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Red Seal Letter Recipient

I know I haven't been using this site much - but I'm planning to revive it soon (though I plan to change it significantly).

However I have something somewhat interesting to share today.

I was one of the Red Seal Letter Recipients -

I received mine in the mail yesterday.

Here is the most comprehensive link I've found to explain what I'm talking about:

Unfiction Forums: Trailhead - Red Seal thread

Here are a few other links:
ARGN.com
Death Walks the Streets
Video of the letter on YouTube
Digg

... and some fuzzy cellphone pix of my letter -
My Flickr page

I'm certainly curious.

~~ Blue

Feastin'

The past quarter, or so, has been exceedingly lousy. Shit, the past few years have boasted a steady decline in which each weeks has, more or less, been worse than the week that preceded it. As a result I haven't posted much of late, I'm a bitter, angry and generally miserable person, but I derive no joy from making others unhappy (if I did then I'd likely be better off) so I see no point in posting nothing but a bunch of bitching and complaining. I don't mind pointing out something shitty, but I don't enjoy just plain ol' bitchin'. Thus the silent blog. I've been unable to think of anything positive (or at least funny) to post.

That said - it's Thanksgiving again!

As I've said since I can remember, I'm not thankful for shit. The vast majority of my problems come from having been born wrong, that is having nothing of consequence in common with those who make my decisions for me. So I'm not going to sift through the life for which I am the placeholder looking for each little nugget that doesn't suck and then pretend to be "thankful" for them. I have nothing that I haven't earned entirely on my own and nothing that isn't out-weighed by the negative aspects of my existence which are almost always a direct result of an outside force. So, fuck "thankful".

But...

Tomorrow is feast day!

Christina makes a massive traditional Thanksgiving dinner and we feast. It is usually a pleasant day with great food and if I drink enough (and I usually do) I can shut down my brain enough to stop thinking, momentarily, about the countless things beyond my control that deprive me of life, liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness. It's usually a good day and it is a good thing.

If anyone is still reading this blog - have a safe and happy Thanksgiving, however you think about it.

So far...

So far I am totally not digging this millenium.

Sorry. Oh! Is this up?

I just wanted to post a quick note to explain my lack of recent posts. Both Christina and I have taken new day-jobs. The move, though positive, has required a great deal of additional effort. It has also coincided with a couple of other efforts which came to fruition in tandem with the move. Consequently we have been completely overwhelmed. We've been busy from the time the alarm clock starts going off pre-dawn until well past our usual bed times, every day for more than a month now.

In short, I apologize for the lack of posts and I'll pick up the pace here once we've gained a little traction.

In the mean time I'm doing everything in my power to make enough time to watch the X-games this weekend... they started last night... this year they've added rally racing.

Jeah.

Juggle deesh!

It was a weird little weekend. Friday was our last day with our now former employer. We drove to Reston for our debrief. We had spent the week giving our "transitional replacements" a crash course. It became quickly apparent that we did a hell of a lot of work and that it required diverse and extensive skills to do it all. By the time we made out of the office to leave for Reston we were both wired and exhausted.

Saturday I decided to avoid working on the Booze Monkey tune that I had on the schedule. I am recording a Bass Guitar session with damned fine regional musician on the 22nd of this month and the scheduling of that session left me with a fairly loose weekend s'far as the studio was concerned. Consequently I decided to pursue another odd bit of inspiration.

I didn't finish because our little gay sheltie Bourbon experienced some sort of seizure. We rushed him to the emergency vet. By the time we arrived, less than 40 minutes after the problem started, Bourbon was out of it and stable. We plan to do the follow up testing with our usual vet, but we left relatively unworried.

By Saturday night, little had been "accomplished" at the Compound.

Sunday however was rather nice. We did a bunch of verifiable work (I like the verifiable work, it is easier to point to) around the house and despite the fact that I nearly melted the day felt pretty good.

Today marks the start of a new job with a new company in the very same office as before. We started our first day with a lengthy to-do-list. None of that wandering around on the first day for us!

There is a great deal going on, but so far things are managed. All of the balls are (currently) still in the air.

