Uncle Bill

Publicado em , por Pedro Couto e Santos

13:24 GMT – now playing: Red Hot Chili Peppers – “Funky Monks”

Yep, I had restarted the whole online diary business last wednesday… and then came Windows. Since wednesday night I’ve been battling my way through cross-linked files, lost clusters, bad directory entries and the ineffable bad long filenames…

In the middle of all this my Windows 95 stopped installing (no idea why), so I had to turn to 98, which I really didn’t want to. I spent hours trying to get the network to… well… work. They say Windows is very network-friendly, but the truth is that if I ran the diag prog that came with my network cards, they would communicate happily between each other… When I ran the windows net diag prog it would respond with a hardware error…

And then, those troubleshooters… “is your computer on?”, “verify that you actually have a cable”… they’re so lame! Anyway, I managed and after five days I got my network, zip drive and some software to work under windows98. Sadly, one of my favourite and latest pieces of hardware, the SoundBlaster Live, still has some pretty bizarre problems.

I just hate this, I seriously do. More and more I believe that Crowley from “Good Omens” came up with Windows in the first place.

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Back in business

Publicado em , por Pedro Couto e Santos

13:24 GMT – now playing: Primus – “Jerry was a Racecar Driver”

Well, I took some time off to reconsider this whole diary weblog thing. I had my reservations about it… I suppose everyone doing this sort of thing will have the same doubts along the way. I think I’ve sorted them out and I’m ready to go on. I find it an interesting stress killing experience, at least.

19:30 GMT – np: Queen – “I’m Going Slightly Mad”

It’s the company’s first anniversary today. One whole year of legal activity. Hooray.

I just finished a neat little illustration for our site, made after a Beatles record cover. Specifically, it’s based on “With the Beatles”, the one with the famous black and white picture of John, George and Paul on the “top row” and Ringo on the bottom. It should be online later on, together with a simple text regarding the anniversary which I also wrote.

Well, it’s still cold and raining, which was not too bad for April (it’s not unusual), but it’s starting to get annoying for May. Not that I like heat, I hate it… but it’s a bit too depressing out there.

I went to the car shop a while ago to change a stop light. They changed it on the spot, which was nice. I always feel stupid around mechanics… It’s just like they know so much, and know exactly what to do with each different car. I couldn’t even remember to turn the electric system on before pressing the brake peal to check which light was broken.

The mechaninc had to tell me: “you have to turn the car on first…”

Cars are somewhat mystical aren’t they? They’re so… mechanical. Weird stuff.

I’m in stress mode. I feel I could chew the tires out of a LandCruiser, but I don’t exactly know why, where this pressure is coming from. I get like this a lot and usually end up breaking something the first time Windows crashes on me.

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Good day bad day

Publicado em , por Pedro Couto e Santos

21:28 GMT

The day was great! And it wasn’t.

It all started out fine, woke up early, had my milk/coffee/caramelized sugar cocktail, felt just fine.

I managed to do the cartoon for tomorrow, scan it and paint it nicely. I think I’m improving on that one, it now seems fine.

Then I procedeed to work on the new entertainment site we’re about to launch and voilá! it finally fell into place and I managed to come out with something cool.

By the end of the day, things were all going nicely until this e-mail came. It was about a bunch of stuff but what really bummed me out was the part about our longest standing cartoon.

It’s been almost a year we started the cartoon about these technology experts who always mess stuff up, anyway, it’s coming out weekly on an online mag for almost a year. We asked for new conditions, gently, not only were the conditions turned down, they’re shipping us off, no further questions.

It’s going to end. My jaw just dropped! I always entertained the notion that they actually appreciated our work and… well, liked it! Apparently they don’t give a toss and so they’re simply getting a new cartoonist or whatever… amazing… on top of everything they send their “executioner” to do the dirty work…

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The dreaded weekend

Publicado em , por Pedro Couto e Santos

23:33 GMT – now playing: Marilyn Manson – The Dope Show

It’s the weekend. I don’t like it. The weekend is full of bad things.

On Saturday I stop, I want to sleep, rest and do nothing, so I do that and the whole day passes me by. At a certain hour I’m bored to death (specifically, now).

Then on Sunday it’s the end of the weekend and so Monday is right around the corner. It sucks, to use vernacular.

So today we did our taxes, which is always a perfect time to make me perfectly infuriated. I simply have trouble accepting that the state takes away my money in whatever percentage they please and then enforce a billion strict rules to not let me deduct my expenses. I become agitated and angry.

About an hour after doing this, I let a little problem with running a game really get to me and thrashed my office. I broke some stuff and threw chairs around and screamed. I didn’t feel much better and proceeded to go watch a match on TV, which sucked bad and my team lost by 2-1.

