Anyway, I didn’t forget about it (well, I did, we both did, but I was reminded by my mother-in-law, who called that morning to congratulate us), so we properly celebrated it that night with a romantic dinner in a very chic restaurant. I just didn’t find the time to write about it. After years of retirement for medical reasons, Crenguţa started working again this January (in an office environment and on a schedule, that is, ’cause she never stopped working. But it was about time she had a break from translation work…). This meant we had to ask her mother to take Dexter back with her to Buzău, because we didn’t want him all by himself all day long. It’s been two months already since their departure, and we miss him like hell.

So I dug up some slightly older pictures (December 2007 – January 2008). Boy, the apartment is so empty without him!

Today was one of those days that are worse than others. If it keeps going on like this, in a month I’ll be climbing on the walls, honestly.

There are about 200 people in our organization, scattered amongst 3 different buildings. The IT Department consists of 2 (two) people: me and the IT Manager, my boss. So you can imagine it can get really hairy at times. The phone rings every 10 seconds and I have to stop what I’m doing to pick it up, then I barely have time to collect my thoughts and get back to work and it rings again…

Of course I can’t solve everyone’s problems simultaneously, so there’s need for some prioritization. But my esteemed colleagues don’t seem to grasp such concept and keep ringing me to demand a quick resolution to their “urgent” problem for which they called 10 times during the past 5 minutes .

There are moments when I’m very tempted to leave the office, or better the building altogether, and just refuse to answer any more calls. And this is mainly because some 60% of the “problems” are actually simple alerts popped up by various applications. And what does one do when confronted with a dialog box unseen before? Does one read the fucking text in order to get an idea of what just happened? NO! One picks up the phone and calls the IT Department, BINGO!

A distinct species are the ones that first dismiss the alert, and call afterwards. My first question is of course what the alert reads, and almost inevitably the answer is “I don’t know, I don’t remember” on “I haven’t read it”.

But the icing on the cake today was the behavior of one the people I share the office with. About a week ago, the same person was complaining to the management that the IT department makes life a hell for everybody in that office, because of the fan noise of all the servers we occasionally reconfigure there, and because of all the equipment stored around our desks and on the hallway (the building is really crowded, there’s barely enough room for people — virtually no storage space). Today he was having a lot of fun playing various sound effects from a collection of special effects, sounds ranging from hysterical laughs or cries, to vacuum cleaners and grinders. Of course, everything appropriately turned up, full volume!

I won’t comment any further. The only thing that made me smile (well, it was a good laugh actually) today, was the picture below. Absolutely brilliant!

Nothing interesting happened in the meantime, really. Except for two nights ago, when I decided to swap the hard drive in Crenguţa’s laptop. If only I knew from the beginning what a hassle is going to be, and that the very next day she was going to ask me to swap it back with the old one again …

From the very beginning when she got her hands on this old Compaq Armada 110, the hard drive, a 10GB IBM Travelstar, had some weird clicks and pops while reading and writing. So I thought I’m doing her a favor if I change it with a 10GB Fujitsu drive I had lying around.

Well, not really. The Fujitsu doesn’t make very loud noises during I/O operations, but the motor that spins the plates has a very loud and sharp hiss, which turns out it’s a lot more distracting because it’s permanent and constant, as opposed to the occasional clicks of the old drive.

But the best part was that I had to take the damn thing completely apart to reach the hard drive! And tonight I’ll have to do it again, to put the old drive back .

Another really sweet moment was when I discovered the IBM drive has an opening that fully exposes part of the pins, which the other drive hasn’t. And the wise guys at Compaq just had to take advantage of that opening, cramming in the ridge of an underlying heatsink!

Needless to say the new drive didn’t fit because of that heatsink’s ridge, so the best solution I could come up with at 2 A.M. was to loosen up the motherboard screws so that I could lift the corner holding the HDD connector just enough to squeeze the new drive in.

I didn’t feel like laughing back then, but I sure did when discovering the quick specs page above: what an appropriate schematic for this laptop!

So I have decided:

• I’ll try to post more often, even if it’s just to say there’s nothing new to say;
• I’ll start reading the WP documentation ’cause the current look it starting to get on my nerves. So a complete redesign has to happen sometime soon… er, let’s make that soonish…;
• Maybe I’ll revisit some old ideas for the main site, that one needs to happen sometime too. Although I’ll probably have to make my sister’s site first, as promised.

Completely unrelated to blogging, but part of the latest resolution:

• I really have to build up the courage and start resume jogging in the mornings;
• I should give up smoking (again, yes…).
• Starting some serious research into business ideas, the whole “job” thing is starting to wear me off. If I have to work my ass off every fucking day, at least some decent money would be in order, right?

I know we all have our ups and downs, good days or bad days. It just seems that lately I’m stuck with the lows.

