FreeBSDGirl.com

It’s been hectic here. My mom called me last night to inquire as to if I was still alive, so I suppose it’s time for a few updates:

Mike and I are getting along “ok” now. It’s still awkward. After the last post, he began to act a bit more sane. We’re working on being friends, but it’s harder than I originally thought it would be.

Google boy got kicked out by his psycho roommate. It turns out she’s that kind of girl that doesn’t really like having other girls around (as they take attention away from her), so she told him to get out if he was going to insist upon dating me. Ok, whatever. I’ve only had like 3 conversations with her, during all of which I was quite nice. I suppose that’s just her perrogative. Since I needed a place to live too, Google boy and I got a loft in the same building he used to live in. The loft is gorgeous. It’s got 12′ ceilings, all concrete and stainless steel, top floor, 1500sq ft. My bedroom is facing the city, and 3/4 of the wall is glass with sliding doors out to the balcony. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I see is a fabulous view of the Atlanta skyline. I love living downtown. It is beyond awesome. Having a roommate isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it’d be. We’ve got quite a bit in common, right down to our shared preference of skim milk - a habit I couldn’t ever get anyone else into.

I went to Ikea this weekend because I don’t have much in the way of furniture. I hate Ikea. It’s ghetto cheap, which is kind of nice, but I feel like a dirty hippy college student shopping there. There’s way too many people there. I did get a really neat chaise/couch thingie for my room though. It’s the first piece of furniture I’ve ever really bought all by myself, other than small tables and bookcases and such. It’s an odd feeling.

I finally finished my first project at work. For the past 3 weeks, I’d been putting in well over 110+ hrs a week. It’s almost like I’m making up for the lack of work I’ve always managed to get by with at previous jobs. Being a developer requires such a different mindset from being a sysadmin. I’m used being smart enough to be lazy, but now it’s all work, work, work. I don’t think I mind it that much. I’m finally not bored. I got a break on Thursday/Friday last week, and I realized I didn’t like being bored anymore. Bah.

I’ve been working on rewriting iwi(4) in FreeBSD 5, as WPA is broken. Bunches of other fun odd little problems with that driver too. I’ve never done this level of coding before, so I’m learning quite a bit. It’s also been totally (not) fun working on figuring out how to debug ACPI on the Inspiron 9300. I may be able to find some help with Darius, but he’s never done work like this either. It’s code to keep me from thinking about work code. I am such a nerd.

My warlock finally hit lvl 40. Actually, I’m 42 now. I *love* my felsteed. Not having to walk makes the game much less of a grind.

Nathan was over this past weekend. It was his first look at my new place. We had the windows open, and when we weren’t looking he apparently amused himself by throwing socks and waffles (???) out the window at people. Good going, Nathan. You are so grounded.

I wore my Google shirt and my daemon horns to work today. Too fun. I hope the horns aren’t over the top.

The past few days have been better. Mike and I don’t like fighting, that much is obvious. Both of us still care quite a bit for each other, but it’s difficult to be around each other. I guess it’s supposed to be. Lately I’ve been hanging out a lot with a person to hereby be referred to as “Google Boy”, as he works for Google. He’s someone I met before but never really had a chance to talk to much. I had to get out of the house, and we ended up going out for a drink and totally geeking out. He’s a gamer nerd of a different type, but he still understands the underlying principles behind WoW and what makes it The Best MMORPG Evar, so that’s got to count for something. We talked for hours about everything from WardenClient theory and implimentation to physics. It’s so rare to find someone that manages to keep up. He even told me a few things I hadn’t heard of before. We watched South Park and had random “me too” moments as I worked on finishing up the perl module I’d been working on for the past few weeks for my employer. He gave me 10 geek points for falling asleep curled around my laptop. I felt horrid, as I consider it rude to fall asleep during an attempt at socializing, but I was just so tired. I wonder how many geek points I have altogether. We need a system for such things.

