drunk puppet night just finished it’s first week’s run, and it’s shaping up to be an excellent show. josh was saying last night that i am the number one best tech person he’s ever worked with. i suspect that it’s because i’m also an artist and i understand what it’s like to be up on stage performing with tech people who just want a list of cues and don’t even bother to follow the script. i’m responsible for providing music for pre- and post-show, but josh has stipulated that there will be no frank zappa (which i don’t really understand, but he’s the boss), so i’ve developed an idea for next year’s DPN, which is a puppet show based on the zappa song called “Mr. Green Genes”… magnificent! i told josh about my idea, and he encouraged me, saying that he’s really looking for puppet shows that push his buttons. jill and her new boyfriend, rick, came up to see the show, and stayed overnight at my house. among other things, jill told me that she’s going through the legal steps to have “officer” lee’s adoption annulled, which is definitely several steps in the right direction.
i’ve recently realised that my button making machine is a good way to suppliment my income, so i’ve been making buttons for the past few days. hybrid elephant is really wonderful that way… i come up with a new money making scheme, and all i have to do is post it on hybrid elephant to see if it will really work. i haven’t posted the buttons on the site yet, because i’ve been too busy making buttons, but as soon as i have a free half-hour or so, it’s going up there. along the same lines, i got a call from aaron c. on friday that he has a potential “job” for which they’re interested in interviewing me… and it’s at schemalogic… i don’t really know what to expect, though, because in the little more than a year since my last contract there, they have laid off or fired almost the entire crew and hired new people. at the same time, aaron said that my name was the only one that came up while they were discussing how to procede with the project that they would have me working on, so it probably won’t be that bad.
i’m starting to get really fed up with the cirque web team. this woman named Q has taken it upon herself to take over just about everything from macque, which could be a good thing except that she seems to think that this makes her in charge of everything, which it doesn’t. i put up a trial site based on what we already had on the web, just to get the ball rolling, and her response was to say that she would prefer a “more modern” design… in spite of the fact that the web as it exists now has only been in existance for a little more than 10 years. she bases this preference mainly on the fact that she has a degree in communications, and has been requested to sit in on initial consultations with clients in a corporate setting, but she’s been a member of the cirque for only a year, and there are other people with more seniority both in the cirque and on the net, who are just as qualified as her to be making decisions. if nothing else, regardless of what kind of degrees she’s got, she’s a very poor communicator, and that’s not just from a web-site perspective (she taught the poi class i took last summer, and she couldn’t understand how my brain injury makes poi difficult for me). i’m ready to quit the team, even as it is just getting started, which is not a good sign. i’m probably going to stick with it for a while, just to see if things get better, but i’m not holding my breath.
i finally got infected. i searched for viruses last friday, and i came up with two on my windoesn’t machine… i don’t really understand exactly how i got infected, because i don’t install software, i don’t do email on this machine, and i’m very careful about the links i click, but they’ve found a way in somewhere. it’s just more fuel for the rant that is posted here. so i went to the symantec web site, because they’re one of the biggest manufacturers of AV software for windoesn’t, and paid for a downloaded version of antivirus 2005, which, i then discovered, doesn’t work on my operating system, which is W2K server. as far as i can tell, there’s no way to tell from their web site that AV2005 doesn’t work with server operating systems, and, as far as i can tell, they don’t make an AV system that works with W2K server… so i called (and spent over an hour waiting on hold) and gave them my story, and the guy said that i would get a refund. i then went to the mcafee web site (because they’re another big one), and paid for another antivirus program (which i made sure would work on my system before i bought it), which should be delivered by UPS tomorrow. then i got an email from symantec telling me how to download their software (which i had already done, which is how i discovered it won’t work), so i called again (and waited another half hour or so on hold) to complain, and they said that if i had already downloaded their software i would either have to pay for it, or fill out a “letter of destruction”, proclaiming that if i didn’t really destroy their software i’m subject to a massive fine or something. they gave me a link to find the letter of destruction, which i found and filled out, and i thought the matter was settled… then, yesterday, i got another email from symantec, saying that the software i had “ordered” wasn’t available, and had to be back ordered. so i called again (and waited on hold for about 45 minutes), and the guy said that i hadn’t filled out the letter of destruction, which i said i had… i also complained about the fact that they don’t say that it won’t work with W2K server, there’s no phone number posted ANYWHERE on their web site, and that when i did finally get their phone number, i had to wait on hold for an extremely long time, and i felt as though for as little time i had spent actually dealing with them that i had been the recipient of extremely poor customer service, and that i was going to go with mcafee because of it… so he sent me another link to the letter of destruction, which was the same as the first one, which i filled out again, and hopefully this time they’ll get the message. the moral of the story: use linux.