Category
Me
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Me, Short Stories, Writing
Published Again: “Payday”
Aldo Calcagno over at Darkest Before the Dawn has republished a story of mine called “Payday”. This story originally appeared in CrimeSpree Magazine, and it’s one of my favorites. I originally came up with the idea while stuck in traffic one evening. In a drowsy stupor I had the idea for a hit man who doesn’t really want the job.
I envisioned this as being the perfect Plots With Guns story (sort of like David Allan Coe’s perfect country song) but Neil Smith went on hiatus before I could complete it. I’d always wanted a story in CrimeSpree, so there you are. I hope you enjoy it!
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Me, Self Improvement
The (Formerly) Running Man
08.10.09 | Permalink | 2 CommentsFor about five months last year I worked second shift in the data center – 2pm to midnight. This left me with my mornings free and nothing to do once the kids were off to school. I was kind of tired of being such a fat slug, so one day I strapped on my sneakers and went for a run.
And I didn’t get very far. But the next day I got a little farther. In less than a month I was running 2.5 miles four times a week. From Labor Day to Christmas I lost nearly 25 pounds.
Then, inevitably, my body broke down.
See, I was born with a club foot (surgically corrected when I was an infant) and later I hurt my Achilles on that same leg, so I had a fallen arch on that side. This put a little extra pressure on my right knee, and finally something had to give. When it did it was the cartiledge over my kneecap.
So I sat around the house and waited for it to get better, and it never did. Nothing else seems to hurt except for running, but even a couple of running steps is painful. I later learned that it can be fixed, but the doctors recommend against it unless the pain is just unbearable. Apparently once you get your knee fixed it’s never the same again.
Fast forward to two weeks ago. I spent three days wandering around Universal Studios. I was on my feet about six hours a day, and while the standing around got old after a while, the walking didn’t seem to hurt too much.
So when I got back I decided to keep it going. In the past 8 days I have walked more than 35 miles, and it feels pretty good. So far I have lost a grand total of… 1 pound. But hey, in a year that will be 52 pounds! And I’ll be down to the what I weighted when I was 15.
Or maybe not.
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Me
Perfect! (Updated)
As I was driving home today – at exactly five miles per hour above the posted limit – I realized that, despite my best efforts, my perfectionism is only getting worse. I still keep fiddling with stuff that works until I have it working perfectly. But I don’t get frustrated or pissed off like I used to. Why is that?, I wondered to myself.
Then I realized it’s because I’m now competent at perfection.
That’s one reason why I was drawn to computers, and why I’m good at working with them: it’s theoretically possible to do something absolutely, positively perfectly, down to the last bit. And when it’s not I’ve learned to live with my limitations.
I still tend to take apart perfectly functional operations because there’s something that’s not… quite… right. For lack of a better term, it offends me aesthetically. For example, I built a job in the Altiris Deployment Server – a tool for installing software and running scripts – which installs Microsoft Windows and then carries out a bunch of custom configurations. Things like turning off the firewall, disabling hibernation, installing the antivirus, etc.
Unfortunately, this led to scripts that contained 25 or 30 steps. Altiris slows waaaaaaay down when you’re dealing with that many steps, making it tough to edit them. And we had different scripts based on hardware vendor (3), Windows version (2), and platform (32- or 64-bit). So that’s 3×2x2 = 12 different scripts for each configuration. And if you want to change just one step, you have to do it 12 times.
So it was difficult to maintain, and as the person charged with maintaining it, I didn’t like that. So today I found that there was a tool you could use to schedule Altiris jobs from the command line. And you could run this inside other Altiris jobs.
So, problem solved. I created one “launching pad” job for each configuration, which then schedules each of the dozen or so other required jobs. And I can change any of those jobs at any point without changing the launcher. Woohoo!
Once again, stubborn perfectionism saves the day, and for one brief moment, I was perfect.
(No, Alice, not as perfect as you.)
UPDATE: I picked a bad day to declare myself perfect, because this guy, he really WAS perfect. Shoot, I can’t even spell Burely.
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