indiboi.com

I barely use windows, preferring Linux & Mac of course. I “upgrade” to Windows XP SP2 this morning when it became available, because you know, it’s supposed to be oh so much better…. and considering how fucking awful windows is in general, well….

I use Windows for a couple of things, mostly playing games and occasionally burning DVDs. I realized I had about 20GB of DVD ISOs unburned and found a mostly full box of DVD+Rs while cleaning up the office… making for the perfect chance to reclaim all that disk space.

Well, I’m sitting here with FIVE dvd coasters! I have never made a coaster with the particular burning app I used first… THREE coasters from that. I started thinking that perhaps the ISOs had become corrupted, it is possible, though unlikely, and proven impossible because I have MD5SUMs of the ISOS and they match. The media ought to be fine because four other DVDs were successful from that box previously. Trying another DVD app I made another TWO coasters, to come up with the total of five.

The DVD burning apps blame the media, while that is possible, it is highly unlikely because of the fact five DVDs failed… they’re not from a spindle, they’re individually packed name-brand DVD+Rs and again, four worked just fine previously.

My only conclusion is that SP2 fuxered my DVDRW drive or somehow prevents completion of the burning process, yippie, argh! Bastards! I’m so not happy about this.

I found a vague reference to something called DEP that could cause this, but from my understanding whenever SP2 decides to intervene and fuck up the way your app works it’s supposed to tell you about it. Regardless I’ve added my DVD burning apps to the exception list — of course I’m totally out of very expensive blank DVDs to see if this works anyway. I’m not particularly fond of the idea of wasting another disc just to see.

So as to not make a big deal of out it, which would probably happen when the woman asks if Patrick is still coming tonight.. as she’s been asking most of the week, I rather offhandedly tell her that Patrick and I have broken up this morning. She asks why, so I rather succinctly say that it is because I’m sick of him. She then immediately asks if Matthew is coming to dinner tonight. I say “yeah, he probably could, but he’s vegetarian.” “Oh, so he wouldn’t like ham, well, I can make a salad,” she says with amusement. She then adds in that certain motherly tone, “Well, at least he isn’t a million miles away.” “Yeah, but the problem is that I’m not interested in dating him,” I say to discourage further discussion… and she adds a disappointed “Oh… Well, you’ll need to find someone else then.”

Strangely supportive, the woman has been seemingly just as disgruntled about Patrick not coming down here to see me as I have been. In fact, I doubt Patrick would have even made the plans to come here today if it weren’t for her ‘demanding’ he come to visit. She then asks, as I’m walking away, “So you’re not going to make up this time?” “No, I don’t think I even want to talk to him anymore,” I reply discovering with each passing moment how phenomenally pissed off I am. That feeling will fade, though I’m not sure which new feeling will replace it.

“Oh, and you can drop the insurance on my car,” I tell her before heading to bed, finally. The only person I intend on seeing lives here in town, it’s not much difference if he drives or I do, really, no reason to bother fixing it, no reason to keep paying insurance for it, especially since it can’t take me the greater distances required to see the other people I want to spend time with.

It was the last straw, as the saying goes, when I randomly log onto chat and see that in Patrick’s profile. What was supposed to be a Saturday where he woke up and came down to visit me was downgraded to ‘I have a lot to do and I’ll probably be pooped.’ I wanted to go out, to go to DC, not be back until daylight most likely. I wanted him to be here for family dinner, I wanted him to meet the new baby…. to have a real day together. After talking to him at nine I quickly lost interest in him being here… I didn’t want the usual evening of him being tired, the kind of evening where I feel like I’m stealing time out of his schedule. I especially didn’t want him complaining about how I kept him up too late. I know it’s supposed to be funny, but it just isn’t anymore. It makes me not want to see him, or if I do, to not want to do anything that involves either of us staying up…. it usually doesn’t work out that way.

He went out again without inviting me. He knows that I, even without my own car, can easily venture up there in the evenings. We were going to be seeing each other anyway…. Saturday, we saw each other Thursday night, so Friday wouldn’t really be that big of a deal… but the fact is, it was a chance for us to see each other that wasn’t taken advantage of when it could have been. You see this happened previously, and I was a little pissed about it. I really did want to go out, he called and said he was going to go hang with Andrew…. nothing about how they were going out to a club.

He’s not been putting any effort into our relationship for the last several weeks. I thought, with good reason, that our relationship would improve with Jon being out of the picture. I thought that perhaps my feelings for Jon, whatever they may be, were taking attention away from Patrick… I think in reality that spending time with Jon helped me deal with Patrick… Jon provided me with a certain closeness that I don’t usually feel otherwise. I miss my time with Jon because of that… of course I reckon he’d still be the wanker that prompted me to stop spending time with him, so that idea is moot.

