The Manic Mechanic

Earlier in the week I pulled the plug on my LJ. I had mostly run out of uses for this, and, to be honest, no longer felt the need to have an outlet for what I would call "personal" matters and discussion with the internet in general. It has been about 20 years (!) since I had ventured out onto the internet in a personal capacity, rather than a technical/professional way for work reasons. It took a lot of courage on my part to make that change, and it wasn't long before I was pouring my heart into online interactions, making literally hundreds of friends along the way, even enjoying a bit of both figurative and literal rock star status along the way. I soon learned that much of this was fleeting, with the vast majority of people eventually moving on, leaving what I thought was some incredible friendships, relationships and great causes to founder and die. Perhaps it was the value I had placed in these relationships, or my investment in them, emotionally, mentally and physically, that left me not only disappointed but also feeling left behind once they had evaporated. It took a while, because for the 32 years prior I had been very much a loner until that time, but I learned to reconsider the experience as more of a crucible, or distillery that helped to separate out the fleeting and leaving the best behind. Maybe more like how maple syrup is made I suppose, where it takes a great deal of sap to be carefully boiled until the sweet syrup remains. What came out of these hundreds of fun (for the most part) interactions and countless good (with a bit of bad) memories is a sparkling core of truly great friends, that to this day still amaze me with some of their actions. I sought to leave my online world as I had formed to to simply concentrate on the product from it. After a couple days (I bet you didn't even notice) I switched this back on, not so much as a continuing place for me to pile my thoughts, but for the few remaining people I know and love who remain here. Without my LJ being active, I had no way to interact with y'all. My analogy is this is like a small town of bygone days where people would run into one another while out and about, or take the time to walk from house to house to say hello and talk over the fence. I guess I can't board up my place yet still remain neighborly, given how this system is set up.

This is not the Livejournal I set up shop in over ten years ago. Like so many other online "spaces" in the past, what began for me as a thriving community has become rather barren. Those who remain, however, and still making great use of the medium, and maintaining fantastic connections. What skeeves me these days is the reduction in quality of the service, the politics of the Russian owners and general disregard for the stateside users that really made the community what it is. The latest technical hell here is the never completing page loads. Sure, the pages seem to render properly and mostly stuff works, but some connections never complete, with the page loading indicator spinning away. This is often a sign of bad server configurations, and sometimes of a more dangerous nature, with open connections lying in wait for malware or other bad mojo. This has been going on for a few weeks now on my end, regardless of what computer or connection I access the site with. Aargh. Oh well, the neighborhood falls apart even more, the landowners letting the place fall apart around the remaining denizens.

I will keep my door open for a little while longer, I guess, at least until the wedding and a bit after. Then, well, we'll see. These days I am busy with as much as my day can hold, trying to get the house and yard fixed up, putting the final touches on a huge network upgrade to accommodate new home security and automation now and be usable into the foreseeable future. La Casa Mayhem is my only true home, I built it with my hands as well as a lot of outside help, and I plan on living the rest of my years here. As my health has taken several downturns in recent years, I now have a sense of urgency to get lots of things done while I am still able to do them in order to be able to have some years later to relax and simply enjoy the spoils of all that labor and thought. I am lucky to be able to (sometimes barely) be able to get around, and I am measuring my time wisely. With the wedding coming up in less three months (!) now, I gotta kick it into high gear. I am overlapping projects to my best advantage. I will be redoing the entryway to the house, with a new front door, paint, floor, lighting, landscaping, and more. I am sitting here configuring and testing security cameras I will be installing while I crawl around doing these other upgrades. Several hundred more feet of network cabling has to be installed too, and I am pleased with how this all is shaping up. In the spirit of the days past, here's a photo of the goings-on as I test one of the cameras down in the Underground Concrete Bunker before I finally get it put where it belongs on the outside.



I just hope my creaky old body holds up as I do all this work, if not, I am truly screwed. Our little wedding is shaping up to be a big deal. Certainly it's the most important day of my life in decades. I can only hope all turns out as we are working and planning it out to be.

Seeyas 'round.

Testing? Number 9? Is this working?

The other evening I decided to post and, lo and behold, LJ was either under attack by Russian hooligans or someone tripped over a thick cable in a server room somewhere. Typical. I'll try that post when things have calmed down.

How's everyone doing?

Well, it appears that LJ is mostly operational, but not without isolated issues. Like eating the long post that I had written a few minutes ago. Ah well, I guess I have to kick the crust off my DW account and use it as a primary, with a crosspost to this place. No wonder I am really soured on blogging and social media in general, it's unreliable and getting to be more work than it's worth at times.

