/dev/zero

I’ve been so busy the past two weeks I haven’t had time to keep up with my LJ.
I started my new job at EA last Monday. So I’ve been busy in training all day. Finally found out what queue I’ll be working (OTQ: Old Titles Queue, anything over 2 years old) and got my desk. Spent most of today brining my machine, which had just been Ghosted up to date with Windows security patches and so on. Then 3 rounds of “role playing” with my supervisor to practice handling the phones, the customer database, etc. Since I’ve done it all before, it was old hat to me. The guy in the next cube over who started at the same time I did was a little more nervouse about it and flubbed his fist couple of role play calls, since he’s never done tech support before. Tomorrow I expect to be on the phones.

In my last post I refered to “Friend” and “Lover”, but forgot that, since my computer at home has crashed on me every time I tried to type up that incident, you have no idea who and what I’m talking about. “Friend” is an alias for a very very close friend of mine. “Lover” is an alias for her live-in lesbian lover. At Friend’s request, I’m not using their real names. I had much more detail typed up before, but I’ve (attempted) to type it all up so many times now I don’t feel like doing it all over again. It would probably crash this machine to. Suffice it to say, there is MUCH drama going on in their relationship, involving polyamory, a 3rd party who doesn’t understand the concept, and breached boundries. Friend asked me to take care of her one evening after work as she was feeling quite ill, and wanted to talk about what was going on. After she downloaded her emotions at me, she felt much better. Then Lover came home and they asked me to stick around and kind of mediate while they talked things out. Unfortunatly though the evening ended on a relativly good note, things went down hill again over the week. Friend is feeling a lot of stress right now and I worry for her.

This commute from Santa Cruz to Redwood City is really getting to be hell. It’s a 50 mile commute each way, and I have to drive it daily. I wasn’t counting on getting an apartment nearer to work, since I’m only guarunteed 6 months on thsi job and I have no money and lousy credit, but Martin called me yesterday and informed me he has a friend who owns a house just across the Dumbarton in Fremont, who will rent me a room for $200/month. Hell, I’ll SAVE $200 month on gas alone taking that place. So I have to meet this friend and check her out, and let her check me out and if all goes well I will be cutting about 40 miles off my commute.

Now the bad news: My car needs servicing. It’s running fine, but it’s going through brake fluid like crazy. The clutch is hydraulic and connects to the same resevoir as the brakes. Every time I step on the clutch, after a few seconds it starts losing pressure. I have to top up the resevoir daily. I’ve used a quart in the last week and a half. I have to get the thing back into the shop that fixed the clutch last time, but they’re only open on weekdays. I won’t have time except on weekends. I’ll have to see if Martin can drive me to work on Friday and take my car in for me. I can NOT not have a reliable car to get to work.

I’m such a slacker. I haven’t posted much of anything this week. I guess work does that.

Nothing really new to report since my last post. Friend and Lover are still having issues. They’ve downgraded their relationship to “dating”, which, for those of us who’ve been around a little longer, know translates to “this relationship is over, we’re just too close to the situation to realize it.”. I really feel sorry for both of them.
They have decided to get couples counseling however, and Friend is seeking therapy from a bi and poly positive therapist.

In less interesting news, I can’t get Medal of Honor: Allied Assault to work on my XP box. I’ve already tried the fix listed in our database at work for the problem I’m having, but it had no effect. Battlefield 1942 also isn’t working, but it has a habbit of rebooting my box. And oddly SimThemePark, which is NOT supposed to work well in XP, works just fine. Go figure.

I went to Saxon’s Pop Warner homecoming game last night. They won again. Not as exciting as last week, but fun anyway. It was a scoreless game until the last half of the last quarter when Saxon’s team scored a TD, then almost did it again on a long kickoff where they nailed the catcher at about the 10 yard line. Didn’t quite make the second TD though. (Wow, I actually sound like I care about football here. I guess it’s more interesting when you know one of the players and you’re rooting for him.)
I’m attending their Homecoming dance/potluck thing this afternoon.