It seems that all of July Patrick had been in this …funk… of sorts. I usually back away when I’m feeling people let go… I’m not really much for holding onto something when the other person doesn’t seem interested. That’s what I did a few months ago around the time when we originaly broke up, where he was ‘testing’ me to see what I would do if he backed off. It seemed that this time it would be better to just put more effort in…. So I end up holding onto something that clearly is no longer working, I’m waiting for him to end it throughout every time we’re together. I’m waiting for something to push me far enough to actually do it myself.

I’ve noticed myself growing increasingly unhappy throughout this period too, I find that the only thing I want to write in my journal is about our failing relationship, but not wanting to actually admit that, I don’t write…. as is clearly obvious. I sink into myself, avoiding people by not being online, and I play The Sims and SimCity with great regularity as a method to withdrawl from my life even more.

Is being with someone, even if it isn’t in the way one wants, better than being alone? I’ve tried it before, but I deserve better. If I’m going to be with someone I want them to want to be with me. I tell Sam, I want a boyfriend, but I want a boyfriend that acts like one. I’ve found myself home alone on too many Friday and Saturday nights… I come to say to myself “Damnit, I do have a boyfriend, I should be out doing something with him!” Of course, he’s NOT home alone on Friday and Saturday nights… he’s out with other people. What good is a relationship like that? …A relationship where it’s pretty damned clear the other party doesn’t want it anymore? Being alone is better.

Is it better to do something with someone, even if it’s not what you’d want to be doing, than to be alone? I go up, nearly every Thursday, to Karaoke. I hate going to Karaoke, but it gives me at least one way to spend time with Patrick. It’s practically infuriating to find out sometime on Saturday or Sunday that he’d gone out and done something that I consider ‘better’ with somebody else the night before and didn’t bother with seeing if I’d want to go. Maybe I should be “twenty questions” when he says he’s doing ’something’ with someone… maybe I should be like “oh, are you going to… I want to go!” …That isn’t my style. My style is to say “I’m going to… I want you/Would you like, to come along?” That’s what I expect of my boyfriend. I’ve not been getting that. It’s the same when we’re out… If out somewhere and I want to go talk to someone, I will rarely ever just walk away from whomever I’ve come with. I will, instead, grab their hand or arm, and gesture for them to come with me in some way. Patrick never does that, he has a tendency to just walk off leaving me to wonder if I’m supposed to ‘tag along’ (which is what it feels like if I follow him) or just stay there… usually standing around a bunch of strangers and feeling in the way. Being alone is better.

Transportation Equity, as Sam puts it, is severly lacking. Patrick has been to see me twice at most since he bought the Mini, the night we got back together and the day we went to Leesburg. It has been months since he bought the Mini, btw. Granted, it is more convenient for me to just go see him, we get more time together if it’s a day he works… which is everyday anymore. He’s working twelve hour days on a regular basis, it really doesn’t leave much room for people… Even one real day together seems like too much to ask for.

I feel like a fuck buddy, to put it bluntly, a friend with benefits. I don’t feel treated as though I’m his boyfriend. I’ve noticed that he never introduces me as his boyfriend… now, most of these people probably already know that this Indi guy is his boyfriend, but when thinking about it, in a social situation, I think I’d add the title… I know it’d make me feel better if he did. I can’t really draw a comparision because of the whopping three non-family people I’ve introduced him to, he’s heard of them considerably before they actually met, the relationship status was abundantly clear already. Actually, it took a good bit of “flaw pointing” to get him to introduce me at all! For the longest time I felt completely like his tag-along…

He just doesn’t like me enough to make it worth my time, I’ve cried everytime I’ve left his house the last couple of weeks. I go up there every time trying to figure out how and if I’m going to break up with him. He came razor-close to having it happen Thursday, but for some reason I just didn’t do it. I’ve been waiting for him to finally talk to me about what he wanted to talk to me about. He’d said back before we went to that party about how we needed to talk about things… we never did that weekend, and we didn’t until this morning.

