I think somebody was trying to give me a message.

The reason I haven't written lately is, of course, I was doing this and that for the other journal, but mostly because every time I write something I get ripped a new one by somebody.

"That's not what I meant."

"Why do I have to learn how you feel in your journal?"

"Can you please not write about me anymore?" I guess you really can't please anybody.

Not to mention that where I used to lament that I never did anything, now I am lamenting that I'm always busy. I am working on this, writing that, designing this, going there... I guess I am a creature of extremes, nothing is ever halfway.

Yesterday I drove out to Kirk's. What a day.

They told me that everything was going wrong with their computer. It was pulling up strange programs when they went into Netscape, not to mention endless problems with their ISP (who has a bad rep anyway, but they swore that they'd talked to a supervisor in technical support or a sysadmin up there and everything was okay). I needed to help them get their domain for their new business set up. I needed to discuss the website design I'm doing for said domain. It was to be a full day of signing them up for a new ISP on a Sunday (not an easy task out in the boonies), backing up and running the Compaq QuickRestore on their machine to just start over if they were having this many problems, and trying to hash out what they want for their site.

I struck out around 9:40 AM after being up really late Saturday night working on scanning photographs and handling the color and tone imbalances caused by the flash they used. You would think that traffic relatively early on a Sunday morning would be light, but I think every freaking idiot in the Houston metro area was on I-45 North headed outbound with me. I've never seen so many people driving over the lines, digging in their back seats while driving and swerving all over the road, speeding up and then slamming on their brakes, etc. Where are the cops when all this is going on?

Also, it's so far out there. I live near Beltway 8 and state Highway 288 south of Houston (generally considered "way out there" by anybody who lives in most of the rest of town). It's not a big deal for me to get anywhere on the Beltway, even I-45 North. But I go past that... past 1960 (the "third beltway" around Houston, the extension of state Highway 6)... past the Highlands... past Conroe... and when I get to Conroe I only have another seven miles to go before I get off the freeway. Once I get off, I still have seven to go on a little hilly, two-lane road with no lights and a 55 mph speed limit that has a Reality speed limit somewhat closer to 70 mph than I'd prefer.

Thus, I'm generally stressed out and a gibbering idiot when I get there, this time compounded by the fact that I'm pooped already. I wanted to leave in time for me to get home and see Felicity, though, so I started right in.

What was wrong with their connection to their ISP? The ISP. As I mentioned before, the ISP swore up and down that the problem was on their end, but when I dialed in it logged me in every time but would pass no packets. If I put in the wrong password for their account then it failed every time, so I wasn't getting false logins. Everything was working up to their terminal server; from there, nothing was happening.

Of course, Jason was pissed that they had lied to him. I tried to reassure him that in my experience with ISPs, including working for one, using plausible denial of all problems and then quietly fixing it was the norm, not the exception, but that didn't make matters better. Instead, we just decided to find a new ISP.

I've discovered something new and odd - ISP tech support can't take your money on Sundays.

We used to be able to sign people up right away, the owner of the ISP being the money-hungry bastard that he was. Some days we took more sign up calls than we did technical support calls (not because there weren't a raft of problems, but because of the never-ending advertising campaign that that place still runs). But the idea that I can call various regional ISPs and they can't take an order for a user, or worse, that nobody is even in the office, is disheartening.

Finally, though, we persevered. The monthly cost was the same as their crappy ISP, so Jason was incredulous, but I told him not to worry, he'd not have the same problems (and when I called him tonight, he said that it's working wonderfully, score one for me).

What was wrong with Netscape? Popup windows. They got an email that had some Javascript that changed their default startup page, and that page pulls up quasi-infinite popups, so to them it was loading all these other programs when it came up. I switched them back to Yahoo! and everything was okay.

Sigh.

At least the problems were nothing monumental. They just sounded that way on the phone.

Once discussion roamed to the website and Kirk and I started to discuss things for the page, specifically design and graphics, photos became a thorny issue. The quality of the photos that Kirk gave me to scan were questionable at best, because they'd taken them indoors at close range with a flash. "They'd look better if they were taken outside - the light is more diffuse and even there," I told them.

He said the design theme should be generally Victorian, since most of the dolls he does are Victoriana, but he'd leave the details up to me. He'd worked with me enough to know that I'd come up with something he'd like, and it's not like it can't be changed if he doesn't like it. However, on graphics we agreed that we needed more images, so we decided to play with their new Sony Mavica and take some photos.

We threw a cream-colored blanket with a Victorian pattern over the back fence, covered a small table with some more cream-colored linens and started taking photos, occasionally with me holding a large beach towel up to block the sun from shining directly on the dolls. I took a few inside of Kirk taking parts out of doll molds, too.

Does this qualify me to be a photographer's assistant?

