indiboi.com

Sometimes someone’s life can be such the trainwreck that it becomes impossible to remain a part of it any longer. I ended last month by dissolving my relationship with Justin. We were, in reality, two people so in polar opposition that we eventually became painfully incompatible.

A new relationship, born from eight hour phone conversations while he was in New York, has been developing over the course of this month. I really don’t know what will happen at the end of next month when he returns to the metropolis, but I do think that we’ll be back and forth enough so as to allow continued growth.

I’ve been gardening, as per usual, with the exception of lately. The last couple of weeks have been very demanding on my time, learning how to properly manage having a full life along with all the other things I’d grown used to doing with my rather solitary existence in the usual. The last couple of weeks have also brought weather so horrible both in heat, drought, and monsoon, as to do a good job at destroying the garden I’ve been developing.

The majority of the dahlias succumb to tubor rot after the five inches of rain that had fallen over the course of one weekend. Overwhelmed with water, they were then unable to actually take enough up into the plants to survive the scorching heat that soon followed. I started with twelve in that area of the garden and I’m now down to four, I’m very unhappy about it… disappointed, depressed, annoyed.

The roses seem to be doing well, they — unlike most all other plants — seemed to fare well throughout the rapidly changing weather conditions. All of the roses have massive new growth and buds, it looks as though next month will be a lovely show… hopefully. Of the newer plants, I lost two of the three campanula, the one remaining is now blooming. It’s pretty, but I suppose that isn’t a tremendous loss… considering all other new plants have survived and if not blooming, they are doing alright.

I noticed, for the first time within my lifetime, a hummingbird in my garden. I saw it originally Saturday afternoon, and then again yesterday evening while it was poking into my red Lobelia. It’s rather thrilling to see such a little bird dart around.

A majority of the herbs did not survive the abusive weather, every oregano and sage is burnt to a crisp after drowning previously. I have some minor hope for them still, but the catnip was beyond help, so it met with the compost bin, joining the dahlias.

The weeds are diligently attempting to take over. When I finally finish regular tasks outside I barely have the energy to withstand the temperatures indexing over 100° to pull the weeds that are encroaching on everything.

The tomatoes are doing well; I have already too many cherry tomatoes. It appears that I’ll finally have some roma tomatoes worth considering even taking inside; previously they’ve been befelled with blossom end rot, making them a bit too disgusting to bother with. The yellow pear tomatoes are very interesting, albeit unusually smaller than I expected, they do taste good though. I’m not sure about the peppers at this point. I have harvested four, and perhaps it’s still a bit early, but they aren’t being as prolific as I had hoped. I did plant considerably more than last year, but I need to make mental and perhaps even paper note to plant many, many more plants for next year. This will also mean creating a new planting area for them.

Most of my work stresses seem to finally be behind me. I’ve not had any instances of server instability, crashing, or otherwise poor performance since banning Movable Type’s commenting system. I was receiving harrassing emails from various individuals regarding that policy change, but thankfully that has ebbed to a stop at this point.

I finally made the upgrade to digital cable with a DVR, it also has high definition channels, but of course with a standard definition television, those channels are of course in SD. This makes me want to upgrade my tv; for a paltry $1200. Right, I’ll get on that immediately. The DVR is nice, I don’t see any majorly glaring problems with it, btw it’s the Motorola DCT-6412. Analog tv, channels below 100, look more shitty than ever. I’ve read that this is because the tuners in the box are of poor quality; but I’m much more likely to believe that it is due to analog/digital/analog conversion: signal comes in analog, is digitized due to DVR buffering, and then converted to analog again for display. The digital channels, and particularly those also coming in as HD (again, viewed as SD of course), do look superb and do not suffer that problem.

I believe Comcast has the billing/services terribly messed up, but I’m afraid to call them and try to fix it, for fear it becomes even more askew. I didn’t sign up under any special promotion, simply because I wasn’t aware of any. The first night the box wouldn’t show any digital channels, except HBO and SHO. The next night it had all the digital channels and SHO, but no HBO. Now it has basically what it should have, but now SHO OnDemand doesn’t work. I received a postcard in the mail the morning after setting up the new STB indicating a promotional rate of $30 for six months, and that would include SHO. I was beginning to make the assumption that I received that promo, but with SHO OnDemand no longer working, something is wrong. Either they’re still giving me SHO when I’m not supposed to have it, or they messed up the OnDemand part. I don’t think I would care to have SHO after the next two weeks. Once QAF is over, I don’t see much need to pay that extra $15 or so dollars. If it would magically disappear in the manner which it magically appeared, I’ll have to call and have it readded, and complain about not getting the promo… that I of course “assumed” I’d be getting… or some other complain-a-thon related antic.

