Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Don Felipe del Mundo's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
12:27 pm	Unemployment means time for liveurinal Phillip update: Anna and I were married on October 18. I don't remember very much of it because I was so nervous beforehand and so drunk afterward. Fortunately we have probably about a thousand pictures to help me out. Apparently a good time was had by all, as my former newspaper hack associates might write. Our cat, Texas Pete, is slowly and messily dying of cancer. I've never been so attached to an animal before, let alone a cat. It sucks. I read that the people you care about have to die so you know how much you appreciated them. I think that applies to hairy people who paw your face in the middle of the night for attention as well. I'm talking about the cat, not Anna. Anna and I did a switcharoo. For about a month she was unemployed after being laid off at Cat. Then something wonderful happened. In spite of W's best attempts to flush the entire world down the toilet, she somehow managed to land a sweet job. A real engineering job. Instead of dressing like a mechanic and coming home smelling of grease and diesel, mad at the world, she comes home dressed "business casual" and in a pleasant mood. I left my job two days before she started hers. Over the course of the two years I worked for my former employer I became a fat, seven-day-a-week drunk, popping three different prescription pills to keep from freaking out all the time. I'm working on that now, as well as trying to plan my future. Our deal is we can't have kids until I'm making enough money to support a family. Anna's concession in this joint decision is that she may allow me to have kids. Haha. It was nice having Anna around all day. I worked at home, so we had a lot of time together. I would make a half-ass effort to do some work, then we would watch Star Trek, drink whiskey, talk, shop for groceries, fold laundry, whatever. Now it's just me and the cat. Me trying to pull myself out of the rut I've been in and the cat finding out-of-the-way places to shit or vomit. Do I take another stab at writing for a living? I love to write, but hate writing the kinds of things people end up paying me to write. Ad copy for a dentist's office, anyone? No? How about a nice piece on the interesting historical landmarks of Bumblefuck, NC? Small town politics? Barf. My father asked me to do contract work for his new company for a ridiculously high hourly rate. The catch is I would be doing exactly the same work I was doing for the last company. Barf again. And panic attack to boot. I have made inquiries about going back to school for some sort of IT degree or certification. I am definitely going to do this, but finances have been too thin for that, so it'll have to wait until next semester or next month or some other time, depending on what I decide to do. Well-qualified programmers who know the software my former employer used make $100k+ a year. That's significantly more than I made managing 20 or so programmers. I enjoyed the small amount of coding I did at my last job and think I wouldn't mind doing that sort of thing indefinitely. I just need to become "well-qualified." I noticed the Biscuitville down the road is hiring drive-thru cashiers. It's within walking distance and probably wouldn't keep me up at night worrying. I picture the job interview scene from American Beauty. Only I'm too young for a mid-life crisis. Current Music: Rain outside. Is it just me or has it been raining for a freaking month? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 7th, 2008
6:13 am	I had a dream that I was working in an eye doctor's place. Outside the office where glasses are ordered, fitted, etc. I was working with a fun bunch of people. They were showing me how to work the register, help people find glasses, and other things. Apparently one of the services we offered was glasses cleaning. We got in a bit of a rush and I was told to take over on this. Spray the glasses, wipe them with a special rag. Check to see if they're clean, hand them back. I couldn't get this one woman's glasses clean. I handed them to her and she said in an outraged voice "These are NOT clean!" I kept cleaning and cleaning and they just got more and more smudged. I ran around the place in a panic, wiping the glasses on table cloths, curtains, other customers' pants, but nothing worked. I was ashamed that I couldn't handle even this simple task. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
7:13 am	Fishin' I went deep sea fishing with Anna's dad, uncle, brother-in-law, and some family friends this past weekend. I had one hell of a good time. But I came back with an assload of fish and I have no idea what to do with it. Because you're sure to be dying to know, I'm going to keep you updated this week on how the fish situation works itself out. First on the fish report: Monday: New England style fish chowder made with about 3.5 pounds of black sea bass fillets. The verdict: Veeeery tasty. In the future though, I will make sure to remove the pin bones. They make soup very hard to enjoy. The trick to this dish, other than using heavy cream, is to coddle the fillets whole in the soup, then stir to break them up. This fish has been on ice for three days now, so anything I don't cook today I think I'm going to have to freeze. Daily bonehead moment: I caught Anna's brother-in-law. He was fishing on the other side of the boat. I thought I had a big damn fish on the line, but no, it was just Chris' rig. I didn't tug too long before I realized what happened. The captain said he'd seen one guy just about yank the other into the water when this happened in the past. Bonehead moment I didn't have: I restrained the urge to talk like a pirate while on the boat. I really wanted to, but I figured nobody would find it funny. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
