dude, where's your car?

This is a picture of part of the yard of my apartment and the road infront of it. For the past 5 days or so there has been a large new pothole that has been terrorizing drivers at night. Basically every other car that passes by drops in the pothole at night. Hubcaps fly off, tires get torn and front ends get destroyed I am sure. Anyway two nights ago I was sleeping by my big window on the bed in the living room from which that picture was taken only to be woken up at 3:30am by some fool shouting "hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello" x100 at the top of his lungs. I just ignored this fellow as I assumed it was just some cokehead who clearly couldn't be talking to me as I know its hard for people to see me up in my bed in my ghetto penthouse from the road or in my yard at ground level. I continued to watch him as he walked around my yard trying to get attention from my neighbors but to no avail. Shortly after I noticed a tow truck drive up and made a 3 point turn on the main road at which point in time this fellow left my yard. I now realize what has happened, he was one of the unfortunate ones who dropped in the pothole and disabled his car. After hearing the flatbed tow truck carry away his car, I decided that it was time for some piece and quiet after been woken up several times earlier that night by other events and went to go sleep in my bedroom that is essentially sound proof.

Anyway I was in the common area the next day about to leave and my neighbour, Eddie, stopped me and told me they stole his car that night. This is a better picture of the entrance to our yard, to the bottom left out of the picture is where we park. I told him about what I heard and saw that night and he told me he was sure that somebody drove in and towed his car out as his car was one of those with the immobiliser chipped ecu's that required the key with the code to start. I felt bad for Eddie as he only had 3rd party insurance coverage but he didn't seem to be too disturbed by it, I guess business is booming for him now(He owns a popular strip club in town). I was sleeping by my window again this morning and at about 6am I was awoken by people talking downstairs. I peeped out my window and saw it was only Eddie talking about his incident with one of the other tenants, I hear car drive up and more people talking.. its Eddie's mother. This woman reminds me of my mother, very annoying.
She, Eddie and the other tenant is now talking about it and I hear another car drive up, its the police. Apparently they found Eddie's car abandoned down the road yesterday. The thieves came in, broke into the car, took apart the ignition to break the steering column lock and pushed the car out of the driveway down the road so they could hotwire it. After they realize it couldn't be hotwired they abandoned it on the road, I guess the immobilizer ecu is worth the money. I am not really bothered much by the thought of them stealing my car too as the insurance payout would probably be a lot better than what I could actually sell the car for.

I will now leave you with an image of how I view the world from the Ghetto Penthouse

My leave cherry is now popped

I took last Friday off, this is the first time in my working lifetime (two years) that I have taken any leave. This leave was well deserved after all that work I was the previous two weeks.
Anyway the Thursday before I called Jodi (My x-crush that I speak of in previous posts) and I asked her if she wanted to go to the beach on Friday, due to the fact that she was upset with me a few weeks earlier for not inviting her to the beach when I went to Lime Cay. She said she wasn't sure and would call me at 8am and tell me what's the deal, now I was bent on going to the beach and relaxing no matter what so when 9am Friday came and I didn't hear a peep from Jodi I called her and asked her what's going on?

J: Friday isn't a good day for the beach, lets go on Sunday.
Me: what's wrong with Friday, I thought you didn't like the crowds?
J: It's just strange to go on Friday plus I'm not sure what's going on today.
Me: you have other plans for today?
J: no.. I just don't know what might happen later.

Of course I am no fool, this girl is hoping for some other plans which she refuses to tell me about to come through and going to the beach with me was plan b. I refuse to be a plan b so I tell her never mind and call my plan b. Its ok for me to have a plan b as I really wanted to go to the beach and quite a few of my friends wanted to go with me plans b, c and d heh.

I called plan b and she was game, I told her I would come for her at 10:30 then went to take a quick shower before I left. Much to my surprise she was ready and waiting for me by the time I reached to her house. This girl has always had a track history of making people wait whenever she is going anywhere and I was prepared to wait 1 hour that morning. K, plan b, was pretty hot in her beach wear. I had to put out extra effort not to touch her that day as it would only lead to bad things. K was kinda boring at the beach, she just sat in my beach chair all those hours eating fish, smoking, sleeping and reading her book in the shade while I was up and down all over the sand and water. This was a new side to me as I used to be able to toss her about the water and have fun the last time I went to the pool with her over a year ago.
I had fun at the beach ignoring the fact that K was lame, I wish I could spend every day at the beach, which leads me to this Friday coming up. To the left is my friend Renee, plan d I think. She also apparently wants to go to the beach with me. This has me confused to no ends.. it must be a trick. Renee is my x's good friends and Renee and I have a platonic relationship, why does she want to go to the beach with me? just the two of us? She has turned down all of my advances to get in her pants with disgust and she loves to mention how much she thinks of me as a brother (the reasons she was plan d)
She is fun in a tomboyish way though, in the picture she was entertaining herself at my house playing pool by herself as I wasn't paying her too much attention. This would be a great asset to have at the beach instead of some girl sitting in the shade hiding from the water. Lets see what this Friday brings.