Okay, what's gotten into LJ this time? Russians? Martians? Someone tripped over a stray network cable?

(Warning, lots of personal meanderings ahead.)

Well, I guess it has come down to this. At first I thought it was just a passing feeling. I tried to work around it, doing what I could to make a presence here and on the very few other social media sites I still use. Granted, the posts are of little substance, videos and failed memes, etc, but at least it was an effort. But I've come to the conclusion that my use of various "social media" outlets has left me more hollow and wanting than if I dispensed with the things entirely.

I realize there are many of you reading this that don't understand what I am feeling. I see a lot of people who absolutely rock their various online self-media outlets. Lots of dialog, on- and off-line gatherings and get-togethers, those sort of things. In my case, I only feel the "illusion" of a robust circle of friends. If I don't initiate a conversation, or join one already happening in another venue (in the case of LJ, this means posting something here or making a comments in someone else's entry), nothing will happen. No "hey, what's up" or other outside initiator will happen. Often if I send a message to someone I might not get a response, or the conversation will cease if I don't make the last entry into it. I generally chalk it up to folks' increasingly busy lives. But when the results have approached 100%, I tend to get the message, even if I am slow to realize.

I've long realized that my personality is not everyone's slice of cherry pie. But as I've found myself going through a lot of terrible things in my life with no one beside me to speak of save for maybe Jeff, I've come to some pretty indelible conclusions. The one that pertains to LJ, and by extension, any other online interpersonal sites like Facebook, etc., is do I continue to pin an increasingly false hope of actual friendship and support based in a "virtual" world? What I mean to say is it seems that doing so has only increased to disconnect and made me realized how little I have in the way of close friendships and camaraderie. Having friends halfway across the globe online is well and good in itself, but in reality it's nothing more than a circle of pen-pals. Human beings thrive on interpersonal contact, something that is sorely lacking in my life in not only recent years, but throughout my entire life. I grew up in an isolated little community where I had no local friends. People that I could call "friends" lived at minimum a few miles away. This involved a car trip or a time-consuming (and dangerous) bike ride through rural roads to get together. As time rolled on, this situation has not changed. I still live in a mostly rural-suburban setting with no neighborhood friends. The few people I counted as friends growing up are the same ones I associate with now on a somewhat regular basis, with the incidental traveling conundrum still in effect.

Throughout all of this the one aspect what bugs me the most is the near perfect record I have with meeting people in person that I have gotten to know via previous online interaction who I apparently have a good time with together, but once we've gone back to our own respective corners of the world, it rarely if ever recurs, Also in many cases the online tête-à-tête diminishes if not disappears entirely. I might not always be the sharpest crayon in the box, but for the life of me I can't figure this one out. Am I the victim of differing expectations? Do I smell bad? Did I not pick up the tip for dinner? I'm totally dumbfounded. When it happens now and then, I can chalk it up to various things that make humans incompatible with one another for whatever reason. When it occurs with nearly the same regularity as a sunset I don't know what to do. Suffice it to say, it does hurt, and I no longer want to expose myself to those kinds of situations.

Where does this leave me now? Do I keep being the one that has to initiate and carry conversations? Do I expend the most effort in trying to buoy a budding personal friendship? Do I send out repeated status queries to everyone involved to basically ask "are we still friends?" I'm no longer going to subject myself to unreturned messages on social sites and apps, no-shows to party and meeting invitations or similar. And, sad to say, I wont expect much more out of LJ other than entertainment, news and mild comment interplay. Pinning my hopes that "social media" leads to being more "social" has only reinforced my belief that the opposite is in fact what is true. It brings well-intentioned people together through often vast distances, raising hopes in people like me that there are indeed people out there that I share lots of interests and whatnot with, but in the end those vast distances remain. And in most cases when those distances were breached, the hope of lasting friendship gets quashed for whatever reason I have yet to figure out.

LJ has become a nearly unusable morass of failed entry and comment postings, delayed or nonexistent comment notifications and for some people a disgusting display of advertising and spam. The latter is not always apparent to LJ users with paid accounts, but the basic stuff is a mess, with all users being subject to all kinds of scripts and mechanisms designed to make money and track user movements and habits. The failure of the various scripts end up blocking the actual content, and people stumbling upon our journals from outside are often forced to watch an ad or video before they can even get to actual entries. I did not originally sign up to be subjected to such bullshit, and I've had enough. What little meaningful contact I do have here is interrupted by what amounts to the Russian Mafia. I'm done with it.

