Sometimes I just feel like going off on anybody about anything at any moment. Well here goes:

Is it really fun to treat me like shit?

• I bust my ass to get things done so that the people I work for look good. And then I get shit on whenever I make any kind of suggestion based on my actual experience rather than pulling stuff out of a book or my ass for that matter. I don’t claim to know everything, but what I do know could be valuable in your decision making process since I am the one that is going to have to make your plan work.
• I bring home a decent paycheck and I take care of the things that family members ask me to do. But do I have to think for you too. I graduated from High School and got 2 Associates Degrees and some 4 year classes. I don’t have to do it again. And the fact that I took computer classes in the late 1990’s, actually the first one was around 1984 on a TRS-80. (10 “Good Times”. 20 goto line 10. ) It doesn’t mean I am any better at attaching files to an email than you are and you don’t need me to make sure you did it right. Oh, and the trash cans that are laying on the grass when i get home since they picked it up in the afternoon and everybody has went past at least once, I am not the only one that knows where it goes.
• I hurt all the time. That is why I don’t do things like go for walks or play soccer in the yard or wrestle with the kids or sit on the floor and play games. I have a 50% disability rating for a reason. I take 800mg ibuprophin at least once a day just to get by. GIVE ME A BREAK. I don’t like doing those thing as much as I used to because it HURTS to much. I am sitting in a reasonably comfy chair at my desk and I am in pain. Don’t ya’ll get it?
• Please stop saving up conversations or questions until you think it is the right time to discuss it. The right time is now. If you wait and hit me with 15 different things when we finally get a few moments of peace, it isn’t a few moments of peace, it turns back into get things done mode.

Please feel  free to comment. I would love to hear from anybody that is feeling my pain or wishes to add to it. I really just want to hear from you.

Since I have deleted all of my social media accounts I don’t know if anybody will even read this but it will make me feel better if I would explain what is going on. A loved one seems to have an issue with my phone going off and me getting on the computer to Twitter or update my Facebook account to the point of me not even wanting to do it anymore. I deleted my Twitter account on Sunday I think and deactivated my Facebook shortly after that. It has been very quiet as far as my phone going of and at least 2 more hammers that were used to beat me into submission are retired.  I hate that this is happening but I cannot get over the fact that it keeps getting brought up and that they think I am playing F’ing Farkle 8 hours a day instead of working and there is no way to convince them otherwise, I just cut off the source. So there is the explanation, it sucks and I am not happy about it but hopefully this person will understand that everything I enjoy does not mean I can’t live without it. I have all ready stopped blogging regularly, a podcast that I really enjoyed doing whether anybody listened or not, and now Twitter and Facebook. Soon I will probably shut off texting on my phone and go back to dial up. By the way, they still have their Facebook account so enjoy.

Having just completed the month of July and the break-neck flurry of acticities that the first two month of summer break have me physically and mentally exhausted, I have been reflecting on the way things were when I was in school and the way things are now.

The major difference that I notice as the father of 3 ages 16, 10, and 4 is the dependency on others to entertain them. I don’t know when that happened but it seems as if they cannot find things to entertain themselves that do not require adult assistance. We have swimming classes, ice skating, tee ball, and color guard scheduled throughout the summer and they are fun things that they enjoy doing. The down time is the killer. My wife prepared the “Bored Box” that has small peices of paper with tasks on them that will be drawn when the phrase, “I’m bored” or “there is nothing to do”. THis was implemented early in the summer and has only been utilized a few times.

When I was a kid we would find our freinds on our bikes and start playing whatever from morning til night. We got into trouble, had a ton of fun, and actually enjoyed having nothing to do but hang out. With my kids it is a constant deluge of “Can we go to Hawaiian falls?” “Can you take me to Six Flags?” “Can you do something with me?” Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy doing all those things. I wouldn’t have ok’ed the purchase of season passes for thiose places if I didn’t, but I like to go on my terms. The last thing I want to do after working 8 hours with an hour in traffic each way is drive up to Six Flags and hang in lines with folks that have been in the 100 degree heat all day and all you can smell is BO and funnel cakes. If you are not 100% on board with dealing with all that, it can suck the life right out of you. Watching them have fun is great, standing in line with them for 45 minutes for a ride that isn’t all that great after the 50th time you ride it, not so much. Hawaiian Falls is much closer but it has it’s issues with the mere fact that it is a water park. Kids everywhere, shade that is overwhelmingly crowded with hot and sweaty humans that are eating whatever as they sport the awkwardly small (not in a good way) swimming attire. I am guilty of this as I have a few extra pounds but my suit is not that small. Proportion, people, remember proportional attire. 550 lbs tattooed hispanic does not equeal a 38 inch waistband with elastic so taught his lower extremeties look like an atlas. It can be a blast if the heat is bearable and the crowd is not too bad, but if it is overcrowded the wave pool look like a back yard plastic pool full of 16000 minnows. For the good of it all we are learning how to manage the time well so we miss the times that things are bad so we have good experiences most of the time.

