Where'd they go???

10:30pm, Southpark wrapping up....

Pager goes off, accident on the highway with entrapment!!! Hot dog!!! Blood and guts time, plus the chance to carve open a car as if it were a sardine can. Who could ask for more???

We get to the scene, and there's the car, lying on its back, wheels in the air like some cheap, mechanical hooker. Which reminds me, anybody seen what the Japs have done now? But I digress. Wait, wait, does that model come with holes or does one have to use a drill???? Sorry, sorry, back to my story....

So the car's upside down, but we look inside and no one's in it! Did it drive itself on its own to that point? Impossible!

Some bystanders chime in, saying they saw the whole thing, and the occupants self-extracted and went thataway! LMAO Well, at least we know it's a stolen car now.

The state police, 3 of them, who looked so alike I asked one of my crew if PA was cloning them, started going through the vehicle while we controlled traffic. One of them came out with a wallet one of the idiot thieves had helpfully left behind. It's easier to catch them when you have a driver's license with last known address.

Parsons Project

I recently finished reading a book titled Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons. Not a bad book, overall, but I have a few gripes.

First off, the author, whoever he is hiding behind the John Carter pseudonym, is very sloppy in many of his "conclusions". It would have been very interesting to me as both a practitioner of the Occult as well as a historian of Occult practices, to see some of the raw material that led Carter to make some of the statements in the book. There's quite a few places where he'll say that Parsons liked squirrels, and he absolutely hated pigeons, therefore, of course, he definitely loved Chocolate Chip cookies. Excuse me? Where the hell did you get to the cookies from the arboreal rodents and the flying rats???? One is left to imagine that in some of the source material not included in the book, there was to be found crystal clear evidence not only of his liking the aforementioned cookies, but also data connecting that to the other statements from where Carter drew his conclusion. Either sloppy writing, or sloppy editing, and it detracts from the book.

The other major problem is that it does contain several inaccuracies in the events in the main narrative, as well as some of the background material on the occult characters that influenced Parsons, either directly (Crowley) or by means of their opus (Dee and Kelly).

Lastly, it was way too short to do justice to Parsons or the epoch it covers. One is left with the nagging suspicion, especially taking into account my first complaint, that this was to have been a much larger tome, but for whatever reason, it was trimmed down to within a page of being unintelligible.

Still, it's probably the best book covering Jack's occult side currently in print, so it's definitely worth reading. And for anyone seeking to understand Crowley's influence in America, this is a must read, no doubt about it. Were I teaching this stuff, which I'm neither saying I am or I'm not, it would be required reading for freshmen. All take note.

Boring Moms

When I was growing up, all our moms were so boring. How times have changed.

Incommunicado

My wireless provider divested a bunch of numbers to another wireless provider, mine among them. Unfortunately, the new wireless provider does not seem to have any actual equipment with which to provide wireless service. No, I am so not kidding.

I have been cellphone-less since 3pm yesterday. I was initially told that it was an outage, being fixed, which should be resolved within 2 hours. I called again this morning, since the cell still wasn't working. After being a pain and frightening the silly twit of a girl who got the call, she finally admitted the whole divestiture thing. It seems that Cingular sold all its North Carolina subscribers to Suncom, the switch effective yesterday.

Yeah, I'm not in North Carolina, some of you are mumbling by now. But I did used to live and work there. When I moved North, I never changed the number, no reason to. Now I'm having to change it, at least, if I ever want service again. Looks like Suncom is some crappy fly-by-night operation, if technical savvy and customer service are any guide. I need reliable 24 by 7 service because my cell phone is how clients and support techs notify me of any issues on my accounts, and we have service level agreements with penalties attached that involve me getting those notifications and responding accordingly.

That's just one more annoyance in what's been a hell of an aggravating 3 or 4 weeks now. I hate Summer.

Let's All Waste Our Time

We had a problem on one of our subsystems here at work last Friday. After a lot of troubleshooting, we finally identified the rogue job that was running away with all the resources, making just about everything else grind to a screeching halt, and cancelled it. It took us longer than usual because it was a problem we'd never seen before. Since it didn't look as if the fault were on the infrastructure or applications we manage for this particular client, I immediately chalked it up to a bug in the 3rd party software that the rogue job belonged to. I then had my tech folks contact the vendor, and ask if they'd seen it before.

