A long and rambling rant. It's going in NSFW tags.
Listening to SOMA FM. Doomed Radio: Dark music for tortured souls
My gf, Aelys, and her sister talked for a while the other night. As a result of this conversation, my gf decided to go away for a few days to help her sister Amelie move and watch her baby. Amelie is moving from her old apartment in Japan Town to a house in the Richmond neighborhood on the western side of the peninsula. My gf will be leaving early tomorrow morning.
Her sister is moving because of her own domestic problems. Amélie just annulled her marriage after over 1 yr. Some time over 1 yr ago, she married a co-worker at her firm and got pregnant soon after. Several months later, at the firm's Christmas/winter holiday party and now visibly pregnant, she witnessed her husband very publicly making out with another co-worker, right in front of her and her colleagues in the bar. It's not an "open" relationship, so for that and other more obvious reasons, this behavior is not acceptable. Amélie later found out that this had been going on for a while. To make things worse, in the following weeks, it was discovered that the husband has piled up 10s of thousands of dollars of online gambling debt, has drained their joint bank accounts. And, he (Jon) continued to go on with the affair in open defiance of decency.
Idle hands are the devil's playthings
It will nice to have my gf out of the house. She's unemployed, has no hobbies or passions that she devotes much time to (except cooking sometimes, and watching a lot of TV ...) A healthy, able-bodied adult ought to have something to do. If not with work, with something like reading, art, or poetry, fitness, or some hobby or anything engaging and uplifting. Something that gives life a purpose. Even playing video games has some merit....
Aelys has been unemployed for a while. She is not paying her share of the rent, but that's not what I'm complaining about, yet. I don't mind helpign her with that for a while as long as does something engaging and is considerate. (My standards arent' that high here. I'm a slacker, not a task-master. There aren't many times in many adults' lives when they have the luxury of not having the pressures of a full-time job weighing down on them or a boss breathing down their necks.) But when she sits around doing nothing the way she has, bad things start happening.
I think it's her idleness that is causing all of the problems that we've been having. She says her only hobby is myself -- I'm some kind of project for her, an emotionally damaged and uncouth person for her try to fix and civilize. So, all she does during the day, while I'm at work, aside from a minimal amount of housework, is to get into my things, open my crates (I've started padlocking them to protect my privacy) and boxes, organize my closet without my permission, read my journals (I've tried to hide them and recently started writing in code), mess with my clothes, my books, my box of smut, somethign, anything. She's even been correcting my pronunciation to try to make me get rid of my Canadian accent. And all of it crosses personal boundaries and creates a lot of stress. My things are none of her business. Another thing I mentioned has been spying in my browser history. When she's not messing with me, she sits around wathcing TV and crying.
to be continued.......
A vacation from my girlfriend, continued
Listening to David Sedaris read short stories on an NPR download.
At work, they were throwing away some old equipment earlier this week. You can look through the pile of junked equipment and pick out what you want before the janitors haul it away. I found a touch-screen panel computer. I'm going to use it for the control panel (it will have a touch-screen GUI) of the Infinite Jukebox that I'm building in the basement. I also found a neat chrome wind-up timer clock. The hands move counter-clockwise. It has 2 buttons on top, one red and one green. Made in West Germany. The hands and numbers glow in the dark. I think it had been used in a dark room for developing film. It could also be useful in a kitchen for timing cooking durations. I gave it to my gf as a going away present. She went away this morning adn will be gone for about a week.
Almost daily, she has complained that I go down stairs and shut myself up in the workshop. She calls it the "Geek-o-Sphere." It's a large windowless basement room brightly lit with fluorescent lights. Its walls are lined with shelves, cabinets, and work benches. Power outlets are everywerhe - ceiling, floor, walls, and benches. Except for the humidity (i need a dehumidifier), it's a good place to work. The room is crowded with some of the usual things, but possibly in larger quantities, anybody with technical hobbies would have: pegboards of tools, bikes, martial arts practice weapons, skis, boots, crampons, ice axes, rope, books, a collection of wicked Victorian-era syringes, some dozen computers and servers (I used to earn extra money by repairing computer equipment -- some extra boxes and parts piled up during this time), short wave radios, video game consoles, monitors, cables, stereo equipment, video equipment, cameras, amplifiers, gadgets, microscopes, scientific lab equipment, electronics and software-engineering projects: microcontrollers and circuit boards I'm working on.
