Inevitability

(The Scene: An imaginary conversation with a hypothetical person. The Time: One week ago. The Place: Let's say...Malaysia?)

Hypothetical Person: Hey Jon, do you suppose you could ever get tired of looking at a beautiful woman with huge boobs?
Jon: No. No, I do not.

Boring!

(The Scene:  An imaginary conversation with a hypothetical person.  The Time:  Shortly after finishing the above picture of Denise Milani.  The Place:  The Belgian Congo.)

Hypothetical Person:  How about now?
Jon:  Shut up.

I mean, okay, it's a good picture, the woman is beautiful, and, indeed, the boobs are huge, but I spent a lot more time looking at the source image than really should have been necessary, given that it's a pretty straightforward image with nothing terribly complex, and that led me, ultimately, to get...well, a little bored.
It was kind of distressing.  It reminded me of the first time I went to a strip club after I quit drinking and finding that while yes, it was nice to see attractive women taking their clothes off, without the booze it wasn't nearly so much fun as I'd remembered.
 Beyond the boredom, though, was the inevitability of it all.
As I posted on Facebook earlier today, they say that a definition of insanity is "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  Well, what do you call it when you do different things and get the same result over and over again?
It seems to me that the word for that is inevitability.
See, part of the reason the picture above took a sufficient amount of time to finish to result in me becoming bored was that my entire approach to drawing it was different from the way I normally draw.  Entirely new techniques that were supposed to lead to entirely new results.
And yet, while it is, by my own admission, a good picture, it's not new.  It looks just like any other picture I've done using my standard approach and technique.
It's inevitable.
And inevitability is kind of boring, even when it has huge boobs.

****

 Speaking of inevitability, despite my earlier post railing at the Universe for its unwillingness to allow me to hold onto my VA refund for more than a few hours, I did plan to, inevitably, buy the Samsung Series 7 Slate.
So it's hardly a big deal that I bought it today, given that there's plenty more money coming in over the next month or two, and I have no plans - despite whatever notions Stacy may have about a Russian mail-order bride - to purchase anything else that's terribly expensive.
It's just that it would have been nice to hold onto that money for a little while, and to fend off the forces of inevitability for more than a few hours...

****

Earlier today I texted Scott a link to info about the slate and a message telling him that I bought it, and explaining what a good deal (it really was a hell of a deal) I got on it.

Scott:  Stacy wants to know what your mail-order bride thinks of it.
Me:  Who cares what she thinks?  I mean, she's just a whore.
Me:  I mean...what mail-order bride?

****

Boss:  (To Co-Worker)  We need to drag Jon out on the links with us.  (By which she means playing golf, for those of you fortunate enough to not have to hear about fucking golf every fucking day.)
Me:  I would kill us all before I'd let that happen.

****

Boss:  (Talking about our SVP)  He wants you to talk more.  He told me, "He seems really intelligent."  I told him, "He's probably the smartest person on this floor."  So he said, "Well, why doesn't he ever say much?"   I said, "Do you think Einstein had long conversations with most people?"

New And Exciting?

Hey Jon, looks like you're posting a new picture. Is it something new, unique, original, and challenging?
No? It's the same kind of crap you always post? Oh, okay.



(To be fair, I don't think that this picture of Scarlett Johansson is crap, and actually I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out, but...well, I'd like to be able to offer you something different from the usual stuff I post, but it seems clear that just isn't going to happen. So while this is a decent picture, it's essentially the same decent picture I've been posting for who knows how long. But don't let my artistic and existential ennui spoil your enjoyment of it.)