1:04 pm	glug Rebecca says I'm getting dull. She doesn't know how right she is. At this rate I will be completely brain dead in a year, chugging Brawndo and watching "Ow! My Balls!!"* I'm marooned in suburbia, up to my eyeballs in debt, and working 10-12 hours a day at a shitty job. I don't have the time or energy to be witty or creative. Anna is experiencing a very similar brain drain for the same reasons. It's time to get out. Time to go somewhere else. Time to do something else. Looking at my calendar, I note that I'm coming up on two years with this company. Two years seems to be the amount of time it takes to make me start feeling antsy. Maybe I should... like... look for a job I can stand. Anyway, I talked to Anna earlier today and she just wants to get the hell out of the Raleigh area, so we're going to see what we can do to make that happen. *Idiocracy references. This was really a very funny movie. If you haven't seen it, you should. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 11th, 2008
9:27 am	Suggestions? How to unwind without chemical help? What do you do with your time? When you are done with 8-12 hours of stressful work stuff how do you slow your mind back down, relax? "Roll a fat one" or "crack open a bottle of whiskey" are not helpful answers, by the way. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
9:59 pm	Death Anna and I watched The Seventh Seal tonight. Well, I watched it and she snored through it. She doesn't do well with movies she has to read. To be fair, she was very tired. Usually its the Japanese movies she likes to sleep through. It takes about six seconds after the first subtitle for her to zonk out. I think she could have handled this one if she had a little more energy today. It was amazing. I don't think I've had tears of that magnitude well up in my eyes since Nathan Teague's little sister hit me in the knee with a croquet mallet when I was 11. I guess I've seen too many movies from 20+ years before I was born to believe that people actually had real feelings back then. That people could write, direct, act such wonderful stories. That people actually thought about life and death in 1957. It's usually hard for me to really feel movies made in that decade. Same goes for music. There's some fundamental disconnect between me and the people of that time. Everything was too damned forcefully upbeat. I'm wondering what Bergman could have done with modern equipment. The sound in particular was horrible. And the soundtrack. I wish there was a way to view the movie with no music whatsoever. Most of the time it was like the snare-bass-symbol triple at the end of a really good joke: superfluous. I guess it's this kind of speculation that leads to remakes. I will brand myself the next time I see me for even thinking about it. Death as a CGI sprite. The invention of a new, "stronger" female character in the name of political correctness. Cutting the dialogue to make room for more eye candy. Blech. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 28th, 2008
11:58 am	Work How many times a day do you wish you had a different job? I know there are people who love their jobs. My boss is one of them. He sees nothing wrong with working 20 hours a day. I seriously doubt there are 15 minutes in a given day that he is not thinking about how to better grow his company. He is his job. I don't want to love my job though. I want to make money doing something that doesn't annoy me too badly for about 8 hours a day, five days a week, then go home. At home, I will love Anna. I will love my family, my friends. I will love my cat, horror films, and key lime pie. I will not love my job. I want to like my job. Like I like Will Ferrell. He's entertaining most of the time. Rarely too annoying. If he were hit by a train one day, causing him to vanish forever from my life, I wouldn't cry. I'm just blowing off steam. I was in the midst of writing an email and sending it to both client and programmer. It went something like this: "I don't understand what you are talking about because your body cavity is muffling your communication. Perhaps you guys can pop your head into each other's asses for a while and work this out." I would love to be out of the middle, but I guess that would eliminate my job, and it would never work. Programmers aren't known for their communication skills. And the clients think the programmers use some sort of black magic to make these machines do what they do. CLIENT: "I would like his website to give my company a home on the web, draw in potential clients, do my taxes, make me more fertile, and strike down my enemies with lightening." PROGRAMMER: "Programming on lightening is complete, though client needs to consider electricity sources. It was difficult to make sure web site executed all potential clients visiting, but all enemies' taxes will be done by the module. This module took 20 hours more than quoted originally. I did not program fertility module because after we signed contract I decided it was impossible. At this time I would like to be evaluated for a raise." (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 17th, 2008
