Got up at the butt crack of dawn this morning because either my doorbell rang or I dreamed that it rang. I'm guessing the latter because there was nobody at my door.

Anyway, I'm up and so now I'm logged in to work monitoring the last few remaining backup jobs from last night. Pretty fucking exciting, I know.

Last night Rich O's was crowded as fuck. It was standing room only in the place. It hasn't been that bad for a very long time.

Plus, it was about 90% strangers.

I sat at the kiddie table with one such stranger and ordered a Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier (1411) and talked with GlassesGirl and LibertyGirl for a bit. Then the throne opened up so I moved there.

For the longest time I just sat and drank my beer and talked with the strangers sitting around me and texted RockGirl. I don't know where they all came from. One guy suggested that maybe IUS had started back up. That's as good a theory as any I suppose.

My second beer was another Weihenstephaner (1431).

As the night wound down GlassesGirl and MusicalHippieDude and WomanRepellant came and joined me in the living room.

My last beer was an NABC Artemsia (190).

There was something else. What was it?

Oh yeah.

I wasn't going to write about it until I'd talked to MixedSignalGirl. Plus it wasn't really anyone's business. Well I talked to her finally on Thursday and told her what was going on. She didn't seem nearly as excited as I'd hoped. Timing is everything I suppose.

Tonight was a good night.

And I'll tell you why.

Because it made sense.

It's as simple as that.

Tonight was the first night in a very very very very very long time during which everything actually added up to the sum of my demeanor.

Tonight, it wasn't the past's broken promises that determined my mood. It wasn't the future's faded dreams that guided my emotions. Tonight, both the past and the future were irrelevant to the stark reality of the here and the now.

There was no rummaging through the cluttered attic of my mind to find the right excuse to be happy. There were no dates reminding me of arbitrary anniversaries to make me sad. There were no ghosts haunting my every thought and tainting my every emotion.

Tonight, I got to feel the way I was supposed to feel. The way anyone would feel in these same circumstances.

It doesn't matter at all how I actually felt when I came home tonight. Sad, happy, pissed, irritated, melancholy, anxious, blissful - it doesn't matter in the least.

What matters is that tonight, for the first time in a very long time, I got to be an ordinary person. An ordinary person experiencing extraordinary circumstances, and reacting to them in an ordinary way.

Tonight, for the first time in a very long time, I got to be sane.

My life has become an endless séance.

Which is funny, because I'm the one who's dead.

(I want to expand on this, but not right now.)

Okay, this is funny.

Not.

eHarmony is based upon a complex matching system developed through extensive research with married couples. One of the requirements for successful matching is that participants fall within certain defined profiles. If we find that we will not be able to match a user using these profiles, we feel it is only fair to inform them early in the process.

We are so convinced of the importance of creating compatible matches to help people establish happy, lasting relationships that we sometimes choose not to provide service rather than risk an uncertain match.

Unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched. This occurs for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply will not benefit from our service. We hope that you understand, and we regret our inability to provide service for you at this time.

I will end this silence.

If I haven't heard from you by then, tomorrow morning I'm going to call you.

If you don't answer, I'm going to leave a voicemail asking you to call me.

If you haven't called back by the time I leave work, then I'm going to your house.

If you're not home, I'm going to wait for you for as long as it takes.

I need to tell you something.

I will end this silence.

I'm thinking that maybe I should just move to Las Vegas. It might be cheaper.

I'm still, of course, going in less than two weeks. That will be all vacation.

I'm going again in late November for the same conference I always go to.

I already knew about this, but it's official now because I'm all booked.

So, yay!

As always, more detailed stalking information will be provided as it becomes available.

Also, the trip to Colorado in early September is still a go, so far.

I wasn't going to mention this at all.

I almost made it. I almost made it to the point where it would be old news, not worthy of an entry.

Almost.

But then, I figured, you guys have already seen me at my absolute worst, yet still some of you remain unrepulsed.

So a reminder is in order.

A reminder of my stupidity.

Got a new server at work last week. I think it was Wednesday. I do my Solaris installations over the network. It is 2006 after all. Installation CDs are so last century.

Anyway, I ran through all of the steps needed to make sure that the boot/installation server was running properly and that it was ready for the new equipment.

• I added the new MAC address to the NIS ethers database.
• Same thing with the IP address in the NIS hosts database.
• I made sure that all of the Solaris 10 CD images were mounted and shared properly.
• I created the proper TFTP entries.
• I had the network people configure the new server's switch port for auto/auto and had them put in the correct VLAN.

Wrong.

I rackmounted the new server, connected its network and console cabling, opened a terminal to the console port, and fired it up.

Watching the boot/installation server's logfiles and snoop output, I saw the RARPs go out from the new server. I saw the proper responses given. Then I watched the TFTP transfer of the boot image take place.

Everything was going very smoothly.

But then, then the new server installation failed with the message Unable to mount remote filesystem.

WTF?

I logged into another server on the network and verified that the installation CD images were indeed mountable. They were, so that wasn't the problem. So why couldn't the new server mount the fucking things?

I must have tried for four hours to get the new server to install. I even killed the rpc.bootparamd and tftpd and mountd processes and restarted them in debug mode, hoping that would shed some light on the problem.

Well, it did, in a way.

The problem was me.

It wasn't so much the output that I was seeing, it was what I wasn't seeing.

I wasn't seeing the boot/install server even trying to share out those CD images.

Finally, I figured it out.

See, up until a month or so ago, I'd used another server for Solaris installations. Up until about a month ago, another server had possesion of the IP address handed out by the rpc.bootparamd service.

And that other server, because it had access to the same NIS ethers database as the current boot/installation server, that other server was actually the one trying to serve up the Solaris CD images. Problem was, of course, that this other server didn't have access to those images anymore - they'd been migrated over to the new boot/install server along with the IP address used to identify the boot/installation server!

Duh.

So I killed the rpc.bootparamd process on the old server, and everything went as planned from that point on. The new server installed correctly. No thanks to me.

That's four hours out of my life that I'd really like to get back.

(This entry brought to you by Delirium Tremens. Delirium Tremens. Dave's Desert Island Beer. A DaveFest Primary Selection.)

Okay fine. I'll fucking write something relevant.

The pieces of my broken dreams lie at my feet. They've been there for longer than I care to remember. I suppose that I've become used to them, stepping around them, finding a path through them. They've become a part of this life that I live. Such as it is.

These shards do serve a purpose. There's a reason I haven't bothered to clean them up. They remind me that it's useless to yearn, that it's worthless to want, that it's naive to need, that it's dumb to dream.

That it's ludicrous to love.

If I sweep them aside then it's likely that I'll eventually forget the lessons that they represent. I am stupid, after all. I think that's been well-established. Forgetting those lessons would be bad. And these broken dreams remind me, but they also warn me.

There cannot be a second time.

So I tiptoe my way through this life. Such as it is. I watch my step. I pick my path. I go around when I have to. I get used to it. I become a nimble fucker. I should join the circus.

And then, and then she comes along and walks right through everything that I've so carefully avoided. With each passing second there's an audible crunch as another fragment is crushed into dust under her mindless stride.

My dreams, foolish as they were, broken as they are, they deserve better than this.

I deserve better than this.