Hmmm, what else…?
Oh yeah, Martin is leaving Zoovy. He’s been talking about it off and on. Last time he mentioned it, he ended up renegotiationg his job status and stayed a little longer. Now it looks like he’s actually leaving. He took a week off to spend with his sweety in Tahoe, then passed through Santa Cruz on his way back to San Diego today. We were going to break open a bottle of champagne he’s been saving to celebrate my finding a job, but someone drank it already. So we had mead instead. Very yummy. I think I lked that better than I would have liked the champagne.
It will be good to have him back in the area. It sucks for him, because he’s out of a job now, but I’m glad I have one of my best friends around to hang out with. Not that I have as much time to hang out any more, now that I’m working and have a 50 mile (each way) commute.

XP REALLY took a crap on me. I tried to repair my install, but it only wiped out my MBR so it wouldn’t boot into Linux. No problem, that was easy enough to fix. But once that was fixed, I found the entire FAT for my Windows partition was corrupted. My data was GONE. I had to do a fresh install, reformatting my windows partition. I lost everything.
On the bright side, I now have a completely clean install of XP, instead of an upgrade from 98 to ME to XP.
And Thomas had the latest Nvidia drivers sitting on his machine, so I didn’t have to download that 13mb file over 56k again. He also had Opera 6 and Netscape Communicator 4.79.
Too bad Allied Assault won’t run on my machine though. It keeps bombing out about 1/4 of the way through loading the first mission. I’ll have to see what I can find about that at work tomorrow.

On the darker side of things, Friend and Lover are having drama again. I hope they work it out soon. I don’t like watching Friend stressing so much.

My housemates drive me nuts when they start screaming at eachother.
Thomas is being such an asshole.

Ugh. So much to write about. It’s been a busy couple of days and I’ve only now had free time to sit down and write about it.

I started my new job yesterday. OK, I said it before, I’ll say it again: the pay sucks. But there are compensating factors. It is, after all, Electronic Arts. And Electronic Arts is huge. You wouldn’t think a company who makes, let’s face it, video games would be so large. But $2BILLION in revenue a year is no small potatoes. They have the usual trappings of Silicon Valley behemoths: on campus cafeterias with 3 to 4 star quality food, on campus gym, lots of toys on the tech folks desks… But add to that: their own movie theater. Where they get premium movies before their official release dates. And trust the folks who MAKE games, to have one KICK-ASS game room.
In one part of the room, a pool table and 3 or 4 50″ plasma screen TV’s hanging from the ceiling, with leather couches to sit on while you watch whatever sports event you choose. In the other part of the room, separated by a velvet sound-dampening curtain, is the video game room. 4 Dell workstations with 2.5ghz Pentium IV processors, 512mb RAM and Nvidia GeForce 4Ti video cards, and all their latest games stacked neatly on a shelf next to each one. 21″ monitors, Aireon chairs, sweet sound systems, and you can adjust the lighting to your own comfort level. At the back of this part of the room leather couches in front of back-to-back big screen TVs, each of which has a Gamecube, Xbox and PS2, with the latest EA releases. Can we say “gamer’s paradise”?
Nothing like Playing Metal of Honor: Allied Assault at 1600×1280x32bit on that setup. I’m going to LIKE working for EA. And of course, once I get my own cube, I can do that without leaving my desk, at lunch or after hours. Apparently the guys in the EA Sports queue like to play Counter Strike.

For the rest of this post I will refer to “Friend” (my friend) and “Lover” (Friend’s lover). Actually Lover is my friend as well but for convenience sake and as I know her through Friend, I’ll call her Lover.

So after work I was in the above mentioned game room trying out MOH:AA when Friend called my cell phone and asked if I could pick her up at her parents place and drive her home, as she was feeling too ill to drive herself. I left right away to do just that.
When I picked her up, as we were driving home she asked permission to dump her emotions on me. I told her to be my guest. She then told me all about the weekend’s drama in her and Lover’s relationship. I won’t get into the nitty gritty here. Suffice it to say it involves polyamory and broken boundaries and a 3rd party who didn’t / doesn’t understand that “polyamory” != “open relationship” != “do whatever you want without regard to the other partner/s”. The stress of how she was feeling about the weekend did not combine well with her flu-like symptoms. I had to pull over by the side of the freeway so she could jump out and throw up in the bushes.

