Brush with Death

I was driving home last night after going out to a bar to celebrate the launch of a new website. I'm driving back home on the Parkway and I'm anal about certain things. One of which is not driving in the left lane unless you're actually passing somebody. The Parkway is desolate. Maybe a car here or there, but getting towards my exit, I'm maybe 10 minutes out and I grab my phone to change the song (I have my radio playing off my phone) and I look up...I see brake lights on the shoulder and I'm thinking...ok that's weird. I'm doing about 80-90 and all of a sudden i FLY past something in the left lane. I look in my mirror and see tail lights. Apparently the car on the shoulder had collided with the CAR that I flew past in the left lane. If I had been in the left lane I never would've seen him. His front end was smashed pretty badly and his headlights were completely broken because of it meaning I wouldn't have seen him until...well until i was about to hit him at ~80MPH.

Some scary shit. I'm alive out of sheer luck. I had a 33% chance of getting into an accident there and probably inches away from 100%

Going to hell

For the longest time I've made this claim. I'm quite sure I cemented this tonight. I always considered myself a person of strong moral fiber. And so the story begins.

Drinks consumed. You need a ride home.
Feeling good, both of us
We drive away.
Your lust so obvious,
Your touch prevails.
Outside your house, your will so strong.
I fake innocence,
I pretend to fight temptation in vain.
You claim drink as my weakness.
I let you continue.
Release.
Your husband does not know.
Now we have work in the morning.
What does tomorrow hold?

FINALLY!

A sigh of relief as I write the last few lines of code for the Flash app I'm working on at work. I couldn't believe it would finally be done. These last 2 weeks have been hell. Somehow we allow the design department to dictate functionality by simply drawing shit on a canvas in Photoshop. After arguing a few points and somebody noticing that we would NEVER get done if the design department kept making changes, I was allowed to move forward with most of the original ideas and a few added ones. somewhere in the vicinity of November 15 I'll be posting a link to the finished product. Now I'll be able to work on other stuff that demands my attention...the cycle never ends.

Stuck in my head

So I had a really good song stuck in my head.  It's an original song by Reina Del Cid on YouTube.  It's called Sirens.  I couldn't help but sing it over and over and I finally decided to record myself singing the chorus.  I hope it sounds ok.  Let me know what you think.

Poker Champ

Went out last night with a few people from work.  We had a poker/UFC night at Dan's house, he's the IT manager.  He's a funny guy.  As soon as I got there he had a beer and did a shotgun...he had to be toasted by the end of the night.  His brother made the strongest Long Island Iced Teas I've ever had.  We started playing poker around 6:30-7:00.  It wasn't looking very good for me, I had 5 chips left.  Somehow I started winning...a lot.  Dan's neighbor tried to knock me out by putting me all in.  I ended up taking him out shortly after that.  I'm not sure if it was the alcohol or some skill starting to manifest itself but I started hustling them and bluffing (I've never been good at poker mainly because I didn't understand it until recently).  I baited Nick, one of the guys in my department, towards the end too.  I checked for a few rounds and saw he had something and let him bet.  Towards the end I upped his bets by nearly 2-3x to beat his hand with a straight.  Knocked him out on that one.

In the end I won 2 games of poker and lost the last one.  It was only a $10 buy in because we were playing for fun.

I was driving home and shortly after getting off the highway I encounter a red light.  There's a Mustang next to me (2000's body).  I'm not really in the mood to race so I take it easy and now we're both cruising at 40 in a 35.  Out of nowhere an older style Maxima flies past us on the wrong side of the road as if we're not going fast enough for him.  We pull up to the next red light and this asshole is in between lanes!  I stop behind him and so does the Mustang.  The light turns green and the Mustang turns left and I go around the Maxima on the right.  I'm sure he was caught off guard by both of us.  Now I'm cruising again and he tries to go around me on the left again only this time it's only one lane.  I throw it into 2nd and floor it because I'll be damned if I let him do that again.  Apparently the earlier model Maximas have quite a bit of power because he clearly won by about a car length and moved back over barely in front of me and started to slow down.  I didn't say I was done...so I kept the throttle pinned and didn't budge when he tried to move in, thus going around him.