You wouldn't think doing these things would take all day, but it really did once you factor in not hearing back from quasi-infinite numbers of ISPs, tweaking various other things on their computer (it needed some attention in general, it's a Win95 machine that hasn't ever been wiped and restored in two years), answering various small questions, sitting around just visiting, installing a new mouse and playing

They have a 6.4 gig Quantum Fireball CY in their computer right now, that came with it (it's a Presario 4824). I used a 4824 as my first machine at this place I was Benevolent Dictator of Technology and General Graphics Geek. They're really nice. (On the other hand, when I handed it down and got three 4850s for the company, and I took one to replace then 4824... well, let's just say I would only use a 4850 as a boat anchor. None of them were ever quite right, especially the ATI Rage Pro graphics, and me with no replaceable AGP graphics slot to put in a decent card. What a fucked-up machine.) But ohmigawd, are those Quantum Bigfoot drives slow. What I don't grok is that the motherboard supports UDMA/33 but they put this sloth-like IDE disk in there that I swear is causing bus timeouts from the primary disk controller during really lengthy read/write/seek periods (it's the only thing that can explain these deathly long pauses when the system is just reading, not swapping). When I was BDoT, I just put in a 10 gig UDMA Western Digital drive (thank goodness it didn't crap out on me), jumpered to slave, formatted it to system and FAT 32, copied everything over, reset the jumpers to swap master and slave and that was that. I couldn't fade the swapping when I ran out of memory on a heavy graphics job (can you say "coffee break"? Well, I don't drink coffee... so it was a "go irritate Xander and drink a Diet Dr. Pepper" break, I guess). Got to love Compaq. Not. Sigh. Hey, while I'm on a tear here... they are only using about 1.5 gigs of this disk, and that includes a full installation of MS Office 97, WordPerfect, various internet apps and other toys I installed for when I occasionally housesit. When I first got Gillian and installed all my... crap... on it, I had already sucked up five gigs of the original disk. Five. I can't fathom only having one and a half gigs used on a disk of mine. I mean, have more than twice that of just .mp3s. I have some Photoshop files that are a full one-third that size. I like my data live, on the hard drive, only occasionally backed up to CD-R. I really have to get these guys some bad computing habits (and go get myself a 27.3 or 40 gig drive, I guess).

with getting problems with the video camera fixed, looking at photos on the computer occasionally during our photography sessions, showing them a couple samples of what I had done graphically for their site to give them a feel, stopping for a neighbor of theirs to come over for an hour, eating some pizza... well, the day went quickly, so I need to go back next week to install Outlook Express (they have quasi-infinite email addresses now, all POP3 mailboxen, so they need to have it configured to check them), install a faster hard disk, pick up more image files of one of his doll classes, install Win98SE on their computer (be afraid, be very afraid) and so forth.

The interesting thing is that the neighbor who came over there said that she had been looking for somebody to put together a "site" for her (in fact, it's one page), but she'd gotten somebody else to put one together (a butt-ugly one at that) for more money than I would have charged. It seems like every time I turn around, somebody's doing something like that. I really ought to get some business cards together and start being more available for business.

Any ideas for a logo for "Renaissance Geek Consulting"?

Can I sue Parke-Davis? Celexa really did a number on me. I was agitated, had serious insomnia and a constant, dull headache. I was not a happy camper.

But worst of all, I did foolish things. Granted, a psychiatric medication change can cause problems thinking, so I should know better than to go around making major decisions while the adjustment takes place. Further, I know that major decisions shouldn't be undertaken quickly.

Also, I know that I wasn't happy with the way things were going with Gurugrrl, but instead of trying to discuss it, I let myself fall under the sway of a misapprehension yet again.

Regardless of the reasons, which would merely be excuses, anyway, I let things go too far with Trinity. I knew it at the time, I just ignored it. I actively ignored it. I even wrote about actively ignoring it. I was an absolute ass to Gurugrrl. She has every right to be angry with me.

What I didn't consider is how long I've cared about Gurugrrl, and her about me. The quality of that caring, rather than the intensity in the moment. The closeness, and all the things we've been through and overcome, without respect to how far we may yet have to go. The fact that when I think about her, I know I haven't felt that way about someone in a very long time, a longing, tender way.

I am blind. I give up too easily. I complain about things too readily. I run away, and when someone doesn't follow right away I take that as some sort of sign that my worst fears are correct.

I need to just grow up and quit chasing shadows and illusions and appreciate the blessings and wonderful people in my life.

We're working on it. I don't know if it will get there or not, or if Gurugrrl will ever trust me again. I think she's seeing that I'm back to myself again, more or less as I should be. I think she's learning again that I really do care about her. I hope it's enough to forgive me.

I don't know if I'll forgive myself, though.

restlessmind