I’m happy, I’m better than anyone ever expected me to be. Everyone at work has commented on how I look and act totally different. They didn’t know why, as not everyone there knows who I am, and I kept quiet about things. I don’t want condolences, or the typical “oh, that sucks, guys are assholes” commentary. I’m the type of person that hates talking to their significant other on the phone when coworkers are standing around. Despite the pieces of my life that are made public here, I don’t feel comfortable discussing it elsewhere. Weird, eh?

I noticed hits are going back up after a drop from when I stopped posting so often. It’s doubtless due to the trainwreck that everyone is assuming they are going to see when they read. Hm. I guess it isn’t boring. It’s a shame I can’t post everything, but I some things would potentially be damaging to the other parties involved, so I keep quiet. I’ve got some good stories, though.

People are talking about me. Again. I went through new links to me for this month. So far, I’ve been linked to in a number of forums, including Fucked Company and Dark Forums. Both kind of surprised me. I thought I’d pretty much fallen off the radar of the idiots, and I’d rather it stay that way, but I suppose with the growth in viewers, I should have expected it. Dark Forums amazed me, especially. Hm. No technical creativity, eh? Well, it’s a shame I’ve signed an NDA for every company I’ve worked for, and I actually honor it, unlike him-who-shalt-not-be-named. Oh well. Usually, I pay no attention to such trolls. It’s not worth it to respond. It just surprised me so much. They have a point, but not for the reasons they’d think. I guess I don’t talk about the things I’m working on here, anymore. It’s more a vent for my personal life, a way to purge. It’s a reality check of sorts. I did post a few How-To’s from a while back, some of which were original material, others were information I’d found various places, sources always credited somewhere or the other. I just gave up on talking about anything geek with anyone, and I didn’t think about discussing it on the blog. Perhaps I should. I lost much motivation, especially after I didn’t have anyone I could use to bounce ideas around. I love geeking out. It’s my favorite thing in the world. Coming to this company helped - Robert knows a fuckload. He’s one of the only people I’ve ever worked with that I could learn something from. He stuck me with some easy stuff to do when I first got here, but now he’s started talking to me about the whackass problems he’s having. He’s the one that involved me in the failover project. The one I spent nearly 36 hours straight at work for, slowly going insane at the level of shit I had to wade through in the horrible linux-ha documentation. Seriously, someone needs to clean that up. Half of it applies to heartbeat1.x, the other half is heartbeat 2.x - and you’re lucky if whatever page on the wiki you’re looking at mentions what version of heartbeat it applies to. There are important functions that are undocumented, except for in the mailing list. Important configuration details that, if not included, can break a good deal of thing provided your failover uses UDP. It’s a great software package, but seriously guys, what the fuck? I don’t care if you can code like you’ve got the Golden Hands of CodeMonkey (+8 int, BoP), documentation is key to making a good product. The wiki sucks. But yeah, anyways, this is why I stay away from other peoples code and politics. I get angry when I deal with incompetence. Such is life. At least Fucked Company mentioned I was fat. I know how to deal with rude comments about my appearance - I’ve just not had to deal with them when it comes to my technical background. Weird.

Speaking of which, here’s something annoying. OpenBSD’s new(ish) pkg tools were reworked from the ground up, ditching FreeBSD’s code and using perl. This was done a while back, to the best of my knowledge. So I had to modify and add a package, not a huge deal. As opposed to using the tools, it’s generally faster for me to just create the +CONTENTS file and tgz the package by hand. I’ve done this a million times before on older versions of OpenBSD, so I spent a good 10 fucking minutes trying to figure out why OpenBSD was being gay. Before, it was considered acceptable to tar up a structure with tar -cf yourpkg.tar *. Now, it flips out if it sees a directory in the tar table. Only files are included. Example:

theosucks# tar -zvtf p5-File-Tail-0.98.tgz
-rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 970 Mar 9 2005 +CONTENTS
-rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 52 Mar 9 2005 +COMMENT
-rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 533 Mar 9 2005 +DESC
-r–r–r– 1 root wheel 22885 Mar 9 2005 libdata/perl5/site_perl/File/Tail.pm
-r–r–r– 1 root wheel 88 Mar 9 2005 libdata/perl5/site_perl/auto/File/Tail/autosplit.ix
-r–r–r– 1 root wheel 13320 Mar 9 2005 man/man3p/File::Tail.3p