We got back to her place and she asked me to stick around and take care of her until Lover got home. She changed into comfy clothes and crawled into bed and we sat there on her bed while she told me more about what was going on and how she was feeling about it. Eventually Lover got home and they asked me if I minded being there with them while they talk it out in front of me. There was a lot of use of “I” statements and explanations of feelings though process. By the time they were done it was quite late, but everyone was feeling much better. It turned out Friend’s sickness was entirely a psychosomatic reaction to stress.
Owing to the lateness of the hour and how far I have to drive to get home from their place, only to make the trip back again very early this morning to get to work, they invited me to just stay the night at their place. I ended up wearing a pair of Lover’s underwear, which I found quite amusing (Hey, these flannel boxers are comfy!)
Lover: “So, do you mind sleeping in a bed with two women?”
Me: “Oh gee, let me think…”
Later…
Friend: “Just so you know, I’m feeling rather frisky now so you might have to watch me go down on (Lover).”
Lover (caught in the middle of brushing her teeth): “squawk! Wha?!? Uh, I’m not shaved!”
Friend: “Do you mind?”
Me: “Oh gee, let me think…”
Friend knows given a chance, I’d do her in a heartbeat. She SO loves to torture me.
Since there wasn’t room in the bed for all three of us while they have fun, they let me have the bed and they took the floor. It was cold enough (and a certain amount of modesty kicked in, I’m sure) that they ended up keeping covered while they went at it, so no free show for me. It was quite amusing to listen to though.
In the morning, Lover started to fix us breakfast, but Friend and I had to rush off to make it to work on time. She brought us some KILLER burritos for lunch though.

I went to bed early last night (well, early for me) so I would be sure to get up in time to get to work on time for my first day.
I set the alarm for 7:00, so I could be out of the house by 7:30.
I woke up at 5:45. And couldn’t go back to sleep. At 6:15 I gave up and got up. Ironed the shirt I decided to wear (Hell, I had plenty of time, might as well get the wrinkles out.) Filled my big travel mug with coffee, even had time for a bowl of cereal. And I still have 15 minutes before I have to leave.

Reading one of my friend’s Livejournals, I saw that her sister, whom I met at her wedding, posted a comment. So I started reading the sister’s LJ… Where she’s talking all about her love life and struggling with mental illness… and I’m sucked in reading the whole thing. I mean, I’ve only met this person once, though I know her sister fairly well (ok, as well as one can through shared membership in a high-volume chat mail list, but hey, I went to her wedding, whatever that says about how well we know each other…)

There’s something oddly voyeuristic about LiveJournal.

My windows partition seems to have gone to hell. Or maybe it’s a hardware issue.
Windows stopped playing audio CDs, so I decided to reboot. Whereupon it told me the boot sector was corrupted.
I booted into Linux and did an FSCK on the Windows partition, which told me the boot sector didn’t match the backup. I tried to copy the backup over the original, but it gave me all kinds of IO errors and now the drive is making tapping noises every few minutes.

Luckily Linux works fine, but it’s root partition is on the same physical drive as Windows. And that’s my big drive. I don’t have the money right now to replace it.

Ok, I guess rejected isn’t quite the right mood, since it implies a bit more negativity than I’m actually feeling, but it was the closest one available.

emailed me last night and asked if I could drive her to a doctors appointment today, so she wouldn’t have to depend on the Metro system. Since she was going to see her doctor because her knee was hurting her again, I’m sure walking to / from bus stops would have been, pardon the pun, a pain as well.

I’ve been thinking about her a lot since I gave her a ride to a mutual friend’s party nearly a month ago. I guess she kinda pushed a lot of my buttons about what I find attractive in a woman. She and I have many similar interests (She’s a THEATER major, for crying out loud!) She has a really cool personality that I like. I even like her voice. The fact that she’s also beautiful doesn’t hurt either.
But last night while talking on the phone, she got a little nervous when I made a comment that now that I have a job I can actually afford to take someone out once in a while. She pointed out what she’s been saying in her LJ for a while, that she’s not in a mental space to get involved with anyone right now. I assured her that I was speaking in the general sense, though I did have her in mind.

