Dustin Williams

I came across this via some deaf friends on Facebook, I thought it was worth posting here. It was written by Dianne Kinnee.
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Reading around the web, I discovered Jamie Livingston’s Photo-of-the-Day.

The New York-based cinematographer Jamie Livingston found something worth photographing a day, and the next, as he meticulously (and miraculously) chronicled nearly twenty years of his life in Polaroids before succumbing to cancer in 1997, on his 41st birthday.

Photo of the Day is the beautifully bittersweet website erected by Livingston’s friends to catalog his prodigious output, with 6,697 captured moments ranging from the mundane to the sublime. There he is napping in one, and newly engaged in another. His lovely gesture of toting around a camera to immortalize the everyday, every day, feels oddly prescient.

I have been reading the comments on Metafilter, Mental Floss and elsewhere. I enjoyed one particular comment that was posted on Metafilter by a user with the handle, krippledkonscious.

This makes me want to do my own Photo of the Day project, not mattering what the subject matter, just as long as it’s a memory…

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A few of the most common things I get asked are: what do I drink, if it’s good, and how to make it. To take care of the first two, it’s called a ‘White Russian’, and yes, it’s very good. It’s a rich and creamy sipping treat, which finally got some long-due credibility in some circles when The Big Lebowski hit.

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i was dreaming of this girl that just broke my heart. i had found out that she was using me in the worst way, and she had to go off and do her thing to someone else.
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Today marks my 22nd birthday. I’m trying to figure out how this one compares to the previous ones.. but I keep getting those mixed emotions. On one hand, I’m very thankful to be where I am in my life at this moment, to have the wonderful friends I have, and for being able to tell those apart from the fake ones. Read the rest of this article »

I was talking to Ellen when she had her car accident yesterday, she just recently reiterated the story to me, and I thought it was crazy of the other guy… until she explained a bit more…
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Recently, I was wrapping up my day at Bear Mountain. By day I go snowboarding and by night I poked and prodded around with computers, the internet, and whatnot. Well, one of the days I was there my friend contacts me in a panic begging me to come fix his computer. I of course tell him that I’m in Big Bear at the moment and not sure what I can do to help. At that I can practically see his heart sink, so I ask him what the problem is.
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it’s a funny story. last night, i was checking DHL tracking on when my brand new digital SLR camera would arrive — which was for the next day. alas, i fell asleep around 4am… i woke up at 1:07pm, and checked tracking — it said “With delivery courier. Riverside, CA” and then that was when i noticed my mom’s note beside my laptop – it said that she was out taking the elderly guy to the doctor’s.
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I was looking into the eyes of this most beautiful girl I’ve known. Then I kissed her, and it was very amazing. I can’t even begin to describe it.
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i’m so stressed out, it’s not even funny. the finances got totally fubar’d when one roommate left without notice. and on top of that, we got raided by the san diego police looking for one of our ill-fated roommates with an arrest warrant; we lost yet another roommate.
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as i was hanging out with peter and guillermo, tony decided to dose himself with cannabis, and we decided to record him while he was high. here’s the results of that: Read the rest of this article »

it’s been so long since i’ve written “for real.” it’s been that i’ve withheld so many details of my life till a good friend of mine advised me to “…write your entries for yourself and the people are just reading it.”
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life doesn’t give you the people you want. it gives you the people you need, to help you, to hurt you, to love you, to leave you, and to make you into the person you were meant to be.

enough said.

As the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command. Four identical machines, running identical software, pull information from thousands of sensors, make hundreds of milli-second decisions, vote on every decision, check with each other 250 times a second. A fifth computer, with different software, stands by to take control should the other four malfunction.

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i have only gotten half of my things from long beach. i miss it there. i’ve been working on a router and server project lately, and it took up most of my time here at kearny villa.
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Now having found a place to live in San Diego, I now have to retrieve my things from the house in Long Beach.

Its going to be hard.

• Make arrangements to retrieve my things from Emily’s.
• College?
• Residence?

I’m on the street. What the hell am I going to do?
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So the earth has circled the sun twenty times since I was born. Big deal. I don’t feel any smarter than I was five years ago. Stagnation, stagnation. I don’t like getting older, so I shall forget about this.

*end of short entry*

I’m now one of the beta testers at Joost. (www.joost.com)

I love their service, and look forward to their continually improved Internet TV platform. My [only] qualm with their service is that there is no captioning.

I was talking with a friend about funny things that happened at my old job… This one popped up…

After a user called me reporting incredibly slow Hard Drive access and application opening speeds, I did a check on his laptop for all files over 50KB in size…

The usual suspects… outlook.ost, some database type things, a few massive spreadsheets… and then…

Gigabyte after gigabyte of porn ripped from DVDs, and a few gigabytes worth of iTunes downloads.