It’s prettier, I guess. I have to wonder why they would write their pkg tools to break if this isn’t followed, though. I guess they want everyone to use the pkg tools to create packages. Blah, takes too long. My days are plagued with little annoyances such as this. I’d rather bitch about boys and money. The rest is just upsetting to the point of being boring and obvious.

I did get to show my boss the project I’d been working on for the past few weeks, today. It’s coming along quite nicely. Getting out of the sysadmin mindset is going to take a while. I totally blame 90% of the bad work ethics so prevalent in the IT industry on the Systems Administrator Mentality. Sit around, play WoW, work on your own projects - until shit breaks. Then all hell breaks loose, and you spend the next 48 hours straight at work surviving off Cherry Coke and skittles. I hate Coke products, so it barely evens out. Now, I’m busy most of the time. Until 12:48 PM exactly, I really can’t do much but sit and stare like a zombie at my LCD. Mornings do not work with me. I end up getting the majority of my work done after 6 PM, as that’s when the adrenaline kicks in. I’m lucky my boss is so understanding. I’m really working to get to whatever I think a developers mindset is supposed to be - and that’s still up in the air. It’s just more different than I expected, although I’m not complaining necessarily. Career changes make work interesting. This is the first job that has given me reason to look forward to going to work in the morning. I’m not the only female here, as well. There’s another, and I thought she was a developer, but it turns out she’s sort of between development and QA. Cool chick, older, has kids. Very…sane up here…compared to the department I was working in before. I miss them. Threating to nail penises to boards and debating if ‘peener’ was indeed a real word added fun to the day. Everyone up here is so quiet and subdued.

Suddenly it appears everyone seems to think I’m a mirror of the WoW patch, as I got about 30 IM’s from random people on patch day. I didn’t have the patch yet, sorry ya’ll. I’m proud to say I haven’t played WoW in 2 days, except when I logged on for 5 minutes to make sure the 1.8 patch hadn’t done any obvious breaking of the UI mods I’d been working on. I blame that on Google Boy. More doctors appointments coming up. X-rays, blood work, more fun. Tired. I am just the funding for the boob job they are buying their wife. Or mistress, depending on how long I’ve been visiting said doctor. This one is new. Maybe he’s different. Maybe he’ll figure it out. I’m glad I went permanent and got health insurance, as this is all about to get very, very expensive.

Also, as seen in comments, my phone is off. To find me, catch me on AIM, although it may be a bit before I answer. My sidekick2 had some kind of weird electrical problem, so I’ve been waiting for 2 weeks for T-Mobile to send me a new one. Yay, equipment protection plan. During this time, I had popped my SIM into my old Motorola v600. I can’t believe I did this. This is so totally not something I’d do, and it shows how truly distracted I am. I dropped my cell phone in a glass of ice water. I just looked over, and it dropped it. Directly. In. Water. I don’t know why. It really wasn’t intentional. I was just trying to put it down on the ground. Mike said my new Sidekick2 should be here on Thursday, so use alternative forms of contact until then. I’ve been busy regardless, so don’t feel too insulted if you sent a VM or IM and I didn’t get back to you. I’m not avoiding you; I’m avoiding everyone, at least for a few more days. I hate answering questions, and everyone is full of them. RTFB.

