Blankshield

Stephan Smith - "The Bell"

"Oh where are you going?" said the man at his desk
"I'm going to a new world," said the child and he stood
And he stood, and he stood, and t'were well that he stood
"I'm going to a new world," said the child and he stood

"Oh I'm sounding drums of war," said the man at his desk
"Oh, I will not fight your war," said the child and he stood
And he stood, and he stood, and t'were well that he stood
"I will not fight your war," said the child and he stood

"Oh, but don't you love your country?" said the man at his desk
"Yes, I do, but you don't," said the child and he stood
And he stood, and he stood, and t'were well that he stood
"I do but you don't," said the child and he stood

"Oh, but do you know the truth?" said the man at his desk
"Yes, you lie and call it truth," said the child and he stood
And he stood, and he stood, and t'were well that he stood
"You lie and call it truth," said the child and he stood

"Oh, you must be scared to die," said the man at his desk
"No, I'm prepared and you're scared," said the child and he stood
And he stood, and he stood, and t'were well that he stood
"I'm prepared and you're scared," said the child and he stood

"Oh, I think I hear a bell," said the man at his desk
"Yes, it's ringing you to hell," said the child and he stood
And he stood, and he stood, and t'were well that he stood
"Yes, it's ringing you to hell," said the child and he stood

----
James

Sometimes I feel guilty about my, um, less-than-stellar punctuality record. Mornings and I do not get along; those who have to live or work with me know this fact well. Lazy Co-Worker Guy will, if I happen to be especially grouchy in the morning, tell me to "go have your coffee, damn it!" Raven is of similar mien in the morning, and a tape recorder in our room would record interesting morning conversations like:

"Mnrph nup Kalen?"

"Nph. Connor."

"Cn u gup?"

"Inna crib. lem whump."

(time passes)

"Mommy! Get your lazy butt out of bed!"

"Mrph?! Oh. Kalen. Sk Daddy fr snggle."

"Mrmph! Oh. Kalen."

And so forth. I'm sure you get the picture. In any case, this ongoing holy war that mornings have declared on me has been known to cause innocent bystanders like punctuality to suffer.

But then I will pause and look at, for example, todays lunch hour. For lunch today, I am:

running case metric queries
staging new workstations for deployment
faxing in billing to the head office
performing records retention on tracked assets
writing a lexmark exam
processing several boxes of parts, packing and prepping for off-site shipping.

Oh, and eating.

I feel less guilty. Somehow, pain-in-the-butt paperwork has that effect on me.

James

I think I want comments. Someone teach my wife how to do Haloscan so that I can be a lazy bastard and rip it off for my blog.

James, lazy bastard.

Random thoughts from the Brain of James.

Best of luck, Myrna. We're here, either way.

I am housegeek, hear me roar. Last night I did the dishes, sorted Lego, fed the baby, migrated from a laptop running win98 to a PC running winXP, ran & folded three loads of laundry, watched Neverwhere, and finished soup stock. And did my exercises. Which aren't housey or geeky, but I did 'em anyway.

Wednesday Catan-ing was fun and I would like to do it more often, but realistically, likely won't. Wednesday is also gaming at Eric's as well as Lara's home-brew RPG night, not to mention usually ends up being "crap! I need clothes tomorrow" laundry night and "Monday was noisy gamers in my house, Tuesday was my gaming out night, now I need to collapse in a puddle and get sleep" night. It's a pity, because I see most of those people so rarely. And Dave? Quit whining, at least you didn't get horsewhipped by the Evil That Is Raven And Mary. Maybe I will go back, just to treat Mary to a little more of the "oh, you like the robber?" game. She deserves it. And Raven will never ever get another sheep port in her life, or until I feel revenged. One of the two.

Looking forward to Friday gaming tonight. Also looking forward to/hoping for a Tempest game this month. I'm enjoying playing Fr. Dave; it's an enjoyable challenge to convey "priest" and "mage" and "normal" in the same character, but I think I'm sort of pulling it off.

And I bought Babylon 5 season 5. Mmm. B5. Pixie, you're welcome to borrow Season 2 anytime.

My fiction for AV:T has stalled again; partly through procrastination, muchly through getting tired of adjusting for revision Umpteen of how space travel works. Hyperspace jumps are at the poles. No, they're in a narrow cone pointing to the destination. No, they're in a stable orbit somewhere around 0.4 AU. Time in transit is 5 days-ish. No it's instantaneous. The map is wrong, all the travel times are off. No, it's right. No, they missed a doubling; it's really wrong. AAUUUGH.

I don't think I'm going to write anymore until the damn game is published and even if it's wrong they can't change it again.

My vague and undefined notions of making a Glitterboy costume for the next Shadowfall quest are probably now null and void, since the group I was planning to play with is looking at a different theme now, and I am so not interested in the matrix-y agent-y theme they want to run now. Pity, becuase I had some really clever thoughts (as yet unproven) on how to really lighten the costume up. Probably a good thing in the long run, though, becuase I can't really afford another three figure disposable costume, which is what it would end up being. The tank I seem to recall ended up costing ~$170 bucks, and the GB would be probably in the same range. Less wood involved, but more esoteric material, so much the same in the end.

James

[poke poke] Archive Archive.

The Blog formerly known as Blog

Ya know, I think I finally understand why Prince renamed himself [The artist formerly known as...] (Ok, he just said 'the artist' everyone else tagged the formerly known as part.)

My boss(es) discovered my blog through a roundabout sort of process; fortunately for all concerned this isn't the sort of nightmare "fired because of blog" thing as has shown up elsewhere on the net - my bosses aren't that sort of boss. But the process is amusing.

A job applicant commented in an interview something about how 'he knew it had the right place because of the water wall', which prompted (logically enough) 'how did you know we had a water wall?'

It turns out that, as part of his investigating our company before coming in (kudos to him; most job applicants don't bother), he had [verb which means 'to use a powerful and popular search engine']ed [name of company for which I work] and one of the things that came up was my blog. Specifically, the parts below where I'm talking about our new office.

So my boss(es), curious, went online and [verb which means 'to use a powerful and popular search engine']ed "water wall" and "[company for which I work] and my blog came up top of the list.

So I went through my blog and corrected references to [the company for which I work] and [the place I work for them at], which I at least found rather ironic to be only in the "woohoo! yay!" parts of the blog.

Upside: my bosses know how grumpy I was/am about being stuck out at [the place I work at].
Downside: they became aware of it in the venting/ranting format it takes below, instead of the reasoned dialogue I'd intended.

Sigh.

[Person who maintains this blog]

I hate my job.

More accurately, I hate corporate sloth and fingerpointing.

I am currently working on a critical piece of equipment that is slightly more advanced that ENIAC, running software that the company who made it (who makes nothing but this software!) stopped supporting 6 years ago because it was too old then.

If this piece of equipment is not up in about the next 12 hours, the plant shuts down and [large chemical firm at which I work] starts pissing away money at prodigious rates.

None of this is what pisses me off. What pisses me off is that this happens about once every year, and (pardon my language) EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. TIME. we tell them, "this equipment is obsolete, we don't support it, if it breaks, you're screwed. You MUST replace it." Every time they say "Yeah, we know."

To add insult to injury, I have been reliably informed that if we can't get this Edsel up and running, it will be our fault. If the person who told me this wasn't such a nice customer rep, and on my side of the fence to boot, I would have walked off the job this morning.

I'm really ready to kill somebody. Good thing I'm going to play laser tag after work.

James

My son, my 2 year old son, just had as many sausage rolls (the little appetizer kind, not the big bakery kind) for lunch as I did.

5 1/2.

yarg.

James