This is heartwarming.

My current contract is getting really insane, and I’d like to bail. The company has gone out-and-out suicidal: stupidity can no longer be an excuse for how completely messed this behavior is, so it must be malice. Unfortunately, I haven’t really heard back from any of the places I’ve gone fishing. The one strong possibility (which would have been a good match for my skills and their needs) is on the verge of falling through: today’s the last day that I should expect to hear something from them. Meanwhile, I haven’t heard from a variety of computer-consultant-pimps who had needs that I was “perfect” for — but, I’m coming to learn that life as a computer consultant means being told over and over again that you’re perfect, and then being shunted to the back burner in favor of better candidates. Whatever. I also suspect that I’ve officially hit the upper bound for my position if I keep working through normal channels — I’ve got a proven capability at a position above my years of experience, and business just doesn’t deal with that well. So I think I am going to need to

With my wedding coming up in less than a month, my life has gone completely insane and I’ve had to push back some of the things I wanted to get accomplished. On the other hand, things are going pretty well for the wedding, and the honeymoon is going to be a lot of fun. When I get back, I really need to focus on getting some of those projects out of the gate…I’ve been struggling with making the time for them for so long that it’s really getting frustrating. Unfortunately, I need the cash flow right now and I don’t have other resources lined up to replace it.

I really miss getting out of the day-to-day drudge and having a chance to think big thoughts and get back into society. I need to get out of my current gig and into one that matters — I realize that it’s going to take a while to get my ducks in a row and get there, but I’m just not the kind of person who can thrive in a “business du jour” setting. Some people see that as keeping busy and making a buck, but it just feels like circling the drain to me. I need to really be doing something that feels like progress, or at least that addresses issues bigger than a codefix or an accounting curiosity. A lot of people out there just don’t get it, but the fact that I’m making good money isn’t really satisfying to me. The fact that I’ve got a professional job where I work on a team and (some of) my team members actually appreciate my existance is a nice touch, but it’s not enough to really motivate me. I want to be able to point to a way in which I’ve genuinely improved my social environment, and the bigger the improvement, the better. The work I’m doing right now only changes the environment of my project, and that’s just not big enough to be worth much to me…particularly since the management here is going to completely destroy all the progress made by my hard work as soon as I bail. Screw that: it basically means that the last year has been a wash, and it’s part of the reason I need to bail. I need to be someone who does something, and I need to see it matter.

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Okay, this guy is a genius when it comes to working his fans. He’s got www.colbertnation.com, he’s sicked people on Wikipedia twice, and now he’s got the whole lightsaber duel thing going on. It’s friggin’ awesome to see him milk the power of “the Internets”.

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The BBC America is showing a series called “Shakespeare Re-Told”. I like it a lot — God Bless TiVo, because it’s usually on in the middle of night. I saw a modern retelling of “MacBeth” taking place in an upscale restaurant’s kitchen, and now I’m watching “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” taking place in a destination wedding resort. It’s really nicely done: close enough to Shakespeare for it to be obvious what you’re looking at, but the language, pacing, and production is nicely modernized.

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When I keep telling people about the wonders of the free operating system, people seem excited about it, but they won’t make the jump because of this impression that somehow Linux is not user-friendly.

Now, granted, I spent a lot of quality time with my Linux box when I first got it.  But I was trying to do some really weird, bleeding-edge stuff — and it’s called bleeding-edge because you can get cut up pretty bad trying it.  I wanted to use Java 1.5 (which isn’t really ready for prime time in the Java community) on a 64-bit AMD box/operating system (which Windows still can’t do).  When push came to shove and it was finally time for me to stop playing around and get to work, it took about an hour to go from nowhere to a working system — nice.  And I keep the software up-to-date with regular maintenance that takes little to no thought on my part.
Now I’m trying to set up a computer for my business to run some financial software and other fun.  Holy crap, has that been a pain in the ass.  After the hour long partitioning fun, I then got to the gritty stuff.  The wireless card that I had plugged into the computer didn’t work at all, so that just pissed me off.  The entire “plug-and-play” thing seemed to have fallen down completely, because the computer didn’t even recognize that there was something plugged into the PCI slot until I managed to find the magic combination of installing the driver, running “Add New Hardware”, and arbitrarily guessing values for various dialogs.  But that got up and running.

So I went to “activate” my copy of Windows.  That failed miserably, and ended up with being on the phone with Microsoft’s phone-activation-bot followed by having to push through a conversation with someone’s deep Indian accent: “NO!  NOT ‘B’!  ‘P’!  AS IN ‘PIECE OF CRAP’!!”
Now I’m trying to install the printer, and I’m having the same problem as I did before with the wireless card…gargh.

If QuickBooks came on Linux…I’d be so gone…

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I’ve really taken with this show.  It addresses issues deeply, so it’s actually an informative news show — nothing disgusts me more than people saying that they get their news solely form “The Daily Show”.  I like “The Daily Show” (and its spinoff, “The Colbert Report”) — don’t get me wrong.  It’s just that they’re comedy shows, and you need to get your news and some analysis from somewhere else: really.  And “Countdown” is a nice place to get the news and analysis — it’s entertaining, it’s informative, and it gets deeply at the issues being addressed.

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