LJ has become increasingly unstable, unresponsive and just plain unusable lately. I guess my theory of LJ becoming less and less relevant in my use going hand-in-hand with SUP Fabrik (the Russian LJ owners now) trying to monetize the thing like another Facebook is true. Usually, site issues like this have resulted in some sort of compensation to the users of a tangible nature. Things like extra userpics, extra paid time, etc. Do they throw us a bone this time? No, they throw us a virtual puppy.



Now, if this critter did not look so much like Kodi, I'd be completely incensed. As it stands now, in Soviet Russia, Livejournal Use YOU!

Jeff finally got his Wii Balance Board/Wii Fit today. The thing is a hoot. The exercises are simple, yet pretty effective, and the balance-oriented games a challenge. I can see us using this quite a bit in the future.

He bought the item from an eBay seller that had high marks. Well, her marks are going to take a dive after he's done with her. She misrepresented the shipping method, changed her story numerous times and sent the thing out much later than she originally said she would, using USPS standard shipping rather than the second-day UPS service she said would be used. This is yet another example of someone making up in shipping costs a lower-than-usual sale, of course. But far too much was changed after the sale, and sending the thing out a couple weeks after the sale rather than immediately does no good either. Anyway, we got the new toy, and some eBay seller is gonna take a hit in their rating.

I tried to post this a while ago, but LJ was completely inaccessible to me for at least an hour's time. I spent the evening putting in LAN segments and taking a nap. I could not help but think of the Great LJ Evaporation rumor. But, it's still here, imagine that. I'd miss you guys 'n' gals if the service were to go. I would not even care too much about losing a 'permanent' account because, in the long run, it's been worth it for me, and the friendships gained, stories told and read, the laughs and tears, it's all priceless.

Not sure about some of you, but my LJ experience has been a mess lately. I am aware of the issues they've been having with DDoS attacks and whatnot. I have not been getting comment notifications, some posts and comments are blank in other's entries, and reading and posting has been iffy for a while now. If you've posted a reply and was expecting a return, I probably didnt get it, and I have to try and backtrack through my comments and do it 'manually'.

I guess this made my decision as to getting a permanent account. I dont want a permanent headache.

For those Livejournal peeps who have paid accounts, head over here to nab an extra week of paid service due to the snafus last week that made the site flaky or downright unusable.

I am currently using the uber PC with RAM I stole borrowed from my work PC. So far, so good, and it means I simply need to get replacement RAM from Corsair. In the meantime, my work PC will plod along minus a gig of RAM. Just to be safe, though, I backed up files I have accumulated in the short month or so this machine has been running. Incredibly enough, it was over 7.5 gig of files. The two terabytes I have in each of the recently built PCs is evidently a requirement.

Are you being annoyed by someone on the internet? By someone not using their real name to identify themselves? Take solace in the knowledge that the person is now committing a federal crime, thanks to actions of Sen. Arlen Specter (R. PA) and others, and signed into law this past Thursday. I am surprised this has not been more widely reported on. This law has serious consequences for free speech and privacy on the internet, but does that surprise anyone given the totalitarian regime controlling this country now? Have a read, and spread the word. You might want to mirror the text too. Just, you know, in case, you know...

Returning to work today I find that the articles I had in a rough draft form were not on the PC. My fault, saving something else and overwriting the previous using the same file name. That's what I get for mixing work and op-ed pieces I suppose. Kinda put me out of mind and mood to start from scratch. It was a crazy day anyhow, so I would not have gotten much done. Too late to get much done at the moment either, so it will have to wait. Some recent events in the news regarding the same things I have been writing about as well. It's beginning to catch the ears of the general populace, rather than those techie sorts like me.

More blarg @ LJ for random 'database unavailable' and technical problem errors lately. The F5 key is your friend, especially if you wrote out a long post and it looks in danger of being eaten alive when you hit "Update Journal" and you get hit with an error page and going back nets you a blank screen (usually not a problem in Firefox). On the error page, hit F6, OK the 'POSTDATA' dialog and you should be fine.

Speaking of Firefox, I've been having issues with it ever since a Microsoft automatic update and moving to v.1.5. Some of my favorite extensions are broken, most noteably Adblock, even though it's compatible with the newer version. Also, FF will begin slowing down after extended use and eventually crashing. Not making me a very happy camper.

Speaking of blargh, why is it that I can do a couple thousand bux worth of business with a company (Newegg) without issues, and my last order gets put on hold due to billing/shipping address issues? And it did not make me any happier to find this out in an email sent a half hour before their closing time, and my call back to them with 20 minutes to spare nets me a bubbly 'we are closed now' automated message? Jumpin' Jesus on a rocket-powered pogo stick. I am half tempted to cancel the order if I get any sort of 'tude from their staff.

It looks like someone has a case of the Mundays.