6:47 am	Maybe computers and maybe dreams I know both of the above topics are boring, but they might be what I feel like typing on the in this box today, y'all. I don't know why I typed "y'all," but it make me recall something from my recent trip to Boston. It only took my saying about three words for anyone there to guess I was not a local. People enjoyed guessing at my origins. The most common guess, for some damned reason, was Texas. Texas. I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, lovely port city of the Old South. I've spent most of my life in western and central North Carolina. I've never lived more than a few hours from the beaches of the Eastern coast. My father was a sailor. Not a cowboy, goddamnit. Okay, okay. He's originally from Colorado. And my mother is from the mountains of Pennsylvania. In school I was ribbed for not putting "battries" in my Walkman, and never, ever directing anyone to look "over yonder" for anything. Around here, my accent is light enough that people tend to assume I just moved here 10 years ago. But take a trip to Boston and I'm suddenly in need of boots and a Stetson. Now, on the other hand, I can peg, to maybe within 90% accuracy, where someone just relocated from to live here. When they move from New Jersey to Cary, NC to take advantage of the drastically lower cost of living and the human-compatible climate, I know it. All they have to do is ask me to pass the salt or say "You call this public transportation?" Any words will do. I can tell Maine from New York from Massachusetts from wherever. Maybe it's a result of living in Raleigh for the last six or seven years. At one of the horrible "networking" events I went to, the speaker, making introductions, went out of his way to point out that one of the guys at the meeting was a Raleigh native. Only then did I realize how rare it is to actually meet someone who was born here. Everyone here is either from up north, Mexico, Africa, or India, as far as I can tell. Where do the people that were born here go? Maybe they all go to the UK to replace the British oldsters that move to Florida to enjoy the sun and lower taxes until they have to move back for the healthcare. I got way off track there. DREAM: My parents threw a surprise birthday party for me. I was touched. I went into the crowd to mingle, only to find it lacking. An old highschool friend who moved to England 8 years ago and hasn't spoken to me since. A guy I liked well enough while I worked with the Water Quality Group, but not someone I'd call a friend. We'd only had a handful of drinks together after work. A girl I was rather attracted to in my days as a convenience store supervisor. We traded insults to wile away the boring hours at work, but the fact that she had a husband put a damper on any romantic plans on my part. People from my "networking" groups. Clients. My bosses from past jobs. Ex-girlfriends, but only the ones from relationships that ended amiably. No Anna. No Amos. No Robb. No Kristi. The Brown Mountain Boys were entirely unrepresented. In short, an entire party full of half-friends and acquaintances. I was making polite small talk and knowing I was in for a long night that would range from boring to mildly uncomfortable when Anna's alarm went off. COMPUTERS: I hate them. For work reasons, I have had to use Windows, Mac OS, and various distributions of Linux across the years. My conclusion: They all suck balls. My G3 with OS9 on it was like a cranky old woman. It was so irritating to know that there were certain combinations of actions that would immediately cause the damned thing to crash when I was putting together a newspaper page. Friday, Vista crashed three times, randomly, ever so politely apologizing each time. Linux just makes me feel like an idiot. While trying to upload some songs to my iPod yesterday using a program called "Banshee," I managed to erase the whole database and replace it with something apparently unreadable to the device. I won't even go into how dumb I felt trying to set up an http server on this Linux box last week. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
10:39 am	Quirky guys Quirky guys, these programmers. Sometimes they make me want to go drown myself in the toilet. I have to put that in perspective though. Our clients make me want to drown myself in the toilet daily. I'd blame the clients for driving me to drink, but I think I took the bus there years ago. Yesterday I was explaining something a client needed to one of our junior programmers. This particular programmer is nice enough, but he doesn't think I'm funny. His sense of humor must be broken, right? Haha. This site has a large database of users. Authenticated users can search the database to find other users by name, company, profession, etc. The client asked us to program in an "email to all" function. By way of explanation, I said something like this to the programmer: "Ok. Say that User A searches for all other users with the first name 'James.' The search returns a page of results. At the bottom of the page, there is a link saying 'email to all.' When User A clicks this link, the built-in email form comes up with all of the addresses of the people named James in the 'to' field. Got it?" Yes sir. Today he sends me an email saying that he has completed the task of giving the ability of an authenticated user to email everyone named James. I suppose that would be a useful function if this were a site for SPNJ (the Society for People Named James). Unfortunately, it is not. If I were the company owner, I'd send this programmer an email back saying "What in God's name were you thinking? Try to use that melon on top of your shoulders for something!" Alas, it is my role to be the good cop to his bad cop. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