Yay!

Have a great week.

Surprise a comin'

I had a fairly nice weekend. Yay! I spent all day Saturday and a few hours on Sunday morning in the studio.

The bulk of Sunday was spent working around the house - mowing, cutting down a fence, digging out old clothesline poles that we've never used and the like.

However we also smoked pork tenderloin while working outside on Sunday. Consequently the evening was spent feasting. Yay!

The aforementioned studio hours were fruitful. Instead of working on the new record, I followed a bit of inspiration down a quirky little path. I plan to make the new piece freely downloadable this week. Hopefully I'll have a page up with an mp3 by Wednesday or so.

This is our last week in our current jobs so Christina and I are both busy transitioning out. But it is a sweet kinda busy, methinks.

But it all seems less important now.

I apologize for the lack of recent updates. It's been a rough and introspective spring. I went through some health issues that generated serious decisions. Ultimately they turned out to be non-issues and I currently have a clean bill of health - arguably the cleanest of my near-forty years.

Ever since the release of South Mountain Magic in the beginning of April 2006 I've faced a non-stop barrage of issues, problems, ethical decisions and the standard hurdles of day to day existence. Nothing that every single person doesn't face, but the stuff that sucks nonetheless. It's just been a long run of bad.

Actually things appear to be looking up a bit, though mainly they appear "good" just because so much "bad" is now in the rear-view.

If I were a blogger of any caliber I would have posted about most of these issues as they were happening... but alas, I'm a bit of a fly-by-night blogger. I have been active in Babble-on since I finally managed to bring her back on-line. Can I have points for that?

So here we are, it's summer now. I was forced to change my name by the society that owns me because my real name wasn't average enough. As of 13 (fitting) June 2006 my name is legally Blue Ajay. I'm too tired to explain that again, the explanation is in Babble-on and can be found in this thread but please know that it resides in Babble-on, where no attempt whatsoever was made for politesse, political correctness or the ever-popular coating of sugar. The rage in the post should be clear and obvious. If it were me, I wouldn't read it.

Both Christina and I resigned from our jobs on 3 July 2006. We begin new jobs in two weeks. We will, however, remain in the same building, with the same customer and potentially the very same office. It was good to quit though. Christina quit for a new job opportunity, I quit on principal. We are hopeful about the new positions and the new company. Such a change always resides in the shadow of trepidation, but I'm choosing to remain hopeful as I bask in the temporary solace of resignation. Yeah that.

I've been working on the new Booze Monkey recordings, and I'm pleased with the results so far. I've changed up my approach a bit. In the past I've worked relentlessly to get albums recorded, usually in a furious burst confined by deadlines and leave from the day-gig. This time around I'm bringing in assorted guest musicians with whom I'm proud to be working, and I'm taking a great deal more time to record the songs. I'm re-recording parts as other parts enhance the dynamics and the like. I have one complete song in the can and a second is nearly finished, but I'm awaiting a guest appearance that is scheduled for a couple weeks from now. The second song, entitled Hope already boasts two guest musicians with the aforementioned third appearance scheduled.

I plan to document much of the process on video and release the results at SanityCheck.net. I've continued to work on the content for SanityCheck.net and hope to start making the progress freely downloadable soon. Yay!

Well, there is my overdue update. Now quit surfing and go outside. If you are going to stay inside in front of the computer, at least surf for porn like everyone else. Yay!

The show that never ends...

Well... finally... after ten weeks or so of painful absence, Babble-on has returned!

I'm still fixing links here and there, but she's back!

Whew!

Babble-on and on

I thought I'd take a moment to provide a status regarding Babble-on, the SanityCheck.net forums.

Most of the people who read this blog probably already know, at least generally, what I'm typin' 'bout. For those who don't, however, right around the middle of April this year the company that hosts my primary web domain - SanityCheck.net - encountered some difficulties that took us offline for a few days. The company handled things beautifully, it was just one of those things. Upon bringing us back online we started to have some problems with the forum code. Babble-on (this iteration) was based upon rather heavily modified phpBB code with a MySQL back-end. Unfortunately the site was based upon version 2.0.8 of the phpBB code and phpBB had already worked its way up to version 2.0.20 (now 2.0.21) with most of the updates being security related. Babble-on is (was) a very active forum that has been around for 8 or 9 years. I knew the code was aging, but I hadn't had the time to update the code - the extensive modifications make the upgrades more than a little difficult.

