it’s 10:20 pm and moe’s not home yet. she’s usually home by this time, and she’s not answering her cell… i hope everything’s okay… (it is… it’s now 10:40 pm and she just walked in)

so i started my job in may. shortly after i started, we did a job for pagliacci pizza which was a 2 colour, 2 sided take out menu. majid said that we’ve done this before, and i should set it up 4-up on 11×17, work and turn so that we can save a plate, so that’s what i did. the next day there’s a big fight between greg, the press operator and majid which goes on for most of the morning. the fight is over the paper that majid bought for the pagliacci job. it’s recycled glossy stock, which builds up way more static than non-recycled gloss (although that and the fact that it’s recycled are the ONLY differences), and thus it sticks together and won’t run smoothly through the press… which makes it practically impossible to print an 11×17 job. after reprinting the job twice over the next 4 days, finally majid decides that we can print the job if he cuts the paper in half and i re-set the job 2-up rather than 4 up… which makes three plates rather than two.

the next time we did the job, around the end of june, i would have expected majid to have learned that either he not buy recycled paper or he should charge more for the job if it is to be printed on recycled paper. i would have expected majid to have learned that if he bought recycled paper, that the job shoudn’t be set 4-up work and turn, despite the fact that it saves a plate… and i have a brain injury for god’s sake! but no… the same fight happened between greg and majid – although we only had to reprint the job once this time before he figured it out this time…

the next time we did the job, around the middle of august, it was the same deal: 11×17 4-up, recycled paper, big fight between greg and majid that takes most of the morning, two reprints of the job…

we just got the job in again today… guess how he wants me to set it up? 11×17 4-up. i ask him what paper he’s bought for the job. recycled gloss.

8-/

either he’s INCREDIBLY stupid, or something else is going on that i’m not aware of…

my new mantra is going to be “i want to quit my job, i want to quit my job, i want to quit my job…”

UPDATE i’m running sound for the hurricane survivors’ benefit concert at the Hale’s Palladium saturday. appearing will be Jamais Trop Tard, The Canote Brothers and Les Femmes d’Enfer at 3:00 pm, and The Honky Tonk Revue, How’s Bayou, The Rolling Blackouts, The Dangerous Flares and Jo Miller at 8:00 pm. come down to 4301 Leary Way NW for sausages, gumbo, red beans and rice, beer, and more music than you can shake a stick at. $15 suggested donation.

… all at the same time… 8)

here is a mirror of the page you get when you’re in the united arab emirates and you try to access a url that is somehow in violation of whatever kind of rules they have about such things in the united arab emirates… you realise, of course, that as well as seeing this web page, if you’re in the united arab emirates, the caliph of securing internet from horny anti-islamic bastards like you now has your IP address and there’s a chance that, if whatever site it was that you were trying to look at is heinous enough, you’ll be getting a visit from the goon squad of the ministry of securing internet from horny anti-islamic bastards like you… rather like they want to turn the US into eventually…

waveland is what the kingdom of heaven will look like… and, you know, i think it probably is…

Me: well shit… a conversation with God.. and an unplanned, but entirely welcome invitation to join ‘s Great Evolution Debate.

more fun with God

the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ of which i would probably be a member if i actually had luxuriant flowing hair… and was a scientist…

they filmed a giant squid!! for real!!

i’m stuck in my office because moe’s current netflix movie is one that i really don’t want to see, which is "The Ring 2"… 8/

on the other hand, that means that i get to listen to my new CD, which is the overture to Kolas Breugnon, Second and Third Piano Concerti, and The Commedians, by Dmitry Kablevsky. i got it because it has the commedians on it, but once i had it i realised that i have played kolas breugnon as well, so it’s even more cool… and i’d be willing to bet that even the most non-musical among you have heard at least one piece of music on this CD: the 2nd movement of the commedians – Galop – is one of those pieces of music that have numerous saturday morning cartoons based around it.