After reminding him of policy, I immediately (and with manager approval) began deleting the music and porn.

After screaming at me that I am “interfering with his personal belongings,” “destroying private property,” “conducting unreasonable search and seizure,” and “being a real asshole,” he asked me why I was deleting his files. Again, I reminded him of policy. He accused me of being gay, saying “You must not like pussy…”

I like it fine. NOT when it’s all over OUR hardware. Anyway…

So then he’s quiet for about a minute or two, and he comes back with “I am going to sue you for damages. I will demand compensation for each song, valued at a dollar each. I will demand compensation for each move at the rate of twenty bucks per movie, since that what I paid for the DVDs I ripped them from. In addition, I will demand compensation equal to my hourly wage multiplied by the time I spent ripping the DVDs and downloading the music, since I don’t have internet at home and did it all at the office.”

My Response: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!

Result: Last I heard, he’s working graveyard mall security.

We are Tech Support.
Do NOT screw with us.

it’s been more and more difficult for me to do anything in the confines of my town. i’m sure everyone has their confines — but me, much more so. you don’t know how much i’ve wanted to do so many things, be it to attend the block, go to friends’ houses when i needed to talk to them, just go around the city seeing people.

the town i’m in is so small a walk around would take perhaps fifteen minutes. i don’t want that anymore. i want to be able to ride a bike around for miles, and not encounter anything but forest. there are times that i have had a chance to go someplace, but couldn’t due to lack of transportation or because someone flaked out.

i know i shouldn’t, but i’m sort of taking a friend’s “half-offer” to table a proposal for me to live with their family with her mother… this’ll be in long beach… to heart. i can attend csulb there if that ever happens, and it’s “in the middle” of everything. i’d have a friend that i can lean on when i need it.

i don’t know if she wants that or not. it is pretty a tall order.

we’ll see.

The CW today said it will not be bringing back veteran drama, The Gilmore Girls.

The network and Warner Bros. released the following joint statement:

“Announcing the final season of Gilmore Girls is truly a sad moment for everyone at The CW and Warner Bros. Television.

“This series helped define a network and created a fantastic, storybook world featuring some of television’s most memorable, lovable characters. We thank Amy Sherman-Palladino, Dan Palladino, Dave Rosenthal, the amazing cast led by Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel as well as the producers, writers and crew for giving us this delightful gem for the past seven years. We would also like to thank the critics and ‘Gilmore’ fans for their passionate support and promise to give this series the send off it deserves.”

The show’s return had been on the fence, reportedly in part due to pay disputes with its two leads, Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel. The show’s finale will air Tuesday, May 15, at 8 p.m. ET.

Seems like every time another Mac user looks over my shoulder, they freak out over the number of little icons I have up in my menubar. And — like all Mac geeks — we have to immediately start trading information, learning tricks, and sharing tips. I’m sure you know the drill by now.

If you were looking over my shoulder right now (and I hope that you are not) here’s the stuff you’d see in my menubar.

• Twitterrific — Gives me my Twitter crack
• smcFanControl — Nifty fan controls for laptops that regularly overheat
• Nocturne — Makes my screen look like a film negative… with some tweaks
• Adium — excellent IM app
• QuickSilver — Duh. It’s QuickSilver
• Desktopple — Poofs away your desktop icons
• Remote Desktop — Control one Mac from another Mac.
• MenuMeters (Network) — Shows Rx/Tx in KBs
• MenuMeters (Disk) — Displays Read/Write to disk in the form of “LEDs”
• Apple .Mac Sync — Almost-saving grace of the overpriced and underpowered .Mac suite is automatic syncing of iCal, Mail, contacts, etc.
• Apple Display — Control for my display resolutions
• Bluetooth Control — Self-explanatory
• Airport Menu — Also self-explanatory
• MenuMeters (CPU) — Shows me my CPU usage
• Sound Menu — Duh, it’s volume control
• Battery — Displays the battery power levels
• Date & Time — Need I say any more?
• User Switching — A little thingy I use to allow guest login whilst allowing me to stay online
• Spotlight — It’s a piece of crap, but it’s our piece of crap. I tend to use the Quicksilver plug-in more often

Oh yeah… i’m rather excited about this feature that opendns is about to release on monday. i found out about it quite by accident when David Ulevitch made a slip-up on his end.

check there on monday! i guarantee you you’ll love it. :)

Lusers don’t have a choice. If they’re not happy with their place in the food-chain… too bad. They have to live with the crap they’ve been given.