I pointed out to my daughter the other day that what she did on Friday and Saturday, would consist of an entire summer vacation for some. Going to Hawaiian Falls on Friday and Six Flags on Saturday in which we got to see Jesse McCartney in concert, would be a busy vacation for us back then. I only remember one time that we went anywhere of note. Most of the time we would go visit relatives and enjoy whatever local flavor was there. Not that we didn’t have a great time, but it was just different.

I have once again had a moment that has changed my life. I finally got a new phone that does more than answer calls. My wife and I upgraded just last week. She got the LG Xenon and I got an LG Vu. I have become more productive and more distracted at the same time.
The only thing similar to what I am experiencing was when we got a DVR. It transformed the way we watch TV. This thing is changing how I do everything.
It is more of a PDA than I have ever had. I have the ability to take photos,video, and all that good stuff. Here’s an interesting tidbit. We don’t have a data plan. My friend is telling me that when that happens it will change me even more. I am excited and afraid. Should I be?

It has been a very busy and productive spring. My work has relocated to a new hangar and we actually had more tech issues than I was prepared to deal with. Now that i am back in the swing of things I wanted to post what has been going on. To my brother, Andy, I am very sorry that I have not been able to do the show or post any thing at FTHTTT. I have been going so fast with Tee Ball, Color Guard, and other kid related activities by the time I get home I have totally forgot about it and it is too late to get online and get it done. To be honest i have not even had the chance to watch any racing, let alone form an opinion.
I have been working on learning about the open source movement and putting as much of it to work as i can get my hands on. I have created an ubuntu laptop now and am really enjoying it. I have a dual boot vista/ubuntu machine at home now and am loving it.

It has been a while since I last wrote and I am having a seriously crappy day. Things are beginning to happen around here and people are starting to realize the things I have been trying to bring to their attention actually need their attention. So I am getting looks like why didn’t you handle this when I give them the answer that Ihave been waiting on you to decide and it is really frustrating. Then I get routers and access points that have minds of their own. And now the computer that I actually do work on is acting crazy so as I wait for AutoCAD to uninstall so I can clean install it again I reach for the laptop and relieve some stress. I think I should watch a movie or something tonight,

Sorry for the gap in posts. Things have been happening quickly around here. We have had family emergencies, new offices in which I (the default IT department) had to setup everything from cat5 connectors to printers to phones. But I guess that is job security, maybe.

If you have read my post in the past you know that I have been diagnosed with idiopathic hypersomnia. Then after trying a medication that worked well I was told that the insurance would not pay for the prescription. After consulting the doctor who gave me some other solutions that were similar to what I had all ready been doing. I went to the VA and got the prescription filled by just showing the doctor my results and talking with him. Nothing too it.

I have been taking it for 3 days now and I feel better and worse. I was drinking 5 or 6 cups of coffee a day just to stay awake. Well, now I have to cut that back and the headache is starting to bother me. The mention of drinking decaf makes me cringe. I have also noticed that I become irritable in the evening. I don’t know if that is the medicine wearing off or a sign that I need to go to bed. I am fighting through it but I don’t want to bother my family. Over the last 2 days I have managed to more done than I would in a week.

My wife has been working on the flower beds and it really looks nice. She has great ideas on what to do with the little area that we have. I know she likes doing that but she seems very frustrated while doing it and I can’t figure that out.