I got my new work laptop a day early - yay! It’s a lot bigger than I expected. I feel like I’m making up for the lack of a penis by having the biggest laptop ever. It’s a Dell Inspiron 9300 - a widescreen with a max resolution of 1920×1200. I made sure to get the display upgrade so I could get the nice res. It’s kind of weird though; I’m not used to having a shiny laptop display. It’s got an odd glass (or glass-like) coating, and the viewing angle seems much greater. The only bag I have that will hold this monster is my Independent backpack. So much for using my $300 leather laptop bag. I’ve only managed to use it twice in the 2 years that I’ve had it. I shouldn’t complain - it’s still as nice as it was the day I got it.

James and I are supposed to be spending the evening together tomorrow. Mike is out of town, and although the notion of spending my birthday by myself wasn’t all that unappealing, hanging out with him seems like it could be a bit more fun. He’s fairly entertaining - when he’s not being an egotistical asshole. ( Kisses, babe. ) It’s been enlightening hanging out with him on a non-dating level. He’s a good guy, we just have … conflicting personalities. As in, his ego and my ego cannot fit in the same room together. He’s the only person other than Mike that I’d want to spend my birthday with, though, so I’m glad he offered to take me out. I just want to be around someone familiar.

World of Warcraft just finished installing on this giant cock. On to my game.

This is a in-real-life conversation (paraphrased, of course) that took place yesterday at work. Names have been changed, etc.

J: Is there a verb for fellatio?
(argument ensues between the males)
Me: I’m looking it up. (…) No, only a noun form is officially recognized
J: so i can make up my own word then?
Me: i guess so
J: B, i’m going to fellate all over your ass
(guys laugh)
Me: i don’t think that’s correct. that’s not the proper form of the word.
J: i made it up, i can make it mean whatever i want
B: dude, you can’t give me a blowjob all over my ass
(chaos ensues, people start walking past our door to see what is going on, etc)

Earlier tonight, I went to Barnes and Nobles to pick up a few books that I needed for work. I was crossing my fingers, hoping none of my C coder friends would be there. If they saw me buying Perl books, I’d never live it down. It’s like your priest seeing you buying a double sided dong (although the question remains, what would your priest be doing in a place that sells double sided dongs in the first place?)

Relating to the link above, I was trying to go snag it from IMDB, but I couldn’t remember the name of the movie - despite the fact that I have it on DVD. So I turn to IRC. How’s this for a movie description?

<sektie> what was that fucked up movie with the double sided dong
<sektie> the one with the drugs
<sektie> and the dude that had his arm chopped off
<sektie> it was totally pop culture
<sektie> and i can’t remember the name
<sektie> it had the older woman in it that started taking uppers to look better so she could get on that gameshow, but then she went insane
<dekkon> uhhh
<c-rOCK> hoes with dildos
<blonde> requiem for a dream
<sektie> oh yeah
<sektie> thanks!

Well, someone had to know. It’s a great movie, and my description doesn’t do it’s level of mind-fucking justice.

On to the books:
Regular Expression Pocket Reference, by Tony Stubblebine.
I have my little Perl Pocket Reference stuffed in my black leather Prada bag already. They are perfectly purse sized, so I can carry them with me everywhere. I’d like to pick up the CVS Pocket Reference to compliment my collection, but maybe later. You can never have enough pocket references.

Programming Perl, Third Edition, by Larry Wall, Jon Orwant, and Tom Christiansen.
It’s not quite as introductory as Learning Perl, as it has good coverage of advanced topics as well as the basics. I think I used to have this book. Maybe I lost it. Regardless, money well spent, as it provides for a good reference book.

Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules by Randal Schwartz and Tom Phoenix.
This is one of the few books I could find on this subject. It covers perl OOP, a subject that most other perl books skim over if not ignore completely. I love this book. Buy it now.

Speaking of Prada bags, do you ever wonder how many O’Reilly books ever see the inside of one?

@ 11 AM. Hm. The folks that said “Oh, FreeBSDGirl” when I introduced myself. Heh. Wish me luck.