2:47 pm	Fingernail Clippings No, not really. I'm off that kick for a while. This is another post about computers. In my ongoing quest to rid my life of Microsoft, I've decided to install Linux (Kanotix) on my laptop as well. In case I need to give the thing away later to someone who prefers Windows, It'd be good to have a disk so they can reinstall XP. Being the shitheels they are, Compaq or Hewlett Packard or Mickey Mouse or whoever made my Presario decided not to give me an install disk. Instead, they put a "restore" partition on my hard drive. Since that will be gone when I format the drive, I thought I'd go ahead and burn the "all-in-one restore disk" from this partition. Upon clicking on this option, I was told that I would need 12 CD's. Their definition of all-in-one is different than mine. What in God's name requires 12 CD's? It can't just be the operating system. And I know it's not backing up my files as well, as my music alone would take up more space than that. I have no idea what I've been burning onto CD's for the last hour. That irritates me. Anyone know? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 10th, 2008
12:26 pm	Vomit One time I drank too much. The next day I hurt. I threw up until I had nothing left in me. Then I drank some orange juice. Five minutes later I threw that up too. I commented to Anna that throwing up when you have nothing in your stomach but orange juice is actually kind of pleasant. It was exactly like drinking orange juice in reverse. It was even still cold. Today, she said that the canned ravioli she just ate was not agreeing with her and that throwing it up would not be like throwing up orange juice. I told her she should vomit up the ravioli, go drink some orange juice, then throw that up for comparison. She said, "You're fired." When I think of vomiting and drinking, I think of the time my friend disappeared from a party for a while. When he came back some time later, he said he'd been throwing up in the woods. I said I hadn't seen him drink all that much, at least for him. He admitted, woefully, that he had been really hungry before the party and the only thing he had was fish sticks. So he ate the whole box. This was 10 years ago maybe. Now, every time I've overindulged in fermented poisons and I'm leaning out a car door or over the toilet, I think "At least I didn't eat a box of fish sticks." Thank you for stopping in to read my bodily functions blog. Next up: ear wax. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008
9:51 am	Massachusetts What the hell do you do on a Sunday in Revere, Massachusetts? Other than go to church? I am questioning the sanity of those who decided to have this conference in Boston in early March. Didn't anyone tell them it's fucking cold here? EDIT: I found out what they do here on Sundays. They walk across the street to the liquor megamart and buy whiskey. On Sunday! Truly enlightened, these yankees. On the other hand, I've concluded that there are only two places in the world that have a bourbon selection I find acceptable: 1. The Apex, NC ABC store. 2. The state of Kentucky. I'm only guessing on #2, but if you can't find three or four good bourbons for less than $30 a fifth at any grocery store, hairdresser's, or daycare there, I'm sorely disappointed in them as well. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, February 29th, 2008
9:40 am	Debt I just paid off a credit card bill I've had for years. The company offered to settle for 35 cents on the dollar. It feels wonderful to have that weight off my shoulders. I will never have a credit card again. They should call them "fuck you up the ass cards." I ran up a huge bill on the damn thing in college: expensive repairs to my ex-girlfriend's shitbox of a car, and rent and bills for the lengthy period I was unemployed, as well as the initial "Hey I've got a credit card now and I can buy all sorts of nifty toys" purchases. Once you factor in interest and late payment fees, that cool new iPod probably ended up costing me damn near $1000 by the time it was all said and done. I was such an idiot. Still am. Only slightly less so now. (Comment on this)
Monday, February 25th, 2008
12:10 pm	regular interruptions My breaks from work take the form of regular IM interruptions from Anna. Here's one of today's: Anna: well it doesnt matter cause i am here and somebody didnt give me monies … moneys … so i cant have chocolate … and im mad at you right now … moneys or monies … or moneis Phillip: option #2 Anna: that doesnt look right Phillip: i'm sorry … i didn't invent the language … and i didn't stop you from getting chocolate … and i didn't make a hershey's bar unhealthy … you need to be mad at 1)english people 2)yourself 3)god, in that order … you'll notice phillip is not on the list Anna: you maybe didnt invent it but i believe you are one of its lower level grammar demons Phillip: hey, i just work here Anna: i hate english people Phillip: it's not like the grammar devil consulted me Anna: and god always comes first phillip … didnt you go to church Phillip: not recently (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