I was pretty close to murder by then.

This isn’t any fun anymore…

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Back to school

Publicado em , por macaco

1:29 am GMT

I’m going back to school today… mind you, I’m a teacher there, not a student. I have to get on a boat in about 8 hours from now to go there and I haven’t come up with today’s class… I’m a bad, bad teacher. I think I dislike teaching a lot…

Anyway, I still haven’t collected my pay from school for March and we’re halfway through April. Needless to say we’re broke and that’s how important it is that I teach as a second job.

I teach in a sort of post-highschool course, which isn’t college, but isn’t that bad either… I really couldn’t say what kind of degree you get there, but I suppose you get out of there ready for action. It’s an art and design school and I’m teaching computers to the first two years of the graphic design course. Basically I have to tell them about PhotoShop, FreeHand, Illustrator and Quark Xpress. We use iMacs at the school which sucks because I absolutely loathe the damned little ugly things.

The computers do look nice when you first set eyes on them… after two months they just look “different”, and now they just bloody look ugly and I realized: “yes! that’s why computers are usually either beige or black”… It’s a low profile thing I don’t suppose fashion victims who actually bought iMacs will ever understand.

Anyway… I still gotta come up with an exercise for the students to do tomorrow, plus I gotta teach them how to start using Xpress which is something I basically can’t do because I don’t use the damn thing and I hate DTP anyway. (DTP means Desktop Publishing, it’s a severly cocky expression for putting stuff on a page and printing it out).

I’m also noticing that it’s only 1:26 am, although I supposedly started this entry at 1:29, which means I either misread the time in the first place or there has been a major space-time warp and I’m about to meet myself in three minutes. Interesting as my life is, I’m ready to bet on the first choice.

I think the worst thing about being a teacher is that you have to get along with a large number of young people. Young people are fighting to establish their identities and personalities and what-have-you. So when I walk in the class room and propose: “everyone draw me a rock band logo containing an illustration of a skull done in FreeHand”, there’ll be a guy yelling out: “cool!”, another guy will say: “this is pathetic!” and a third one (could be a girl this time) will say they’d prefer to do it using PhotoShop… What do I do?

I’m the teacher! I act like a mature adult, of course! I reach in my bag for my trusty double barreled, easy loading Quake shotgun and start distributing hellish punishment. Heck… I’d do it if it was a perfect world. Like my wife’s brother said the other day: “we should have several lives so we could just do that kind of stuff (he was referring to driving off a steep cliff)… then we’d just load…”

And he’s right, you know.

I just know that in a few hours, when I’m driving down to the boat station I’ll start feeling that Carmageddon sensation creeping up on me, I’ll start looking wickedly at pedestrians and sleepy slow drivers… unfortunately, I’ll just be a good boy and prevent a lot of deaths.

Life just isn’t fun enough. Neither is death, apparently.

…I don’t think anyone reads this, isn’t that pathetic? I double dare anyone reading this to e-mail me (not you, you nearly-successful lawyer with the highly intelligent 2-year-old who will inevitably take over the world)… but anyone else, I triple dare you! e-mail me now! Yeah right…

8:56 am GMT

Hello? am I awake?

I went to bed about four hours ago, now it sort of feels like I have thin long acupuncture needles in my eyes. I hate not sleeping.

On top of everything my e-mail program insists on downloading messages from the server that I already have… it’s now downloading the sixth version of every message in a 33 message batch, isn’t that nice?

Oh well, I gotta go to work…

20:05 GMT

Home… home at last.

Got my March paycheck, so it wasn’t all bad. Actually it wasn’t bad at all, except I was unbelievably tired… and I’m staring to suspect that my students think I’m some kind of junkie by the way I drop my head on the cafeteria table and gulp down coffee, like I’m trying to recover from some terrible hangover. So now I’m gulping down my 9th coffee of the day and reading my e-mail… all seven copies of each message… I long for Linux.

23:42 GMT – now playing: David Bowie – I’m Deranged

Coffee number 10.

I’ve just watched a pretty cool movie my wife rented. I was called “Dark City”. Nifty. It’s about this sort of alien race which uses a whole city as an experimentation lab and they exchange people’s memories around every night turning them into someone else altogether. Very good story, nice sets. The alien characters looked a bit like a cross from Fremen from “Dune” and the guy from “Hellraiser”, but ok.

Blast! My coffee’s over… I can’t get online the damned phone operator is messing up again! No, not the ISP, it’s the telecom company, the damned monopolist bastards…

Boy, I’m tired.

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