A day later, they came back to us saying that yes, they have not only seen it happen sporadically, but they've got a patch (fix) available for it. Now I just need to schedule a convenient time to apply the patch, and problem solved, right? Yeah, you'd think...

Since what we do is manage the IT area for our clients, we're supposed to provide an analysis on what caused a problem resulting in significant degradation of service. I prepared said analysis and submitted it as I'm supposed to, with the truth in it. Basically, that the vendor had admitted to a problem in their software, and provided us with a fix, which we would implement in the next available window for it.

Moron Manager #2 at my client, who is one of my favorite persons to annoy in the whole wide world, immediately came back with a demand that we investigate and determine the exact problem, as well as what arcane set of conditions caused it. I responded in barely civil terms that a) 3rd party vendors are notoriously unwilling to provide internal details on their bugs and b) that I'd have to be having sex with insane people (e.g. fucking nuts) in order to dedicate valuable people's time in tracking down some stupid error for which we already had a fix just to satisfy their morbid desire for stupid, pointless, useless information.

LMAO Well, that didn't go down too well. The account manager called me a short while ago, saying that he agreed wholeheartedly with my position, but could I please refrain from replying to the email that Moron Manager #2 had already told him he was sending in reply to my comments.

It's been about an hour since the account manager told me that, and no email yet. Either Moron Manager #2 decided he'd already looked stupid enough in print for the day, or else he took me off the distribution, in which case he's not only disagreeing with my position, but also complaining about me, personally.

Wish I could tell him that I already tried, actively, to get fired from this company 3 years ago (I would have made out like a king, due to certain conditions of my contract) by being obnoxious and difficult, on top of unbearably rude. No luck, I'm still here. So good luck trying to get me in trouble for doing a good job, asshole.

Screw the Dog

No, the title isn't a command, despite what the sicko in the article did. Here's the article, so that you all have a reference to what I'm talking about.

It turns out that one Cory Williamson of South Carolina has been accused of raping a dog, and 2 minors. The article states as a development that the dog has died, presumably of internal injuries suffered during the incident. Due to that, the charges against Cory have been upgraded.

I find it highly disturbing that the dog rape is played up, while the fact that he also raped 2 neighbor girls is barely mentioned. I'm all for animals, and their rights, but human rights should always run at a higher priority. It's a sad comment on our current society and laws that the rape of the two underage girls (one only 3-years old) is not enough to put this sicko away for life, or better yet, just execute him, so that instead it's a boon for the prosecution to upgrade the animal cruelty charges. That'll probably get him an extra month or so of jail time, before he's let out to do the same shit all over again.

In the inevitable reckoning that is on our horizon, when either rational people will again regain control of this nation or we'll finish going to hell in a handbasket, sex crimes must be looked at carefully, and punishment made to fit the crime.

Another necessary area for review, and one that will probably end up influencing all criminal activity, is the current leniency we have for petty crimes. In a not too long ago past, minor offenses were punished with a whipping, or some time in the stocks, or any number of similar punishments designed to cause pain and/or humiliation, but rarely any permanent harm. Some of these punishments started at home, or in school, back when corporal punishment was de rigeur.

Nowadays, when we punish minor infractions with a lecture, or in the worst cases, counseling, people grow up thinking there are no consequences for their actions, no matter how bizarre or depraved. Until, that is, they actually do something so horrendous that they get killed or put away for life, but that's only after they've racked up a long string of victims. Had most of these recidivists been punished in a real fashion at the start of their straying from the conventions of a rational society, then their careers in whatever criminal behavior they practice would probably have been nipped in the bud.

I'm amazed that no one's done a serious study based on the correlation between the drop in hard punishment, both in the legal system, as well as in home and school, and the obviously related rise in not only number of crimes, but also the extreme nature of some of them. Or again, probably someone already has done such a study, but it's not in the Liberal media's best interest to give it any airtime.

