Category: Generic

Struggle

Today has been a tough day. Nothing bad happening, just lots of stuff at work happening simultaneously that is stressing me out. The stress increase is unnecessary and pretty irrational, but it’s real none the less.

We have been asked to setup a new development environment that has an extension with our new ai software. I’ll save my ai rant for another post (and you bet your sweet skynet fearing ass that many such posts are coming) but suffice to say I have been having a ton of trouble getting the new environment up and running. Most of my team got things running without issue but a few people have been hitting major trouble. I don’t know if my troubles count as “major” but I had to uninstall everything today and start from scratch and it finally worked. Finally. I feel a huge relief.

Today is Monday and I haven’t posted anything since Thursday. That’s crazy. I never go that long without boring the internet to tears with at least one pointless post. What’s wrong with me?

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me… I’m currently not in a band. I’m starting to get to the point where its not a matter of wanting to be in a band, it’s a matter of needing to be in a band. Maybe even multiple bands. A cover band, an original rock band, a bluesy jam band… all of the above?

I’m also starting to reach the point where my desire to start going outside and taking pictures of everything is getting out of control. By extension, my desire to try new 35mm film cameras is also getting out of control. I’m having to force myself not to open up ebay when I am sitting in front of a computer. A Nikon F5 (or F6, or F4, or F2) would really hit the spot right now. Also 100 new lenses would really make life better during these dark days of fascist dictatorship.

Speaking of our fascist dictatorship, I consider myself a pretty militant atheist but I grew up catholic. Can I just say that on this day in history I would really like to give the pope a high five?

What else, what else… the Red Sox are no longer the worst team in the big leagues. When I looked at the standings yesterday there were a whole two teams with lower winning percentages. Nice. On top of that, the Bruins clinched a play off spot. Bring me that post season, where they will likely get bounced in the first round.

Okay…. that’s it for this post. Back to work, you.

War Crimes

The fascist president of the fascist states of america yesterday announced that he was going to kill everyone in Iran. He didn’t because of a cease fire that capitulated to all of Iran’s wishes. Good job, fascist president of the fascist states of america. You started the war and you surrendered. Way to make america great again.

Surrendering isn’t the point of this post. The war crime is. Threatening to kill civilians is a war crime. The fact that he did not follow through on his threat does not make it any less a war crime.

He needs to be in jail. Now. Yesterday. He needs to be removed from office, obviously, whether that’s impeachment or the 25th amendment, I don’t care. It needs to happen. My point is, he needs to watch the proceedings from a jail cell. He can have some toady fascist lawyer watch with him, but he needs to be in prison now. Preferably a military prison. Even better, a prison in Nuremberg.

This needs to happen right now. Not tomorrow, not some random day in some theoretical future. Now. Right fucking now.

Spring, My Ass

I was running a little late this morning. I wanted to work in the office and I had a meeting on my schedule at 9:00am. I had to be certain I could get to my desk before that meeting started. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get in on time. As I was packing up my shit to leave the house I told my wife that I would plug my work address into the GPS and if it gave an estimated arrival time of after 8:50am I would work from home. Note: this conversation happened at 7:15am.

I got into the car, opened up the Waze app and pointed it at work. The ETA was 8:41am. Okay, I should be all right. That was when I saw the snow flake.

WTF? It’s April 7th… snow? By the time I got to the end of my street there was a light flurry. By the time I was about 10 miles down route 93 South it was full on snowing. By the time I got down to the route 4 exit off of route 128 South the snow was sticking and it was snowing heavily.

Up yours, mother nature. Up yours.

I parked my car at 8:56am and practically ran up to my desk on the fourth floor. I was in the meeting one minute late at 9:01am.

It is April 7, 2026 and it is still fucking winter in New England. Bite me.

Blackout

The Artemis II mission is currently circling the moon and is out of line of site communication with NASA on Earth. That great big empty rock in the sky is blocking the way.

They are less than half an hour away from their closest approach to the Moon. Earlier this afternoon they broke Apollo 13’s record for flying the farthest distance from Earth. At this very moment they are looking at the dark side of the moon from a point of view that no human being has ever seen.

To say that today is a great day for humanity is an understatement.

Meanwhile, the orange piece of shit clown gave a press conference where he said he was going to destroy Iran completely. He didn’t use the words “nuclear weapons” but the implication was as clear as a mentally defective nazi can get.

How can america simultaneously have its finest moment and its worse moment?

Where is Artemis II Now?

The Artemis II mission is well underway. The Orion Capsule with its crew of four humans (unlike Artemis I which was crewed by four manikins) launched atop NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) last night and boy do I hope I have all of these terms correct. Oh well.