Ever wonder what it’s like to skin a live dog? It’s not fun. I found out tonight. RJ-45’s fur is coming off in clumps, and her skin is falling off with it. The best thing right now is to remove all of her fur so it doesn’t get matted into the wounds as they dry, so I took it upon myself to give her a haircut. 10 minutes into it, I realized the easiest thing was just to tug on the hair just barely and it’d come out on its own. She laid with her head in my lap through all of it. It was heart breaking. At least now the wounds will heal up faster, unobstructed. She appears to be a little happier, although she’s still not moving around much.

If she doesn’t get better by next weekend, I’m going to put her to sleep. I start crying any time I think about it. I was talking about it on IRC today to a couple of Mike’s IRL friends, and one of them started making really rude comments, making light of the situation. I signed off and bawled my eyes out for an hour until I finally fell asleep. There’s a difference between being a troll and aiming to really hurt someone. I wasn’t expecting that from him. Why would he want to hurt me? I don’t know what to say.

I’m taking a temporary job working in my landlord’s water company for a while. It sounds like I’ll be getting paid to sit in the retail office and IRC. Rock on. I’m only taking this to have something to do with my time. I hate sitting at home all day. At least it’ll take care of paying this months rent for me, although not much else.

LOTD: Forget Me Not Panties.

:: Phone Conversation ::

FreeBSDGirl: Hi, one of my friends told me ya’ll might be looking for an admin. Is the position still open?
Manager at Company: Yes, what’s your name?
FreeBSDGirl: Randi Harper.
Manager at Company: Oh, FreeBSDGirl!

…

Bloody Hell.

It’s been over 2 weeks since my last update. A lot has happened, I’ve just been so busy.

Starting off, I got dooced. It happens; such is life. They knew I was looking for a new job, anyways. I felt bad about leaving in the middle of such a busy time, but they wanted to rush it. 3 days later, I had an interview at a new company. Providing I pass the background check - and I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t - I’ll be employed once again. As toor said, it’s 1996 for sektie, 24/7, 365.

Mike left for Networld+Interop in Vegas the day before, so I had to make the call to him letting him know what happened. I wasn’t so much upset about being dooced as I was about telling him. He took it about how I thought he would. 2 hours later, I had an interview set up with the company I’m about to go work with. This alleviated his stress a bit.

This was Tuesday. I got home, and what does a bored FreeBSDGirl do? She puts on her party dress and heads to Bradleys. This set the tone of the week. The first night was fairly uneventful. I went with my sidekick2, knowing that I’m not the most social person in the world. I’m not used to going out without Mike, so I liked to have something to fall back on so I’m not just staring into space. I talked on IRC for a bit while enjoying my screwdriver, then got ready to leave when I saw that Adrienne, one of the few people I felt all that comfortable talking to wasn’t going to show up. As I was walking out, two guys stopped me and told me to come talk to them and they’d buy me a shot. I told them I wouldn’t drink a shot, but they could get me another screwdriver. They both seemed nice enough sober. One of the guys got very drunk very quickly (ick, jaeger), and kept telling me to drop my boyfriend and hook up with his friend, the nice drunk. The nice drunk kept apologizing for the dumbass drunk, and I talked to him most of the night. When Calvin arrived, I went to Churchills with him and some other guy because Bradleys closed early. I think I got home around 3 AM.

Wednesday, I went to Bradleys again. I met up with Christie and talked to her most of the night. After the bar closed, I went to some hot blonde chicks apartment with her, and hung out with two hot blonde chicks and Christie. One of the hot blonde chicks gave me a back massage. It was awesome. I got home at 7 AM (ish, not sure).

Thursday, Cinco de mayo. Pics here. Started the night at Tijuana Joes with Christie and Adrienne. Went to Bradleys around midnight, already pretty drunk. Got drunker. Left with Calvin and drove around most of the night, went to some really cute chicks house. She looks just like Pink, even has the same hair and same attitude. She’s supposed to be doing my hair as soon as I call her. She is awesome. Calvin drove me home around 9 AM on Friday morning, and I had a job interview later that day. I felt like crap, probably due to food poisoning. Whatever.

