The Vent Thread

[lloyd9988]

Spoiler :

Lately, I've been feeling incredibly overwhelmed by, well, everything. It's been over a decade of "Put on a smile, something better will happen soon", there are occasionally brief spots, but no real improvement in the long run.

Oddly enough, I feel the same way. Probably not exactly the same way, but mostly putting a smile on just so no one notices that your thinking about how the job your doing is not helping you progress in life, you don't know what truly excites you in life or how to contribute something useful to the people around you. Something that feels like I'm not where I need to be.

Your situation is probably way different than mine, but, since you brought it up, I just kinda had to agree that this is what I've been recently thinking about too.

[macchinainterna]

Spoiler :

Lately, I've been feeling incredibly overwhelmed by, well, everything. It's been over a decade of "Put on a smile, something better will happen soon", there are occasionally brief spots, but no real improvement in the long run. The back-up store of optimism is running out and I don't know how to replenish it. I think the worst part of it is that I just feel angry at myself. People have it worse than me, I should just deal with it, not get frustrated and upset.

I know exactly how you feel, Ileia. Trying to stay optimistic and hope for things to get better for you, and while some improvements are made here and there, they don't feel like they're enough to push back the weight of everything else that's keeping you down. Or much worse, something else comes along that puts you back at square one. It's frustrating as hell, and it's difficult to look on the bright side of things after so many setbacks. You have every right to feel upset and you should vent. It helps a lot to get it off your back, and it makes it easier to deal with your troubles. Don't be angry at yourself because you feel that your problems aren't as bad some other people's.

You have a lot of good friends who are willing to hear you out and offer their support whenever and wherever you need it. You don't have to go through it alone. Hang in there, Ileia.

I'm also really sorry about Georgie, Ileia. I just found out about him this morning

[Otohiko]

I'm sorry to hear about Georgie, Ileia

[CodeZTM]

I'm so sorry Ileia, about Georgey and everything else.

/all the hugs ever

[BasharOfTheAges]

I came back from dinner last night to noticing a strange dripping sound. At the same time my father, who had stopped by for the weekend, noticed some water stains on the ceiling in my family room and office. Opened my closet where the HVAC blower unit is and found about 10 gallons of water sitting at the bottom of an emergency catch basin. The blower unit for my HVAC system hasn't been serviced in like 5 years or more... bad on me, and the condensation from the AC part of it has been really high lately because of the high humidity heatwave we've had up here for the last week. I'm guessing the drain might be plugged a bit too. It looks like no serious immediate damage. Been running fans all night... but I'm definitely going to need an emergency HVAC repair to happen very soon and I might need to tear open the ceiling in my office right where I just got everything set up for my new painting table.

[BasharOfTheAges]

System was off all day, so I just got home and turned it back on. Annoying grinding metal sound started up. Thought something was a little stuck, so I tried a bit of percussive matinence... Turns out it was the soft, easily dented sheathing around the blower housing hitting against the rotating drum inside and the banging on it just dented it more. Now its too loud to even run without the thing sounding like a jackhammer.

[Kionon]

I just fired my psychiatrist because he would not shut up. He kept trying to talk about Japanese politics and how life is so so hard for him trying to assimilate into Japanese society after thirty years and he just doesn't think that my naturalisation will change anything about my relationship with Japan...

Dude. Shut up. I am not even discussing JP citizenship with you. And you are supposed to listen to me.

I've actually noticed this about most of my male doctors and I've decided I'm going to look for a female one, but it is really hard to find one who is English speaking and takes Japanese national health insurance. And I am just looking for a GP at the moment.

[ngsilver]

The new SSD I had bought back in April to replace the 80gig Intel SSD I had as my system disk bit the dust and is now in RMA process. I needed a larger disk for my main system disk and in the process I was able to span the 2 Intel SSDs to make a 160gig editing scratch disk. I love my intels and have had no issues with them but they're twice as expensive as many other brands. So I decided to go with a SanDisk Ultra Plus 128GB SSD because it was cheap. I've had experience with sandisk SSDs with the playback/stream systems I built for Youmacon so I figured it'd be fine. Go figure it bites the dust almost exactly 3 months from when it was installed and first turned on. It's something that happens so I'm not really all that angry tbh, but SanDisk has the most annoying RMA process I've ever dealt with!