(Not) Living In Interesting Times

Thursday morning I woke up five minutes before my alarm went off.
Even so, I ended up leaving at pretty much the usual time, and somehow managed to get in to work ten minutes later than usual.
Not sure how that works.
I was a bit tired, but not overly so, until I got onto my weekly call with one of our vendors and she started talking about how tired she was, and as we spent a good 45 minutes yawning back and forth while reviewing open tickets, I found myself getting progressively more tired, and by the time the call was over I was ready for a nap.
Given that there’s nothing that I watch after 10 on Thursdays, I decided to turn in early, though that, of course, didn’t pay off, as the fact that I was exhausted was no help whatsoever in getting to sleep.
Friday morning I repeated the Thursday morning experience by getting up earlier than usual and arriving at work later than usual.
A bit before noon my boss came around and asked if I could go to a meeting with her that afternoon. The meeting was with another company down the street at 2:30. I had a conference call at noon, which lasted over an hour, and then went to grab some lunch. I’d just finished eating, at about 1:35, when my boss came around and said that the meeting was actually at 1:30 and we needed to go right now.
We got back from the meeting around 3, and my boss said that she intended to pack it in and go home and recommended that I do the same. So, after tying up a couple of loose ends, I did.
Still feeling tired, I decided to use the extra time to take a nap when I got home.
During said nap I had an odd dream in which a pretty girl I’d never met before was trying to talk me into going to some party with her and her friends, all of whom seemed really keen on making sure that I went with them.
However, this party, my dream self knew, was a party thrown in celebration of pranks and pranksterism, so I was, naturally, suspicious, with visions of the prom night scene from Carrie flashing through my dream mind.
I woke up before I found out whether or not I was eventually talked into going.
After I woke up it was an exciting evening of eating some leftover Polish sausage that I’d grilled the night before (While grilling the sausages, which were almost ready, with one already starting to burst, I used the tongs to reposition one, and the second the tongs touched it, the sausage burst open and sprayed my face and neck with hot sausage grease. I thought, “Now I know how porn actresses feel.”), and watching my most recent Netflix movie – Shrek the Third – on my computer, as for some reason the sound was jacked up when I tried watching it on my TV.
Despite staying up late last night not doing anything in particular, I woke up a bit before 9 today and decided to shower, dress, and venture out into the world.
I had decided to go to Best Buy to either buy some more speakers, or else simply buy some speaker stands to use two of my old speakers, and go for the full 7.1 set up. I got there a couple of minutes before it opened – as did about a dozen other people – and stood outside in the drizzle waiting.
Once I got inside I decided that I’ll just hold off on the 7.1 thing, possibly taking Scott’s suggestion and hiring some pros to come in to fish speaker wire through the walls and ceiling and get all of the speakers mounted. Maybe even get the house wired for Ethernet at the same time.
From there I went to Arby’s and had a Bacon, Beef, and Cheddar, figuring that the fact that it included bacon made it count as breakfast.
And now here I am, thinking about taking another nap.

Boring Day Entry

Yesterday the company held one of its “beer bashes” here.
This one was special, though, because it was the last one, or at least the last one here.
That’s because the building I work in has been sold, and everyone is being relocated from Reston to Dulles. Dulles has plenty of room due to the massive layoffs that have taken place over the last couple of years.
A lot of people have already made the move – Scott was trying to see if there had been any noticeable change in dress code when we were in Dulles on Monday, as the Reston people tend to take the companywide casual dress code to the extreme end of casual compared to the people in Dulles – but there are quite a few who still haven’t.
Even though yesterday was the official “goodbye,” we’re still very far from having everyone relocated, and it looks like that won’t be happening until last week.
The process has been going on for quite some time, and it led me to say to Scott yesterday that, “It’s starting to seem like the end of Return of the King; every time you think it’s over, it starts up again.”
Those of us working in the NOC, though, aren’t going anywhere until September, as they have yet to actually build a space for us in Dulles.
That means that for a few months we’ll be the only people in the building. Although this means losing the cafeteria, I’m still kind of looking forward to every day being like Saturday here in terms of empty hallways, break rooms, and bathrooms.
It also means that I’ll probably never again see the pretty girl who smiles at me that I sometimes see, though I haven’t seen her in a long time anyway.
Of course, there is one person from the NOC who will be heading to Dulles before September; next weekend is Scott’s last, as he will be moving into a new 9 to 5 job.
I’m going to come right out and say that I’ll miss him; he and I hit it off almost immediately when I started in this job almost five years ago. He’s been a very good friend to me all along and has done a lot to make this job more bearable.
Okay, that’s all the schmaltz you’re going to get out of me.
Speaking of friends, the other day after I got off the phone with Brian I thought, “You know, I should probably try to acquire at least one more friend. One who can actually go to R-rated movies.”
Then again, if I’m going to go through the effort of acquiring friends I might as well go a step further and give finding someone who could be more than a friend, and I just don’t have the energy – or unfounded and baseless optimism – to try to do that.
So screw it.
(Hey kids! Remember, trying is hard, and you’ll probably fail! So let “screw it” be your watchword. And that’s today’s Threshold Edutainment for Kids Life Lesson!)
Yesterday I burned my way through yet another comics-related blog, having gone through all of the archives and read everything of interest.
This leaves me little to do on my weekday workdays, as I can’t really bust out the comics (in hard or soft copy form) when there are management types skulking about.
Blogging is considerably less obtrusive and thus easier to get away with.
Of course, when I do that, Clueless the Wonder Intern gets curious and wants to see what I’m doing. As soon as he hears the clacking of keys his head pivots and he tries to puzzle out what I’m doing, thinking that maybe this is some opportunity to learn some important new skill, little realizing that I’m not doing anything worthwhile and that he isn’t actually capable of learning anyway.
Lately, now that it’s just he and I on the desk, he’s been sitting as close to me as possible, which annoys me. After all, as I’ve mentioned, at one time there were six of us working on this desk, so there’s plenty of room, and no reason for two people to be sitting right next each other.
The layout of the desk goes Windows PC, Linux PC, Windows PC, etc. To do my job, I take up four stations using one of each, sitting in front of a Windows box, and using the Linux and Windows boxes to my left. There’s Linux box to my right, which I’m using, and a Windows box next to that which I’m not using. He typically sits at that Windows box, which is too close, especially when I do something on the Linux box and he has to lean in close to try to see what I’m doing.
If he were a normal person, I would just say, “Hey, back the hell up off me,” but he’s not. It would take too much time and effort (Hey kids, what did I say about trying?) to explain the concept of personal space to him.
So if direct, blunt, tactless confrontation won’t work, that leaves only deception and trickery.
Towards that end, yesterday morning I turned off all of the computers immediately to my right and made sure that the fourth computer over was prominently on. Further, I moved all seats away from the desk except for one, which I placed in front of said computer.
This didn’t even give him pause; he moved the chair over and parked his ass right next to me.
This morning, however, I was smarter. I logged on to the computer he usually sits at, loaded up some graphs, and when he came in I told him that I needed to monitor them and required an unobstructed view.
(It wasn’t entirely a lie.)
Even so, he sat in that spot for several minutes just staring at the graphs as if he could somehow, through some magical process, figure out what they mean.
Eventually, after I’d said, multiple times, “Just use that computer down there,” he moved.
I will use this tactic from now on, since, as mentioned, he can’t learn, and will therefore never see through it.
In any case, I have a conference call that I should probably pay attention to, so I guess I’ll wrap this up.

