers pulled out the line from Meido’s arm, and taped a small wad of cotton-wool over the puncture. Oddly, the orderly glance right at Meido, and they both held a gaze for a second or two. The other man broke off, and, scooping up the blood bag and tying off the tubes, he left with out a word. The warden appeared in the doorway.

“He all done?”, he asked someone out in the corridor. Meido couldn’t see who he was talking to. A thin, quiet voice answered, almost in monotone.

“Yeah,” The death dry snapping of a pair of rubber gloves being removed bounced off the white tiles, “He’s done.”

As the warden pushed the chair down the corridor, taking Meido back to his death row cell, the orderly watched, dropping the bulging blood bag onto a metal trolley that was filled with the things. His hands shaking he reached into a pocket of his white smock, and pulled out a packet of Marlboro Reds. He pulled out a laminated ID tag with the pack, the name printed was “Dr. Lucas Augustine”. He inserted a cigarette between his lips and quickly lit it. The smoke bit at his throat as he inhaled a shallow breath. Augustine looked down the corridor. The pair had disappeared, the patient taken back to his cell in the death row tier.

Right, so. I’m ploughing through this here book. I use the word book in it’s loosest possible sense. The only thing that this item has in common with other books is that it’s got words printed on pages that have numbers on them. This is no War and Peace, dear reader.

Decisions. I have to make a decision. If there’s no new action, then I haven’t really made a decision. See, I have been paying attention, although I was distracted by the cars in their pretty colours moving on the road outside. Anyway, decisions. I have to decide…what, exactly? I have to write down what I want. I don’t need to write it down, I’ve got it in my head. There’s a big long list of stuff there, there’s not enough paper or ink in the world to write it all down.

Firstly, the book is pretty much made up of Robbins telling me how successful he is. I’m depressed, I don’t need some lantern-jawed former janitor to tell me how great his life is right now. Secondly, there are far too many metaphors in this book that there deserves to be. I’m deeply suspicious of people who talk in metaphors, managers who cascade information down to me, or touch base inbetween meetings. I’m the Mao of Metaphor, and right now, Robbins is my Counter-Revolutionary Public Enemy Number one. There are a lot of sales people who love Robbins. Are you one of them? Get the fuck off my blog now. I don’t need or want you to contaminate my virtual presence with your obessesion about percentages, certificates, childish, childish office “pranks” (you know when you didn’t go to university? You didn’t miss anything, and you don’t have to start making up for it when you should be working) and your overpowering aftershave and flashy suits. And stop talking in metaphors while you’re at it, you ill-educated heathen.

There’s some kind of aversion that I’m sure will benefit from Freudian analysis where our Tony has to use the word “mate” instead of wife or girlfriend. I baulk at the word partner, but sweet Jesus, it’s a hell of a lot better than “mate”. I would find “fuck-buddy” a bit more palatable, in all honesty.

So what have I learnt so far. Not very much. Tony is very successful but couldn’t write an engaging sentence with a gun pointed to his wife’s pregnant belly and he has more money than God. Actually, I haven’t seen God’s balance sheet for this year, so that might actually be a bit of a lie.

For those of you who are too lazy to actually read the book, or listen to his nails-on-blackboard voice reciting this faecal discharge of a book (that’s another thing: find me one author who quotes HIMSELF in his own chapter titles. Either that, or Guess the Size of Tony’s Ego, email me at the usual address), it basically comes down to (and this is a free gift, from me to you, you lucky, lucky people) : Make goals, work towards your goals daily, exercise, eat better, don’t let emotions interfere with financial matters, and finally, get out of your house you lazy good-for-nothing waste of flesh.

To see what other members of the Robbins Cult of the Self-Embittered at talking about, have a look at the forums. Scary, isn’t it?

With me posting my CV on both Dave’s ESL and Monster, my spam went through the roof this last couple of days. It’s not helping that I’ve had the same address for the last three years, but it’s on my business cards and I give it out in nearly all my contact details, so I’m pretty much stuck with it.

My email setup consists of a vanity address and a GMail account. On the vanity rogueshadows.org domain, I’ve got SpamAssassin (SA) running, which was setup with default values, with no autolearning and no Bayesian filtering. Configuring through CPanel, I thought that there was no way to turn the Bayesian filter on, which was a bit of shame because the filters on Thunderbird are quite good at catching spam that hasn’t been marked as spam.