8:05 am	My company I work for an interesting company. They have just requested that I set up another server. At my house. I already have one set up for them here. They want the things here because nobody is ever at the office to look after them if they put them there, and my cable internet is 50 times faster than the shared connection we have at the office. I know why we do the weird, shady things we do, but that doesn't make them any less weird and shady. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 18th, 2008
9:33 am	Absurd "[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd." -Richard Feynman So I wonder what happens when your quantum computer breaks. Do you open a word file to find that is infinitely long, displaying all possible combinations of characters? I guess if you scroll long enough you'll find "Hamlet" by Mr. Bingles. Somewhere in there will also be your resume, cast in the most positive light possible. Just email the file and tell your soon-to-be employer to look for it beginning at line 1E32454343477789. Oops. Outlook sent the email to every possible email address. (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 16th, 2008
8:12 am	Free! I'm free of Vista! Hooraaaaay! I finally got a Linux distribution to: A) Dual boot so Anna can still load Crappy ol' Vista (That's how it's written in the bootloader entry too). B) Work with my 8-year-old wireless USB adapter. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Skype has a beta version that works with Fedora 8, so I can still use it. This is very important for work. I still would have had to switch back and forth between OSes if this had not been the case. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
8:15 am	What I do For anyone curious about what I do for a living, here it is. I write emails. I write them to two groups of people: 1. Those who know vastly more about websites and computers in general than I do. 2. Those who know vastly less than I do. Neither group is fun to deal with, and being the go-between for the two is a great big ol' bitch. Here's an example of an email to the first group, just for fun: We also need the site's database restored from the same date. Regarding the earlier response from Xxxxx Xxxxxx, I would like a little clarification. Forgive my lack of knowledge on the matter, but I don't understand what she means about not having the MySQL agent. I know I am able to access the MySQL database via phpMyAdmin through Plesk, so I'm not sure what she is talking about. Is she saying that the db is not backed up? Are we missing some sort of support package required for db backup? Is there something we need to install in order for you to be able to restore the db from 02/06/08? In short, what can I do to bring our database back from the dead? And here's this one, which I sent to a member of group 2, after a month of her telling us that her newsletter module wasn't working because she didn't get it in her inbox after she sent it out: Hey Xxxxx, I checked your xxxxx@xxxxxxx.com inbox using webmail this morning and the newsletter was there. I wouldn't usually do that, but I wanted to make sure it was there as my guys couldn't think of any reason you'd not get it. What this tells me is that the newsletter is making it to your email address and then probably being tagged as spam and thrown away by your email client. You'll have to adjust your junk mail settings to make sure you receive it in the future. Can you check your trash or junk mail (spam, bulk mail) folder to see if it is there? Phillip This was the best example of a group 2 email I could find on short notice that didn't have pictures. Yes, I usually have to draw pictures for these people. (Comment on this)
Monday, February 11th, 2008
5:01 pm	Everyone has the flu. But not me, muthafuckaaaas. I had a flu shot before I left the country. I AM INVINCIBLE. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 7th, 2008
1:51 pm	IPA APB I don't drink a lot of beer anymore because 12 ounces of it has an annoyingly small amount of chemically pure alcohol in it. Just a for-instance: 12 ounces of Longhammer IPA has 0.78 ounces of pure alcohol in it. 12 ounces of Evan Williams black label has 5.16 ounces. Anyway, I thought I'd put out an APB on a good IPA. If anyone reading this knows a good pale ale or IPA I can pick up at Total Wine and More for less than $9 a six-pack, please let me know. If you think Bass is a good pale ale, please do not respond. The perfect pale ale has the following characteristics: 1. High alcohol content 2. Beautiful hoppy bouquet 3. Strong flavor of hops working together to form a perfect, unified taste. Not just the taste of 14 different kinds of hops lumped indiscriminately into the barrel. When I swallow I want to say "Hmmm. Grapefruit. Nice!" not "Bluugh. Potpourri!" 4. It must have enough hops in it that when I burp an hour after my last drink, it tastes like flowers. EDIT: I recently switched to Opera from Firefox. I had no idea how dependent on FF's spellchecker I had become. I had to use Liveurinal's spellchecker four times on this fucking thing. Current Music: "C'mon Sea Legs," Immaculate Machine (1 Comment |Comment on this)