As our host was bringing us back online we began noticing some problems that indicated we were probably being hacked. In an effort to protect the past couple of years worth of posts we took the site offline. I backed up the database and began working on updating the code. I configured Apache, Perl, PHP, SSI and MySQL on my PowerBook and hunkered down to work. I had (have) all of the posts so the situation was, more or less, only a nuisance. Interestingly, methinks, the forums were successfully hacked while they were offline! But by then I'd already created all of the required backups.

I had the site updated to version 2.0.20 and I was working through some tests to make sure things were working when my PowerBook's hard drive crashed - ironically as I was connecting to my external backup drive. I hammer my PowerBook. I'd had her for about 20 months at that time and I usually run her 24/7. If I'm not actually working on her, she's running a backup routine, or copying files on our home network, or something... she earns her keep to say the least. I recently checked her uptime before a reboot to find that she'd been running for 29 days since the last reboot... yeah, she really earns her keep. I sent her off for repair, new hard drive, whatever upgrades were available and moped around for about a week while feeling like Timmy without Lassie. I had everything backed up on my external drive except for the upgraded Babble-on forums that I had completed just prior to the crash.

But here is where the BLUE-luck really kicks in. Upon receiving my newly repaired and upgraded PowerBook I set about recovering her from my backup drive. I connected the drive, and prepared to recover everything... and my back-up drive died. Go fuckin' figure. I wear a belt and suspenders and I look both ways before crossing a one-way street, only to be hit from above by a falling piano while a denim-eating-bacteria eats away my Levis.

So I spent the next week-plus rebuilding my PowerBook from scratch. I lost more than two years of email, contacts, pretty much everything. Most upsettingly I lost a bunch of fictional prose I had been working on. I write music and lyrics on a daily basis and I've done so for most of my time as an adult. But fictional prose is a new discipline, one that I was just developing. That loss kicked me in the proverbial balls. Whine whine sob sob. By the way, that wasn't just a turn of phrase, my testes are actually prone to sharing proverbs.

So after rebuilding my PowerBook, I once again started rebuilding and upgrading Babble-on. I've worked on the code during every bit of free time, most evenings and weekends. By this past weekend I had fully recreated my development environment and I was completely focused on the project. I spent, literally, over 20 hours on the rebuild this past weekend. I actually walked from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, sat in front of my PowerBook and hacked for more than 10 straight hours on both Saturday and Sunday. By Monday morning I had fully recreated Babble-on, without any lost posts, on my PowerBook. Yay!

But it doesn't work on the production server. Boo!

Sigh.

I've tried everything I can think of, and I only have one remaining idea to try (as of this typing). If that doesn't work, I'll be forced to start fresh with the forums. I will still have the archives, but the old posts won't be online. Big fuckin' sigh. Either way, the forums will be returning soon. I cannot convey how much I miss them. We've had Babble-on for going on a decade and it is the very center of my social world. Without it I have a much reduced connection with most of my friends. This is the longest (by far) that Babble-on has been offline during that time. It sucks, and I cannot wait to have it back. Hopefully with the past couple of years worth of posts.

To all of the regular (and casual) posters in Babble-on, it won't be much longer before the forums return, though we may be starting over. I miss you all, and look forward to a return to abnormalcy.

This feels too familiar.

"Obviously it is best to avoid hangovers," I said, "but barring that - I recommend you embrace the hangover."

"I feel like shit," she replied.

I've worked too many Sundays.

Sundays should be for hangovers.

I could use more hangovers.

I'm back at the day-gig today. My apologies to anyone in the mid-Atlantic region of the continent who finds a shortage of Alcohol at their usual source for the elixir of the gods. It was a week of considerable lushitude.

Oh, and welcome to 6 June 2006 - 6/6/6.

Have a great day of the beast.