First I had to open an online trouble ticket with them. Then, after waiting 3 days for a response I get an email response asking me to re-install my OS on the drive. I refused as all the troubleshooting I'd done up to that point points to a disk issue and not an OS boot issue (apparently they latched onto the first statement that the issues began with a BSOD that led to boot failures, completely looking over the 10 paragraphs of troubleshooting steps and results provided after that initial statement.) After arguing back and forth for a few more days via email I finally got the support person willing to offer RMA for the device, I just had to re-state everything I already had filled out in their online system about the registered SSD and my personal info. So after all that I finally get a voice mail today from support, leaving no callback number, asking for me to once again confirm the date of purchase. Since I wasn't given a callback number I just called the number on my missed calls list. After being bounced around by 3 different operators I finally made it to SanDisk support, in India.... What proceeded after this was an hour long conversation of the support person on the line not understanding what I am saying, asking me to repeat all the steps I had already argued on, before finally accepting the RMA and sending me the info on it. The upshot of this is that I don't have to pay for shipping, but getting to this point was a journey and once they receive the part in 1~5 business days they'll ship the replacement out in 1~10 business days for a 1~5 business day arrival. In the end I'm going to be out of a system disk and thus PC for about a month... So much for my planned AWA entries.... (I do have my laptop and it has Adobe CC installed on it, but I will have to come up with some ideas from scratch since all my source/projects for my previously planned vids are sitting on my main system that I cannot access)

Sigh... I understand that these things happen and honestly I'm glad the drive failed now rather then a day after the warranty ends, but the process is so arduous. Last RMA I had to do was for a motherboard from gigabyte. All I had to do was register the product (it was in use for 4 years by this point) and fill out the info and the issue. They issued an RMA no questions asked and I had my motherboard back in a week good as new... maybe I was spoiled by that process, but having worked in tech support on the other end of the call it pains me to have to deal with script readers.

TBH, I think I'm going to skip SanDisk the next time I consider an SSD purchase. Perhaps it is really worth the extra price to buy Intel....

[Dr. Derpface, J.D.]

About at the end of my rope where certain people. New Guy (who's been here since January) was hired fresh out of school with a degree in Audio Engineering that the ink was barely dry on, ostensibly, to improve the quality of our live broadcasts. As such, he was put in charge of all things A/V related. This includes things like DVD creation & distribution, video editing, etc. that I had previously been tasked with. But the way this whole situation was sold is that he's some sort of whiz-kid who can do anything and everything...

Well, FOH sound has improved (even though I feel it's entirely too loud, but what do I know, I'm not "certified" ), but the rest of the stuff is falling by the wayside.

• Broadcasts are no longer edited down for replay the following week. They just end if they go over.
• Aspect ratios for online video are screwed up (4:3 letterox stretched horizontally to be 16:9 - the worst of both worlds) despite being informed of this WEEKS ago.
• Videos are put online much later than they used to be.
• Filesizes are about 8x higher with worse quality.
• Phase variance in recorded audio not fixed, even though I told him EXACTLY what the likely suspect behind the issue is.
• Instead of just inverting one channel, he creates a completely seperate mono encode to put online.
• Media distribution is back to me, but he still hasn't given me the ISO's I need that were created by him.
• Broadcast computer just needs some tweaking to fix performance issues, they go buy a $4,000 Mac Pro instead, that suffers the same issues.
• Computer for another input to the video switcher freezes right before broadcast. He wasn't even aware we used that system.
• "Acoustic treatment" for the broadcast audio room consists of leaning a couple of panels behind the monitors, rough backing visible to anyone walking by.
• Waits until the last possible minute to get a crew together for outside events.
• When nobody signs up so the event can't be broadcast, makes up some excuse about how "the team got a well-deserved break."

I could go on, but I need to calm down and get some sleep. But the worst part is I can't even bring any of these issues up. It would be seen as nothing but sour grapes on my part.

[Castor Troy]

Finally got booted out of my house by the cops last week since my laywer warned me that the court immediately dismissed my latest injunction to stay in the house for another 2 weeks to prepare for my court date. At this point, I didn't really care anymore since living in the house was a death trap every 2 weeks. The court got tired of my injunctions and told me to GTFO.

I put up a decent resistance for the past 6 months and (mostly) enjoyed every minute of it. Kinda sucks to lose the first house I ever owned, but if I can get it back, great. If not. Whatever.

Good news is that I was able to find a new apartment pretty fast and my landlord decided that I can get all my stuff out for free, so I got it all last Saturday and safely moved it into my storage unit.

My new apartment is pretty fucking awesome and my (now former) landlord and my former mortgage company are probably shitting bricks right now because the first hearing of my court date is Thursday.

War's finally begun.