I got funny email from Smitty today. He contends that Doug and I were making out before AND after the Deadshow in question. He (Smitty) sat in the front seat of Doug's car to give us privacy, as we made out in front of the rest of the world in the hatchback (so much for privacy)... and then he puked all over the steering wheel/column and in the footwell of the car. Super! So much for being mister Nice Guy and giving us some space... I don't think the mighty Chevy Manza was ever the same after it's baptism of beer. So indeed, Smitty, I stand corrected.
Neil is one of the songwriters who wrote the soundtrack of my early days. I love his weird voice, his interesting phrasing... songs like "Helpless," "Comes A Time," "Old Man," "Cripple Creek Ferry." I even liked his Trans album, and I am one of three people in the USA who bought a copy of "Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks" when he did the rockabilly thing. I loved his scathing "This Note's for You," song, which actually won best video of the year when it came out, even though MTV refused to play it due to the fact that he slams every possible corporate sponsor out there. I love how he is now the Godfather of Grunge, according to most, and how what was hot then got hot again. I loved his appearance on the NYC Hollywood fundraiser thing, and he sang a stirring version of "Imagine..." like no other I'd ever heard. I love how he plays harmonica. I love Neil Young.
I need to go buy a few of the old albums on CD. I have them on vinyl, as if I'll ever actually play them again, but seeing as Napster is dead and gone I'll actually have to go invest some scratch in the tunes I like. Neil is butt-ugly though... he never was a handsome man, but handsome is as handsome does, and he has led a wonderful life, full of insightfulness and adventure. Now that he's older he makes me think of my dad. Scary.
Overall it sucked ass.
It lacked even the most simple vision that Neil put into his one song performed a scant week and a half ago. They had an orchestra. Horns. It was insane!!! Why an orchestra to back up the singers? Because it's more like Broadway, baby!! And that's what New York is all about, right, baby? Lame.
Only a couple "legitimate" top-billing musicians there were like Dave Matthews, Lou Reed and STP. No one who was really a true "contemporary" of Lennon, Lou Reed and Billy Preston in exception realy... No former Beatles were there. There were a bunch of second-tier musicians who have yet to shine in the music world, like Rufus Wainwright who performed with Sean Lennon.
Julian Lennon wasn't there... stupid if you ask me.
My friend Scott in Chicago pointed out the wacky fact that Yolanda Adams is a gospel singer, and she got to sing "Imagine." It's a nice song, but it is completely nihilistic. Scott says 'I loved hearing this gospel singer belt out "Imagine there's no religion...'"
Yeah. Jesus is gonna be pissed at her now! She's lost her Gospel Street Cred with me!
I really wasn't impressed with the entire program's presentation. In fact, disliked it completely. I'd watch again just to see Kevin Spacey do his thing though. I did like how he made clear the tight connection between Lennon and NYC, "Lennon was Liverpudlian by birth, New Yorker by choice." So if it was nice to see the strength of New York embodied in one singer songwriter, at least it wasn't Billy Joel. Scott and I both wondered if this was thrown together in the last 10 days or if it was planned far in advance, well before the WTC incident.
I'm not a big John Lennon fan. I always leaned more toward Paul McCartney as a songwriter back in those days (then he started to write pop tripe like "Say Say Say" and "Ebony and Ivory"). Beatles fans are usually cut into two camps... the Lennon fans and the McCartney fans. Even though the two worked hard writing stuff together, they each had signature sounds and songs, and their individual styles shone through a lot of the collaborative tunes. I never found Lennon to be THAT big an inspiration. "Come Together," yeah. Whatever.
Lennon also married that ridiculous clown Yoko, who continues to make buttloads of dinero off of what's left of his good name to this day. She's a no-talent, do-nothing slob who just got lucky. I could so do without her.
Anyway, I didn't intend to write today about Dinosaur Rock. I am pissed about tech support. Let me 'splain.