When I dropped her off back at her dorm, I figured then was a good a time to talk. I turned to face her and told her that obviously, I’m attracted to her, (at which point she got the classic staring down in her lap, “Oh boy, it’s going to be THAT talk. How am I going to break it to him gently?” look on her face. She didn’t really need to say anything after that for me to know how she felt.) I told her I understand where she is right now, not wanting to get involved in a relationship with anyone. I told her that I still intend to ask her out on occasion, but that it’s with no expectations of romance, just two friends spending time together doing something fun. She responded that, per a recent thread on the Polyamory list, she had to tell me that she likes me as a friend, but she isn’t attracted to me.

So. There it was. I couldn’t say I was the least bit surprised. I mean, no matter how much I wished it were different, I knew that was going to be her response anyway. I’ve had times in the past where, knowing in my heart that the attraction wasn’t mutual, I still let my head pretend if I didn’t say anything, didn’t press the issue, didn’t make her come out and say it, I could pretend it was. But I know where that leads and it’s no fun.
I hadn’t actually initiated the conversation with the intention of getting her to tell me how she felt about me. I just wanted to reassure her that I know she doesn’t want to get involved. But she was honest with me and I certainly can’t fault her for that.

I can’t help but think all my friends who are new mothers and fathers (there are a LOT of them in the last two months) would appreciate this one:

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/forbetter/archive/forbetter-20021016.html

I got the job!
I start on Monday.

Well, I really don’t know how well I did on my job interview today. I THINK I did ok, but not sure.

One guy only asked me one question: What files do you put on a DOS boot disk?
I knew the answer, but it makes me nervous when they only ask one question.

The others asked all sorts of questions about how I would go about troubleshooting various problems with video drivers and so on. I think I did ok.

All this nervousness for a job that pays less than 1/4 of my last 4 jobs…

I’ll wait another 20 minutes than give Nija a call. She knew right away how well I’d done on Friday. Maybe she’s heard something.

I’m the only one who does dishes around here.
Sent this evening to our house mailing list:

As the one person who washes the dishes around here, I’d like to ask everyone
else’s help in reducing the amount of work to be done.

Instead of placing your dirty dishes in the sink, can you all please scrape
them into the garbage / compost bucket and place them in the dishwasher? It
only takes an extra 3 seconds, and keeps the kitchen looking (and smelling)
much nicer. (Rabbit, this goes for your friends to.)

If the dishwasher is full of clean dishes, do your part: put them away.

I think we’ve all noticed what happens when I take a break from doing the
dishes.

Also, I’m going to start bleaching the sponges and scrub brushes once a week.
This keeps them cleaner and they look much less disgusting. Who wants to eat
off of something that was washed with a gungy brush?

Ok, anyone tell me how to set the subject of a post using the LiveJournal client in windows?

The “interview” really went well.

Turned out it wasn’t really an “interview”. They just wanted me to take a fairly simple written test to assess my technical skills. Stuff like “Are you familiar with DirectX? Describe it.” “Name two differences between Windows 98 and W2k”,”What is the difference between a CD and a DVD?” “Name two network protocols.” Stuff I can answer in my sleep.

There were two other guys in my session, and they tested another group in the morning. A friend of mine was in that group. The tester explained they need 8 tech people and “There’s a reason we’re looking for TECHNICAL people. We’ve realized it’s easier to take a technical person and tell them ‘Here, play this game for 6 hours’ than it is to take a gamer and teach them tech stuff.” Ya think?

So a half hour after I walked out, the guy called me back. I go back for an actual interview on Monday.

Wow, I might be employed soon.

I’m off to my first interview in I don’t know how many months…

Nija called me up last night and let me know about a job she heard about over at EA’s customer support dept. 6 month contract, pretty much no possibility of going full time after that and only pays $9.50 / hr, but it’s a job. She asked me to send my resume over and she’d submit it for me.

This afternoon I got a call from the hiring manager. I go in for an interview tomorrow.

Woohoo!

I spoke to Martin on the phone yesterday and he mentioned how easy it is for adults with life experience, returning to education, to get into the UC system. I thought maybe that sounded like a good option. There’s no jobs available in my field, I never did finish a degree, having kind of drifted through college at the JC level (having done rather poorly). If I could get into the UC, get some grants, maybe be an RA in the dorm (thus taking care of housing requirements for a while), I’d be all set.

