Vacation day
Started: Monday, August 19, 2002 20:47
Finished: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 00:31
I took today as a vacation day. I can't afford to be doing that much, especially if I spend money like I did today. This is not a guilt trip, because I think I needed a day off. Seriusly. Now this music makes my eyes water.
Restart track so I can transcribe lyrics.
[Bitscape walks back to the bedroom, puts xmms back to the beginning of the track, and makes a run back to the living room for Dagobah's keyboard.]
Heh. I've also got the cd insert so I can type lyrics from there at will.
I came here like so many did
To find the better life
To find my piece of easy street
To finally be alive
I know nothing good comes easy
All good things take some time
I made my bed
I'll lie in it
To die in it's the crime
You can't help but prosper
Where the streets are paved with gold
They say the oil wells ran deeper here
Than anybody's known
I packed up on my wife and kid
And then left them back home
Now there's nothing left in this paydirt
The ghosts are all I know
Now the oil's gone
and the money's gone
And the jobs are gone
Still we're hanging on
Down in...
...
Dry county
The promise has run dry
Where nobody cries
And no one is getting out of here alive
This song haunted me when I listened to it years ago. Now, I'm listening to it again, for the first time in.... 8 years?
(Ogg file available to trustworthy people upon request. I don't want to open my music collection to the anonymous masses at this point, because, well... I might have unintentionally made a few enemies last week. I don't know. In any case, somebody with possible enemies doesn't want to give the RIAA any ammo either. Ho hum. Paranoid me.)
[Bitscape discovers more of the wonders of command line xmms, so he can control the music from Dagobah's console without any messy restarts.]
Listening to the song again.
[Cranking the volume, just a little... Hope this doesn't bother the neighbors...]
And no one is getting out of here alive
...
I begged the clouds for rain
I prayed to God for water
For this burning in my veins
...
Beautiful stuff.
So anyway, after a little food upon waking up.... I slept pretty much all morning today.
...And through a good portion of the afternoon. Zzzzz....
On the one hand, I was saying to myself, "Good. I need this. I've been running short on sleep for weeks. It's about time I caught up a little."
But on the other side of my brain: "Unemployed. Sleeping most of the day. Doing nothing. Eating a little bit. Getting sleepy again. Jacking off. Then more sleep." I remember the pattern well, because there were times when I experienced it for months on end. "No, no, no! Can't go into that again! CAN'T! I'll run out of money next month. This won't work. Don't procrastinate! GET GOING!"
Mid-afternoon, I checked my phone log. I had received a call from scottgalvin.com. This was expected, since I had briefly discussed some business possibilities with him the day before. I called him back.
Well, there may be a few contract programming / tech opportunities with other people he knows, if I want them. At this point, I'm not even sure I do. I told him I would consider it, and was very grateful he was willing to hook me up. We'll have to see what happens.
Even if I do decide I'm interested, I'll have to learn more about these opportunities before agreeing to anything. But if there is truly a quick one-time PHP programming task that can be done in a realistic 8 hours, paying wages similar to my old job, it will be very tempting. (I know normal professional consultants bill much more than the salary of a programmer, but since I'm a total newbie, I wouldn't be able to demand such perks immediately. In fact, I'd be grateful somebody would be willing to consider me at all, at this point.)
After getting a shower, and fixing a stupid "oopsie" glitch with my professional email address, I went for a little walk / run using my standard neighborhood loop route. I made an effort to get a little more in shape a couple months ago, but now I find that I seem to have again reverted to a state of physical unfitness. Doh.
After breathing the fresh air for a few minutes, I journied to the local Safeway, where I purchased some chips and salsa. (There is one brand of really good texas salsa that they do carry in certain Safeway stores here. It's not made in San Antonio, but I did discover it there. Arriba Fire Roasted Red Salsa, Hot. Great stuff.)
I also bought bagels and cream cheese. Gotta have those essentials. :)
Back at the Castle Lair, I stocked my fridge with the new items, and consumed a small portion of them.
After that, I decided I did want to make a little trip to Best Buy. (Conspicuous consumption, but... hell, maybe it would motivate me to get a job a little faster. Anything to avoid stagnation. Even crisis would be better than that.)
On the way, I heard a report on the radio about news I thought I had heard last week, but couldn't confirm. On 88.5 KGNU radio, they were running a more in-depth special report.
Major Dock Workers Union Strike happening in Oakland, California. The union, apparently, was extremely upset with the Bush administration's threat to send in the National Guard to do the jobs of the striking workers. If the voices could be believed, they might be on the verge of rioting. (But one can never be sure, with so much empty rhetoric being thrown around these days.)
A local Boulder journalist was interviewing members of the Union leadership, about their demands. (This was somebody I had heard many times before on the station, giving reports about Boulder issues.)