I always go back to the society envisioned by Heinlein in his book, Starship Troopers. It's a shame that that part of it was completely dropped from the movie version. In the book, lashes in the town square are a common punishment for intermediate transgressions against society, and service to the community, in the form of military service, a pre-requisite for exercising the full privileges of citizenship. An idea the founders of this country would have appreciated, as it was more in tune with their original vision. The "everyone is a citizen with full privileges just because they were born here" mentality means that those unwilling to do anything for society and country have the same weight given to their opinion as that given to those that do serve. There's something very wrong with that, especially in a society like ours, where leisure and sloth have become desirable states for most.

Counterterrorism

I attended a 6-hour training session this past weekend at the Fire School. The purpose of the session was to simulate a large-scale disaster, and learn how to handle it from an Emergency Response and Logistics perspective. The supposed disaster was accidental, not a result of a terrorist attack, but I could tell it was supposed to have been terrorist initiated. They just didn't want to come out and say it and spook the few Liberals attending who were still in denial. I won't even mention what the incident was supposed to have been, save to say it could easily happen just a few miles from where I sit now, which was the location used in the mock exercise, and probably will happen before too long. The reason I won't go into details is because I do not agree that terrorists are as smart as we are and that posting ideas is okay because they'll all have occurred to the terrorists already. Fact is, if terrorists are so smart, I doubt they'd be blowing themselves up as they usually do, so I'm not going to give them any freebies.

Anyway, we had people from all the different agencies that would be involved in handling a disaster of that magnitude, and we went through a roleplaying exercise, complete with radios to talk amongst ourselves, and a central dispatch feeding us info as it became available. Each person then did what they thought they were supposed to do in the scenario. That is, move resources to where they were needed, call for resources we didn't have available, share info with other agencies as needed, organize civilians and get them out of the way, deal with the incident, and do cleanup afterwards.

Very scary. Not the incident itself, but the responses of some of the participants. I had one idiot who froze every now and then, and wouldn't pass on info on the radio. I'd ask him to relay a question to the other teams, and he would stare at me, then stare at the radio, then back at me. After I'd repeated my request a few dozen times, going so far as to phrase the sentence he should use on the radio, he'd finally get around to doing it. Since he'd been placed as my superior, I had to observe the niceties for a while, but after a bit I started bypassing him until he was just a pointless feature of the landscape. The sad thing is, in a real incident we'll certainly have our share of people like him, and it won't be as easy to shove them aside, I warrant.

Note to self: Accidentally disable any morons quickly in the event of a real incident.

Summer

I apologize to my fans and sycophants for not having been posting daily of late. It's due in about equal parts to a huge workload, a friend visiting and the general lethargy that warm weather makes me drift into. I swear, I'd cheerfully hibernate during the summer, especially since I'm assuming that bears relinquish their caves, which must be dank and cool, during our hot summers so they can frolic about and catch fish. I could see myself doing a sort of timeshare on a cave, alternating occupancy with a bear family.

Anyway, a recent upgrade at work has highlighted a piece of stupidity engineered in tandem between our development folks and the client, which is now threatening the whole business. There's a piece of software on the main computer which has as its sole purpose in 'life' to assign computing resources to different jobs (programs, tasks) that run according to the flow of business. The old version allowed certain jobs to be 'put to sleep', and denied cycles for hours at a time, allowing higher priority jobs to run freely. The new version is more democratic. It forces some cycles to be given to even the lowliest task.

Now, the stupidity I mentioned lies in the fact that this 'putting to sleep' was more of a loophole in the old version, than a legitimate feature. Nonetheless, the developers working for my employer discovered it and let the client know about it. Then for years they took advantage of this loophole to code inefficient programs that hogged cycles, and kept the whole thing running smoothly by judiciously denying cycles to low priority jobs. So far so good.

When the new version went online, the whole system started slowing to a standstill during peak hours. After a week or two, we finally discovered that the 'reverse timeslicing' which is the cute name given to the feature on the old version, was no longer available. In other words, there's no fix. The only solution is to recode years of applications to no longer hog cycles like they used to, but instead to run more efficiently. That's months of work, and not enough people available.

A costlier solution would be to throw processing power on to it, so that the jobs have more cycles available to them. The problem is that we charge the customer by cycles and they don't want to pay for any more. They feel the system was running okay before the upgrade and thus any extra cycles required should be paid by us.

It's looking more and more as if it's going to take a lawsuit to untangle this one. To add insult to injury the contract is so vaguely and stupidly worded, that you can make a case either way. In fact, if time machines were available, I'd be convinced that The Bible was written by my company's contract people.

Luckily, I don't give a damn. My job's to keep things running as smoothly as possible with the resources given to me. I don't get the resources, tough noogies. On the down side, even though I don't care, I still have to attend endless troubleshooting calls while techies monitor and tweak the system, looking for an alternate cause for the slowdown that just isn't there and never will be. Not to mention the pointless management meetings with the client explaining to them why their stupidity won't work miracles anymore.

That's taken away most of my free time, hence the scarcity of updates of late. I've considered just writing posts en masse when I have the time and backdating them, but I feel that's a cop out. Better to just post when I am able to, even if that's only 2 times a week. I'll go back to my usual frequency as soon as the shit finishes hitting the fan.

I've had tons of witty commentary on modern life, some of which I even remember now, but the moment has passed. A few, maybe, are worthy of keeping, and I'll try to pen them when I can.

I am sure future historians and analysts will bemoan my client's stupidity and the veritable gems of wisdom that were lost as a result of my not posting regularly during this crisis, but them's the breaks.

Silver rain was falling down upon the dirty ground of...

London Town... It was a cowardly attack, that you suffered yesterday. And even more cowardly the ever fewer voices still urging we treat the terrorist scum with kindness and tolerance.

Malaria is spread by a mosquito. So far, vaccines against malaria have had mixed results. Due to this, our efforts towards stemming the spread of the disease have been concentrated on eliminating its vector, the mosquito, by fumigation and by reducing its spawning grounds (any brackish water, even small amounts in open cans and other containers). These efforts not only kill or prevent the spread of the particular mosquito that passes on malaria, they also have the same effect on other types of mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes aren't evil, they're just trying to eat. The ones that spread malaria don't do so on purpose, the malaria bug is just hitchhiking a ride on the mosquito's saliva. We're not evil, we (our species) just happens to live in malaria zones.

Yet we kill the innocent mosquito.

Same thing with the terrorists, folks. Most of them do not see themselves as evil, they're just fighting the West, whom they view as oppressors. We certainly don't see ourselves as evil, we're helping ourselves to the oil, and giving payment in return, as well as sending countless millions of dollars in aid money.

Unfortunately, the mosquitoes, sorry, I mean, the terrorists, are causing harm to us and they must be destroyed. A lot of non-malaria carrying, oops, I mean, non-extremist Muslims are going to have to be exterminated along with the rest. No one's evil, we're just at odds.

Why do I support the West? Because I prefer our way of life to theirs. Sucks to be them, I guess.

What're we waiting for before we finally detonate a good sized RAID bomb over Riyadh and see how that affects the global spread of malaria, um, terrorism?

And again, London, thanks for being with us, and hold strong. We will prevail. This is not the first time, and it won't be the last, because every now and then another crazy culture will sprout and point weapons at us.

We'll stand together, as we have for a good while now.

Long Weekend

It was a typical 4th of July for me, and I hope everyone else had a good one. We had a festival in town on Saturday, celebrating its Founder, whoever he was, and however many years ago he staked out a town. I participated in that one in my capacity as a bujutsu student, as our bugeikan had a stand in the festival. We were there all day, giving demos of our style, and receiving a day long lesson, if truth be told.

Sunday I think I slept most of the day away, then went on to class in the evening.

Then Monday, the 4th of July itself, I learned belatedly that our firestation was participating in a parade, so I went to that. We had mechanical problems with one of our trucks, so we participated in diddly-squat, and some tempers were frayed. I still had a more or less good time, since I amuse myself in very simple ways, mainly by watching other people's antics, and those are always available. I also had my iPod, which I've been slowly filling with music for just about any mood I may happen to be in, so even when I got bored with the antics, I could tune everything out with some nice, heavy metal. Then at dusk I patronized a local park to watch the fireworks, and had a kickass bloomin' onion.

Today I spent on a pointless conference call instead of lazing about, all because my client likes to run their system at a 100% capacity instead of paying for a bit of slack, and the newer OS version doesn't like that. There's a huge ruckus going on between the client and the account manager as a result, and I'll be dragged into the fray tomorrow, I've already been told.

