Month: October 2019

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I Know I Said I Wasn't Going to Do It…

…but it was a slow day at work and I had a full backup from the night before, so I figured what the hell? I could always restore from the clone when I got home if it hosed everything.

And I know that every year I say I'm not going to upgrade and yet—without fail—after months of trash-talking the betas, I do it on the very first day the new OS is officially available.

Well, after using it for the past several hours and checking most everything out, I have to say I'm more than pleasantly surprised. I don't know how many overnighters the Mac team at Apple had to pull since I was cursing out even the most recent beta only a few days ago but it would appear that everything that I experienced as broken only last week is now fixed.

While most of what Apple did was behind the scenes, there are lot of subtle graphic improvements, tweaks that make doing things easier, and a general speed increase that is noticeable. I also appreciate that the ever-bloated iTunes has been split into three separate programs. My biggest worry in upgrading was that I'd lose all the carefully curated album art I'd assigned (an issue brought up in the forums in regards to the betas). Admittedly, it took a couple hours for it to repopulate, but all the custom artwork is present and accounted for. Another minor inconvenience was that initially the "Recently Added" group only showed albums I'd added within the past twenty four hours.* A full accounting of what's changed is beyond the scope of this blog, but there are several excellent reviews available online in case you're interested in knowing more. I had been preemptively warning friends not to upgrade, but I may have to reassess that in the coming days.

*Letting it sit overnight repopulated everything in the proper chronological order.

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Stolen from Tumblr

Because fuck…

I didn't care that he had a little daughter. I didn't care that he had another one on the way. I didn't care if he sometimes treated his dogs better than he treated me. Hell, I didn't care if he had a wife. I liked his wife. She was nicer than most of my buddy's old ladies. You could tell she doted on him. And, he was good to her, too. Solid, they were. Real solid.

I didn't care about any of that, because every Friday night we'd head down to the local tavern after work, have a few beers, shoot the shit, maybe play a game of pool or two. And no matter what, eventually he'd wink at me, and say, "Let's get the hell out of here."

And we would. Me following his pick-up truck to a place out on the edge of the town, just this side of the State Park. And, then he'd fuck me – always in the back of his truck. Sometimes it was quick and dirty. Sometimes we didn't get our clothes off, we were so hot for each other. Sometimes, when I was real lucky, he'd go at it again, really driving into me, all that muscle bearing down, riding it like there was no tomorrow.

Fuck, it was hot.

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And Who Among Us Wouldn't?


Rami Malek, the villain in the new Bond film, on his "moment" with Daniel Craig on set:

"We had this scene that was a very complicated scene and we were rehearsing for it with our terrific director, Cary Fukunaga. And, we were sitting at a table over hours just batting about ideas back and forth. And we finally cracked this really challenging scene. And he grabbed me, picked me up—and I can't tell if I initiated the next moment, if it was him or I—but, a kiss transpired between the two of us. And I'm gonna say that Daniel initiated it and I was very taken aback … I took a moment, caught my breath, and I looked out and said, 'So, does this make me a Bond Girl?'"

I.Would.Have.Died.

Seriously; Daniel Craig kisses me? I would die.

Source.

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2 Days Down

It's been an interesting few days at work.

It started Saturday night. For some godforsaken reason, I decided to log in to my work account to check email. (Yeah, I was that bored.) That was my first mistake. When I attempted to get into the webmail portal, it kept returning, "bad account name or password." Thinking I'd fat-fingered it, I attempted to log into VPN. That returned, "account disabled."

Okay, I'd definitely fat-fingered it and locked myself out. I gave it fifteen minutes to allow it to reset and tried again. Same result. Not overly concerned—but with memories of how I was unceremoniously let go from ADOT starting to dance in my head—I went to bed and decided to just wait until morning to try it again.

Sunday morning rolled around and I still couldn't get in. Having worked myself up into a panic, I texted my supervisor and asked if something had happened to my employment status I was unaware of. There was no response.

Several hours later, and now in full panic mode with visions of the six months of unemployment hell I went through last year now doing a full-on rave in my head, I called the boss…and got his voicemail.

He called me back an hour or so later and assured me that nothing had changed and that I'd probably locked myself out. (He was in fact a little taken back that I'd even consider that they'd summarily dismissed me like that.)

Finally calmed down, I enjoyed the rest of the weekend and headed into work Monday.

Arriving at work, my account was still disabled. Fortunately my boss was there and when he went in to look at my account, he said, "That's odd. It's showing you've been termed." Apparently all of us who originally came in under this one particular contract had been termed—even though I was technically no longer a part of that group, or even working in that department any more.

As I overheard a few of my supervisor's phone calls to the main I.T. department, I thought, "This is what barely-but-well controlled anger sounds like." While it took nearly all day—and several more phone calls—to get my full access restored, everything was back to normal by the end of the day, and they'd basically paid me for sitting around for 8 hours looking pretty.

I came in Tuesday morning and it was a full-on repeat of the day before. "Account Disabled. See your Administrator" was my greeting when attempting to log into my computer.

So apparently someone else in the I.T. food chain decided to take it upon themselves and complete the tickets to have our accounts termed. This time it took nearly a day of phone calls—and more than a few supervisory visits to Human Resources—to get it fixed. At one point I could log in, but it showed my name as "Termed" and I had no access to anything. Then I couldn't log in at all. Then my separate administrator account that allows me to do big boy things stopped working…

Since I had access to absolutely nothing and to prevent the impression they were paying me to look pretty two days in a row, I suggested that I spend the day cleaning up the computer lab, a room that's become a dumping ground for old equipment and a project we've been discussing for months but never had the time to start.

By the end of the day, I gave up trying to log in, because nothing had changed from the morning. For some reason this time it had to wait until overnight processing to be fixed.

Fortunately, yesterday morning everything was back to normal and I was able to get back to my regularly scheduled duties. But seriously… the level of incompetence was astounding.

What did I learn from this?

(1) There is absolutely no reason for me to check work email on the weekend and (2) I really need to start socking all the "extra" money I'm making from this gig away…just in case.