So its monday . . . yaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!

Who is happy for Mondays? me!

Q: Why?
A: As I predicted in my last post I was stepping into the standby week of hell.

Q: My relief today?
A: My boss came back to work after a two week leave and I am off standby duty :-)

It must have been planned, shortly after my boss left things fell apart and most of his responsibilites fell on my shoulders. At 3:00pm last week Monday I got a call from HP saying I need to shutdown the EVA8000 in my datacenter for critical repair work. Whats the EVA8000? its something that you don't power off, ever. This is the first time we are shutting down the eva8000 since we got it over a year ago and it's in my hands on that public holiday Monday. I got a window of 1 hour to do the maintenance work which was a few hours away so I quickly documented a shutdown plan/notification and sent it out to all the stakeholders who had dependencies on the eva8000(I also had to shutdown their machines due to this also). Try to imagine my bitter feelings as I called some managers telling them I will be bringing down their applications only to hear them at the beach having fun. Anyway after all the calls and the emails I went down to the datacenter, got the work done and was on my way home by 9:30pm :-(. End of Monday.
Tuesday brought on a whole different set of problems mostly I suspect due to issues we were having with the same hardware from Monday and I escalated all of them to the highest level, they were now partially out of my hands, HP is now sending down a specialist to sort us out.. right.
Wednesday/Thursday/Friday the specialist is here "fixing" the problem.. yet somehow we are in the exact same position we were in on Monday and he somehow stole my office space downtown. The problem is now 10x larger as my boss' boss is now asking me if its possible to schedule a business critical update on Saturday night. Now this update can only be done if I can get a process to complete successfully on Friday night. I gave him the grim statistics that this process has had a success rate of 1 in 3 over the past few days and he in turn tries to tell the business that it can not be done at this point in time. The business is not having it and they put the squeeze on him and of course he then puts the squeeze on me. We work with that 33% chance of getting it done and by some miracle it went through. At some point in time my boss' boss, the HOD, realized how much work was being done and called me and informed me that when my boss came back I can get two days extra off, yay! I can see myself sleeping on the empty beach, the only worries in my world would be the crabs on the sand.
Saturday/Sunday went by fairly smoothly. All things went as planned almost. They anounced the work being done to the system on Saturday night on the radio and the work started. I didn't hear a peep from a soul until 11:00am Sunday morning, when I got a call telling me the work is complete. It is my job now to test the integrity of the upgraded system, I told them to give me 20minutes as I was on the road on my way to visit my parents. I reach my parents house and of course a big argument starts between my mother and I over some old issues, I hook up my laptop, vpn into work.. the upgraded system is broken of course. After about an hour on a conference call with support from London and my mother arguing in the background all is well, the system is back up and I can have a civilized conversation with my mother. I then ate some food and left. On my way home, after a lot of thought I have decided to stop visiting them on Sundays, maybe they will see me once a month now. I refuse to deal with that added stress to my life at this point in time and it is avoidable, I hope they understand.
It is now Monday, a new week and a new chapter in my life. I have the next three weeks to kill before I am scheduled for standby again :-D

The long holiday weekend.. well for most people.

Yup as usual I am stuck at home again on another public holiday. Its Independence weekend and most of Kingston(the young'ns at least) went up to the North coast to celebrate it. My weekend wasn't a complete bomb though as I went to Lime Cay on Saturday and just chilled on its prestine white sands while filling my belly to my hearts content but today is Monday, the public holiday and my standby shift started today at 8:00am and it seems like this week on standby duty will be a very event filled one. At least I can look forward to a fatter paycheck at the end of the month for my suffering.

I will now leave y'all with a picture I took of Kingston four years ago from my sisters old apartment, not much has changed since then: