There was a company wide announcement this morning: some of us will be unemployed by noon today.

Oh joy!

If anyone needs me, I’ll be hiding under my desk until lunch.

In other news: We dropped my wife’s motorcycle off at the dealer last night. They’re installing the majority of the accessories that we ordered today (with the exception of the windshield, which has been back ordered until september).

Also: we need to buy another windshield for my wife’s Durango. With all the construction on the freeway, there’s quite a bit of debris. Yesterday, my wife was heading eastbound when a large rock flew out of the westbound lanes and smashed a golf ball sized hole in her windshield (she was so shocked she nearly hit the concrete barrier that separates east and west bound traffic. I called the Washington State Dept of Transportation and they’re gonna pay for a new one (this is our second windshield in 2 years that’s been smashed because of the construction).

The woman I spoke to at the WSDOT was polite and I didn’t yell at her (which I could tell she appreciated). Hopefully it won’t take 6 months to get this taken care of.

And finally: It seems that the withdrawal symptoms I’ve been having are subsiding a bit. The whole “shake like a junkie who needs a fix” thing is getting better. Of course, my back is killing me from all the car rides, but life in general isn’t too bad.

Quick update – 4:02 PM
I made it through the layoff. So did my brother-in-law and all my friends at work. Life is good.

I’ve been off the morphine for just over 2 weeks now, and I’m still feeling like crap.

I still get the shakes, my guts are in a whirl, and I have a general feeling of pure ecch 90% of the time. Wheee… fun!! Addiction is NOT your friend! I only wonder how long the withdrawal symptoms are gonna last.

Other than lying on the couch a lot and doing a piss poor job at work, not much new has been going on.

I spent most of yesterday watching “I love the 80’s Strikes Back” on VH1. Funny damn stuff. My son and his friend were watching it with me… laughing at the styles and fads of the decade. When they saw Boy George, my son turned to me and said “The 80’s were friggin’ weird, Dad!”.

Yeah… I know.

I then explained to him how I wore makeup back then. Mascara, eye-liner, lipstick, eye shadow, etc. I thought he was going to die laughing (and no… I will not share pictures).

Other news: according to slashdot, a variant on the MyDoom virus is all over the web. Google is currently down because of it (it returns error code 503 when you do a search)… so are a few other search engines. People… for the love of all that is good and pure… STOP OPENING EVERY DAMN EMAIL ATTACHMENT YOU GET!!! I don’t care if your grandma sent you a *.scr, *.pif, or *.exe file… use some common sense! Also… buy a damn virus scanner, keep it running at ALL TIMES, and update it regularly!

Shop as usual, avoid panic buying.

It’s 3:51 am and I’m awake and at work.

People are doing the whole vacation thing and we’re short handed at the moment. So…. I got lucky and get to fill in for the night shift again (thank God for coffee!!).

It’s kind of a pain in the butt to do right now. I get up around midnight and have to wake someone up at 1:00 am to put my back brace on (something I can’t do by myself). My wife has to work in the morning, so I got my eldest son to strap me up. I also can’t take any pain meds because I have to drive. It makes for a very long night.

I am gonna talk to my boss and ask her if she can keep me out of the graveyard rotation until after I get out of the brace (hopefully around August 12th). This ought to make my family slightly more happy (and well rested).

At least I have something good to eat: Mesquite Steak with jalapenio potatoes and a red pepper, corn, and bean mix. Nummy!

Lets see… what else is new….

My boss came to me on tuesday and asked me to set up couple servers for a new product. This is an install I’ve never seen before, but I’m never gonna say “no”. After talking to engineering I was told it takes about 10 days to get it all configured (read: it’s a bitch to set up!).

I got most of it set up by the end of yesterday and just have a few tweaks left to make it complete. Not bad for 3 days work! 🙂

The following image pretty much sums up how I feel at the moment (going off of morphine is no picnic!)

I have been notified that I need to make a retraction from yesterdays post:

I stated that I spent $10,700 on my wife. Let it be known that we collectively spent thus said funds.

Happy honey? 🙂

As for my astoundingly stupid actions yesterday which led to the destruction of the comment portion of this blog… all is well in the land of wwbd now. The author of the MT-Blacklist plugin that I use to keep those damn spammers at bay was unsure of the direction I should go in to correct my problems (but rightly chastised me for running such an old and beta version of hte software). I removed it and installed the current release of his plugin and all is right in the world. Seriously… Jay Allen is a savior to the MT using community! You should go to his website and make a donation… do it now!!

Other things: um… there aren’t really any other things.

So, I leave you with the link of the “whenever the hell I feel like posting a link”: Scary Squirrel World (because we all know that those little tree rats are demonic!)

This blog got a serious drive by spamming from some moron last night, leaving 210 different comments that linked to the same lame ass website.

Fortunately, I run a utility, mt-blacklist, which makes it easy to clean this crap off. Unfortunately… I selected too many comments to remove at one time and the script timed out.

This means that for now, you can’t leave a comment on the blog until I figure out how the hell to fix it.

Sigh… if anyone out there knows anything about mt-blacklist, here’s the actual error message it gives me:

Can’t use string (“-1”) as a HASH ref while “strict refs” in use at /var/www/whitewomanblackdog.com/extlib/jayallen/Blacklist.pm line 196.

Of course, I’ve checked Jay Allen’s site but have found nothing to help at this time.

In other news: It’s day 4 of no morphine for moi. I feel like a big crap burrito, but it may be getting better.

Also, on Saturday, I spent $10,700 on my wife (because I love her!). She’s the proud new owner of a 2004 Suzuki Intruder 1400 (silver) with a ton of extra accessories.

Update – 4:41 pm
I found a page on Jay’s site where I could post my problem. While they’ll pry flame me for being such a moron, they’ll also pry tell me how to dig myself outa my own hole.

Film at 11!