We, on the other hand, don’t have to. We have a choice. If you don’t like your place in the industry you can recover anytime you want.

SysAdmin. That’s right.

You don’t like the way your career’s going, you don’t like the pay you get on the job, anybody around you, you can check out anytime you like.

Lusers aren’t allowed that, though, and believe me, if they were, they would use it. There’d be a lot of executives, total arseholes that live in high-rises, diving out the windows. PHBs… if they even had remotely that thought would take a look at themselves and go, “What the FOCK! Monochrome in a 32-bit world… this blows. I’m just gonna suck in the halon… I don’t have the intelligence to fix a server or run backups or even hook up my own monitor. I’m just gonna dive in front of the next train. Why even bother?” Now, helldeskers have the opposable thumb so they could kinda do it the exact same way we do.

Now, there’s a bunch of people that say, “Oh, it’s against the law”. Well, since when do we care about the law? Other people say, “Oh, we should save them.” Yeah, well you know what? Not everybody wants to be saved. Not everybody should be saved. And who are they to force their will upon us?

I mean, isn’t that one of the joys about being the admin? Freedom of choice? Now, it’s not all bad.

Now, I’m not saying “Kill yourself.” But if you’re gonna be an idiot and do it anyway, it’s no slice out of my training budget. There’s a lot of good that could come from it. A little bit of bad thrown in.

Some of the things:
A job will open. An office will become available. There’ll be more disk for me. They say there’s two PFYs for every BOFH — if you’re a BOFH, there’ll be four assistants for me. There’ll be more single-malt scotch for me. There’ll be one less luser in line at the show who gets up to the reg-desk without their FOCKING slips filled out. I won’t ever have to go to the store to buy my favorite salt & vinegar chips and have the clerk point at you and say, “They bought the last bag.”

You won’t help change the Microsoft sign to a Hundred Billion Screwed. You’ll never get caught. You won’t have to worry about printer-jams ever. No more, “Hey, we got more pages out of the old printer!” There’ll be one less person with the root password. You won’t have to recycle. There’ll be one less P76 Leyland on the road. There’ll be more bandwidth for me. Fifty or so toner cartridges’ lives will be spared. Your fingers won’t ever get red from exanguinating lusers. You won’t be forced to deal with the beancounters every quarter anymore. No more forms.

You’ll be saying, “Hello, World – down and not across!”

No more wet dreams about PAs. No more Steve Ballmer… for a few years anyway. Wondering “Am I losing my edge?” will be a thing of the past. Say good-bye to crappy Christmas presents from vendors and OEMs. You won’t have to suffer through a company retreat. FOCK contracts and re-negotiating. You’ll never lose sleep over a downsizing scare. Adios, acne. Worrying whether you got rid of the evidence or not won’t be on your brain. See ya later, unpaid overtime. You’ll never have to sit through another presentation brought to you by the creators of pie-charts. Junket season forever. No more paying bills. You won’t have to do backups.

You won’t be able to lock lusers in the tape-safe, though…

You’ll also miss Scary Devil Monastery. Jolt Cola. The amazing electrifying feeling that surges through your body when you fock someone over for the first time. You won’t be able to watch Jaws and practice your grin. Lager. Living above ground. Expense accounts. You’ll miss the rush of starting your first interoffice war. Getting to the age of retirement where you can tell your employers “FOCK OFF! I gotta make my own mistakes… you did.”

You’ll miss porn — you’ll miss thinking about it, looking for it, porn by yourself, porn with a partner, porn with multiple partners. No more pub lunches that seem to go on forever. Rolling IRAs. Naming their fileserver something obscene. Making a difference in their budget. You’ll miss the pleasure of hallucinogenic screen-savers. Watching your CEO’s mistress change clothes over a streaming webcam. A lifetime of clickety-clicking. Watching your least-favorite luser get made redundant. MP3s: you will definitely miss MP3s. Trying to sneak into your office drunk, three hours past morning tea.

You’ll miss the blaze and smoke of the kit the boss bought. The taste of sweet revenge. If you’re a Linux admin, you’ll miss the feeling you get each time you defenestrate a server. If you’re a Windows admin, the feeling each time you pirate a licence key. You’ll miss your favorite LART. Secretaries with whipped cream and strawberries. Beating your PFY at video games. You won’t be around to see what shape and color the new workstation from Steve Jobs will be. You’ll miss the feeling you get when reminiscing about your first boss-replacement — thirty years after the fact. The joy of receiving bonus-checks at Christmas. Double-dipping. Getting bombed, releasing the Halon, and framing that guy in marketing because he stole your parking space. Flying toasters.

Hey, you were hired — finish what was started.