It’s strange, in a way, how when we first met I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get more involved because I liked him as a friend. When he broke up with me, at my, err, persuasion, a few days later his attitude was mostly that he didn’t want anything at all to do with me. Obviously that changed as we’ve been together for several months afterward. …So he wants us to be friends, and for once it doesn’t feel like the cliche that happens all the time, but I’m just not sure. He says that he still wants to see me, etc, and I think I’m okay with that… but on the other hand, I’m considerably less motivated to drive an hour to see someone I’m just friends with, to go do something that I’d only go to so that I could see him in the first place. Essentially, if he wants a friendship of any kind he’s going to need to put a hell of a lot more effort into it, and since he’s been incapable of putting any effort into a relationship that has clearly more benefits… Yeah, right, we can be friends. I just can’t see myself caring… I adore Matthew as my friend, he lives in the same damn town I do even, but I see him maybe once a week, but usually more like every two weeks. Apart from the clear differences in those two relationships, being with Matthew is more fulfilling on the boyfriend level…. even though nothing we do is anywhere near it, we just go out and actually do things… dinner together, drinks, out to a club. It’s the kind of stuff I want to do with my boyfriend, but don’t quite manage to be able to. I think, realistically, if it weren’t for Matthew filling the gap, I don’t think I could have tolerated being with Patrick for this long. It just would have come too close to the “what is the fucking point?” phase earlier.

Ultimately I’m just sick of the way he’s been treating me. I want to be with him, but I can’t be with him like this. He wants to be with me, but also doesn’t want to be with me or anyone. That just doesn’t work. I’ve done all I can, it’s a failure within him that has caused our relationship to disintegrate. Since he’s incapable of making that decision, I made it for us this morning. I won’t allow us to be with each other just to be with someone. It’s an amicable breakup, but to me, he’s fucked up in a major way, I’m really done with it this time, as they say. To slightly contradict, maybe eventually when he gets it together a bit more I’d consider it, but it doesn’t seem like that’ll happen for at least a year.

Right, so… again, still alive.

I totally forgot to mention that back in June (I guess) I made jelly, preserves, and marmalade, heh… Mint, Kiwi, and Orange (shock) respectively. I used pineapple mint for the jelly which basically causes it to taste like pineapple much more than mint, it’s good though. The kiwi preserves ended up being painfully sweet, ehhh… and the orange marmalade is absolutely wonderful. The downside is that orange marmalade requires an insane amount of work to actually make. …scraping all the white crap from the inside of the peels of several oranges and lemons takes forever.

My car didn’t pass inspection, so I’ve been relatively immobile lately. I’m going to get it fixed, but I need to wait until I get paid which won’t be for a little while yet. This has severely limited my ability to travel to Harrisburg, or more realistically severely limited the amount of time I can spend up there, since I need to have the ‘family’ car back by 7AM during the week. It kind of works out, sort of, because Patrick is working considerable overtime anyway, so I’d not likely go see him, much to my disappointment.

Hosting clients seem to be dropping like flies lately. It’s probably not as bad as I perceive it to be, but I’ve lost a good number without really balancing it out. I guess it’s par for the course, since I don’t usually have cancellations — mine just come in waves for no apparent reason. As an aside to the whole work thing, ever since moving to the new server there hasn’t been a second of downtime that hasn’t been scheduled for (Apache upgrades/network upgrades).

I have been spending a decent amount of time actually working lately. Most of it has been billing related work, there’s been a lot of changes to accounts, etc, and billing seems to have been a little messed up by clients not creating their new payment plans as they should, oh how I hate that. Also though, there’s been a lot of bullshit with my old server provider: they simply wouldn’t cancel the server, it took three separate requests and now they want me to pay for the entire month after I cancelled it originally. Fuck that… their network quality had been so poor I ought to be demanding they pay me! I’ll never pay for service that I didn’t want provided anyway.

Additionally, I had a client get his money back from the credit card processor simply by claiming he didn’t know what the charge was for… basically fraud. This was a most infuriating situation, to the point I’m still considering changing credit card processors, prohibiting orders with AOL email addresses, and preventing the use of AMEX cards for payment. I’m just sick of that level of bullshit, there’s absolutely zero merchant protection: a customer can claim they never signed up, etc, and just automatically get their money back without regard to the truth of the matter. It’d be one thing if just one month of service was refunded, but the processor stole 6 months of service fees totalling about $100. You want to know what is hilarious about this? I bet you do… As per standard procedure when someone is past due, which by default is what happened here… going six months past due instantly, the website was suspended and terminated. In a couple of days I receive a message from the credit card processor indicating that the customer called them back and appologized, the customer realized finally what that $100 over the last six months had been for. I ended up being able to keep the money that was rightfully mine and turned the customer’s website back on. Can you explain to me how someone can’t remember the name of a company they contract with for services? I know the name of every single company that I pay any amount of money to on a regular basis and what that payment is for.

My bank seems to have changed their online banking for the worse lately too. It used to be that any money transfer done online would take effect immediately as a memo post. I could then immediately use the money without having to wait several days for the actual transaction to post to the account. It seems as though the transactions no longer memo post, but show as “transaction in progress” instead. Now, this would seem to mean the same thing, just the terminology being more precise. It isn’t. My rather hefty server payment was declined because of this “transaction in progress” much to my horror.