I'm not saying it was smart...but it sure as hell was fun.

Then i went to bed feeling great....and woke up with a bit of a headache.  I figured I'd eat something because it was about 1PM when I woke up.  My stomach didn't really like that and shortly thereafter the toilet and I were face to face.  I still haven't eaten anything since.  Funny part was I actually thought of thejoefrom1993's video where he said he had a phobia of throwing up.

On the bright side, no headache anymore.

Hacked

Backstory:  I own 3 dedicated servers.  I run one website off of these 3 servers.  It's load balanced across all 3.  I also have a few websites on one of these servers and only on that server.  In the recent past this server in particular was the target of an attack and somehow the attacker got in and made a backdoor for himself.

Today:  The aforementioned hacker let himself into the same server and wreacked havoc.  I'm part of an IRC network and they were able to traverse a few of the servers on the network because of my compromised server.  All 3 of my servers are part of this IRC network.  The server that was hacked also went down tonight.  I'll most likely have the datacenter reimage it in the next few days.  I was able to take a few of the websites off of it before it died tonight.  I'm just plain pissed that it got hacked in the first place.  Don't these people have anything better to do with their time?  I work hard to pay for my servers.  The money doesn't come out of thin air.  These bastards have the balls to fuck with something that I pay for every month.

I hate people.  I find them fascinating, but some people are just so selfish that I can honestly say I hate them.

Life lessons of the real world - cont'd

My story continues, as you can obviously guess from the title.  I got to choose which department to be on.  I chose to go back to front end with the manager I like and after a sit-down with the CTO of the company we concluded I'd be on as a special projects developer for the front end.  I would be a shared resource for both departments but primarily front end.  Basically this means that, for the time being, nothing will change with my current projects.  I'm glad everything worked out the way it did and I'm sure once October 2009 comes around I'll be looking for a new job.

As special projects developer for the front end my projects could range from back-end, flash, SQL, and AJAX as well as front end.  All technologies I'm familiar with and I'll be glad to use all my skills.  I'll also be partnered with a back-end developer for some projects to gain more back-end experience.  If nothing more, my time at the company has been one big learning experience.  I've learned more about people, Javascript, Flash (AS2 and AS3), PHP, and HTML/CSS than I knew going in.  I've grown as a person and I've also grown more cautious.  Sometimes it's the bad experiences that shape us most.  I know I've learned a lot.

Life lessons of the real world

I'm not going to lie, you're going to see a lot of work-related posts in this blog.  The fact is I code for a living and it's what I love to do so it stands to reason that since it's not only what I love but what I do every day that I'll have quite a few blogs about it.  That being said, I wish to share one of life's lessons with you.

Today - Monday, October 20th, 2008 - I learned a valuable life lesson about trust.  As many of you know, trust is hard to gain and easily broken.  Trust is terribly fragile and once betrayed, it's very hard to establish a relationship with the person that betrayed said trust.  Some people are out for themselves, it's a fact of life.  That's not necessarily a bad thing because, in the end, it's simply animal instinct to make sure you come out on top - survival of the fittest, if you will.

You might be wonder what I'm babbling about.  It boils down to the fact that I had my 6 month review today at work.  I thought it went fairly well.  I didn't get the raise I wanted but I got a bonus and I was told the raise would most certainly happen at the 1 year mark, mainly because the company is slowly being drained of funds by unmentionable sources.  I left the meeting with a good feeling.  I was sure my faith in the company, and most importantly my boss, had been renewed (we had a bit of a blowout last week when he managed to come down on the whole department because he was having a bad week).  I knew he had lied to me before but I figured I could get past it and continue a working relationship with him.  After all, I'm still getting paid.  I found out later in the day that although he presented me with two options during our meeting, one of those options had money attached which was not mentioned.  In retrospect he led me to the choice he wanted me to make and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.  Mind you that I have yet to sign a contract with the terms we agreed to in that office and I most certainly won't sign anything until I explore all the possibilities open to me.