I’m really at the pinnacle of three-week domesticity with the boyfriend. We go grocery shopping, using a cart, have gone to Ikea, Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, & Williams Sonoma… along with planning and execution of dinner parties. Two with just three people, which really isn’t so much a dinner party, but then also this past weekend we had a party of five. I’m enjoying this new little life, even if it does have an end coming next month. I have to keep thinking that we’re cramming in so much ‘life’ together because we have a limited period of time to be able to see each other whenever we’d like, without having to board a train first. It’s been a bit difficult for me to adjust to having something so domestic and intimate happen so quickly. He’s the closest to ideal that I think is actually possible… although an hour long bitchfest over a table decoration isn’t something I have any desire to repeat within my lifetime.

The dinner party Saturday was lovely though; the food was good, it was nice to have friends together, and the boyfriend did an absolutely lovely job of preparing the gazebo for dinner. It was a view out of a magazine, or in this case… it was very reminiscent of this ‘celebrate summer’ image on the Ikea website (in feel, not that everything was from there… of course).

I suffered the fifth Maxtor harddrive failure within the last year the other evening. I came into the office and heard a clicking sound, the kind you just know means something terrible has occured with the hardware. I will never again buy a Maxtor product. This one failed with its warranty expiring in June 2005, yes… last month; as if it were designed to do so. Fortunately, I suppose, this one contained mostly porn, so the loss is not tragic. Regardless, that particular failure rate is astonishing, it’s also across multiple different computers, so that cannot be immediately blamed. I believe that I’m going to begin a personal policy of replacing drives immediately prior to their warranty expiration. Instead of attempting to get their entire useful life, they’ll be trashed, and that warranty expiration will mean “time to replace” instead.

I had a horrifying moment this morning when I decided to actually calculate my net income. I’ve been very… complacent when it came to knowing how much money I actually make. I knew that I had enough to basically do whatever I wanted to do… except that started to slowly change over the past couple of months, when whatever I wanted to do also included doing things with other people again. This horrifying moment came after the first mortifying moment of realizing I had a mere $2.99 in my checking account (that’s not my only money-related account, so relief breathing can begin). My income has dropped significantly since the summer of 2002, when life was grand and I was preparing for that life with Davey. I’m still mostly in a “give-up” mode when it comes to work… it’s either just okay, or it drives me crazy. The glory days of my company, as sad as it is to say, I do believe are all in the past. This financial realization has only reinforced my desire to say that I simply don’t make enough to put up with the bullshit that I have to put up with. I think that things are slowly improving, but I think slow will be the case for a very long time, if not forever… forever being until I finally decide to get rid of the company and try something else for a while. I’m really missing the steady and plan-around-able income that a normal job would give, and even more so I definitely miss the health insurance benefits. I’d also be making, if I could manage to deal with it, a significantly higher income; the downside is that my freetime would also dwindle to nothingness. Right now I still think that my income is okay, and while it is practically minimum wage (if I had to actually work 40 hours per week) the free time is well worth the lack of higher income. I also do not have a car payment, rent, house payment (it’s paid for), or any of the other monthly bills that a higher income would be utterly required for.

I’m forced to reconcile myself to actually creating a budget, to not spending money as though it were water, but to really focus on what I want to use my money for. This month was abnormal though, from a fiscal standpoint. I went to Leesburg, Ikea twice, had three semi-expensive dinner parties, ate out multiple times, went to the dentist, and it just happened to be my month of buying things like big bottles of excedrin , lactaid, razor blades, and all that other insanity. I suppose having money left at all, even if a meager three dollars, is a miracle.

My health lately has been questionable. I’ve been under a dire amount of stress with the company, I haven’t had a weekend without the baby (my brother’s baby that is) for as long as I can remember… and I still think that my boyfriend’s mother is going to kill me. I’m sure this is translating into why I’m having such horrible tension headaches… it’s as though I need to wait until the excedrin kicks in before I can even move from my bedroom in the morning, err, afternoon. If it isn’t a headache killing my mood, it’s how sick I’ve felt after eating lately. I’m almost considering going back on a nicely anorexic diet of only water and cigarettes, since food makes me ill.

That’s July.

I’ve banned Movable Type’s commenting system from being used on Positive Fusion. I hope this is my last night and morning of practically zero sleep thanks to hundreds upon hundreds of mt-comments.cgi threads sucking cpu until the load average is at over 90. I hate to do it, but the majority of hosted sites do not use MT, and by allowing other sites to continue using its horrendous cpu destroying comment system, well… they’re all getting hit by these outages. It’s so very telling how the load average almost immediately dropped from 90 to 2 upon instructing Apache to deny requests to mt-comments.cgi. Positive Fusion isn’t the first webhost to prohibit Movable Type and it certainly will not be the last.

Wednesday morning I accidentally left my phone/pager in the office. I figured that things have been going fine and didn’t worry too much about it. Early that morning I had a pounding on the bedroom door… server went haywire.