Maybe I'll Watch The Grass Grow

I woke up this morning sometime after 6 and, given that this is my short day I thought about just staying up, but then I thought about not staying up and that idea won out.
I woke up at several other points after that and thought about getting up, but there was a wonderfully cool breeze blowing through the window and right across me, and when that happens it’s almost impossible for me to move, because lying in bed while a cool breeze blows across me ranks up pretty high on my list of favorite things.
(What do you want from me? I don’t drink and I don’t smoke and I have no sex life; my list of favorite things is naturally pretty short and I have to really stretch to come up with things to put on it.)
Eventually I forced myself to get up and do the usual bit of nothing that is my morning ritual. After talking to my mother I took a shower and gave Brian a call.
We had tentative plans to see Knocked Up yesterday, but when I talked to him then he said, “I don’t have time for the likes of you,” so I decided to try again today. This time he said, “I have more interesting things to do than go to a movie with you – like watching paint dry.”
Come to think of it, I may be paraphrasing a bit and he probably didn’t say anything quite like that, but the end result was that we didn’t go yesterday and didn’t go today.
I thought about just going by myself, but that would have meant having to gas up the car, and then deal with afternoon traffic on the drive back. Considering that I don’t especially like going to movies alone anyway, I decided to call it a miss.
Instead I just made a quick trip to the comic shop to pick up this week’s books, and now here I am.
Wish I had some paint to watch dry.

Random Crappy Pictures

There are some pictures that I'd taken on my PDA that I've had sitting around for a while and have meant to post, but haven't gotten around to it, mostly because they're fairly shitty, what with the blurriness and whatnot.
Still, here they are, starting with a picture that I call Enemies.


I call it that because every window on the back half of this car was shattered and patched with plastic. I didn't see any dents on the body, and couldn't really conceive of how this could have been the result of an accident, so I concluded that this person has enemies. Enemies with baseball bats.

Up next is a composition I call Hotel (Sans James Brolin and Connie Selecca).


If you don't get the Brolin/Selecca reference, you're probably a. younger than I am and/or b. less likely to retain the names of cast members of TV shows you probably never even watched than I am.
In any case, this is a shot of the hotel that my brother Brad and I stayed at when we were stuck in Detroit overnight on our way home to see our dad before he died back in October. The little raised balcony area on the right side is where I sat and wrote a Threshold entry when I found myself unable to sleep.
I've never mentioned it before, but I have to say that the only thing that made me choose to write an entry rather than hit the hotel bar that night was the fact that I knew that getting drunk would be the last thing my dad would ever want me to do.

And finally we have The Leaning Tower of Boredom.


One of the things my company likes to do best is spend money on Pointless Retarded Crap (PRC), little bits of expensive company progaganda which they hand out to us.
This happens most frequently on the heels of massive layoffs, leading us all to comment, after recognizing just how much money was probably spent on said PRC, that the expense is probably equal to the lost wages of someone who's been laid off.
The latest bit of PRC is a weird little cube thingie. It's actually several small plastic cubes covered in paper and held together in such a way that you can fold it around into slightly different shapes and reveal different printed surfaces, all of which have information that relates to business conduct and our rules for said conduct. Some surfaces have little ethically-related slogans, while others list a number that you can call to address any business conduct questions or concerns you might have. Still other surfaces stress the fact that all calls are anonymous in order to encourage you to rat out any and all co-workers who may be violating the standards.
In any case, on Saturday we had boxloads of the things sitting around, and hours and hours to kill. Here we see one of many structures I built using the cubes and various other materials found around the desk.
Simon referred to Scott and I as "uber nerds" for taking pictures of it. My picture turned out shitty, so Scott beamed the picture he'd taken with his PDA smart phone to my PDA via the IR ports, at which point we said, "Now we're uber nerds."
Of course, he has little room to talk, as at the time Simon was busy playing WoW, and is the only person I know, as I pointed out, who uses the "word" pwn3d without being ironic.

In any case, that's it for this installment of Random Crappy Pictures.