The Vent Thread

[Flint the Dwarf]

Have to wake up at 5am to get ready and go to work, so you try to go to sleep about 9pm or so.

[series of unfortunate events]

I work that same schedule, but even without any distractions or crazy events it's still hard to get up in the morning. It's just not right waking up before it's light out.

[dj_ultima_the_great]

I'm at a terrifying point where I think my parents are as dependent upon my income as much as their own to pay for the cost of living.

Must. Leave. Quickly. O___________________o

That's it, Code. Let's both ditch our parents and escape together.

[Flint the Dwarf]

I supported my mom for years, and it sucked. Eventually I just had to cut out and let her deal with her own problems. She's basically taken care of by social security, medicaid, and her parents now, but I know that can't last forever.

It just makes me feel like I've got to do whatever I can with what I've got now, so that I don't end up in her situation later, where you're taken care of by flimsy social support systems.

[dj_ultima_the_great]

Our gas got turned off today. I just had to shower and wash my hair - all three feet of it - in ice cold water.

[Flint the Dwarf]

With 3 feet of hair, you totally needed Sindel in that gif.

[BasharOfTheAges]

More computer hardware fun. Tried to build up a server to host a bunch of lossless video i wanted to not get rid of.

Started off trying to build the server using Ubuntu. After i spent several hours formatting drives, they all came up weird... Brushing that off, I made up some samba shares and rebooted to see if my win7 network could make heads or tails of them. The system failed to boot. Something killed the boot manager. I shut the system down, disgusted after playing around with it for a few more hours and getting nowhere.

Next attempt was to just load up Fedora 16 on the system because I was more comfortable with it than Ubuntu. I decided to use an old disk from my main system to be the main OS drive on the thing. Pulled it from my main case and started installing. Turned back on my main system and found (after several hours of debugging) that this old HDD was the only drive that had the boot table on it, and that my SSD that was running windows was actually slaving off of this thing for the past year. One repair CD and several reboots later, the main system was all set and I had wasted another 5 hours going absolutely nowhere.

I finally get Fedora going on my main system to find out (again after several hours of debugging issues) that several SATA ports on my motherboard are part of a different controller that the BIOS doesn't control and that there's no Linux driver support for in any release I could find. To add insult to injury, the video card I had on the system caused it to tweek out and crash X every time i logged in. Another 5 hours down the drain.

Screw it, I said last night. I'm just going to pop a drive from the file server and put it into my main system where that old drive i took out to install fedora on was plugged in. 2TB of space is more than enough. But wait... what's this? Windows thinks it's only 1TB. I proceeded to spend all night trying to figure out what was wrong and learning about a bug with certain versions of Gigabyte motherboards that stemmed from a BIOS back-up feature wherein the board tries to write a Host protected area to hard drives attached to it so that it can recover BIOS info in case of emergency. The bug was in calculating the space left on the drive that's hard-written to the header. From the OS level, the HDD is whatever size this value says. The tools used to fix this issue in a windows environment are all 32 bit XP based (and since they deal with hardware access and drivers and shit, they don't even work in compatibility mode). I'm pretty sure I now have 5x 2TB drives that think they're 1TB drives.

Still haven't been able to move my files off my editing drive to make room for more source or start work yet.

[aesling]

Just...wow...

[meleechampion]

Not really a vent.

Visited my parents. It'd been a month since I'd been over. It's late, so I sneak in, say hi to the dog. Nothing had changed, not that I'd expected it to. Walk into my room and just... something felt off. Realized the 3-4 pictures of me and her were missing. Nothing in their place. Blank wall, empty dresser top.

Probably one of the weirder emotional feelings I've experienced. Just this... "oh, right" ... *sigh*

[Kristyrat]

For the past four weeks or so I've been using what little free time I've got to work on an intro sequence for our school's yearly showcase of student work. It's a pretty big event (or at least, has been in the past, this year it's smaller because of budget cuts and such) and the winners are voted on by faculty and advisers. It's also a good opportunity for employers to see what's coming out of the school. I got the opportunity to do the intro and was super excited to give it a shot, the final edit being due tomorrow.

Found out today that because of the lack of budget, they've decided to cancel the show this year. So the intro that I've been working on all month, skipping class and neglecting course work to make sure it would get done and look awesome, isn't going to be used at all. I know it's my fault for neglecting my course work for it, but it's still a bummer.

At least I can still use it for my portfolio and reel, and I'll definitely try to do it again next year. But still, it's pretty lame.

[dj_ultima_the_great]

The sheriff showed up at our house today. He said we have to leave as soon as possible.

Our electricity will be shut off on the seventh. I can't imagine that we can stay in this house past that, but as of right now, we have no apartment or other living situation set up for us.

I talked to my manager at work today, and she understands the predicament. (Crying in her office may or may not have had something to do with this.) She said to not worry if I'm suddenly unable to come into work one day. She knows I'm trying my hardest to keep all of this from affecting my job.

I'm honest-to-God terrified right now. I can't even begin to describe how frustrating it is to deal with my mother. She won't even allow me to be angry at her. She blames her previous silence about this whole situation on my "attitude." She felt like she couldn't talk to me. Right, because springing this shit on me a few days before the goddamn domestic apocalypse was a good idea. I'm sorry if I get infuriated at someone who caused this situation and can't take responsibility for it, and when she does, it's always with, "Yes, I fucked up our whole lives. What do you want me to do? Kill myself?"

No, I want you to stop being melodramatic and take some fucking ownership of your actions. You caused this, and you are NOT a victim. Dig your own grave; don't drag me into it with you. I called my sister earlier and asked her for money. I couldn't stop crying after I hung up the phone. I don't want her to think of me the same way that she does of Mom. She never would - I know that. She loves me and she said herself that she would sweep me out of here in a heartbeat, but I'm just not sure that that's an option. I'm desperate, but there is a certain border of sanity maintenance that I'm not willing to push past, and living with her would cross that border many a time, as badly as Mom, if in a different way.

Anyway, this is turning into a rant. I need to go entertain myself somehow. I need some laughter to balance out all the tears from today.