the mac is finally reformatted… i bit the bullet and moved to the machine with no USB for 2 days while i wiped and reformatted the newer of the old macs, but now it’s running a lot more smoothly, and it doesn’t take 20 minutes to boot up… i don’t know what was on the disk, but for some reason, when you rebooted the machine, it took about 15 minutes of a flashing blue world icon before it even started the boot sequence, and then it flashed the “i can’t find the system” icon for another 5 minutes or so before it actually found the system and booted up… i low level formatted the drive and reinstalled the operating system and it still happened, but then i zapped the PRAM and that did it, which leads me to believe that some time in the unknown past, somebody who didn’t know what they were doiing had access to a system-level utility that allowed just anyone to set the esoteric and unknowable settings in the PRAM, which they did, before conveniently deleting whatever utility it was. in any event, it doesn’t do that any more. i really like having ATM on my machines, because it means that i can have all the fonts in a central location, and use the same font files for every workstation. all i had to do was connect to the network and upload the font archive and i was up and running.

massoud has been "doing things" to the network… i’m not sure of everything he’s doing, but the black and white and colour composite printers alternately work a lot faster, or they don’t work at all, but they don’t tell you they’re not working, they just don’t work. i’m not sure if i like it or not. also he’s rigging up an exchange server (gag)…

i took the price list for pipes off of the hybrid elephant site today because i don’t know when i’m going to get my workshop set up, and i’ve gotten three inquires about them in the past month… great… just when i start to attract some paying customers i have to shut down the most lucrative part of my business because i don’t have room to set up my workshop… 8/

’57 t-bird golf cart – won’t last long…
drum set made of cheese… i bet it sounds funny…
ask father hardon – now that’s just wrong…
logical fallacies
do-it-yourself argument for those of you who don’t have time to get into an argument with someone else…

now last year, i was _THE ONLY PERSON_ to show up for the public ritual vegetable sacrifice, so unless you have extenuating circumstances that prevent your attending (with the exception of those Tinites who live in other states) i expect to see you in attendance, otherwise bad things could happen… like a cancellation of future vegetable sacrifices all together. you have been warned.

First let me say that I love my country and all that it has…or had…to offer. But my love for my country is an adult relationship type of love. That means that even though I love her, I understand that she is not perfect. I also understand that she has problems, and I do what I can to help her work thru them.

I also understand that when she gets sick, she needs me there even more than usual. But this particular form of sickness is the kind that she will have to admit to first before anyone is able to truly help her.

It is a sickness that is somewhat akin to an addiction. That is something I know plenty about. I was a Chicago Cubs fan for many years…

America’s Battered Wife Syndrome

by Gail Thomas

Dear America,

As a friend of the family I can’t sit back and watch you do this to yourself without saying something. Consider this a long distance intervention.

Your man is no good. He treats you like crap, lies to you, abuses you, bullies you, exploits you, takes your money. As a friend I want to tell you that you deserve better. You deserve a person that treats you with respect, cares about your welfare, and your children’s welfare, but that’s not George and it never will be.

Do you tell yourself that he’ll stop, or that it won’t get worse? He won’t ever stop, every insult, injury and death he has caused are a line that once crossed will never be uncrossed. Forget the dream. You will never have the American dream with George. You have to forget about what might have been, what George might have been, and realise that at the end of the day you are what you do, and look at George’s track record…

Notice how he’s alienated all your friends? Who can blame them, they can’t understand why you stay with him when he treats you like shit and embarrasses you in front of everybody. The more his public behaviour overshadows yours, the more doubt creeps over them, they wonder if they knew you as well as they thought they did. You seem to have changed – if you condone his behaviour- and your silence can create the impression that you do. People are more inclined to take things at face value when they feel alienated. Your friends remember the good times you had together, the heroic battles you fought together, all of the intricate interweavings between their families and yours through time and space. Do you even recognise yourself anymore America? He is a drunken, coke-addled loser and he always will be, you should kick him out of your house today before he can destroy any more members of your family, your history, your culture, before he decimates your bank account so irretrievably that China and Saudi Arabia repossess all your stuff.

YOU CAN DO BETTER! You are an amazing country, beautiful, interesting, funny, positively glamorous, you wouldn’t stay single for five minutes, you know that suitors would be competing for your affections and any one of them would be ten times better than George. And how can you stand his god-awful Stepford’s answer to Marie-Antoinette mother, piping up with another casual atrocity every time she opens her mouth.

Because of George and his friends global warming is now upon us – I know what it has cost your family already, combined with George’s complete uselessness and indifference in a crisis. It would probably now be possible for a mathematician to calculate exactly how much of all of our futures we are losing for every minute you stay with that sick, twisted, idiot.