The other night I was working on a movie and audio file database - getting everything so its searchable from a website using php script linked to a MySQL database with an embedded audio and video player or streame it something. I have some video and music files in the form of mp3s, ogg vorbis, and others. I'm working on getting it all online (only accessable by me and a few friends) and in the form of an infinite Jukebox wehre you can type in the website, a password, type in what you want to hear or watch, and then have it streamed to your computer.
It's a big project. Just getting it all in to 1 searchable database is a challenge. Anything pre-made that I've tried just chokes. So, I spent a week writing on custom software . Anyway, it's goign to be spread out on 3 corporate linux servers that I found in the trash. They are huge towers, much larger and heavier than any beige desktop tower pc. Packed with hard drives and cooling fans, they draw more than 500 Watts each. (During the winter, I'll keep it turned on to help provide heat for the house.) The databases will be linked to gether by 1 searchable webpage. It will look like Pandora or Shoutcast or something. I haven't decided on the layout yet. Anyway, after working on it for a week, after reading up on php and mysql and writing my own code, I finally found something pre-made and opensource that seems to work. It was pretty much what I've been trying to do myself and it even used the same approach. So, I've quit writing my own software (why re-invent the wheel), and started setting up the opensource software. I need to finish scanning in all of the data, and then figure out how to share mysql database access among 3 servers. It still chokes when I try to link the databases.
Anyway, the next morning she complains that I come home from work late, then I shut myself off down there and play games.
Me: would you rather have me down there smoking crack? (Hobbies like th is have been therapeutic, provided they're not making me so mad (which computers will do sometimes) that I'm punching the cement walls. Somethign that I immerse myself in and get my mind off the occaisonal craving).
My gf, on the other hand, wants me to spend my free time, what little of it there is, watching TV upstairs with her and her cats. Just as she says that her only hobby is myself, she says that she should be my only hobby. This is hard for me for a number of reasons. She is completely not into the things that she claimed to enjoy doing when we first met. Some of what she is interested in, I can't relate to. I hate TV. Since Seinfeld went off the air, I haven't been able to find anything that can hold my attention for more than a few minutes. She was watching "Glee" (a TV show) the other night. Not my thing. And I am not overly fond of cats. I get twitchy and restless, if I don't bring a book or laptop upstairs and read or work on a project and sit with her while she watches. Then she gets pissed wehn she comments on something that just happened and I say "huh?" Though I am working on trying to nod and smile and say "yeah, " to fake some enthusiasm and pretend to know what is happening in the show.
NSFW:
Listening to SOMA FM. Doomed Radio: Dark music for tortured souls
My gf, Aelys, and her sister talked for a while the other night. As a result of this conversation, my gf decided to go away for a few days to help her sister Amelie move and watch her baby. Amelie is moving from her old apartment in Japan Town to a house in the Richmond neighborhood on the western side of the peninsula. My gf will be leaving early tomorrow morning.
Her sister is moving because of her own domestic problems. Amélie just annulled her marriage after over 1 yr. Some time over 1 yr ago, she married a co-worker at her firm and got pregnant soon after. Several months later, at the firm's Christmas/winter holiday party and now visibly pregnant, she witnessed her husband very publicly making out with another co-worker, right in front of her and her colleagues in the bar. It's not an "open" relationship, so for that and other more obvious reasons, this behavior is not acceptable. Amélie later found out that this had been going on for a while. To make things worse, in the following weeks, it was discovered that the husband has piled up 10s of thousands of dollars of online gambling debt, has drained their joint bank accounts. And, he (Jon) continued to go on with the affair in open defiance of decency.
Idle hands are the devil's playthings
It will nice to have my gf out of the house. She's unemployed, has no hobbies or passions that she devotes much time to (except cooking sometimes, and watching a lot of TV ...) A healthy, able-bodied adult ought to have something to do. If not with work, with something like reading, art, or poetry, fitness, or some hobby or anything engaging and uplifting. Something that gives life a purpose. Even playing video games has some merit....
Aelys has been unemployed for a while. She is not paying her share of the rent, but that's not what I'm complaining about, yet. I don't mind helpign her with that for a while as long as does something engaging and is considerate. (My standards arent' that high here. I'm a slacker, not a task-master. There aren't many times in many adults' lives when they have the luxury of not having the pressures of a full-time job weighing down on them or a boss breathing down their necks.) But when she sits around doing nothing the way she has, bad things start happening.