Did I see the launch? No. I live near Boston which means while the rocket was blasting its way toward the stars down in Florida I was stuck in stupidly awful traffic on route 128. You know, like you do.

Despite my traffic woes, Artemis II launched and made it into orbit. That leaves me with a new question. Where are they now? Turns out NASA kind of has an answer, thought the reality of it was a little underwhelming.

NASA’s Artemis Real-time Orbit Website (AROW) let’s you track where the capsule and its four astronauts are at any given moment. Can you imagine how much internet traffic a page like that would have had back in July of 1969 when Apollo 11 was making its trip to the moon? Or at least how much internet traffic it would have seen if internet traffic actually existed. You know what I mean though. You’re pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down, right?

I’m somewhat underwhelmed by the site. At least so far. I don’t know if its the site itself or if its just getting slammed with visitors or what, but it is unbelievably slow for me right now and it took a really long time before I could do anything at all. Once it loaded though, it gave me some cool stats. Right now they are 35,553 miles from Earth, 235,997 miles from the Moon, and they are traveling at a brisk 3,841 miles per hour. May the rest of the world pardon my use of English units. We’re ass backwards Americans in these parts after all.

Check out the site and have fun keeping an eye on things as they travel to the moon, do a lap, and then come home safely. Space exploration is super freakin’ fun, even when the mission is just a test drive. Enjoy!

Launch Day

I’m sitting at my desk at work and the lights just went out. It wasn’t a power failure, it was just that none of us moved enough to trip the motion sensors that turn on the lights.

Sigh.

Hey, we’re going to the moon! The Artemis II mission is about an hour away from its launch window. I’ve been putzing around social media for the last 25 minutes or so and I think I just saw that the crew was loaded into the Orion Capsule. Assuming we don’t abort, they won’t leave the capsule for 10 days or so. They will fly into Earth orbit, circle the globe a couple of times, then head off to the moon. They aren’t landing (that will be Artemis III), they are just circling around once and then heading back.

This is just a test mission. It’s basically the same mission as Artemis I. The main difference is episode I had manikins for crew while episode II has humans. Four of them. Three Americans and a Canadian.

The launch window opens at 6:24pm Eastern time. It is currently 5:32pm Eastern time. The weather forecast is mostly sunny and warm. Things are looking good right now, but there is still plenty of time for issues to pop up.

Fingers crossed they launch tonight, circle the moon, and come home safely.

They’re Back, Babie!

Last night was the Juno Awards ceremony. That’s the Canadian version of the Grammy’s. The show included this one ditty from this little Toronto based rock and roll combo…

They are back! For really reals, Rush is back!

Maybe an odd choice of song, but it was the first song on their first album so it was sort of fitting that the first public appearance with their two new people, Anika Nilles on drums and Loren Gold on keyboards, was that same first song… though if they were going to go with literal first songs they should have gone with their cover of Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away, which was their first single. But I digress. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson on stage again. We’re going to see them in New York in a couple of months and I CAN’T FUCKING WAIT!

Out Running Errands

I went out to run some errands today in Andover and Methuen, MA. I took my camera for some stop light theater pics.

Route 28 in Andover.

Same building from the opposite direction.

Downtown Methuen. Still route 28 but with the clock that I can’t ever stop taking pics of every time I am near it. It’s a compulsion. I should probably talk to a therapist about it or something.

The clock through the sunroof. Epic.

Longest Week Ever

Man… I sure do bitch about work a lot, don’t I?

This has been the longest work week ever and it’s only 1:00pm on Wednesday. Why is that? Why am I so stressed? There’s nothing going on that requires my stress level to elevate out of control. It’s just been a reasonably normal week. Sure, my dining room did flood yesterday…

Did I mention that? We have an office water cooler in our dining room. It is exactly the thing you picture in your head when you hear people talking about being at work and talking around the water cooler. A great big five gallon jug of water sitting upside down and draining into a tall cooler. Yup, exactly what you think. Yesterday it seemed to spring a leak and we had a small lake forming on our dining room floor.

I unplugged the unit and pulled the full bottle off of the top. I had put a new bottle on that morning. There had never been any leaks before. Was it the cooler or was it the new bottle? I betcha you can guess. Once the bottle was out of the equation the leaking stopped. Yup, there was something wrong with the bottle. I put a new bottle on to see what happened and it’s been leak free for about 24 hours now. Problem solved, I think.

Anyway, outside of that and the ugly fact that it snowed twice this week, it’s been a normal few days. Why am I stressin’? Why am I bitchin’? Who knows.

I do know that we’re planning to go to a No Kings rally this weekend, so maybe it’s not so much work stress but it is actually excitement over the coming event. Maybe.

Until then… 2.5 days left in this already long, long, long work week. Crud.