Staff Letters: Phil

...I've worn out always being afraid... An endless stream of fear that I've made...

October, October, October. The month of weird shit. The month of my 6-month anniversary (which is technically today, but Lynn is out of town on business). The month of Devil's Night. The month of All Hallow's Eve. Truly one of my favorite months.

October. Things change. The whether changes. People change. Clothing changes. Prices change. And next month is an election.

October. People dress up, eat candy, and do wonderfully foolish things.

Some of you may remember last Halloween wasn't a great time for me -- but this Halloween things are looking up.

October.

Oh Shit! Is it REALLY Oc-mother-fucking-tober already?! Oh crap.

So, this weekend was an interesting one. Friday night I'm bring Lynn home, and I we hear something hit the underside of the car as we near our exit. But it sounded like it went under the car and then it was gone. So I pull off the highway, and as I pull up to a light, I hear a scraping of something on the ground. At the same time, work calls and explains there's been some big problems. My brain splits between the two events going on.

A block and a half later, I pull in front of Lynn's place and get out of my car. While my coworker is still talking to me, I walk around my car to find a 3+ foot rod sticking out of the front of my car and bent around the side of my car and dragging along the ground. I realize I'm no longer listening to my co-worker and only caught that there were major problems. I told her I'd be in the office shortly and that I had to deal with something first. I hang up with her and Lynn and I look closer and notice that the rod has taken various gouges out of my paint and even put a small dent in the top of my wheel well. Great. It takes some efffort but I get the rod out of the front of my car, and head into work, which is only about 3 blocks away. I get to work to find out we had a power failure. Despite two power feeds, a deisel generator the size of a small apartment, and two UPS subsystems -- we somehow lost power long enough to bring the machine room up to a scortching 100 degrees when the A/C lost power. Various machines shut down, or otherwise crashed. Two admins were already there, and trying to get systems up. This was about 9:45. By about 1 we had all critical systems up and started working on the rest. By about 4:30am I told everyone to go home as all but about 4 systems were up. By 7am, almost everything was up and I went home waiting for a few minor issues. Around 7:40 I finally turned off my cell phone and went to sleep. There's a night for you.

On October 30, I'm having a Halloween Party. That should be fun.

Lynn and I are both not really into the whole "month anniversary" deal, but for our 6-month anniversary I sent flowers to her office which she seemed to like. A lot. =)

I'd like to say something about the upcoming election. Bush is a brain-dead monkey who doesn't know the difference between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Ladan, or Afghanistan and Iraq. He doesn't even allow someone with a pro-choice sticker to enter his compaign events (his security refuses to let someone in even if they remove the sticker). Please, for the love of all that is wonderful, do not subject this country to four more years of this moron. Go vote. And go vote for anyone except Bush.

On a different note: Doom III for Linux was released last week! Go Id software for being so cool! Now I gotta upgrade my machine!!

What else? Oh, my other brother and sister-in-law will be having a baby around my birthday! I get another niece/nephew!

BTW, I will be hitting all three California shows. See you all out there! And, if I'm lucky, Lynn will be hitting two of those shows with me.

Lastly... don't forget about our motherfucking cool contest!! There are two chances to win a $30 book!

Until next time...
Phil

GOOD

Maybe I'll get my motorcycle eventually
Halloween!
Metallica tour coming around again!
Going to be an uncle again
Lynn

BAD

No motorcycle yet
Not enough time for anything

MOVIES

Bad Boys II
Margaret Cho: Revolution

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