Londinium or bust
What does the “or bust” construction mean, exactly? “If I do not reach my intended destination, I will physically explode in some way”? I don’t know. I’ve never known. Forget I said it.
I had hoped work would be a leisurely stretch before my holiday, but some stupid piece of shit job blew up in my face this morning and I chased it the rest of the day. Oh, well. A quick note before I retire, then.
Most Boston-to-London flights are overnighters, arriving right in the teeth of the London morning commute. That sort of flight is easier to catch on the Boston end, but hell on the London end. I don’t sleep well on planes; I showed up punchy and fizzy and spent the whole first day hoping that more than usually tactless things don’t come out of my mouth. Tactlessness is, as you might imagine, a problem for me.
Finally, we found a flight that leaves in the morning and arrives at Heathrow around nine at night. Perfect — just enough time to drive home, settle in, drink a bottle of fizz, eat a meal (toad in the hole. My favorite!) and fall into a deep, weaselicious dream.
But the Boston end? Not so nice.
Still, I prefer to front-load my pain. Who was it said that drunkenness would be moral if you could endure the hangover first? It wasn’t me, but I fundamentally agree: payment first. Then pleasure.
My flight leaves at nine. Not bad. But I have to get a bus to the airport, per their schedule. And I have to get a cab to the bus. And the cab company won’t let me pre-book because it’s a short trip, but they won’t guarantee me a cab because I don’t pre-book. (Yes, I have friends. I wouldn’t dream of waking them in the wee hours to drive me, which is partly why they’re still my friends. Despite that whole tactlessness thing).
So here’s how it goes down: alarm goes off at three in the morning. I get dressed, pack my toothbrush and call a cab for 4:30. The cats begin acting especially cute but very sad, the knowing little bastards, so me and my luggage move out onto the lawn to wait. The cab is late. It is always late. They didn’t take my number, so there’s no way I can know if the cabby is lost and I’m screwed. This is — this ALWAYS is — the low point of the day. I treat myself to a dram of stomach acid. And possibly half a milligram of Xanax.
The cab arrives and drives the short hop to the bus station. (A cab ride all the way in to Logan would add several hundred bucks to the round trip. I could do it, but it would hurt). The bus station is dark. There’s usually a moon. And a pair of young lovers, or a very old lady, or scruffy college students, or all of these things waiting for the Logan bus. It feels poetical. I miss my stupid cats.
The bus ride into Boston is dark but sparkly. I feel like That Girl. I take a lot of artsy, blurry photos out the window. The line at the ticket counter…well, this isn’t Christmas, so maybe not so bad this time. I’m starting to enjoy myself, but I miss my stupid cats.
I saunter around the Gate 33 area. Have a nasty cup of Starbucks airport blend. Borrow a cup of electricity from Massport to charge up all my shit, if I can find an empty outlet. Start to get excited. Miss stupid cats.
The flight East is magic: you fly into the planet’s rotation. The flight is six hours, but the clock says twelve. So the whole day is compressed into cartoon time. They feed us a lot; keeps us quiet. So we go from the rosy fingers of dawn to the scarlet imprint of twilight in less time than it takes to work the morning shift.
Get me! I’m a jet setter!
Miss my stupid cats already.
This is going to be great!
May 14, 2007 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 7
Friday, May 11
Next week, Weasel goes back to Angle-land for a couple of weeks. But it’s okay. They have the Internet there now. You know, that thing is getting to be like…some kind of … international network or something.
May 11, 2007 — 4:31 pm
Comments: 23
Nertz to you
No, not you…them. You know. Them.
I’m sitting in the lobby of the building next door, soaking up a lovely five-bar wifi signal. I haven’t been over here for ages, but I used to work in this building. So half the people walking by are, like, “hey, Weasel! Where you been?”
“Oh, you know. Over there somewhere. I’m here to steal your wifi.”
“Great! Help yourself.”
And I might, too. I got a new laptop battery for my birthday, which untethers me considerable. O, I have slipped the surly bonds of cubicle.