Gee, who’d have guessed Martin had no clue what he was talking about?
Turns out there are no special considerations for “adults” with “life experience”. I went up to the UCSC campus this morning and talked to the folks at the admissions office. Nope. Either you’re eligible out of high school, or you’re a transfer from another university system. As a transfer from another college / university, I still have to meet their minimum academic requirements. And I don’t come even close. At 31 years old, having been in the workforce for nearly 10 years, I still have to meet the same requirements as a kid out of high school or JC.
I shouldn’t be surprised I suppose.

I don’t have time to dick around at the local JC to bring my grades up to their standards and take the required courses. I need a roof over my head. I need clothes on my back. I need to eat.

Heh, my Demonic name is “Roylmtycylnyfinjyncru, Succubus of Chaos.”
Cool. I’m a succubus. Didn’t realize I had the right parts to be a succubus.

Soba is being unusually affectionate tonight. This is very much not like her. Normally it’s her brother that’s demanding attention.

But tonight she’s constantly getting up in my lap wanting me to scratch her ears and pet her. It’s been quite a challenge to keep her off the keyboard.

Well, my buddy Martin called me to let me know he is NOT quitting his job and moving back up here from San Diego. I guess that’s good for him. He needs the job. But in a way I was hoping he was. He’s one of my best friends. He and I were working on going into business together before he left, and that seems the most likely way I’m going to find a job right now.

Oh well. I’ll survive.

Rabbit just walked into the computer room pulled out a $10 bill and set it on top of my computer and declared “Crisp new $10 bill to do the dishes.”

Now, understand, the dishes in the sink are literally piled up past the level of the faucet. Gunilla and I were both rather upset about this. There’s dishes in there still full of food that no one bothered to dump in the garbage before putting the dish in the sink. Now, I don’t do that. Gunilla doesn’t do that. Thomas doesn’t do that. That just leaves Rabbit and his little friends.

So when Rabbit wanders in offering me money to do the dishes, I’m a little confused. Why should I do his dishes? Even if he is offering to pay me? I don’t do household chores for money. So all I said was “Huh?”

“I’m offering you money to do the dishes.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to see if you can work.”

I told him to get out of my face.

I don’t give a shit he’s the only one in the house who has a job, or that I’ve been unemployed for over a year. That doens’t give him the right to come in and question my ability to do work, or attempt to get me to do his work by paying me for it.

Someone (probably Rabbit) went through a door that we never use, because the latch doesn’t work right. So my cats (strictly indoor cats) got outside. One of them gets out on his own occasionaly, so I’ve accepted that he can handle himself. Soba, on the other hand, is a tiny little thing and has never been outside.

Luckily for Rabbit, Senar was just sitting right there outside the door and didn’t object when I scooped him up and tossed him inside. Soba ran from me however. But she came in on her own when I just left the door open.

I swear, if anything happend to my cats (there are two large dogs living in the back yard) I would hurt Rabbit.

Well friends really are coming out of the woodwork today.

I got an email from a very good friend of mine, Nija, a copy of a job posting she saw that she felt was right up my alley. Unusually for my friends, it actually was! Near perfect in fact. I’ll have to give them a call tomorrow.

So a couple of hours later she gives me a call. Now, this is one of those really dear, close friends that I really don’t get to hang out with nearly enough. That combination of being unemployed and broke, and her underemployed and broke, and living something like 40 miles apart just means getting together doesn’t happen very often.

So we’re chatting away, catching up on stuff, when a mutual friend comes up. Chris, another very close friend, just suddenly dropped off the face of the earth a few months ago. I mean, she was still around, but all of a sudden she wouldn’t talk to me. This is the second time this has happened with her. We had recently re-established our friendship after nearly a year break where she wasn’t talking to me. The first time she claimed she thought I was upset with her about something, the whole time I thought she was upset with me about something. When we finally started talking to each other, we were both unemployed and not seeing anyone, so we both had lots of free time on our hands. This resulted in us hanging out together a lot. We got to be very close friends, talking on the phone every day and hanging out 2 or 3 times a week, just doing stuff. She started to share some intimate details of her life with me which really made me feel good that she was that comfortable with me. I helped her out, just being there with her when her exes came over to get some stuff they left in her apartment when they moved out and so on. With all this hanging out I began to notice some personality traits in Chris that I really found attractive and started to re-evaluate how I felt about her as a friend. I realized I was becoming attracted to her. All of a sudden she stopped calling. She stopped returning my calls. She didn’t respond to emails. Several months go buy, I give her a call one day and actually catch her at home. We talk for like 20 minutes. Everything seems cool, only when I ask what she’s been up to lately all she would say is “I’ve been busy.” Again, I don’t hear from her for a couple of months. I’m kind of wondering what’s going on with her. Even if she isn’t interested in me, I thought we were still friends. Hey, I’m an adult, I can handle rejection.