I see you doing what everyone in your position does – you end up looking to the perpetrator for comfort because theres no one else left, and look at how he reacts for Christ’s sake, look at what he did to New Orleans, and you should know that yet again he did it in front of all of your friends, all of us saw nothing happening whilst thousands died, all of us heard Ray Negen and the president of Jefferson Parish (I must heard him 30+ times now and I still cry every time) and all of us heard George’s bloody mother. We have been trying to help and he won’t let us. We are all appalled and aghast, it breaks our hearts to see him hurting you like this, and you not fighting back, you just take it and take it as it slowly spirals down into the pits of hell. What will it take America, will you let him kill you before you’ll kick him out? This is not rhetoric America, he is killing you every day you stay with him. If I had described your relationship with George to you back when you were still with Bill you never would have believed me. He degrades you in little increments, every day he erodes your assets as well as your dignity, your reputation, your legacy and your life America.

All of our TV crews were rescuing survivors as they filmed the devastation because there was nobody else there to help them, all of us saw the victims being treated like some sudden new insurgency, with suspicion and hostility. Those poor people, the heart & soul of New Orleans, the very people whose culture and history made New Orleans beloved around the world, He just left your brothers and sisters to die. Can you really continue in your relationship with George after this? There is a degree at which cognitive dissonance becomes outright delusion. He is a maniac, he is destroying your life, please, please leave him, just leave him, only you have the power to make it stop.

He is selling out your family business, if you let him continue like this how are you going to live? How are you going to feed your children, what happens if you get ill? Everything he has ever touched has turned to shit, he puts any idiot that’ll kiss his ass into positions of power and New Orleans is the result. Kick him out America! Do it today! I know it feels like you would be leaping into a void, but I promise you, you will be leaping out of one. Your friends will come back as soon as they see you are back to your old self, they really miss you. I know that less than 36% of your heart is still in it. Go with the 67% of you, that 36% is just that vestigial, primitive part of the brain that clings to the familiar no matter how badly the familiar sucks.

It all comes down to you, America. I know no-one likes other people passing comment on their relationships but this is an extreme situation. You are in very real danger, he is hurting you everyday and he is hurting us, your friends as well. But only you can make it stop. We are all rooting for you, although we don’t get to talk to you very often anymore, because he cuts us off from you. We are on your side, we will all be over the moon the day you finally kick him out. You know he really should be thrown in jail for the things he has done to you. Him and all of his gangster friends.

Please, please, do it America, you know I am right. If not for yourself then do it for your brothers and sisters and children. Do it before he kills any more of your family or anyone else’s. We are all really worried for your welfare.

Your friend,

Gail

i don’t really feel like updating, but it’s been a week and i’ve got so many links on my desktop that things are getting crowded… 8/

massoud, majid’s brother, the so-called "networking expert", had a question for me today. he was "buying a server system for a company" (God knows who, although i think i have a fairly good idea, and God help whoever it is) and wanted to know what X and O stood for…

i shook off my first inclination, which was to say that X was kisses and O was hugs (although it took longer for me to shake it off than it would have before my injury) and asked him to show me what he was talking about. he took me to his laptop, where he showed me the following, which i have reproduced simply with HTML:

if he doesn’t know what X and O stand for, i wonder if he knows what ETH0 stands for… 8/

today pete, the other "graphic artist", asked what "operating system" i was using on the PC. i told him that PC has windows 2000 on it, but it was my impression that it and XP were enough alike that it was pretty difficult to get lost. he poked around for a few more minutes and then asked me how to get to web mail… so i showed him that web mail was already started, through firefox, which i chose from the task bar. he was somewhat taken aback and said that he had never used "those extra toolbars" (which come with firefox, not the OS) before…

he’s like my mother-in-law… doesn’t know the difference between an application and the operating system.

we’re running out of room on the web mail server, and majid’s only "solution" has been to install yet another email client to download the messages from a month ago, which he’s too anal to delete. we have three years worth of email in various places on the network because "there are times in this industry when people decide they’re not going to pay for work… we have to protect ourselves…"

we did a business card for a guy who has an office in bellevue and an office in england. the most recent set of changes came in via email this morning, which i printed and added to the job box. the email said that after a change in the phone number, they approved the job to print so that someone could pick up the finished cards on friday. i made the change and output plates for the job. later on, majid yelled at me because the phone number was different from the one on the proof copy that he found inside the box… but he hadn’t seen the change, or the new proof copy, which were stapled together and paper clipped to the work order on the outside of the job box, right in front of him!!!