And I'm sitting there thinking, "Why the fsck isn't this being covered by the national media? If the president is going to be sending in the National Guard to replace striking union workers, this is important news, regardless of which side of the issue people are on." (Yes, KGNU is known for having an openly liberal bias. They don't deny this.)
I jotted down a couple of urls they gave at the end of the program. Then, I went into Best Buy to find my treasures. More commentary on the Labor Union stuff in a bit.
Inside Best Buy, I circled the store a few times, and found.... Well, the one DVD I had in mind, they didn't seem to have. I thought I had seen it in passing while in the Portland Best Buy, but... Maybe not. I can't find it online anywhere, so maybe I hallucinated. Odd. (Or maybe the one I saw wasn't what I thought it was. Hmmmm... Nevermind. I never said anything. [vanish])
What I did find: I was looking for an album I had owned years ago. Bon Jovi's Keep the Faith. (I won't elaborate about the details of how it was lost here, but suffice it to say that I have discussed it somewhere in the Content Collective many months ago.) I wasn't sure whether they would have it, because it came out 10 years ago. But it would be worth checking.
Well, they had it. Sort of. The only copy available was a "Digitally Remastered" version. "Newly 20-bit remastered from the original tapes. Enhanced Packaging faithful to the original album release." $14.99. Hmmmm...
I'm not big on those "remastering" jobs. My 12-year-old cds still sound perfectly good to me on my current audio system. I would have much preferred a $9.95 bargain bin version of the original. In fact, I might have preferred an original copy identical to the one I used to own, even if the prices were equal.
But alas, the only one they thing they had was a remastered version, and only 1 disc of it on the shelf. So I decided to bite. $14.99 wasn't totally out of line with current record prices. And it would still have all the same music. All those "old" songs I used to listen to. That's what I wanted. ("Old" is a relative word. That was the last Bon Jovi album I ever bought. Even though he continued to put out new solo releases, the more recent stuff never really appealed to me.)
After looking through more of the cd section, I concluded there was nothing else there I was willing to buy. Madonna and Britney appear to be set on milking their hardcore fans to death with $20+ "rarities", remixes, rehashes, and other things that actually do look interesting, assuming money is no object. Casual fans like me already have the major album releases. Nothing more required right now. :)
I noticed several other acts who had put out fancy "Remastered" versions of albums, similar to the Bon Jovi stuff I had found. Is this sort of stuff the artists' idea, or the record companies? I dunno. Don't feel like thinking about it right now.
Anyway, with the cd I wanted in hand, the last item I wanted to look for: A tv antenna. I've decided that I'd still like to watch some Buffy Season 7 this fall. Also, it might help my credibility when I talk about how "the mainstream media never covers important things like California dock worker strikes" if I actually watched a tiny bit of what the mainstream tv news puts out. For all I know, they could be talking about the dock workers strike on the nightly news, and I'd never know it.
So... not wanting to waste tons of time, I wandered to the tv section, and examined the selection of antennas. I decided that my best long term bet would be one that was slightly more expensive, but included a signal amplifier. So if I move out a little farther from the Denver city in a couple months, I should still be able to pick up some signals. For slightly more than the price of 1 month of AT&T Digital Cable, I had my super duper enhanced antenna.
I paid for my goods, and returned home. (For some reason, it has recently become a more arduous process to buy things with a debit card at Best Buy lately. According to the clerk I talked to last week, they have been having problems with fraud. So now you have to enter your PIN at the register every time. Grrrr. On the bright side, maybe it will provide enough disincetive to go there that I'll actually save some money by staying home. Heh.)
Back at home, I put on my new cd, and began the process of hooking up my new antenna.
The antenna turned out to be very easy with my tv. Just a single coax from the antenna base to the tv covers both VHF and UHF. Much simpler than the old tv's in my parents' house, way back when.
Reception with it is... interesting. With the signal amplifier turned off, channels look more or less like they did back in the Louisville Compound on the tv that had rabbit ears. Some decent. Some crappy. Maybe one or two completely perfect. (Of course, the ones with perfect reception incidentally always happen to be the channels you never want to watch. Funny how that works, isn't it?)
But when I turned the signal amplifier on, and started fiddling with it, I found that with enough tweaking, I could get near perfect reception on each channel. But then, each channel likes different settings. And you can also adjust the position of the antenna itself. This could be a source of infinite fun and frustration for a perfectionist geek trying to watch a scifi/fantasy show. Tweak, adjust, tweak. :)
(BTW, a good broadcast signal can look much better than a "Digital" cable channel. Many of those cable channels featured some nasty artifacts, often very visible. How did they get away with charging $46/month for that? Well, I guess I paid it for 6 months. Seems silly now.)