It is something that happens to all of us. We reach a point in any venture that we take on and then we get to the place that a decision needs to be made, a direction needs to be set, or a plan needs to be developed. The economy is struggling, the country is trying to figure out what it wants to be, and cities and states are trying to figure out whether to take bailout money or not. Families are trying to determine how to move forward and provide for now and try to look at the future.

Whether we want to admit it or not, the future has changed. Just 1 year ago i was thinking about setting up retirement stuff and college funds. Now I am trying to do the same but the fact that my 401k is own 40%. I am basically losing the employer matching each month. The only thing certain about the future is it won’t be what you expect.

I tell you, the way the last week has gone in the life of the bartonomus, I am beginning to feel like the stars have misaligned themselves. Holy Crap! Last Thursday I had one of these machines refuse to boot to windows. Of, course this has critical data to our day to day operation that has not been backed up so after 3-4 hours of carefully trying to restore the thing without losing any data Iwas successful. It is still acting weird on startup but it is running otherwise normally.

Then, my co-worker who is not very tech savy has his home machine catch the crud. It has some data that is important to a project that has been going on for a while so my boss volunteers us (he and I are the resident IT department, by default). He give it a go and by Friday lets me at it. Well, after several different types pf attempts, I get the thing to at least get to the WindowsXP splash screen. From there I know I can make some things happen. Repaired XP but lost alll and I mean all the data. I ran a Linux based utility of of a hand dandy cd and it scans it and I found the virus and got rid off it.

I told him several times that I was trying to do every “non-destructive” repair I could find. I honestly think the data was lost before I even touched it. After telling him that his machine was running but I will have to recover what I can he informs me that he had all of his tax records and about 10k photos on that machine. And he did not back them up. OY! The machine had a 60GB hard drive. After getting working it showed 46GB of free space. I recovered 49 GB of data after lettig it runn over the weekend. So i try to find a storage solution for him and then he says he has a hard drive that we can store it to in his car. Cool, external 250GB I think. Wrong, internal 250GB HD. So I tear his machine apart and install it, initialize and let it format as I go home for dinner. Yesteday I get the tfiles saved and put in the new drive so he can go through and keep what he needs (I sure as hell ain’t gonna go through 49 gigs of someody else’s data). Install AVG so he has some antivirus. FAIL! He is so far behind on updates I have to run Windows Update so AVG caan run. After 67 updates including XP service pack 2. I get it installed. Run the scan overnight and come in this morning.

As well as dealing with all that, I had to fix another of the big machines that needed to have it’s video card replaced. It started acting up and then just quit working. I usedthe Dell online chat and trouble shot it and they got me a new by lunch and he was up and running when he got back from lunch.

My computer has been having issues as well but nothing major, just enough to piss me off while trying to do everything else. Fixing those issues as they come up.

So I got home last night and really felt the need to run anti-virus scas and updates on all our machines just in case. Nothing major there, knock wood. So I came in this morning and check my co-workers machine and it had runs the scan and took care of the minor issues. restarted it to update everything and she is running well. I unhook it from the monitor I used to fix thins and move the other machine back in its place. and then I hear, I bought some more RAM to put in the machine to make it run better, can we put that in today? Here we go…..

BTW, I am a drafter.

Good Morning! A simple greeting that is said out of reflex for most people every single day. I have always tried to say good morning with honesty and sincerity. It is the first impression that you give the people around you every day. I have known many people who just say it out of habit and you really feel like they could care less about giving you a smile and a wish that your morning be good. But I digress.

Ever since being diagnosed with my sleep disorder, I have tried to do things that can keep me from getting sleepy as well as things that wake me up. I have found that waking up is a difficult thing for most everybody. I now understand that the rutt that I find myself in from day to day adds to my feelings of sleepiness. The more routine things become, the more unable to feel awake and alert I become. In order to change things up I try to do something different each day. Today, i am writing this at a way earlier time than I would normally do and I have switched up the order of what I am going to do this morning. Unfortunately, my commute can’t vary all that much.

I also find myself getting frustrated with the routine of the folks around me. It is like clockwork. I get here at about 7am and the guys that get here before me are talking about one thing or the other. They mostly have a negative spin on things and I have to fight to stay positive. Not what i am looking for first thing, but I don’t expect them to motivate me. Here’s the thing, I break things up a little bit everyday and it is working almost as well as the prescription medication I had. Go figure.