June 20, 2007

I am in at work early - the morning shift. Which I created. To provide lots of support for our clients in different time zones. To make sure that blah, bluh, blih.

I got in a full hour earlier than the required 7am - I have no idea why (I think I suprised my alarm clock and the girls), and have spent the time so far trying to get back my mojo after a too good vacation at the end of which I realized that for the first time in years - the first time since I took my current job - that I was dreading going back.

It is very hard for me to recover from this realization; it always has been. I give up easily in the face of constant reputation-harming failure. Personal failures of certain types don't bother me, but a demotion, a trailing project, constant lack of progress that is visible, all get me in a internet-browsing-when-I-should-be-working frenzy that can last for hours, days, or sometimes until the next weekend bookend to an unproductive blitz.

And so it goes; off to try to get something going.

December 06, 2004

When did Saturday Night Live get so bad? I was watching last night and Weekend Update is fucking sad - Tina and Amy are very funny - mean funny; but this is nice and easy and not funny.

Would somebody tell them that SNL is supposed to be a) mean b) on the edge?

October 19, 2004

Man, you know the world is changing when you see a Kurt Vonnegut piece and there are freaking comments to it from readers.

August 19, 2004

The structure of a computer program reflects the structure of the organization that built it.

Conway's Law

June 04, 2004

You know back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we’d lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I’ll be damned if all those things didn’t come true. –James Carville

February 17, 2004

After I get done checking my messages every morning, the light on my phone that tells me that I have a new message stops blinking. It takes a few seconds to get the message, and every morning I sit there and wait for it to stop before I start returning calls. It has no idea that it will stop blinking, or which one will be its last.

January 15, 2004

Schematic

November 21, 2003

favorite place

It had a sense of history about it, and it had the right angle, which is a lot. The window faced in a way so that you didn't have to turn your head to look down on people on the sidewalk. I would just sit and watch people for hours, pages not turning, nothing getting written. The place had a sense of personal history; my grandfather's old office was visible from it, my father, brother, mother, and sister had probably all walked past that very ledge. For that matter, I had known hundreds of people who were familiar with it; had grown up around it in a literal or figurative sense.

And speaking of that, there were all sorts of things that you could make up about how it was symbolic. The main drag that split the university from downtown lofts and coffeeshops could be any number of things: the transition from boy to man, from education to real world. The students crossing over to work internships with hip small companies was a progression, a growing-up. So was the drunk stumbling down the stairs of his loft - late for class, crossing over the other way.

And they served really good coffee.

October 30, 2003

Now's the time in the show where I look at my gigs of server logs and make fun of the people who have found this site through web searches.

I should say, before you look at the list, that I was suprised to find out how many people look for weird shit on the web, and how many of them appear to find it here.

I think that as you read these you will find that they provide a fresh cross-section of very deep sadness. Searching for something on the web is, in a way, a very desperate lonely act. You don't have the advice of friends or family, so you look up something using a machine and try to draw from the experience of others. In a way, the items below paint a picture of a porn-seeking racist loner who makes me want to cry.

September 02, 2003

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?: We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I moved to Atlanta with a certain vision of it that I have found to be in stark contrast to its realities. I grew up in a city in Georgia that was close enough to Atlanta to feel its modernizing influence in many ways, and I grew up wanting to move to the big city. My limited experience with it growing up was either through the study of civil-rights history or through personal experience. Our few trips to Atlanta left me with the impression that all kinds of people lived there; that it was the melting pot that I had imagined.

After living here for the last few months I have found that Atlanta is as bad or worse in terms of residential segregation compared with other areas that I expected to be behind the times such as Columbia, SC. I lived in a northern Georgia county, which I jokingly refer to as land of the white people because of its 4% minority population. Atlanta is just like everywhere else, the whites live on one side of town and the blacks live on the other.

Atlanta in some ways is worse than other places because it pretends to be modern; it stands up when people ask what city will lead race relations in the next century. Even though there are many rich, successful black men and women in Atlanta, in my suburban life I don't see or hear about any of them - they live to my south.

July 28, 2003

Racist things that I have heard since starting this job

• A coworker saying that his old car will be worthless when he resells it in a few years: Or I could just go down here and sell it to a Mexican, they'll buy it.
• A coworker talking to a client about Underground Atlanta: Well, they have had some problems - it has gotten rough down there, you know - darkened up.
• A coworker (actually 2) suggested that I not go to the Cheesecake Factory downtown because: It's like all black now.
• A coworker showing me an email forward entitled ghetto prom. After looking at a few pictures of some black high school kids in nice suits and brightly-colored dresses, he remarked: Man, that is some nig*** shit.
• A coworker making a racist joke: What's the worst thing that you can call a black person that starts with 'n' and ends with 'r'? Neighbor.
• Coworkers discussing a recent law that prevents a lot of people from riding in the back of a truck, which is a common way for manual laborers to get to work: Well how are Mexicans going to get anywhere now? Maybe they can pack them underneath straw in a line like they did on slave ships.
• A coworker complaining about how he has to go to the bank physically to deposit his wife's paycheck: Her boss is a fucking Jew so he is trying to save some money so he won't do direct deposit.
• You know now they want to give the poor another tax break, which is fair since they don't pay any freaking taxes anyway.(Not really racist, but classist and conservative and it has bounced around in my head since I heard it.)
• A coworker talking about what the city of Miami is like after going there for the first time: It's like a fucking third-world country down there - they have signs that say: "We speak English".

I am saddened by how long this list is, as there are probably things that I have forgotten to include.