I got to a page about a week ago that generated user_prefs for SA, and I uploaded it to my server, overwriting the values that CPanel had done. Lo and behold, there were the options in the menu, appearing as if by magic. My new super-duper spamtrap now uses Razor2, Pyzor, DCC, RBL denial and Bayesian filters - with the net result that nearly all my spam now is being caught. I’ve had to whitelist yahoo and hotmail, because a lot of my friend use it, and there’s invariably a little bit of HTML or text formatting in those messages that manage to weight an email at over my Spam Score, which is set at a fairly aggressive 2.3 - the recommended level in SA is 5 for a single-user.

Since I read my mail mostly through GMail (I’m away from my own computer a lot of the time), my mail gets filtered twice, and all my mail that’s been marked with ***SPAM*** goes in the Deleted Items folder on GMail. Oddly enough, email from a friend of mine at a gmail.com address got flagged as a false positive, so I’ve whitelisted both googlemail and gmail.com. A Yahoo message also got flagged a false +ve because the signature that Yahoo’s mailserver attached to the bottom of the email read something like “Sick of emails about Viagra? Get the New Yahoo Mail”.

So, I have reclaimed my inbox! For the time being, anyway.

In the true spirit of Edward Jenner I’m experimenting on myself again. I did it once before when I was fed up with hearing about the various diet plans that everyone was banging on about at work, and managed to lose five stone. Which diet did I choose? I drank more water, got more exercise and started eating sensibly. I threw in one of my own little variations and I quit eating sugar completely.

So now, I’m intrigued with the outlandish promises that have come from one Anthony Robbins. Being truthful, I would like to improve my situation, I’ve been doing the same job for the last four years. My job gives me a fairly intense routine when I am working, since I’m usually doing six days a week, with a twelve hour day. Because I work freelance, albeit with some support from my diary service, I’m out of work now and again, and, although I’m comfortable, there have been times when I’ve been living in hand-to-mouth near poverty, maxing out my overdraft (I’m allergic to credit cards) and having the odd occasion when I’ve had to walk to work because I’ve had no money for taxis or trams or any other form of transport. So I’m putting Robbins to the test, and I pledge, here and now, to diligently follow the advice that’s in Awaken the Giant Within, and, um, see if anything happens.

Right now, I’ll tell you I’m a sceptic, I don’t think this is really going to work, but lots of people are saying that it’s changed their lives, so I want to plough through the promo bullshit and the get to the real truth. Firstly, I’ve done the same as he has already, and I’ve looked to the people who are a point in their career and their life where I want to be someday. I see people like Steven Speilberg, James Cameron, Kurt Cobain, Benedict Allen, Mark Kermode, Dylan Moran, a number of writers who work for Lonely Planet, and many others. What I can see that they all share in common is that they had been doing what the loved doing before they “hit the big time”. Speilberg was making his Super-8 moves, Cameron was working as an art director, Cobain was playing dives in Aberdeen Allen had made several trips abroad and written a number of books before he appeared on TV. Even people like David Dickinson, he wasn’t a TV presenter or actor before he became a household name, he was working with antiques. Hendrix played as a backing guitarist for a few years before breaking through with The Experience. The best example is Quentin Tarantino, who was writing scripts while he was working in a video shop for around five years. The’s no Shane Black, who sold his first screenplay at 22, but he is a great screenwriter. He got his directorial debut when he was in his thirties. One of the people who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting (Jeff Minter at one of the BIT do’s) had been happily knocking out games for donkey’s years with little concern of any kind of super-duper world-domineering “success” (I presume, anyway, do correct me if I’m wrong). And now look at him, doing all sorts of things for Microsoft as well as working as Expert Bit Twiddler at Atari (that was a few years ago).

All this adds up to the old maxim “follow your bliss”. If you do what you love, then everything else will fall into place. One of the things that I agreed with Prince Charles with was (I don’t mean that we discussed this over dinner, but it was all over the papers a while back) was that people “think they can all be pop stars, high court judges, brilliant TV personalities or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability. This is the result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically and socially engineered to contradict the lessons of history.”. He wasn’t saying that people shouldn’t get ideas above their station, he was saying that people want success to come in microwavable packages. It seems to me that he was talking about thinks like Pop Star/Idol or X-Factor or The Apprentice, where people can’t wait to be recognised to be doing one thing, and one thing well. People want success now, and they want it all. You can rise above your station, but it needs work, you need to put effort into your three years at university, or you need to have your six years at medical school. There’s no such thing (yet) as Medical Genius, or Superstar Lawyer on ITV.

So, anyway, I’ll keep reading, and inwardly digesting, and we’ll have a look at the results when I’ve finished the book - which Tony seems to be thanking me a lot for reading. It’s very Californian and new-agey, but I’ll do my best to keep focused.