Reasons Why I'm going Insane Today


1. Fruit Flies

They are driving me insane. There is NO FRUIT anywhere in the vicinity of my desk, yet swarms of these obnoxious hateful creatures are constantly flying around my face, landing on my lips, and fluttering about in front of my computer screens. I have moved the Fruit Fly Trap of Doom (a balloon glass w/ about an ounce of red wine, covered w/ plastic wrap that has holes punched in it) to my desk in hopes that it will help the situation. Currently there are about 10 dead or dying fruit flies in it, but most of them were already there from the time the Trap of Doom was in the kitchen.

I am soooo good at killing house flies with my bare hands, but fruit flies have these incredible evasive techniques. Today I think I have only managed to kill by hand about 3 of them. I think they're so tiny they literally slip through my fingers. Arrrrgggh! I hate them. They make me crazy.


2. Computers Suck.
(Warning: this one is kind of technical)

For about the last hour, I've been unsuccessfully trying to install Linux to an LPAR on a JS22 for a demonstration that I'm attempting to record. I really just want to get this out of the way; these recordings have been hanging over my head for months now. And I'm not going to have another opportunity to work on this for months, because my work schedule is so full.

Well, I have been doing exactly what I should do. I confirmed the MAC address of the LPAR. I modified the dhcpd.conf file on the install server. I checked everything twice. EVERYTIME I TRY TO BOOT FROM THE NETWORK IT TRIES TO INSTALL THE WRONG IMAGE USING THE WRONG CLIENT IP ADDRESS. This is making me crazy! I restarted dhcpd like a bajillion times. I thought "Is it using a different MAC address? Is it using the wrong dhcpd.conf file? ARE THERE TWO IMAGE SERVERS ON OUR NETWORK USING THE SAME IP ADDRESS?!?!?" What the heck is going on? Arggggh!

It's said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Well, about 20 tries later, I guess you can call me insane.


3. Windows' Window Manager

This one has driven me insane for a long time. In Linux, you can choose your window manager based on its qualities. The window manager is the program that controls how your desktop behaves. In Windoze, afaict, you can't choose it, it just IS. knowing microsoft, it's probably an intrinsic "feature" of the operating system, they probably didn't even code it up in such a way that it could be modularized. Or maybe they left it to the behavior of individual applications, and it just so happens that all the crappy apps i'm forced to use for work just happen to behave in this annoying-as-all-getout fashion.

Anyways, this is what drives me nuts. Anytime something happens in an application like a change in state, it steals my focus. ARRRRRGGGHHH. DO YOU KNOW HOW ANNOYING IT IS WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO TYPE SOMETHING LIKE A PASSWORD CORRECTLY FOR LIKE THE FOURTH TIME AND YOUR FOCUS GETS STOLEN AGAIN?

There MUST be a way to configure this behavior. Not only does it steal my focus, but whenever I get a new message via Sametime (IBM's internal IM app), it also makes my Task bar, which is normally hidden, appear, and it WON'T go away until I click on it. This is EVEN MORE ANNOYING than usual when I'm using Application Sharing in Elluminate to do a demonstration, b/c the task bar is in the same location where Elluminate docks itself for the app share. So then I can't even end the App Share until I have clicked on the task bar.

This is what i have to deal with every day. I hate the combination of Windows' window manager and the annoying behavior of Sametime and Elluminate when it's in app-share mode. And it's making me crazy.


------------- Ok, I had to come back in and add one more thing
4. SLOW CONNECTIONS/SOFTWARE

Argggh! the IVM (Integrated Virtualization Manager) is soooooooo incredibly slow!! Is it just my connection to Beaverton? That seems unlikely, since the AMM is also there and it's GUI seems fairly responsive. This is making me crazy, crazy, crazy!

Betrayal

my greatest fear
unleashed
is this sickness too much
will it overcome me

and why
didn't he tell me
before

now i scan the list
name after name after name after name
is there no one i trust?

phone rings
rings, rings, rings, rings... voicemail

well after all it's nearly midnight there

one person i could surely call
any time of night
and yet
i can't talk to her about this
won't talk to her about things of this nature

so i keep dialing
eventually
i'll find someone

to trust

Ready
(found on a post-it notepad I normally use for grocery lists and the like; I think I wrote this April 11)

you made inroads
little by little...
when i first met you
seems so long ago
a far off time
-who were we then?

were we the same people who stand here today
strong, solid, yet shaking like leaves?
fragile as snowflakes drifting down slowly
we are strong; we are not wholly without goodness or character-

but are we ready?

Death, which I seem to think about a lot but seldom blog about

The other day we were out in service and went on someone's return visit that has cancer. In fact, the friend who was visiting her was afraid she might have passed away, b/c last time she went to see her, she was in the hospital in critical condition. The lady has stage 4 cancer and she's got 2 kids.

I commented something like "Man, it must be hard to live with that hanging over your head." I paused, thinking about it a moment, then continued, "...But then, I guess we all are- living with that hanging over our heads." (thereby totally bringing down the entire service group.)

The fact is, we are all living under a death sentence. If it weren't for the ransom, none of us would have any real hope for an everlasting future. When you think about it, at what point can you ever say, "it's enough- I've had enough life, really I don't mind dying now." Is it worse to die now than next week? The fact is, if you're happy, and you aren't in constant pain, life is a blessing and a joy. I felt in light of tomorrow's Memorial of Jesus' death, it was an appropriate topic to ruminate about.

A separate thought about death that also came out of the same day in service. We were talking about cancer and someone made the remark that surviving has a lot to do with your will to live. I have to admit it kind of bothers me sometimes when people say that. I'm not saying it's completely untrue. For example, I know someone whose dad was living with a 3-month cancer death sentence for over a year, but he managed to live to see her wedding day, and then died just a few weeks later.

But my aunt wanted to live, too. She had grandbabies that she fully expected to see grow up. She had a marriage that was happier towards the end of her life than it had been during the 40 odd years prior (they married young- she wasn't that old). She was loved. She had a lot of things she enjoyed doing. She had a strong will to live, but it wasn't enough.

I don't plan on dying, but if I do I hope to at least die doing what I believe in, to the last.