Yeah. Some time in the recent past, I had a birthday. I’m not going to tell you exactly when. It’s not that I don’t trust you — gosh, you guys are the bestest minions a weasel ever had. Only, I’m one of those paranoid types. Date of birth, mother’s maiden name…brrr. Kryptonite. I believe there’s a bot out there right this minute crawling the web, one measly singularity shy of stitching it all together; sweasel.com plus alt.support.pee-shy plus the Class of ’78 High School Reunion Committee plus my recent credit card records equals…well, I don’t know, exactly. I’m not in a hurry to find out.
The battery came from a place that reconditions them on the cheap. I’m very pleased. They promise substantially longer battery life than a manufacturer’s original battery at about a third of the cost. The instructions recommend completely charging and discharging a new battery at least five times to get it up to the full charge. I’m on cycle #3 at the moment, and currently getting about three hours a go.
Have you ever opened up a laptop battery? Inside, there are…well, batteries. Like regular old rechargeable batteries, taped together in sequence. How the manufacturers have the gall to charge upwards of a Franklin for that is anybody’s guess. I suspect what these guys do is crack open the case and replace those batteries with newer ones of higher spec. You can send them your old one to refill at a very low cost, or buy the whole thing for a bit more. I opted for the latter, so I can use the new battery when I actually need battery power, and use my crappy old one as emergency backup when I’m plugged into the AC. That constant trickle charge is apparently the battery slayer.
Well, I’m babbling. Gosh, it feels grand.
May 7, 2007 — 12:52 pm
Comments: 14
Friday, May 4
Why not vote Weasel? You’re going to get one anyway.
May 4, 2007 — 3:01 pm
Comments: 28
Several wifi technical issues and a naked transsexual porn star
It’s Mayday. The communists are communicating, the socialists are socializing.
Nope. No idea what that means. I woke up with it running through my head, thinking, “I say, Weasel! How droll!”
Today was neither as unpleasant as yesterday nor as productive as I hoped. I’m still +1 on the rodent offsets, but the night is young. I got my re-imaged machine back but, as I remembered, that external Linksys USB wifi dealie is the shits. It couldn’t get a decent signal in the stairwell looking out the window at the building next door. (When I used it at home, it couldn’t consistently hold a signal when placed directly on top of the router).
There was, however, a tantalizingly strong signal coming from right inside the building. Wide open. I emailed around to see if anybody knew what it was. Finally, I plucked up the courage and connected to it. Up came the company logo and login. Also a scary “business purposes only” warning. Huh. So they’re providing us with wifi now.
So! I’ve got a PCMCIA card I can try in the business laptop. Or I can give it another go with my ThinkPad (which I have this evening rescued from the clammy embrace of Linus Torvalds. I like Linux, but I’ve never gotten the damn thing working right). Problem with both of those options is…where does the antenna go? No smartassery from you in the back. Finally, I can try to jack into the provided wifi signal using some kind of tunneling software so they can’t see what I’m up to.
My technical problems are boring. But then, so is not being able to surf the internet.
Meanwhile, this here feller is Buck Angel, the Man with a Pussy, currently the world’s only (incomplete) female-to-male transsexual pornstar. No, I don’t remember how I got here, but it’s dark and I’m all by myself and I’m cold and scared. Can somebody come pick me up? I want to go home now.
Sometimes the internet makes me feel like crying.
May 1, 2007 — 5:05 pm
Comments: 11
Bad day, defined
Okay, compared to this guy (man, that croc is an evil looking bastard, isn’t he? Photo via NZ Herald), my day was a dawdle. But I had to deliver the coup de grâce to an injured squirrel on my morning commute, and that’s never an auspicious sign. How come road-injured squirrels always lie in one spot jerking and flipping out like that wounded Daryl Hannah replicant thing in Blade Runner? Horrible.
I dug out the old work laptop I use to test programs, plugged in the wifi dingus…and discovered I don’t have admin privileges on that machine. So I put it on the network and called the Helpdesk. It hasn’t been on the company net in a couple of years, so it’s all screwed up for updates. Turns out, that model was “retired” a while back and I was supposed to turn it in. I thought for a moment it was going to get confiscated, but someone dutifully picked it up for a re-image. I should have it back tomorrow.
Somehow making IS complicit in the circumvention of their own rules pleases me.