One day I log onto an IRC channel I sometimes hang out on and she’s there. She doesn’t respond to anything I say, completely ignoring me. One day some friends and I make plans to go to Ren Faire. Thinking Chris would enjoy this, and making one last-ditch effort I /msg her and invite her along. The sum total of her response was “got plans”. No further response after that.

Anyway, back to my talk with Nija. We start talking about Chris and I ask her about all this. And here’s the surprise: Nija tells me that Chris told her I was STALKING her! Ok, how is calling someone, asking if they want to go out to do something and having them say “Yeah, sounds like fun.” “stalking” them?

It gets weirder. Apparently Chris did pick up on the fact that I was attracted to her. Only instead of simply telling me she wasn’t interested, she decided I wouldn’t take it well and it was better to end our friendship without a word. When Nija talked to her about this, Chris apparently felt it wasn’t “worth” trying to deal with. Now, I can take rejection of a romantic level. I’m a big boy. But to be totally written off as a friend as not “worth” dealing with the perceived consequences of rejecting me? Not “worth” it? Nice to know just what my friendship is “worth”!

Chris extracted a promise from Nija not to tell me any of this, but then she flipped out on Nija a while later, in a similar fashion. Apparently my friendship is “worth” a lot more to Nija, than it is to Chris.

Chris was someone I really cared a lot about, as a friend. And I’ve just been thrown away.

I’ve been unemployed for a year and a half. The tech industry just ain’t what it used to be.

I make my living as a Unix system administrator. But with the dot-bomb, there’s just no jobs out there. If I did Windows, or Oracle, I might have a job by now. But so far I’ve had a grand total of 3 interviews. In 19 months. And no second interviews. Most companies just don’t respond when I send them my resume in response to a job posting. Or at best I get a “thank you for your resume. We’ll let you know if you’re a match for anything. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”<sigh>

My unemployment insurance ran out. I didn’t get a penny out of my original claim, because I didn’t finish their stupid paperwork and expected to have a new job any day. When I decided I really needed the money and called them up to get things flowing again, they told me they could extend my original claim by 13 weeks, but after that I’m out of luck. No, they don’t care that they didn’t pay me ONE SINGLE PENNY of the thousands of dollars I qualified for. They only care about calendars. And now that extension has run out and California no longer qualifies for the second extension granted by congress.

So here I was, getting all set to move in with my parents in Dallas. I get along with them quite well and I have quite a number of friends in the DFW area. Actually for a long time I was looking forward to it, BECAUSE I have so many friends in the area and I get along so well with my ‘rents, and they have a great house, and I really had no friends left in the area. Not ones that would put forth the effort of maintaining our friendship, anyway. But I have two cats. My parents have 1 and Dad is allergic to cats. His allergies put up with the one they have, but probably would not survive two more. To my surprise Dad said they’d be willing to give it a try anyway.

But recent developments make me very reluctant to leave the area. Saturday was my 12 year high school reunion (for various reasons, the 10 year didn’t happen.) I discovered a bunch of old friends who are still living in the area. Some of them weren’t really “friends” back then, but 12 years on, ya get a little more interested in keeping in touch with them. Also, I recently met a someone and I’d like a chance to find out what’s possible, before I move out of the area.

So here I am playing around with my new LiveJournal, finding “friends” on LiveJournal through other friends. Which leads to adding one or two to my list of contacts on ICQ and Yahoo Messenger, when all of a sudden just about everyone on my ICQ list from the old Inferno BBS days log on, one who only logs on about once a year!