I'm very childlike in my mentality.  To me, things tend to be black or white.  I'm a developer, I guess you can say I see things as binary or boolean, 1 or 0, true or false.  I tend to trust those around me.  It's clearly not the best practice but at the same time I don't wish to be closed to the world and unapproachable.  It seems I merely need to open my eyes instead of needing somebody to accidentally tell me something for it to hit me.  Maybe I'm not ready for the real world.  The real world is ugly, full of lies and betrayal.  It's a place for the battle-hardened.  I find it difficult to justify what happened in that office today.  I can't comprehend what motivation he had to mislead me (or lead me, in this case).  I have a lot of growing ahead of me and a big decision to make in the next few days.

I originally thought of quitting because I can't work for somebody who is going to constantly lie to me and I'm supposed to trust that this person is relaying my messages to upper management and back in the chain of command.  I'm not sure I can deal with the pressures of work as well as having to worry about what he's lied to me about today.  However I also thought of the fact that I'm not there to understand him.  I'm there for me and to further my career.  If I make as much money as possible at the company and put as many projects as possible on my resumé it can only benefit me and I'll have a huge stepping stone for my next job.

I'll have to see what I end up doing in the next few days.

What happens when you get old

A few months ago my grandmother's health began to decline. My mom hopped on a flight last week. She feared it may be the last time she saw my grandmother alive and it's been 2-3 years since they last saw each other. It seems she took a turn for the worse and now my aunt will be flying out. I have to drive her to the airport. Her flight leaves at 7 so we need to be there a few hours before then.

Tonight won't be fun. Not sure if I'll even go to work tomorrow. Maybe I'll go late after a decent bit of rest. I told them today that I wasn't sure if I'd be coming in tomorrow. We'll see how this goes.

When I was young (about 5-6) I had such a fear of getting old and dying. I would cry and come up with theories on how to beat death. I thought you didn't die until you hit the floor. I remember thinking that if I held on to something I wouldn't fall, thus not dying.

I'd rather not think about death and it's inevitability. I'd rather think about life and its inconceivable complexity.

A nice surprise

I woke up this morning to realize I already had somebody not only read my first blog but also take the time to post a comment. I wasn't expecting anybody to have read it yet since I only created it last night around midnight.

I plan on eventually writing real blogs but for now I'll be blogging about blogging. I'll bring in parts of my day so it's not terribly boring. I also don't plan on blogging every day or that'll be boring. I'll blog every few days or if something eventful happens. In the meantime, check out Joe's vlog and blog and Josh's blog - both far better than mine.

On a sidenote, I've been working on some flash at work. I'm not sure I can legally tell you exactly what it is but I can tell you it's for Playboy's apparel site and it's my first major flash project. I coded it in ActionScript 3 and it's pretty damn cool. I'll link to it when it's complete. That should be in 1-2 weeks.

Back to basics

I thought I had left the blogging life behind. I guess I thought wrong.  I was never terribly good at blogging but always wanted to express myself.  I find myself to be far more eloquent in writing than I tend to be verbally.  Perhaps it's the fact that I have time to compose my thoughts - though most of my writing is stream of consciousness anyway.

I've recently been intrigued by the idea of vlogging and I'm not terribly sure I'd be any better at it that than I am at blogging but, as I said before, it intrigued me. Maybe it's already past its prime, too popular, too mainstream. Who knows. Maybe I'll work up to it regardless of its social status in the public eye.

For now, I'll settle for blogging and attempting to make my life a bit more interesting so others may want to read about it. Come back soon and see how it turns out.