i worked late today. we were doing 5 business cards for a company whose business card layout was 8 up, in spite of the fact that it could be 10 up, but majid has said that he doesn’t want me to mess around with files that already exist, and this one already existed 8 up, so i left it alone, just duplicated the layers necessary to typeset new business cards. so now the business cards have been approved to print and majid says that the layout is wrong… these cards don’t bleed, so they can be printed 10 up, so i stay late to make the changes, despite the fact that our press operator is going to be gone until monday…

meanwhile, majid, massoud and "mike the idiot" were all in my (very small and cramped) office space trying to get one of mike-the-idiot’s reformatted PCs to work – it won’t boot at all, it just keeps cycling between the POST and trying to load windoesn’t, but never quite gets there. massoud is digging through the guts of the computer on the floor while majid and mike-the-idiot have a conversation about macs and me in farsi. i don’t understand a word of farsi, but i understand when both majid and mike-the-idiot say things like "typesetter" and "graphic artist" and "bruce", all of which they are both saying with great regularity. at one point i get the very strong impression that mike-the-idiot was saying something along the lines of "majid, you’re the business owner… if you say no more macs, use windows, bruce will have to accept it, otherwise he won’t have a job."

now mind you, i don’t understand a word of farsi, so i could be way off base here, but even still… i’m in the room here guys, doing stupid stuff that you didn’t want done originally, but then changed your mind about. if you’re going to have a conversation about me, at least be polite enough take it in the other room, or have it in a language i understand! and for that matter, i hope he does say "no more macs, use windoesn’t" because that will give me the excuse i need to quit right then and there. i’d love to see his face as i punch out and walk away with no notice…

in other news, the fremont philharmonic is playing at the wallingford wurst festival from noon until 1:15 pm, saturday. be there or be oblong.

here’s something strange… i’ve been nominated for the 8 Hunks of Hanukkah, whatever that means… go vote, or something…

moe and i went and saw The Bobs perform at the triple door last saturday. i’m still getting over seeing dan bob instead of joe bob, but moe has been a fan for almost 20 years, and she’s seen a lot more bobs come and go than i have. it was cool to see matthew bob after the show, because i work with him now, and he’s famous… 8) somebody in charge of mailing things from the bobs’ mailing list sent me a copy of the 20/20 CD, which was entirely unexpected (i already have one copy of it), but cool in a confusing sort of way.

amusing cthulhu license plate… i wonder how they got it past the virginia DMV?

bush asks condaleeza rice if he can go potty during a meeting of the UN security council…

U.S. CONCENTRATION CAMPS – FEMA AND THE REX 84 PROGRAM

Physician who told Cheney to go Fuck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina, Detained, Cuffed by Cheney’s M-16-carrying Goons

"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did." quoth Rep. Baker of Baton Rouge

bushy george declared a state of emergency in louisianna before hurricane katrina hit… but he didn’t declare a state of emergency in the parishes that were hardest hit by hurricane katrina until it was all over… WTF?!?

Bush Not Aware That His Own FEMA Director No Longer Works For Him – maybe you know something i don’t… 8/

Halliburton Gets Contract To Pry Gold Fillings From New Orleans Corpses’ Teeth – which sounds a lot more shocking if you don’t realise that it’s from The Onion… 8)

i wonder why i haven’t heard of jeezis-is-lord dot com before? maybe it’s because "THIS WEBSITE IS BEING SYSTEMATICALLY BANNED!"… or maybe it’s just boring and predictable.

