Teach a man to fish

I went down to the conference center this morning to elect a trustee for my company's pension plan. I figured that they would be operating off of Jamaican time so to pass time I drove by the waterfront and stopped to take pictures of whatever interesting there was to see in the sea :p. Looking at this picture now I am trying to figure out if this guy was one of the many homeless people I saw around the waterfront or if he is just a fisherman trying to make a living. I used to work in the Kingston mall building on Ocean Blvd. a couple summers ago and I didn't remember seeing so many homeless people before. but I am proud of this guy here as I suspect he just looks like he's looking for a meal. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man how to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime.

Of course my prediction was right.. a bit too right, these people started the meeting over an hour late so I had quite a bit of time to sit and lament how I got into this mess on a lovely Saturday morning. The one good thing is that I sat beside a lady from my company who I've never really spoken to before but she always waved to me whenever she saw me. We chatted for a bit before the meeting started so my social network within the company is 1+ soldier larger now. I won't make this yet another post about women but I left that conversation with the following question in mind: what is my standpoint on my co-workers daughters? are they off limits? they aren't exactly company ink so in theory nobody should screw if I dip my pen in them.. lol

In other happenings downtown this week the police foolishly locked off Duke St. and all roads leading on to it in preparation for the annual opening of Parliament. They normally do this every year but this year they decided to start early so I would have a hard time getting to work, I eventually had to drive around some barricades and negotiate with a police officer to let me through to my building. About three hours later I saw the ceremonies start, it was an interesting scene. All the big government officials came in their Land Cruiser/Prados, apparently you aren't saying anything these days unless you roll up in one of those. Lots of police on horses, bikes, soldiers on the road, police on the Parliament roof, the blue jump coat special forces on the prowl and they looked trigger happy. One should feel safe in an environment with so many law enforcement personnel but this is Jamaica and the police are the ones doing the killing. If all goes to plan hopefully this will be the last year I'll be working downtown for now..
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Who can relate to birds doing the nasty?

Apparently I can. I was looking out my kitchen window this morning while contemplating what to do for breakfast when I saw these birds carrying on bad. Ok maybe they weren't doing the nasty but that's a bit close to be normal company seeing the power line they were sitting on was about 100 feet long and they were the only two birds on it. Maybe a bird expert can come in a tell me why the other one didn't find his own spot on the line.

This sparked some memories of my adventures in sharing a bed with girls. One such adventure was with Original, I used to walk past her apartment on my way to/from the car park and probably after 4 short conversations she asked me to stay with her one night. She was hot, I was single, why not? We did exactly as I agreed to, I slept on my side of her bed and she stayed on her side(she had a big bed) then I woke up and went about my business back at my place in the morning. Over the next couple of days as she got to know me better she progressively inched her way over until she was sleeping with her head on my chest. Needless to say the following week, by the time I dozed off she was completely on me, not touching the bed, like those two birds in the picture above.

Now I wasn't complaining as I said she was hot, one of those girls that made my toes curl and my big 6"2' frame could manage her slim form but I remember looking over at all the empty space on her bed and foolishly wondering whats wrong with it, the bed must be more comfortable than me. I have since asked another offender for a reason of the invasion of personal space and the explanation given was that she felt safe when she was touching me. Of course they would kick up a storm when I roll over on my side and my back is facing them in efforts to get comfortable. Really now lets not be obsessive compulsive but sometimes personal space can be good.

pip pip.

UWI Carnival 2007

I passed by UWI carnival 2k7 was today like the paparazzi I am. I must say that things have changed since I have stopped going up there after my friend stopped working in the computer lab last year. The first thing that caught my eye was the new stop light at the main gate, this was long needed, I don't know why they waited until I left to put it in.
My carnival friend told me she wasn't going but it was supposed to start at 10am.. I did my Jamaican time calculations and figured it would start by 1pm yet still I was early. I stopped by the new Jucy beef for the first time too and as I finished I went around to the Mary Seacole Hall where things normally kick off.

People started to crowd there and these are some of the pictures I snapped:

This lady tried hard to get my attention from across the road so I could get her picture.. I'm glad I did, I absolutely love those shorts on girls, too bad I didn't see any girls actually wearing them though.. lol


These girls were representing the AZ Preston Hall, my old hall. As far as I was concerned this was the best costume, not cause yellow is my favorite color or anything ;)


These girls in the redstripe band were pretty lively in comparison to the digicel band who was dead like dog, of course they aren't seen above cause that would be a waste of space.

Rain started to fall shortly after it started so us spectators started to take shelter where ever we could find.. the girls under my bush were dancing up a storm.


The rain started to come down so hard that for the sake of my camera I sheltered by the Philip Sherlock Centre. These girls here on the left gave me some serious screw face after I asked them for a picture to remember the moment, they asked me what I wanted it for, I said personal collection.. oops I forgot about the blog. They started to smile after a little bit of encouragement from me though, I hope they don't mind.

Jamaica: the land of Kleptocracy

I was looking at this bit of money that normally litters my desk and I got to reminiscing of the days $2 JMD could buy me lunch and have change, I may have been young but I can still remember. Fast forwarding to current times it requires at least $200 to get something worthy of being called a meal.. why is this? I blame the government!

I many not know much about politics, economics or accounting but I know this government is running their country into the ground. The government is currently operating at $900+ billion in the red with them quick to borrow more to finance the next fiscal year's budget, how can they spend money each year that they don't have? They need to take a page out of Barbados' book.. I can see us reaching Zimbabwe's level in the future.

