Author: Mark Alexander

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Never Take Naproxen in the Middle of the Night

I woke up with my lower back in pain around 3 am, so I got up, popped a Naproxen, and went back to bed.

The dreams I had thereafter were just bizarre. One in particular I found so weird I had to scribble some notes because if I didn’t I knew I’d completely forget it by morning:

I was at work. I pulled my Mac out of my backpack and realized that somehow I’d grabbed Ben’s old machine that’s currently sitting in a closet. I briefly thought about using it (since I basically just needed it for email and cruising the internet) until I could go home at lunch but then realized it didn’t even have an OS loaded. I told my boss I needed to run home for a few minutes (I live, after all, less then 5 minutes away) and left.

I arrived home to my last apartment in San Francisco, to discover a notice from UPS taped on the door that a delivery had been attempted and that Sparkles water had left a new bottle of water. The UPS guy was still there, saw that I’d come home, and came back to give me a large envelope.

I went in the building and noticed that the door to my apartment was ajar. I knew that the landlord was doing renovations, but she’d mentioned nothing to me about needing to get in my apartment. I walked in and every wall was covered with plaster patches. I thought, “what the hell?” and at that moment she walked in.

The landlord was Joan Rivers. Yes, Joan Rivers. (IRL, Molly, my landlord in SF was just as old and nearly as wealthy—she lived next door to Diane Feinstein—but not anywhere near as funny.)

“What have you done to my apartment?” I asked.

“Your apartment?” This is my apartment. You’re on the wrong floor, silly! I’m renovating this one for me.”

And then I realized that yes, I was in the wrong unit altogether and that the UPS delivery wasn’t for me and neither was the bottle of water.

Interestingly, while this was supposedly my last apartment in San Francisco, it bore very little resemblance to the real thing. IRL, you got to the apartment via an outside balcony that ran the length of the building, and it was a large (for SF, anyway) one bedroom unit. In this dream, it was reached by an interior hallway and the unit I found myself in looked much a standard generic hotel room.

Have I mentioned that the entire time all this was happening, “Singin’ in the Rain” was playing at angelic volume and that somehow I had forgotten all about the Mac—or returning to work—and had come home to watch the movie? (Something I’ve never seen all the way through.)

From there it got even more confusing. Joan had apparently taken over the apartment below mine, but I needed to go the apartment above mine to watch the movie. Joan wanted to see it as well, and while the door to the stairway was blocked by construction stuff, leaving only an opening about six inches wide, she somehow managed to get her skinny ass through but I had to take the elevator (which IRL we all referred to as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride). Apparently the elevator had been replaced as part of the construction as well, and it was now glass-walled and overlooked the four-story foyer—but still dropped an inch once you got on.

Upon reaching the fourth floor apartment, I realized I was now carrying my Dad’s old flat panel computer monitor (apparently to watch the film on), but Joan was nowhere to be found and the apartment where this was going to happen was occupied by two black guys who had no idea why I was even there.

And then I woke up.

I always hope that by writing these dreams out I’ll gain some understanding of what my subconscious was trying to tell me, but with this one I’ve got nothin’…

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What The FUCK Does This Even Mean?

From the website of one of the neighborhood-razing overpriced apartment complexes going up in central Phoenix:

AUTHENTIC LOCATION

Located in the Midtown neighborhood, it provide[s] easy access to local businesses, art and culture. Residents enjoy authentic experiences and embrace one-of-a-kind events over corporate brands.

What the hell is an “authentic location?” Would someone prefer to live at a fake location? And what about “one-of-a-kind events over corporate brands?” What the FUCK does that even mean?

The website has no floor plans and no pricing info. These are the images in their gallery describing “Bold Progressive Living.”

So in other words, drunk hipsters with more money than sense? I guess that is their target demographic. The only thing missing from those photos are man-buns.

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Me In Social Settings

And it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. But I wasn’t always this way. Yeah, I’d always been somewhat shy, but I was never one to avoid interaction with people. I really think the tipping point was when I lost the full use of my voice and I was no longer able to be heard in loud gatherings. I think that also speaks to my discomfort in large crowds…

That could also be why I took to blogging with such gusto—and against all odds stay with it. In its own twisted way, it allows me to be heard.

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Bitching and Moaning

First off, let me say that I am very grateful to have a job and to be working—even if it is for less money than I was earning ten fifteen years ago.

That being said, working for a government agency these past six months has been an eye opening experience. I have nothing in my work history to compare the level of dysfunction I encounter on a daily basis. Not even DISH was this broken, and that’s saying a lot.

You would think that this agency would’ve learned from the fiasco that was their 3-month new equipment refresh project that was started before Ben and I returned to Phoenix and is just now—more than a year later—wrapping up. Hiring Dell to basically do everything short of placing the new equipment on users’ desks wasn’t their first mistake. That was failing to get the necessary teams in place to do proper testing of the hardware and software before pushing it out to the thousands of employees across the state. If that sort of infrastructure had been in place, then maybe—just maybe—it wouldn’t have been necessary to terminate their contract when Dell failed to live up to the ridiculous expectations and timeline they’d been given…and then turn around and rehire them because it was obvious that without their outside knowledge and assistance the entire project was going to crash and burn in a spectacular fashion.

But no! Get it out, get it out, get it out! NOW NOW NOW.

So six weeks after I came on board and a few hundred Win10 machines had gone out the door, most of those machines started coming back in to be reimaged with Win7. Mission-critical software didn’t work properly. Users hated the OS. The CIO “left to pursue other opportunities” and his replacement immediately announced that unless the hardware wouldn’t support it or there was an overriding business reason for Win10 to be used, all new hardware that went out was to be loaded with Win7.