The client hates to be told they're idiots, and my account manager just about has a heart attack anytime I'm in the same room with them, since I'm known for telling it like it is. So I'm guessing tomorrow's meeting is just the account executive and me, and he'll then tone down my statements to something palatable to the client, even if the statement's link to reality is destroyed as a result. This company does more on wishful thinking than it does on actual work.

Mountain Rescue

Okay, let's see if I can write this in a single session...

Last Sunday we were supposed to be having the Sweet Sixteen party for one of our firefighter's kids. The whole firestation was invited, of course, and I had already geared myself up for the day to be made up of one 911 call after another. Murphy is our patron saint, of course.

Well, I was right. The party was to start at 2pm and go on till 10pm. The calls started coming in non-stop at around noon. An accident. Another accident. A medical call. Then around 1:00pm they died down. I planned on making an entrance around 3-ish. Well, I never got to 3pm. At around 1:30pm a call came in to assist on a rescue on the mountain. I was very far away, but I hopped into the car and started heading towards the station. When I was 5 minutes away a call was sent out for additional manpower.

I made that truck, and we set out to where our Chief was waiting, a couple of miles away, off one of the trails. He had a couple of hikers in tow, and they reported that while hiking, one of their number had taken a fall and hurt himself. They'd been walking for an hour, so they guy had been lying out there for at least that long. One of them offered to lead us up to where he was.

It was going to be a hell of a hike, at least an hour up, and we had to carry a shitload of equipment, plus water, and whatnot. We set out, about 8 of us on that first team.

After about a half hour of climbing up a very steep trail, which disappeared every now and then and turned into rocky brush, the heat started getting to me. I decided I'd do better with less clothes on, so I peeled off my coverall and continued with civvies, except for the yellow firefighter helmet which I kept on for protection. I cached the coverall where I could pick it up on my way down.

After a bit, another team caught up with us, this one consisting of trained mountain rescue folks. We joined forces and continued for a bit. At one point I saw people coming at me at a clip, and one firefighter helmet rolling down the slope. I was glad there wasn't a firefighter attached to it.

Turns out the lead folks, who were carrying a stokes basket, had stumbled into a beehive built under a loose stump. The bees had swarmed and were blocking our way. They stung one of the EMT guys who had started out with us, and one of our firefighters was being forced down against his wishes. He was known to be allergic, and was pissed at being made to retreat. He hadn't been stung, luckily. It was his helmet that was making its way downhill.

We waited for 10 minutes or so till the bees calmed down and we then continued, skirting around them. While we'd been waiting for them to chill, I downed a bottle of water. I probably sweated it out not too long after, it was a hot, humid afternoon. Worst possible weather for hiking outside of a thunderstorm.

By that time, helicopters were flying around, and more and more rescue teams were assaulting the mountain. Another team or two had started out from a nearby ridge, hoping to get to the injured hiker laterally, instead of making the full climb. They'd driven up to that nearby ridge, but they still had a long hike ahead of them, just not all uphill like ours. We knew all of this, of course, because we were in radio contact the whole time with the Command Post at the base of the mountain.

At one point it was more or less decided that we weren't too far from the patient, and that it was better to make an intermediate camp to leave most of the equipment at, and have most of the party continue on, thus lightened of most of their load, and try to get a quick visual on the hurt man. Once they'd found him and ascertained his condition, they'd radio for the equipment they actually needed and have that taken up to them. I and another firefighter from another station were selected to remain with that stuff, while the rest continued on.

So we stayed there, perched on a steep incline, sipping at the water we'd been left with, which wasn't a whole lot, but then, we weren't going to be moving too much more. After a bit, we heard a call go out for another search and rescue, across the river on the NJ side. Seems another hiker had gotten himself lost. And then reports of a corpse having been found by yet another search party started coming in. The corpse didn't seem to be related to any hiking mishap, either. From what I gathered over the radio, it looked to be someone that had been unceremoniously dumped there.

After about a half hour, the advance team radioed us and requested we take the backboard up to them. We selected what we'd take on it, and started after them. Now, this was all on a steep, winding trail such that you had to literally walk a good 500 feet in zigzag to gain 20 feet of altitude. It's all rocks and cliffs and no way to climb straight up, and the trail is close to non-existent in many places. Anyway, we followed the scuff marks the advance team had left, and we got to a point about 50 feet below them. I'm guessing because even though we never saw them, we started hearing them above us. They'd made contact with the victim, and about then, they were joined by the other team, the ones who'd been making their way laterally from the neighboring ridge.