this morning i was listening to the radio on the way to work and i happened to hear the fab faux perform “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and an interesting thing happened to me. i actually heard the lyrics in a new way, and instead of going to work thinking that today was going to be a repeat of yesterday, where nothing would get done and i would become even more frustrated with my state as a wage slave, i went into work having “layed down all thought, surrendered to the void” “that you may see the meaning of within”… and i noticed that exactly the same things happened to me today whether i felt that way or not, but because i “surrendered thought” before going to work, i found that majid’s idiocy, which is getting worse and worse as time goes on, didn’t affect me at all…

yes, majid wants me to use a G3 PowerPC that doesn’t have any USB ports while i’m reformatting my G3 imac – in between working on all the jobs that have been piling up for the past week while we battle with a computer network that doesn’t network – which would be good enough if it weren’t for the fact that it has a screen that’s too dark, but he hasn’t made any noises about going to indesign, especially since all of the jobs are located on the network and for some unknown reason, indesign wants things to be local otherwise “bad things”™ happen – crashing with occasional loss of data and/or network – to indesign… but you know, so what? he’s bound and determined to do what he wants to do, regardless of how mind-numbingly stupid it is, regardless of how much i complain, so why should i care? he doesn’t pay me enough to care, so i’m just going to stop.

meanwhile, this is ganesha chaturti, so happy ganesha chaturti everyone!

from the “christians”, another reason not to be “christian”: "god’s" mercy evident in katrina’s wake. meanwhile, senator landrieu implores president to "relieve unmitigated suffering;" end FEMA’s "abject failures".

i really need to find a better job. this one sucks SO BAD…

the mac on my desk, a charcoal G3 imac from about 1999, is dying. majid just recently bought a new mac, one of those cool LCD monitors that has no box, just a mouse and keyboard that plug into the back, and a slot to put in CDs and stuff, but i don’t know whether he can install Os9.x on it, much less whether he wants to… and, of course, the colour printer and the black and white printer are both old enough that the manufacturers don’t make drivers for OsX, and have no intention of doing so, so the new mac is pretty much useless at this point. we also have a PowerPC G3 desktop box, which is likely going to end up on my desk when the one that’s there now finally bites the dust, but that hasn’t happened yet because there’s still software to be installed, printers to be connected to and the little minor detail that IT DOESN’T HAVE USB, which means that i have to put up with an obnoxious mouse with a ball that doesn’t work well at all, or use my optical mouse without installing the USB-only drivers for it, which means that i’ll get none of the “extra features” like one-button copy and paste, or three functioning buttons, that are the main reason why i use it.

and majid’s brother, massoud, has finally shown up – majid promised me that he’d be here on the 18th of august – but instead of being a networking expert, as majid had lead me to believe, so far he’s done nothing but sit around and poke through web sites and help majid bring in two “new” monitors that he bought “reconditioned” at best-buy (for $80 apiece), and then help majid carry one of them out again the same day because it caught fire when he turned it on…

and that’s not to mention the fact that i’ve got a huge pile of jobs that have been stacking up for the past 3 days while i battle with the computer to keep it alive, which majid and farah are getting more and more uptight about, but not uptight enough to do anything OTHER than blame the guy who is supposed to be doing them, but instead is doing a job he should be getting paid 5 times as much for so that he can do the job eventually…

and when i actually am able to work on a job, one of the more recent ones has been to make a PDF from a freehand file that we’re sending to "mike-the-idiot" (who doesn’t even support macs at all), but i can’t do it because for some reason the PDF comes out with no background, in spite of the fact that it clearly has a background in freehand… which frustrates the hell out of me, and makes me look like an idiot, even though i’m sure anybody who tried it would have similar difficulties.

and when i complain about jobs that get changed without customer approval “because that’s what they’ve always had before” (in spite of the fact that it’s not what they proofed, and not what we have a signed release to print from the customer, and, when the job is printed – incorrectly – the customer rightly refuses to pay for), i get told that i’d better get used to using indesign and windows, because that’s the direction we’re going to go, and if i don’t like it, my resignation is welcome on majid’s desk at any time…

WAGE SLAVERY SUCKS!

also, more i am a terrorist links:
Bush’s Answer to Crisis: Don’t Buy Gas
Taxpayers Foot Bill for Bush’s Gas Guzzling Trips
Bush’s Approval Ratings At All-Time Low

a few things that i’ve got collected during the past week or so:

boingboing gets copied by ken schram, but gets no credit, probably because they’re boingboing…

i found out what happened to joe bob, had a couple of performing groups i work with get mentioned in a round about way, and read an article by richard bob about auditioning a new bob…

more bush being bush, when he has ample opportunities to act like a president, instead he’s cussing, being rude and flipping people off.

much chaos at work, but i’m too tired to complain. to say that i want to quit would be an understatement. i’ll probably update more tomorrow.