The Screaming Viking

I see why all the people out here are the size of twigs. All we’ve fuggin done is walk around…-alot-. Public trans is quite handy but you do still have to walk a ways to get where you wanna be. I think part of my problem is I’m not drinking enough water. It seems like in the mornings my legs are just killin me, but after I’ve had time to hydrate a bit they are leaps and bounds better.

We’re hoping to head up to fisherman’s warf tonight, not really sure what’s there but it’s something to see anyhow. There really hasn’t been anything around here that I couldn’t live without seeing. I’m not very impressed with this town. There are too many damn people, stores are pretty expensive and there are homeless everywhere. We went up to some old ferry house last nite and the homeless there were leaning over the landscape wall dividing up their crack.

I’ve probably ranted about this before, but for christ sake what function in society do these folks serve? Sometimes someone gets on a string of bad luck or a bunch of shit goes seriously down hill and they lose their possessions and what not…but how much effort does it take to work as a janitor, cook, construction…whatever and make enough for food? People sleeping on the street doesn’t bother me at all…but it’s the ones with the cups begging that drive me up the fuckin wall. We’ve seen a few people that are standing there doing -something-, singing, playing an instrament…something with a cup in front of them. That I have no problem with at all. They at the very least trying to do something to make some cash, whereas the man with his hand out expects a “hand out”. The only person I owe a god damn thing to is that little blonde headed monster…the rest of ya’ll can kiss my ass. Get a god damn job, do -something-. Pick up trash, pick up a broom, flip a burger….LEAVE AND FIND A JOB! obviously nothing is keeping you here. God damn I’m sick of these fuckin people everywhere. They are like locus. They are a drain on society and need to be eliminated. They really suck the joy out of a pleasant experience. In the area we are in it seems that 99% of the people we’ve seen on the street are black men, but more then that 99% of them are well built black men that are able to move around very well….is something unknown keeping them from picking up a fuggin mop? The guy I’m down here with has given a couple of bucks to them…and boy oh boy can one haul ass over to you when he sees a dollar come out of your pocket. Saw a guy the other day, asked me for money and said he hadn’t eaten all day…but he was smoking a ciggarette. QUIT FUCKING SMOKING! take 3 bucks and you can buy bread and some psedo meat to last for days. I saw a couple of pigeons in town…walked right up to a couple of them…how hungry are you fucker? There are plenty of ways to survive that they have not explored.

They don’t want food though, they want their next fix…their next buzz. It’s sad that someone has digressed to that level….and us as people are not helping them by giving them a hand out. Have a place that helps them get some food…but not a free meal. You want food, you gotta work for it, help cook, help , clean actually work ffs. If you arn’t willing to work…then we’ll simply create a job for some of your homeless compadres…who’s job will be to eliminate the ones not putting in effort to change…hell we’ve created several jobs….scout, exterminator and cleanup.

We managed to make it to Cali without too much issue. My big ass DOES NOT FUCKING FIT IN AN AIRPLANE! I either need less ass or more seat…I want both. If I ever go anywhere again it’s first class or I fuggin drive.

It took us 2hrs from the time the plane landed till we got to the hotel. Public transportation down here is pretty handy, we had to walk a couple of blocks from where the BART (subway) dropped us off to the hotel. We had to weave in and out of a few beggers to get there….but it didn’t go too bad.

The hotel room itself frankly…sucks. It’s clean, but it’s old and very very small. You can hear -everything- that happens though. The person upstairs runs their shower and it’s loud as hell. Someone slamms a door and it echos…but you can’t hear people talking in their rooms. The room itself is bairly bigger then the bed…I’m not a fan. It is only 2 blocks from the place where we have training though…so that’s cool.

The town itself from what very little we’ve seen is ok. We rode through some crappy lookin parts on the BART but the down town seems nice. We left the hotel last nite around 9 local time lookin for something to eat, saw a denny’s sign and rounded a corner….then protected our nuts. It was rather spookey…couple of women that look like they would do anything for a 20, couple of guys that seem like they’d have kicked my ass…and a massage parlor that had an arrow pointing towards the basement….. we quickly got out of the alley.

We had dinner at “mel’s diner”. It was very good…about like eating at a denny’s for prices. I had a chillie cheese burger that was huge and filling. My co-hort had the meatloaf that he couldn’t finish. For lunch today the place we’re at catered in. It was sammiches…but they were really good…sourdough bread with some various toppings. I went with roast beef. They had enough so we all could have had a couple with some left over…one was plenty for me. They had a ceasar salad along with it, which I had. Usually it’s kinda blah…but it was pretty good.

The class itself is quite informative. They have answered any question I’ve posed quickly and efficiently. Everyone here outside of me is a windows person, so they are spending alot of time explaining linux. Hopefully this afternoon or tomorrow will be all about this product.

I’m hoping to do some shopping either tonight or tomorrow. They have a very large (area wise) fat man store that I’m hoping to find better deals then in Fargo. I should get something for the monster…and rumor has it someone has a birthday coming up. I wanna get that done asap and spend the rest of the time lookin around. Things seem a bit pricey down here though…I see why everyone out here thinks ND wages are low.

Glad I freed up a Credit Card!

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Incase you haven’t seen it, Chris Benoit seems to have gone completely ape shit.

Tank Johnson was released from the Bears…which is exactly what they needed to do. I think a lot of people were surprised he wasn’t released after jail.

Well, I take my first business trip tomorrow. I fly out at 1500 for sunny San Francisco!!!! I am soooo not looking forward to it. I need the training and that part of it is really exciting, I’m just not all hot and bothered about the location. Some place like Chicago or somewhere in Colorado would have kicked ass. We’ll see how it goes though. It would be nice to have some time and be able to piss around a little out there…but we aren’t going to have a lot of time for that I’m thinkin…we’ll see.

I’m figuring on bringing my computer along, so I’m not completely out of touch with the outside world. Naturally I’ll have my cell. Kinda shitty that the one for work probably won’t be in till Tuesday at the earliest. I looked around at the various models Sprint has and wasn’t really impressed…unless a guy wanted to spend a few hundred on a Treo. I ended up with a “kitana” which was the “free” option. We’ll go with that for now and see. It would be ideal if they would comp me X amount for the phone I already have…but I suppose going over on a personal minuet plan is quite likely if something explodes.

Since I’m going to be on a plane for several hours I decided to buy myself a gift….I picked up a zune from Best Buy today. IMO it’s feature set is a bit better then the iPod, the price is quite comparable. It only has 30 gig of space…but I should be able to work within that. The movie and sharing options are what sold me…along with the built in wireless. I’ll report after the trip how the little device faired.

The backup issue has been solved. I’ve created scripts to backup the important shit. The biggest problem is the time it spends archiving (taring) the files. It takes a bit of processing power to crunch out the backups. Mjollnir does it faster then the bitch, but it has other things to do. I’d like the bitch to be able to transfer the files then tar them locally, but that takes a bit more space then I have…and I’m not entirely sure how to get perl to get a directory recursively through net::ftp.

As far as users are concerned, mail and the mysql tables are backed up nightly at 2am. I am going to keep a weeks worth of backups at a time…so if you -really- need something or if something explodes we’ll have some sort of backup to restore. The root drive is going to (starting tomorrow) run backups weekly and diffs every nite. Meaning it does a complete backup once a week, then each day for the rest of the week it checks to see if anything has changed and creates a “diff” file that is significantly smaller. The extremely large directories are going to get backed up monthly. IMO that’s plenty.

I’m not sure how much space this is all going to take up…I’ve got it running a full backup now…so we’ll see what I have to work with.