Coffee and cigarettes…

October 28, 2008

How not to splice cable

Filed under: warning: dangerous memes — techrat @ 4:54 pm

One of the true joys of working here at the Fun Factory is that I will, occasionally, encounter something so horrifying from a technical perspective that I seriously wonder just who in the hell it was I replaced. After today’s discovery, I’m convinced that the answer is “a frakking idiot”.

You aren’t supposed to DO this to network cable. Really. Trust me on this. At least they got the gorram color-pairs correct.

How not to splice Cat5 network cable. Ever. Or I KILL YOU!

How not to splice Cat5 network cable. Ever. Or I KILL YOU!

October 24, 2008

wait a minute… how’d a girlfriend get in here?

Filed under: brain candy — techrat @ 8:23 pm

Life has this habit of occasionally going into hyperspeed around me. I don’t know what starts it or how to stop it, so about all I can do when it does this is grab the tiger’s ears and pray there’s no speedbumps.

A few weeks ago, I was killing time at the airport waiting for my sister’s return flight and saw someone appear online that I hadn’t talked to in months. Our conversations had always been casual, and extremely entertaining. She was one of a handful I’ve befriended over the years who managed to keep up when playing ‘follow the bouncing pop culture reference’. I’d actually figured she’d either lost interest in me and wandered off to other things, or someone had wisely snapped her up off the singles’ market.

But she was back, by whatever artifice, and so I said ‘hi’ and struck up a ‘where the hell have you been? and what’s going on now?’ sort of conversation to re-establish communications and catch up on things. I’m still not quite sure how, but I managed to talk her into meeting up with me the following night to have a cup of coffee and actually put a face and voice to the words we’d seen on-screen all along.

What followed have been three of the most interesting weeks (in all senses of the word) than I’ve had in a long time. The tiger’s got an earache by now, and I couldn’t really care less.

I’m not really one who tries to occupy someone’s every waking moment… I’m actually far more likely to look for reasons to let people have their lives as uninterrupted as possible by me, and if there aren’t any reasons, I’m quite likely to contrive some. But, from the start… I wanted to see her.

I wanted to see her a lot.

And that’s pretty much what started to happen.

It’s actually somewhat disgustingly cute. Even the things we don’t have in common (or are outright opposites in) lead to lively discourse, not zealous positional argumentation. The things we do…. well, those are already starting to yield in-jokes, and we’ve pretty much only scratched the surface, I’m pretty sure.

I am inordinately fond of her already. It isn’t the new-toy rush of curiosity alone, though I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t there at all. It’s more like I’ve met someone I should have known for most of my life. And that I’ve met someone I’m going to keep around for the rest of my life, in some fashion.

Cheers, AB… to the start of something wonderful.

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