So – recently my home-hosted Mac server’s boot drive took a powder, and needed to be hosed and rebuilt. The server functionality has proved significantly more difficult to rebuild than in the past, primarily a function of orphan docs clogging Google search results pertaining to this or that combination of this or that system and server software release.

At about the same time, AT&T cut off my phone’s data plan with no notice, something which I learned after an increasingly aggravating three hours on the phone with various personages in customer service and tech support. In AT&T’s case, the cutoff was the result of a policy rather than a functional issue – my Treo, which I have used with an AT&T $20/mo plan called MediaNet, is apparently not eligible for the plan, even though I have had the plan for three years and was initially set up with that plan by Cingular’s CSRs in the first place.

Cingular, for future readers, purchased the juddering, smoking ruin of AT&T mobile and rebranded. This is something which confuses the shit out of me when I go to pay the bill online. Each time, I struggle to remember that Qwest, my local landline provider, which was once AT&T, is not the new Cingular. My bill pay service won’t let you change the names of the accounts once you have it set up, so this is likely to get worse as, oh, gas companies purchase municipal utilities and are eventually absorbed by corporations owned by leathery-skinned ETs who arrive from Sirius five years from now.

Anyway, fuck AT&T, and I’m ready to move on. Being of conservative mien with regard to functioning hardware, I just want to swap SIMs in my current cell phone farm, which kinda-sorta limits me to T-Mobile, the other GSM provider in the US. Naturally, figuring out T-Mo’s plans and options is an undertaking akin to parsing Pentagon and TSA press releases regarding ‘progress’ in making America more ‘secure.’

Complicating matters, on Monday, T-Mo rolled out a $10/mo VOIP landline add-on for extant customers, which, once you really wade through the details, requires either DSL or cable, so your landline is likely to remain in place unless you know enough to buffalo your Qwest rep into dropping the charges for the POTS line while keeping the DSL in place.

Meanwhile, my server rebuild project keeps getting shorted time.

I really hate all of this needless complexity. As implemented in our culture, it’s effectively a non-governmental tax on time, and I resent the shit out of it. I suppose I could just Craigslist my phones and my computers, and transfer the mercury and lead disposal burden to shiftless cheap-ass hippies.

Come to think of it, there is a certain appeal in that idea.

At around midnight between Monday and Sunday, AT&T (formerly Cingular) started blocking internet access on my cell, which is currently a Treo 680. After a couple hours on the line with their nerds and sales goons, it was established that the company had programatically excluded MediaNet users based on ‘unapproved hardware,’ such as my 680, which is not an approved model of phone for the old plan.

I have used the plan for about three years across a variety of phones, so I’m pretty pissed off. Downgrading from my current 2-line plan to the cheapest 2-line plan offered will mean a revenue loss to AT&T of about $40 to $60 per month.

Despite this, no negotiating tactic employed would budge them to simply restore service. At one point, I began to use the milkshake line from There Will Be Blood; at another, I slowly counted off the dollar cost to AT&T of their idiocy, “One, two, three…”

I was wildly obstreperous, incredibly obstinate, intensely articulate, and wholly incredulous. I tried to be right, abrasive, and entertaining all at once.

Well, fuck ’em. Interesting to note that Verizon has a $100 flat-rate cell-and-land plan. Time to shop around.

Come on, come on, there’s a hundred-bucks-plus a month on the table. Who wants my money, assholes? Come on and tell me why you deserve it, come on!

Most of my day today was spent loading a solid half-cord of well-seasoned but mossy and buggy cedar rounds from some craigslister’s backyard, followed by a dump run to the astonishingly clean and sort-of science-fictiony Shoreline Transfer Station.

For my sawbuck, I had been expecting a quarter-cord at the most of iffy wood, not the really decent stuff I ended up loading, to my arms’ and my back’s chagrin. Having borrowed Greg’s little half-ton Chevy truck, I felt it was only thematically appropriate to bring the dog everywhere with me as I wrestled the recalcitrant truck into submission. He was very well behaved if a bit puzzled, since riding around usually means a visit to the dog park.

Of course, all this manly activity did nothing to advance my data recovery project, and I have been working on that since I returned. I have managed to get apache to boot and the base content is in place, but MySQL needs to be fixed, and there’s this and that Perl doohickey to wedge into this and that data crevice and yadda yadda yadda.