It was because of one person’s installation of Movable Type.

It was that same person’s installation of Movable Type that was causing so many problems before. Somehow they fixed it, but only temporarily it seems.

I didn’t forget my phone/pager the next morning, and sure enough around the exact same time of the butt crack of morning it went off, and wouldn’t you know it? It was that same website being cunty for the 101st freakin’ time.

Somehow, by the grace of the gods of internet, there wasn’t some major catastrophe to pull me out of my lovely slumber Friday morning. I almost pissed myself that things didn’t go nutty while I was getting much, much needed sleep.

I finally get around to being almost asleep this morning and ‘ding-dong’ and it was a page from the monitoring service. It was that muther-fucking Movable Type website AGAIN. I haul my weary ass up to the office, I think I get it solved and head back to bed. I’m finally almost comfortable again and then… ‘ding-dong’ …yet again.

Positive Fusion is absolutely excellent hosting. Problems are not at all common, and when they are it’s almost always the fault of someone’s perhaps poorly written or otherwise malfunctioning Perl script – it gets fixed and all is well with the world again.

Movable Type might be fine and good on its own, I don’t personally believe that, but the problem is exponentially compounded by the ability to insert plugins/modules/hacks/etc not always written by the best of the best Perl scripters. It, like so many other things, can quickly turn into a disaster when ignorance and technology blend together.

It’s all the more frustrating when the webhost is blamed for the user’s fuckup. Don’t say that Positive Fusion abhors PHP or can’t process PHP when you’re too incapable of writing it or setting it up properly. Positive Fusion has long been advocating the use of PHP alternatives to Perl applications. The PF website has some rather interesting, perhaps even sophisticated, PHP programming… the entire thing would cease to function if we ‘hated PHP with a passion’ as accused. Holy shit, this indiboi.com is entirely driven by PHP! …and it’s hosted by Positive Fusion! Oh Martha, bring me the smelling salts, I’m getting the vapors!

I don’t want to terminate accounts, it’s rather against my own best interests financially speaking. Of course, when that one account doesn’t truly net all that much income-wise is then continually threatening every other account because it is running software so devastatingly bad as to overwhelm the entire server, I have to put an end to it.

It doesn’t help that the company is being berated on the very same website causing repeated problems for every single other website hosted!

Sunday morning on a casual stroll through the garden we discovered this little creature, kindly posing for a photograph.

On the Saturday afternoon previous we took a spur of the moment jaunt down to College Park to visit the great Swedish emporium of inexpensive home-related goods, and of course, the sole purpose of that trip was to buy this gnome. Isn’t he cute? As usual I somehow managed to spend a ridiculous bit of cash at the Ikea, they really do suck one in with the inexpensiveness, until you’ve spent a fortune.

Mr. Lincoln also gave us a perfectly formed bloom, thanks to the copious rain lately and the cooler weather.

The dahlias are beginning to bloom. I’m very much liking the ‘Mystery Day’ I bought rather on a whim, it’s actually turning out to be quite grande. The ‘Nuit de Ete’ is also very nice, so dark of a red that it appears black under most lighting. I haven’t been able to get that many great photos yet, so I’ll refrain from posting them here, but you can also take a look at garden.indiboi’s Dahlia album to see them all. :)

I’ve finally completed the pathway to the rose garden too. I’m very happy with the results of this spring’s labor.

I finally had to replace my little blue Colibri lighter. It was a very sad day last Friday when it finally ceased to function. I nearly destroyed it back in February when I was trying to burn down the lounge with candles for Valentine’s Day, but managed to keep it working for several months after that. I’ve replaced it with another Colibri, this one is black with chrome at the top and bottom. I’m not totally in love with it, but it certainly works well and I like it enough.

I’ve been much more interested in cooking again lately, as a result of someone demanding I cook; so I did — Thursday and Friday. Thursday’s dinner was a sauteed shrimp with tortellini and red sauce; Friday was again shrimp, but this time marinated with a soy, brown sugar, and hot pepper concoction and then sauteed. I then reduced the marinade to a sauce, and set the shrimp over a bed of coconut & lime jasmine rice; sided by basil mango salsa. It was truly delicious. Both evenings were finished off with a fruit tart, hehe, the first being peach and blackberry, the second being peach and blueberry.

The first evening’s little ‘dinner party’ was somewhat rained out. It began to sprinkle very soon after sitting down for the first course, the weather rapidly turned into a downright assult of rain… the umbrella just couldn’t handle it. Dinner then proceeded in the lounge for the main course, all of us sitting around the coffee table, with dessert held standing in the kitchen, lol.

Thankfully dinner Friday evening worked out a bit better in regards to the weather; we weren’t sent running into the house due to the rain. On the deck, surrounded by the trees and birds singing, it was wonderful.