As for my cd: Well, I didn't like the remix at first. It sounded too much like the "new" cleaner Bon Jovi sound. Did this really come from the same recordings I had listened to back in High School? I hadn't heard it in years, so maybe it was my perceptions that had changed.
Well... after listening to a few favorite tracks, the best I can do is conclude that maybe they did clean up the sound waves of the instruments a bit, but it's still the same recordings I remember. Same songs for sure. So I'm happy.
It might be interesting to do a direct side-by-side comparison of an original cd against the new one on my audio equiment. A valid test would require raw, uncompressed wave data from both sources, so downloading MP3's from a P2P wouldn't work. Have my perceptions changed, or has the recording? (The notes say that they used 100% original recordings, with the same mixing levels. Just newly remastered digital. Whatever.)
Anyway, I still like the songs I liked then. And there are some songs on the disc that I just don't care for. I barely recognize them anyway, because I never listened to them before either. :)
It's just there ain't nobody here
Who know's just what's the crime
As for the Oakland Dock Workers strike, I tried several searches on CNN.com, and turned up nothing relevant. I don't know what's going on. You would think that if it was happening, they might at least have a blurb about it.
I also tried going to the web site of the union organizers to see if they might have news. Well... That page looks to me like a convoluted mess. I eventually gave up on trying to get any current news out of it. There's a lot of lofty communist-esque sounding propaganda, and a confusing interface (which sometimes seems to work, and sometimes, you click a link and get nothing), but I gave up on trying to find current news about the big strike.
My take, based on the semi-objective program KGNU was running: These particular labor union people are idiots at best, a severe danger to this nation at worst. The president has "threatened" to send in national guard troops, not to beat them up (as might be a familiar scenario to anyone who studies history from a century ago), but to do the work they refuse to do, because they don't like the terms. And for this, they are angry.
I wouldn't blame people for not liking certain aspects of their job. Whether it's the pay, the working hours, the benefits, whatever. Hell, I decided there were certain things about my job that I didn't like, so I decided to quit. (And then my employers decided they wanted me out before I could get a chance to quit.)
But for crying out loud, if you don't like the work, and you don't like the people you're working for, FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO. Move to another state. Work as a pizza delivery expert, get a job at a gas station, whatever. Or start a business. Or something.
But to sit around and bitch because somebody else is going to take over the job you are not happy with doing.... well... it's just utter stupidity. That's my view.
It also troubles me that these events, which I still believe are very real, appear getting absolutely no coverage in mainstream media outlets. They should at least say something, even if it's just to post a 1-paragraph blurb. Or maybe CNN did cover it, and their site Search feature just isn't working very well.
All I could find on the front page was talk about the potential for war with Iraq. Big deal. We've been bombing them for years. Not only during the Gulf War under the direction of the previous president whose name was Bush, but during the Clinton administration too. It didn't seem like such a massively front page item when Clinton was ordering it. Why now?
The whole thing just makes me want to tune out, watch my music videos, and fall asleep.
(BTW, MTV-2 seems to come in fairly nicely here with this new antenna. A little fuzzy, but definitely viewable. Yes, you read right. MTV-2. The "premium" version of MTV. The offshoot which was created to be like the original MTV, and actually still plays music videos. Unbelievable. I debated with other IRC gatherers what the source of this signal might be. A few stray radio waves from the neighbors' tv cables? A secret alliance between Viacom and the FCC to help promote their network? A pirate rebroadcasting the signal from out of his basement? Who knows.)
Well.... Mass irc is over. I need to go to bed. I'm promising myself that I'll at least fill out the application and bring it into Whole Foods Market tomorrow. I need some kind of job, and that one looks workable. I like that store.
So, I think I've covered everything I wanted to discuss in this rambling. I've multitasked it with irc for much of the time, so it's taken several hours to write. But here it is.
I'll finish with another lyric from my new cd. This one might be more familiar to people who listened to pop music around 10 years ago.
I wake up and French kiss the morning
While some marching band keeps its own beat in my head
While we're talking
About all the things that I long to believe
About love and the truth and what you mean to me
And the truth is, baby you're all that I need
I want to lay you down on a bed of roses
For tonight, I'll sleep on a bed of nails
I want to be just as close as the Holy Ghost is
And lay you down on a bed of roses
P.S. Ah hah! Here's some dock worker news. I must have just been asleep. Just found this press release. Maybe CNN would have something too, if you just give it the right combination of search terms; enough to filter out the noise, but not specific enough to make it return nothing. I dunno. Maybe nobody is even really interested. Truthfully, it all seems quite far removed from my life too. But still, somewhat interesting. Signing off again.