Ok, so, funny story. I don’t do meth. I did it before, years and years ago, but I’m generally drug free. However, Calvin came over and he had some and he wanted to smoke it. I figured, what the hell, I’ll try it once. So we’re at my place, and I’m like, Ok, how do we do this. He says, “Well, we need a pipe.” I didn’t have one. He suggested a lightbulb, so I went and got one. We both sat staring at it for a while, wondering how the hell to get the end off. I left it up to Calvin, but he didn’t have much luck. I think he broke 3 lightbulbs before he managed to do it properly. He tried using scissors, knives, breaking it against a table - any number of things. Anyways, the end result is that I didn’t smoke any meth. It just seemed like too much effort. Drugs are bad.

I went to the job interview, and the recruiter met me downstairs. Her reaction? “Oh my god, Beth didn’t tell you to wear a suit?” So, according to her, I already practically had the job - I had so many internal recommendations that it would be hard for them not to hire me. I wore a skirt and a nice shirt though, and she said the guy interviewing me was the type that would get a bad impression if I didn’t wear a skirt. I was feeling like crap from the food poisoning, so we just rescheduled. I had no suit, and I was 3 miles from the mall, so I drove to Bloomingdales and threw myself into the arms of the first gay man I could find. He took one look at me, set me down in the dressing room, brought me water and tissues, and proceeded to find me the best suit ever. I paid $800 for it, but it was totally worth it. Hella Ellen Tracy/DKNY.

Mike came home that weekend and flipped his shit. $800 is too much to spend on a suit? Whatever. I needed it. Everyone needs at least one good suit, right?

Well, that details week one. Week two is a blur of talking to the new company, playing Midnight Club: Dub Edition (which rocks the shit, by the way). I taped together my Powerbook today so I could use it again. Between being kicked down a flight of stairs, being thrown at the wall, falling off the back of the TV, being stepped on by Mike, and dropped on the pavement several times, it is a miracle that this laptop survived. I’m going to take the tape off soon and take some pictures to send to Apple. Maybe I can convince them to give me a new laptop in return for using mine in the Apple museum as testament of how hardcore Apple products are. Apple, I promise I will not talk about how much your devtools suck ass or how you’re all trendy faggots anymore if you do this. Love, FreeBSDGirl.

So there’s some drama going down at work. Oddly, it doesn’t have to do with the Atlanta crew.

Someone from the Pennsylvania crew has been posting on my blog and mentioning where I work. The last time this happened (a few weeks ago), I had to get HR involved. I’ve had issues with stalkers showing up at former places of employment, and I really didn’t want to have to deal with that bullshit here. Taking a gun to work isn’t fun, nor is it generally approved of by management. When I took all of this to HR, I asked them not to do anything yet, I just wanted them to know of the situation. I didn’t really want to take it to HR at all, but my boss was CC:ed on an email I was throwing around, and when it was known that the posts had inflamatory remarks about the company I work for, legal had to get involved as well. Comcast has been contacted - oh, did I not mention IP’s on this site are logged? Hi, 67.165.73.109. It’s a big fuckfest here, folks. Pay $5 to see the show.

Well, they just posted again. They’re starting to mention names, and it’s really childish. I can understand their hatred of me. They got let go, and I took their jobs. Look guy, I’m sorry that you don’t have a job anymore. But why are you attacking me? Get over it, find a new job. Or, if you do want to flame me, that’s fine. Join the crew. I also suggest you join #nanog on EFNet. They *love* talking trash about me. They’re my own personal hate club. However, mentioning the company I work for and giving out internal information like server names is highly unprofessional.

In short, it’s no wonder you’re out of a job. Get over yourself.