As you know from my recent laments, we moved, I lost my office. Yadda yadda. In addition to consolidating us into veal-sized cubes to save on workspace and get everyone in the same area, which will eventually save money if they can sublease the upper 3 floors of the building, they are moving us onto Exchange 2000. Across the board. So everyone in the company and our subsidiaries are on the same system, with far fewer email servers. Instead of one to three servers per company, there will be 8 total.
Fewer servers than companies. But based on employees it is perfect. Sounds good, but nothing good comes without problem. Or so I've heard.
So the tech support dudes have been down here, all day yesterday and part of today. They sit down saying "can I jump on here for a minute?" and normally that's all it takes is a minute. Only they don't tell ya that it's gonna take four hours to compress and backup your 3000 email messages into a new format, 2000 of which you could have deleted if they gave you more notice (we all got an email on Friday, I was out Monday, then they show up Tuesday AM bright and early to do their thing).
Three people ended up needing their systems rebuilt.
Three.
Rebuilt.
All because of this.
Half the company is now on one server, the other half on the other, and a ton are getting their systems rebuilt. It is all fucked up. I try to send a message to someone across the office from me, it bounces back. What the fuck!!!! They aren't sure why this isn't working, they aren't sure the cause. But they aren't touching my machine until they figure shit out. Talk about planning.
After they backed up my messages, and discovered that the move to Exchange crashed the other 3 people, I told them they most certainly could not work on my machine. I also informed my boss. I told her to use my private email if she needs to contact me until further notice.
The VPN installation went great, we moved from a Nortel system requiring us to use a little Key Fob "Token" thing, which I keep misplacing and it takes me hours to find... so I am more than happy to move off that crap onto something that I don't have to carry or keep safe. Thank Goodness.
Since moving down here, I cannot FTP anything to the web servers. This part of the building is in a different part of the network node or some bullshit. So the UNIX dudes have diagnosed the problem and have to get with the network dudes to get me in through the back door or route me differently. Blah blah blah. I know some technical lingo, but this kind of crap makes no sense.
I don't care what the fuck the problem is or how you are going to fix it! Don't explain shit. Just fix it. With the amount of time you waste jawing at me and yakkin my ear off, you could be fixing this shit.
Just pat me on the head and tell me you'll fix it and when, and get the fuck on your bike and get to it!
I don't care about VPNs or pings or masked IP addresses or Port Number conflicts.
I am a content whore, and you're cutting into my whoring time... and it costs the company, my super pimp, some serious dough.
So quit your shit talkin' and get this fuckup fixed before I call my boss (the super personal superbitch) in to rough you up with YOUR boss. You don't want that shit coming down your pipes, so fix it!
Damn! Fucking piece of ass lazy Dilbert reading network protocol gabbing jerks! Ass buckets! One and all!!!! Die Die Die!!!!
I feel better.
I used to work in tech support. It would sometimes take me days to figure out and fix some of the shit that would happen to people's systems. Perhaps this is all just karma... and my delaying or poor diagnosis history is now coming back to haunt me? Nah.
I'm a lot more understanding than that whoring pimp paragraph up there would make me out to be. I have had people throw equipment at me when it doesn't work, and it was their doing not mine. I have received little praise and lots of yelling from people who should act more dignified, who get paid four times as much as I do and don't know where to plug their mouse or keyboard into the back of a PC. I know helpdesk people have a billion other people to help, and sure I can make myself look busy on the computer doing other stuff. I can even do stuff that I need to do, I just can't change it up on the server, so I have to keep track of what I'm up to... it's kind of a pain in the ass because I know I will invariably overlook something and not put it up and then I'll get yelled at. But that's life.
Of course, while I'm writing this total bitchfest, someone from network services called me and had me to an ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew just now. And I can now FTP. So my problems are solved and I have to get back to work.
I was of course grateful and thankful. Thank God I have the journal to rant at. It keeps me from yelling at humans.
I have two movie reviews, but I've run out of time. Perhaps later... perhaps tomorrow...
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