I wrote the above sentence about forty five minutes ago, then Damien came in and laid a large, fine woodrat at my feet. Pity it wasn’t dead. It jumped up, shrieked, ran across my feet and disappeared under the radiator in the livingroom. We could see it dashing back and forth underneath, the perfect cat-tease. Every time Damien hooked a paw in its direction, it would let out another squeak. Rodents don’t squeak like squeak toys. They squeak like forks raked across dinner plates. You hear it with your molars.
I held a cardboard box against the radiator with my knees, got a bamboo back-scratcher in one hand, an empty paper towel roll in the other, and tried to spook it toward captivity and ultimate freedom. But it was not to be. It leapt over my backscratcher and holed up under a big armchair, behind a pile of old comics. It’s quiet now.
Damien is curled up in front of the chair, placid as the Buddha. Fuck it. I’m going to drink. I’m not offing two adorable rodents today. Death is going to have to sort itself out this time. I just wish it wouldn’t do that whole “red in tooth and claw” thing on the wall-to-wall carpets.
April 30, 2007 — 5:56 pm
Comments: 11
Friday, April 27
April 27, 2007 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 11
A weasel in the wires
Today I sat at my desk and wrote a screed (in notepad!) about how the forces of goof-offery always triumph over the armies of bossage. Then I realized I should probably actually triumph before I do the happy predator dance on the corpse of my enemy. That’s what you call discretion. I don’t have much of it; please savor this small sample.
That Buffalo long-range wifi adapter McGoo found is the best idea I’ve seen. Unfortunately, it’s vaporware. Everybody’s talking about it, nobody’s selling it.
Somebody on eBay is selling a “wardriving” kit, which is a Buffalo long-range PCMCIA wifi card and external antenna. Looks good, but getting on for $75. That would be fine if I were sure it would work. I can afford to spend that kind of money, but I can’t afford to waste that kind of money.
I know my own laptop’s wifi falls about twenty feet short of the signal. But I’ve got a work laptop and a PCMCIA wifi card I bought for my last rig, so putting those two things together is the next step before I start spending money.
So if those of you who blog don’t see quite so many weasel tracks in your usage logs lately, it’s not for want of trying. I’m a-coming. Or, as Hillary would say, “yo yo yo, me am ain’t not noways tarrrrrrd, y’awl.” Now it’s Friday and time for happy beverages!
— 5:36 pm
Comments: 21
Damn! Blast! Fie! Piffle!
My boss informed me, casual-like, that a new, strict directive on work-time websurfing is about to be handed down. They sent him the draft a few weeks ago.
Oh dear. I am ever so annoyed.
Does this mean an end to daytime websurfing? Will I actually have to buckle down and do my job?
Pff! Please. If they wanted me to do my job, they’d make my work more interesting. Some days, it’s like they don’t even care if I’m entertained. So, you know, if they’re not even going to try to compete with the internet, what do they expect from me? I’m not made of stone!
Still, I’d better stay off their crummy, poopy, stinky, lousy servers. The building next door has a wide open wifi signal. If my office were twenty feet closer, I could nick a signal on my laptop, no problem. I sometimes wander out into the stairwell and check my personal mail at lunch that way. I could try to get a job in the department on the other side of the building, but that’s Training. Training people have cooties. Big giant ones.
So, anybody know anything about wifi reception boosting? Obviously, I can’t do much about boosting the signal. And I have a lot of unusual things in my office, but I think a parabolic antenna might get noticed. I don’t have a clear line of sight to the other building, anyway.
C’mon…think. Otherwise, you’re only going to hear from me on my own time. You know: the Not Sober hours. And I’m a sloppy, boring drunk.
April 26, 2007 — 4:42 pm
Comments: 26
Ack! I’ve brokened it!
Messing with my sidebars last night apparently pissed Explorer off. My content is all shoved down below the right sidebar, and I didn’t realize it because I don’t fire up IE at home unless I have to. I can’t fix it from work, because something in the firewall times me out when I try to access my bloghost control panel. Not something I’m inclined to complain to the Helpdesk about, know’m mean?
So, we’ll have to crouch down here below the fold today. C’mon. It’ll be fun. We can build forts out of blankets and couch cushions and eat grilled cheese sammiches and watch cartoons.
Update: Fixed! But the sammiches and cartoons are still on!
April 25, 2007 — 7:53 am
Comments: 8