Time to reheat that ol’ pasta sauce, I reckon. I’m still a bit peeved that the data emergency has stolen some of my goals from me this weekend, but hey, at least I didn’t freak out about the problem and it looks like all the contributed content will be fine, one way or another.

Dammit, I forgot to call my folks. I knew there was some midday thing that would get eaten by the time monsters.

I’ve been asked about this a few times today, so here’s the standard reply, which is a straight-up party-line Cuban-American family reply:

Fidel’s retirement doesn’t really change anything, today. It might, if Raoul actually creates programs to change various economic or even political practices. But Raoul’s track record is not such that one anticipates big change.

On the other hand, maybe the family is really getting ready to step aside, and if so, who knows?

Here in the US, it can be tricky to talk about this stuff in our families, precisely because it evokes such strong emotions. Personally, I surely hope the US embargo is lifted shortly, as it has clearly not resulted in meaningful political or economic adjustments to U.S. or Cuban-exile demands. Likewise, I surely hope that the various on-island cultural, political, and economic pretzels Cubans and others have bent themselves into can be unbent with lissome Carribbean grace and good sense.

This weekend viewed, in theater:

Juno
There Will Be Blood
No Country For Old Men

Misc other:

Visited EMP and SF museum

Chores completed:

Vacuuming
Dishes
Veterinarian visit for dog
Long dog walk
Grocery run
Pantry straightened up, old food tossed
Straightened up both living rooms
Passport applications filed
Online housecleaning and updates finished

Recent news of mortalities hither and yon – tard bombs, a suicide, another suicide, two or three recent murders, a pet put to sleep – has me musing on my relationship to my own dead. I am told I spend more time with these shades than others do, than is socially common.

I don’t have a useful means to evaluate these statements, so I mostly interpret them to mean “you’re a downer, and harshing my mellow,” and appropriately ignore them.

From my perspective, I spend no measurable time with my dead, they being, er, dead.

Yet I do miss them terribly. I feel them standing behind me as I walk around, massed in the blind spot behind me, crowding together so as not to knock shit off my shelves.

Additionally, on hearing news tying electrode brain implants to involuntary hallicinatatory real-time immersive memory experience, my first thought was that I will be able to see my sister again before I too pass away. And that is a happy thought, infected brain lesions excluded from the wetware calculus for the nonce.

Last night, I dreamt that I have been running a self-published book off of this blog’s archives every X number of words. I held the slim and floppy newsprint perfect-bound paperback in my hands and flipped though it, feeling the metal type impressions and wondering how I was able to afford three-color handset type decorations and one-color engravers cuts of the various photos, posters, and drawings I’ve flung up into the bitstream since 2002.

I also dreamt that I started an independent film company with my friend Greg, Paul Constant (a writer for The Stranger I once interviewed for Tablet concerning his comic-writing endeavors), and Warren Etheredge of The Warren Report.

So it was a night of improbables.

Five days left until my first day off since December 1. Can’t wait.

I just took my dog out for a night time constitutional which concluded with me in hot pursuit of our domestic canid, who, in turn, had taken off as if on fire after a smaller animal, an urban coyote, had the temerity to cross our driveway out of the dark.

I had assumed coyotes must live around here but this was the first time I’d seen one. I think I know where they must live and I assume the recent flooding has probably disrupted their lairs and routines.

I closely lectured the cat about the importance of keeping insideam but she only sharpened her face against my extented finger.

As I pulled in, relieved to be free of the terrible rain-bound traffic on I-5 tonight, I noticed a flock of forty pigeons wheeling in the gathering dusk over the arc-lit asphalt of the filling station.

Thinking nothing of them, I proceeded about the business of filling my tank. I fiddled with my wallet and selected a credit card, and fumbled with the pump’s keypad, and dropped my gas cap, and so on.

Once a firm connection had been made between my car and the Earth’s carbonaceous past, the rattle and whoosh of wings drew my gaze up. The same flock wheeled over the lot, now over the intersection, now circling a skeletal tree. The birds’ orbit was compelling and curious.

After a few laps, some settled on the roof of the station’s car wash, only to excitedly leap skyward, clapping and rattling as they launched. I stepped out from the covered pumping area to get a better look as they considered and then fled another bare tree.

As I watched them bank off in another direction, a larger bird, all alone, settled into the tree through the drizzle. He plumped his feathers irritably and shook off the water as he turned his head, eye on the flock. The redtail hawk had squab in mind this evening, and they knew it.