I’m now wearing size 34 pants. With the size 34 pants I still need a belt. The pants I bought just a couple of months ago, size 36, fall completely off within moments of putting them on. This is a considerable problem because, even though I knew better, I went out to walmart without wearing a belt. My pants weren’t falling off, they seemed to have done their re-shrink deal after being laundered, etc. By the time I got to the store I ended up having to walk around holding my pants up as to not create a ’scene’ by them falling off, lol. I’m down to size large for shirts, instead of extra large, but of course due to my neck being 17.5 dress shirts still fit all wonky. I don’t remember my waist ever being a 34… I think I went from “children” sized clothes right to 36… hitting 38 and staying there toward the end of highschool. I hate to admit it, but I actually even owned a pair of size 40 pants, now granted I know that was a purchasing accident… they must have been mislabeled. Regardless though, I can say that I dropped from a 40 to a 34 in six months because of that, lol. The whole weight-loss situation is both a blessing and a curse… I’m scared to try on my leather pants that I spent quite an insane quantity of green on… they’re painfully too big I’m sure.

I’m up to my eyeballs in tomatoes from the three plants I have in the garden. The irony is that I don’t even like the damn things! I brought in practically half a bushel of them yesterday morning, oy! I finally made the tomato sauce from scratch that I’d been going on and on about to everybody all summer! Preparing Roma tomatoes for making sauce is an insane amount of work, btw, one needs to pierce the skin, blanch the tomatoes, peel the tomatoes, slice the tomatoes, scoop out the seeds of the tomatoes, then dice the damned tomatoes! It was extremely good though, lol. I did cheat a little by adding storebought garlic and onion… but the tomatoes, herbs, and peppers were all grown by me. :-) Note to self: wear rubber gloves of some kind when preparing all of this — my fingers smelled like garlic for a week!

I needed a hair cut, it was getting out of control. I could have done the unusual and actually went somewhere and overpaid for someone spending 10 minutes with scissors on me (I’ve paid for a haircut THREE times since August of 2002) or done my usual haircut on myself… I’m rather good at it, btw, because I do actually care about my appearance, otherwise I wouldn’t cut my own hair. Remember a while back when I’d done the blue with black tips? I then dyed it all black to get rid of it? Well, I still had a little bit of that black left floating above a sea of my painfully ordinary blah brown hair… A proper haircut would have still left some black and I thought that was just dumb. It also helped that I’d just watched this movie with a guy having a very short hair cut… he was hot, but anyway. I pretty much shaved my head, just for the hell of it, it’s just hair, it grows back. The woman sees my haircut and gives it, literally, two thumbs up. Matthew comes by and gives his fashion-nazi approval, all good. I go visit Patrick and he goes apoplectic. He’s still bitching about my hair, lol. Actually, he’s relented slightly, but it’s pretty amusing with how much he obviously hates my hair cut. Of course, we seemed to have had the same idea, at least to do drastic changes to our hair… When I arrived at his place he’d gone back to red fauxhawk. I adored the sort of shaggy, curly, moppy looking hair he had, made him look all cuddly or something. I really like his aggressive/edgy fauxhawk look too though, it’s more of who he is in my mind anyway.

I also have a new cellphone. My whatever it is piece of shit Nokia was getting on my nerves with high regularity. It has this tendency to not ring whenever I’m in my bedroom causing me to miss considered important phone calls from Patrick & Matthew. I started looking for a replacement only to decide it was just too much money… I wasn’t going to buy a new phone unless it met two very important requirements: 1) It must have bluetooth and 2) it must have a camera. The camera part is slightly less important, but these days most bluetooth phones have a camera anyway. I settled on the V600 from Motorola, but again, $300 for a phone, ick. Lastnight I randomly mention something to my brother David about his ‘old’ Samsung X105… I totally forgot that he ever had a T-Mobile phone, and didn’t even consider the idea that he’d still have it anyway. Turns out that he did still have it, and he gave it to me. With a quick swap of the SIM card I now have a Samsung X105, schweet! I told Patrick that I’ll be getting my gay card points back that I lost by having that shitty Nokia. Score for getting a new and better phone for free.

The wireless network here was also expanded by the addition of another wireless router/WAP. Getting the two WAPs to bridge/span together was a bit of a task, my iBook doesn’t want to switch away from the Airport even if the signal from the other WAP is considerably stronger. I also started having all sorts of strange speed issues when connected to the Airport. I finally gathered that the channels of the two devices were too close together. After spacing them the entire channel spectrum apart speed returned to normal. Hopefully that solution will be the permanent one.

Alright, that’s enough for now… as this turned into an hour long entry instead of being a quick point rundown like I originally intended, whoops.