I’m an emotional wreck. I suppose much of the problem starts here. I won’t get into any details now, but it’s a situation for which I see no solution in the near future, so I might just have to live with it.

I have days (sometimes more than one in a row) when I find it impossible to focus on a task, no matter what that task may be. So I just surf the net, read the blogs of my favorite designers, artists, programmers or whatever (first I was tempted to include some links here, but then decided they are too many — maybe it’s lame, but some of them you can find in the sidebar. I will update the list one of these days). And so I get even more depressed, ’cause everybody seems to be doing so well, they are all so successful at what they are doing and shit… Or maybe they are not such cry-babies like I am? Could be an explanation.

But I guess it’s more related to the fact they don’t seem to struggle through life. They all have nice vacations in exotic places, they all (more or less) work on Macs they own and love, they all bought iPods Nano the day after the launch and things like that. Yes, I know money isn’t everything, but please, don’t tell that to me! I would really like to know how long is anyone going to keep his or hers spirits high when, at the end of the month, all of the fucking hard earned paychecks disappear like nothing for utility bills and food.

I don’t have crazy dreams. I don’t wish I had shitloads of money (I do wish I was a rock star though, but for different reasons). I don’t need the most expensive [insert item here: cell phone, car, boat, whatever] on the market. In fact I think I don’t have any dreams at all lately, except for one: a normal, decent life.

I mean, fuck: please tell me there’s more to life than eating, sleeping and working to pay the bills!

I may have said before that I’m not a religious person, but even my beliefs are at an all time low now. Where the fuck is that God that loves all his children the same?

And I’m not the one to complain. I mean, think of the starving children in Africa or elsewhere. So it better be a plan there, somewhere, otherwise this life is so unbelievably pointless.

Yeah… one of those days again. Smile, tomorrow can always be worse.

Studies have found that while negative words register with a depressed person’s brain, positive words are dismissed.

“If we give people sentences to read — like ‘I am a loser’, ‘I am a winner’, and ‘I am a wagon’ — it’s obvious that wagon is nonsense,” Atchley said. “But a depressed person’s brain responds to wagon the same way it responds to winner.”

“That’s because both words — winner and wagon — are unexpected”, said Steve Ilardi, a KU psychology professor who’s partnering with Atchley on the project.

“If you read a sentence like ‘This pizza is too hot to cry’, the word ‘cry’ would trigger a telltale brain-wave pattern that says ‘I wasn’t expecting that”, Ilardi said.

…

“So if a depressed person reads a sentence ‘I am a success’, the word ‘success’ triggers a brain-wave pattern showing the patient doesn’t see himself that way at all”, Ilardi said. “If the person isn’t depressed, the brain-wave reaction will be just the opposite”.

No shit…

Good thing the office manager had a spare power supply (for some obscure reason). The case fan had died maybe two months before — the IT guy refused to deal with the situation, he told me to pick the computer up and take it to the seller’s customer service.

I said thanks but no thanks, of course. One reason was because it’s not really something I should do. But the most important reason was because the computer was purchased from the same seller that fucked me a few months ago when my motherboard broke! They refused to refund me regardless the fact their service contract states very clear they must do it in case they fail to repair or replace the faulty part within thirty days. They were also proposing some incredible upgrade options where they would just subtract half of the catalog price from what they were offering for my motherboard and processor — to account for physical wear of the parts (still in the warranty period), at least that’s what they were saying. And all this for an upgrade I wasn’t neither requesting nor wanting. Read the whole story here, it managed to piss me off again just remembering it!

Anyway, on Friday (that’s yesterday) around 7 a.m. the power supply fan from the server at home choked on dust too. That’s why the server was down for the whole day yesterday and half-day today, in case anyone noticed. Probably not. I had to shut it down and go to work, hoping I’ll address it later last night, but I got home too late and too tired to do it.

So half of today was spent taking apart, dusting, oiling and putting back together the case fan and the power supply taken from the computer at work, then the one from my server. It wasn’t my first experience of this sort, but I can surely say now I’m an expert on refurbishing clogged up fans.

I sure like the fact the server is a lot less noisy now. The only noise coming out of the case is from the shitty processor fan. It’s a boxed Slot 1 Pentium III which I just wasn’t able to take apart. I didn’t try to mess with it too much though, I said to myself a noisy processor fan is better than no processor at all.

Oh, and for a few hours today my ISP had some problems with out of the country connections. Then both their main name servers and both the secondary caching name servers just went down for another hours, so down the drain went in-country connections too. Well, it’s not like it was the first time… When I called the customer support line to ask what’s going on, the chick at the other end was so “nice” I could swore she would have loved to spit back some “juicy” words at me. But I just refused to get mad today. Fuck ‘em.