After they'd discussed the situation, it was decided the hiker was in much too bad a condition to be hauled down, and they'd be getting him airlifted. We'd started up the mountain at around 2pm, and by then it was 5:30pm. We were ordered by radio to turn back to where we'd left the equipment, put it all back in the stokes basket, and make our way back down with it. The rest of the crew would stay up there with the patient, and help clear a landing zone for the helicopter.

Ah, well. My buddy and I started back, and we reached the equipment not too long after. The stokes basket and all its contents had either flipped over, or some animal had flipped it over for us. Luckily, everything was close by, so we didn't have too much trouble gathering it all up again, and securing it. We then started down. By that time, it was about 6pm.

We reached one of those points on the trail, if you could call it that, where it sort of forked. One trail headed up, another down. Neither of us could remember where we'd come from, although I had a feeling we'd come from the branch that headed up from where we were. We dropped the stokes basket and explored a bit on the one that headed down, and it did look serviceable enough, and it led directly down, and we were tired. We figured even if it wasn't our original trail, it'd lead us to the bottom. What the hell. We went back for the stokes basket and started down.

The trail was great for a bit, but then it sort of trickled down to nothing and disappeared. It wasn't a problem, though. All we needed to do was continue heading downwards, and we'd hit the main road. Impossible to miss, since traffic would run you over in a second if you did fail to notice you were walking across a state highway. And if by some chance traffic failed to get you, and you didn't notice the road, falling into the Delaware River right past said road would be a sure sign that you needed to turn back.

So, without a trail, our only concern was to make it down quickly, since we had only a couple of hours of daylight left. That's when my buddy got a serious cramp in his legs. To the point where he could not walk and had to sit down. We reported the situation by radio and refused the offers for another team to be sent up for us. My buddy was sure he'd be able to continue once he'd rested for 10 minutes or so, and we were both sure that if we headed downwards, we'd make it.

After he'd rested, we continued on our way. Slower than before, since he was still in some pain, but still making good progress. After about an hour, the people below were starting to get antsy about us, and radio conversations increased in frequency. We still rejected offers of help, though.

After a bit, we got to a really rough patch, consisting mainly of boulders strewn across the mountain side. This allowed us to identify our position perfectly, and a crew was sent to meet us at that point on the base. A couple of them started climbing up to help us with the stokes basket, and we made contact with them a few minutes later. From that point, it still took us about 30 minutes to make our way down to the base. My buddy went ahead and I stayed behind to assist with the stokes basket. He was cramped up so bad that I still made it to the bottom no more than 5 minutes after he had.

We were rushed to a waiting ambulance, as having spent a good 7 hours on that piece of crap mountain, they wanted to check us out completely. Also, one of the guys who'd climbed to meet us right above the base, was hyperventilating for whatever reason. I insisted they look at him first, since I was feeling perfect, albeit a bit thirsty. After he'd been taken care of, I got my pressure checked, as well as pulse. I was sporting a little heat exhaustion, understandably, so I was given water and placed on O2 for a few minutes. I was then released after filling out some paperwork and that was that.

I hitched a ride back to my station and proceeded to enjoy the last hour or so of the party. Felt sorry for the poor kid whose birthday it was. Almost everyone at her party, including her father and boyfriend, had spent the whole party up the frigging mountain. I then discovered that everyone had first been told that we (myself and the other firefighter) had gotten lost and no one could find us. It seems the person we'd been in radio contact with the whole time had neglected to pass on any news to anyone. Idiot.

Also, it seems I had been checked into the hospital as I was in bad condition. I denied that categorically, and pointed out that I could not be at the hospital if I was standing right in front of them denying the whole thing. My logic finally convinced them, but it took a while.

Then the stupid newspapers were carrying the story the next day, along with the tale of the 2 lost firefighters. If they'd used my name I'd have sued them.

Oh, and the hiker? He got airlifted out at 10:30pm. A good hour after I walked off the mountain. Poor dude! But it took all that time to get a good landing zone set up.