I can’t tell you how many problems that cleared up—not to mention it cut down our machine prep time by half.

My time here was supposed to have ended when the refresh project wrapped up, but I truly believe my supervisor wants to keep me around long enough to survive the agency’s hiring freeze so he can bring me on as a full time employee. (This would be a huge pay increase, bringing me back in line with what I have been making prior to this.) Thankfully for both of us, a new project was coming online—the replacement of around 250 customer-facing kiosk devices across the state; all of which would need to be imaged and prepped for deployment.

And that is where today’s rant comes in.

Once again we are being told to get something pushed out the door without adequate Q&A testing being performed—even though we know things are not working properly—because apparently it’s more important to show that something is being done rather than wait and make sure what’s being done is right.

With one batch of machines already out the door and in the field, the first time I had to unbox a few dozen other already-imaged machines was when the powers that be realized the assigned computer names were too long and couldn’t properly join the domain. The second time the machines (which thankfully hadn’t gone out yet) were unboxed was because someone realized that from a data security perspective, these very public machines probably shouldn’t have their USB ports active. The third time they were unboxed was because someone else realized that the machines needed to have an auto-login to the service account that ran the kiosk software.

The auto-logon worked sporadically at best, and seemed to be tied to the machines being in the proper group in Active Directory. Once they were in the correct bucket in AD, some worked and some still didn’t. “Oh, it’s a back-end issue they’re working on,” my supervisor said. “Go ahead and box them up and get them ready to go out.”

Against my better judgment, I boxed them up again. My boss returned to the workroom shortly after I’d finished the chore and said, “We need to force group policy again.”

I wonder what stupidity tomorrow will bring?

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Tastes Change

As I’m sure I’ve written here before, I’ve been a huge fan of Philip Glass since discovering his music via Koyaanisqatsi in 1986.

To this day there are parts of Akhnaten and Satyagraha that still send chills down my spine.

But in 1989 he released 1000 Airplanes On The Roof, a work that by all accounts I should’ve devoured, laying his music over a theme of UFOs and alien abduction (something I was way too much into at the time).

And yet, I hated it. I don’t know if I was expecting to be blown away like I was with Akhnaten or if I perceived that his style had changed too much since Koyaanisqatsi, but I was not impressed.

When the CD was stolen from my collection in 1991, I didn’t bother replacing it.

In the years since Airplanes, Glass’ music has evolved and changed—as we all have—and I’ve loved pretty much everything I’ve heard of his in the interim.

So when I was looking over my recently found “List of Stolen CDs” and noticed that Airplanes was on it, I thought, what the hell—give it another listen.

And upon hearing it again, I don’t understand why I hated it so. It doesn’t give me chills, but it is quintessential Glass.

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I Can’t. I Just Can’t.


I can’t. I just can’t. And this my friends is why it is so vitally important that we all get out and VOTE in November. If you don’t want that Cheeto-faced straw-toupeed fucktrumpet sitting in the White House—and by extension idiots like this running the country and determining your future—you have to VOTE. Sitting at home on November 8th, thinking you don’t need to drag your ass to the polling place because everything says that Hillary has it wrapped up, is no guarantee she will win if you don’t cast your ballot. We need to show unequivocally that Trump’s hate and his Neo-Nazi brain-dead followers have no place in our society.

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So Many Feels

To celebrate National Dog Day, Universal Pictures presents the first look at, A Dog’s Purpose, an upcoming 2017 family comedy film starring Josh Gad, Britt Robertson, Peggy Lipton, and Dennis Quaid. A Dog’s Purpose comes to theaters on January 27th, 2017.

“Based on the beloved bestselling novel by W. Bruce Cameron, A Dog’s Purpose, from director Lasse Hallström, shares the soulful and surprising story of one devoted dog (voiced by Josh Gad) who finds the meaning of his own existence through the lives of the humans he teaches to laugh and love.”

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Like Running Into An Old Friend You Haven’t Seen In Years

And so another journey down the back alleys of the internet has turned up something quite unexpected—and quite forgotten.

In the mid 1980s, right after I’d gotten my first CD player and replaced my mediocre Sony stereo equipment with some good gear (Yamaha, baby), I stumbled upon the Private Music record label. While their wares were eventually sold everywhere, it was at the audio salon (the venerable Jerry’s Audio for my Arizona readers) where I purchased the aforementioned equipment that I initially discovered them, and many of the discs became the soundtrack of my life after my relocation to San Francisco.

I don’t remember how I landed on that Wikipedia Page, but even before I’d read through the whole list of their releases, a name popped into my head—along with a song title: Eddie Jobson, Theme of Secrets.

I remembered the name and title, and was surprised when I did a search through my iTunes and came up empty. WTF? Why didn’t I have this album in my collection? Was it one of the CDs that was stolen from my apartment in 1990 and never replaced? Did I get rid of it during my purge in 2013 without ripping a copy first? It turns out Secrets wasn’t the only Private Music album curiously absent from my collection, but it was the one that proved the most difficult to find again.

When I did finally track it down and heard those notes playing, a tear came to my eye. Rediscovering once-loved-and-forgotten music really is like running into an old friend whom you haven’t seen in years.

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Any WordPress Gurus Out There?

It seems the most recent WordPress “upgrade” has broken something. Again.  I’m no longer receiving email updates when comments are left on posts.

As you can see, I have the proper boxes checked off in the control panel, and the email address they’re being sent to is valid (nothing has changed), so I’m wondering how to get this working again.

Any ideas?