I think it's her idleness that is causing all of the problems that we've been having. She says her only hobby is myself -- I'm some kind of project for her, an emotionally damaged and uncouth person for her try to fix and civilize. So, all she does during the day, while I'm at work, aside from a minimal amount of housework, is to get into my things, open my crates (I've started padlocking them to protect my privacy) and boxes, organize my closet without my permission, read my journals (I've tried to hide them and recently started writing in code), mess with my clothes, my books, my box of smut, somethign, anything. She's even been correcting my pronunciation to try to make me get rid of my Canadian accent. And all of it crosses personal boundaries and creates a lot of stress. My things are none of her business. Another thing I mentioned has been spying in my browser history. When she's not messing with me, she sits around wathcing TV and crying.
to be continued.......
A vacation from my girlfriend, continued
NSFW:
Listening to David Sedaris read short stories on an NPR download.
At work, they were throwing away some old equipment earlier this week. You can look through the pile of junked equipment and pick out what you want before the janitors haul it away. I found a touch-screen panel computer. I'm going to use it for the control panel (it will have a touch-screen GUI) of the Infinite Jukebox that I'm building in the basement. I also found a neat chrome wind-up timer clock. The hands move counter-clockwise. It has 2 buttons on top, one red and one green. Made in West Germany. The hands and numbers glow in the dark. I think it had been used in a dark room for developing film. It could also be useful in a kitchen for timing cooking durations. I gave it to my gf as a going away present. She went away this morning adn will be gone for about a week.
Almost daily, she has complained that I go down stairs and shut myself up in the workshop. She calls it the "Geek-o-Sphere." It's a large windowless basement room brightly lit with fluorescent lights. Its walls are lined with shelves, cabinets, and work benches. Power outlets are everywerhe - ceiling, floor, walls, and benches. Except for the humidity (i need a dehumidifier), it's a good place to work. The room is crowded with some of the usual things, but possibly in larger quantities, anybody with technical hobbies would have: pegboards of tools, bikes, martial arts practice weapons, skis, boots, crampons, ice axes, rope, books, a collection of wicked Victorian-era syringes, some dozen computers and servers (I used to earn extra money by repairing computer equipment -- some extra boxes and parts piled up during this time), short wave radios, video game consoles, monitors, cables, stereo equipment, video equipment, cameras, amplifiers, gadgets, microscopes, scientific lab equipment, electronics and software-engineering projects: microcontrollers and circuit boards I'm working on.
The other night I was working on a movie and audio file database - getting everything so its searchable from a website using php script linked to a MySQL database with an embedded audio and video player or streame it something. I have some video and music files in the form of mp3s, ogg vorbis, and others. I'm working on getting it all online (only accessable by me and a few friends) and in the form of an infinite Jukebox wehre you can type in the website, a password, type in what you want to hear or watch, and then have it streamed to your computer.
It's a big project. Just getting it all in to 1 searchable database is a challenge. Anything pre-made that I've tried just chokes. So, I spent a week writing on custom software . Anyway, it's goign to be spread out on 3 corporate linux servers that I found in the trash. They are huge towers, much larger and heavier than any beige desktop tower pc. Packed with hard drives and cooling fans, they draw more than 500 Watts each. (During the winter, I'll keep it turned on to help provide heat for the house.) The databases will be linked to gether by 1 searchable webpage. It will look like Pandora or Shoutcast or something. I haven't decided on the layout yet. Anyway, after working on it for a week, after reading up on php and mysql and writing my own code, I finally found something pre-made and opensource that seems to work. It was pretty much what I've been trying to do myself and it even used the same approach. So, I've quit writing my own software (why re-invent the wheel), and started setting up the opensource software. I need to finish scanning in all of the data, and then figure out how to share mysql database access among 3 servers. It still chokes when I try to link the databases.
Anyway, the next morning she complains that I come home from work late, then I shut myself off down there and play games.
Me: would you rather have me down there smoking crack? (Hobbies like th is have been therapeutic, provided they're not making me so mad (which computers will do sometimes) that I'm punching the cement walls. Somethign that I immerse myself in and get my mind off the occaisonal craving).
My gf, on the other hand, wants me to spend my free time, what little of it there is, watching TV upstairs with her and her cats. Just as she says that her only hobby is myself, she says that she should be my only hobby. This is hard for me for a number of reasons. She is completely not into the things that she claimed to enjoy doing when we first met. Some of what she is interested in, I can't relate to. I hate TV. Since Seinfeld went off the air, I haven't been able to find anything that can hold my attention for more than a few minutes. She was watching "Glee" (a TV show) the other night. Not my thing. And I am not overly fond of cats. I get twitchy and restless, if I don't bring a book or laptop upstairs and read or work on a project and sit with her while she watches. Then she gets pissed wehn she comments on something that just happened and I say "huh?" Though I am working on trying to nod and smile and say "yeah, " to fake some enthusiasm and pretend to know what is happening in the show.