Where does the money go? into the prados and fat pockets of the politicians and their friends. I pay my 16.5% gct, 25% income tax, 1-40% cess/stamp duties, transfer taxes... for what? for them to take $2 billion out of the people's pension funds. These crooks should be held and charged for the injustice they have done to Jamaicans as the head of any other company would be prosecuted by its stakeholders if they ran their company into red.

.. don't mind my ramblings.

How to kill a croaking lizard

I guess I've mentioned croaking lizards(geckos) enough for google to throw a few people my way with queries on how to get rid of them, so this is my definitive guide for all those who come this way.

For those of you who have cojones my first line of offence is bug spray :D as depicted here. The fly right off the wall once the spray hits them so try to get them square on the head. The lizards may not pass immediately but they will be left in a disabled state for a while, long enough to sweep them outside or to pick them up with some tissue and discard.

I have seen my parents make attempts to catch them with glue traps but those didn't yield much. I have actually caught a large croaker with a spring loaded rat trap, I guess they like cheese as much as the rats. I have attempted to blind them using a 10mw laser but it seemed to have no effect.

For those of you who are deathly afraid of these things (yeah, even pictures of them) need not read/scroll down any further.

I strongly suspect that I sprayed this bugger before and he some what recovered from it.. but not too well... I doubt he survived his second dose.

Goodbye lover, hello friend.

Recently my friend threatened to steal my condoms and of course after she left my house there were none to be found. I asked her where they were and she said she took them so that I can't bump nasties with anybody until she brings them back.. now there is a foolproof plan. I later found them hidden under a pillow but this is just silly I should just stop such relations with her, cold turkey, as she is clearly confused.

This is a familiar fork in the road and the decision is hard especially when the girls have the goodies to make my toes curl. Local culture would state "dem have the glue to mek man stay" as I always kick myself after seeing some fine ass girls I've pushed to the curb previously. The problem is that these girls are not right, there is always a major problem that clashes with my requirements of a sustainable relationship. They may get A+ for body, A+ for looks, A+ for cleaning my apt, washing my clothes and cooking for me, but they fail horribly when they sign me up as Joe grind or claim to break up with their man when things start to get steamy with me.

I am glad I have enough sense not to stay or to grow those situations any further than some bump and grind. What is interesting though is that I am able to keep them as platonic friends after, though it would explain why it is hard for me to get some of my female friends to be civil to each other. The big question is do I end things with this condom hiding girl? She doesn't meet my requirements to be a girlfriend but her body is up to spec, I lose about 30 IQ points just looking at her and she does everything humanly possible to please me. This is definitely a road block on my road to finding wifey to settle down with.

Too much fun last Christmas for X-Miss Jamaica world

Like everyone else I was driving on to work yesterday morning listening to the radio only to hear them talking about 11 week pregnant Miss Jamaica. At this point in time I didn't pay it much attention as I thought they were referring to Miss Jamaica Universe 2006, Cindy Wright, not Miss Jamaica World 2006 Sara Lawrence. Later on in the day my friend told me it was indeed Sara and I was so shocked she hadn't even crossed my mind.

The news came as a shock to me mainly because I always thought of Sara as a little girl not some 22 year old pageant winner. Her older sister and I used to be close friends in high school and as such she got the label of little sister. Even up to this day I am trying to shake the 'little Adrian' name my sisters high school friends still call me even though I am now a couple inches taller than them at 6'2". It is sad though.. since I know the family and all. One would also expect her to know and practice safe sex, I hope that Christmas was worth all of this.

Later on in the night I went online to see what info I could dig up on this story and was led to my friends(I really hate social networking sites) hi5 account. Sara was pretty easy to find as everybody knows everybody on these sites, I don't understand how people can have 500+ friends in their network. If I was to ever have an account on one of these sites my friend list would be restricted to only people I actually know and talk to(at some point in time) and would probably be a sad 80 or so. Anyway I saw Jessica, Sara's sister, my long lost friend amongst many other people I used to talk to back in the day. It was nice to see them doing well after so long but this still isn't enough to encourage me to actually join.

Oddly enough as I was going through peoples profiles I was shocked at the amount of information they put on it and of course I thought back to this blog. People can read it and get a good feel of me, I'm not sure if thats a good or bad thing... lol. I am not really a secretive person so it would be hard for me to keep up an anonymous blog.

The fall of an era

It seems as if my one and first true love of the internet IRC shall no longer be. Well to be correct, IRC will probably live on but all my friends from there are now gone.

The early years:
I got my first taste of IRC back in 1996 but didn't have much access until 2 years later. After 1998 I started to get the hang of it but still bounced between networksthe place, changing aliases not really calling anywhere home. It was about december 1999 I came across a chanel #scripterz where I met a bunch of people who I would become close friends with for the next 5 years.

The dark middle ages:
As I used irc on dailup I became exposed to a world of linux and at a summer job in 2001 I worked under an ISP admin who seemed to be a guru at linux, at this point in time I vowed to be just as good as him. I had a 166MHz i686 machine w/ 32MB of ram which I used as my test linux box (it still resides in my closet today) and slowly but surely my linux skills grew. It was kind of pointless to have a linux machine on dialup as the only way they shine is on the internet and I didn't have any money at the time to buy access to a linux machine(shell) online to aid with my irc usage, the used to cost around $10usd/month for a basic package. So I started my downward path to the darkside, hacking.

In learning to use linux at home and my studies at UWI I became quite good at C and coupled with my growing knowledge of the internet I became a force to recon with, acquiring access to all the unix machines to fill my every desire. Social engineering, sniffing, stack smashing, man in the middle attacks,... ,I used every method in the book to hack. This grew my knowledge base swiftly too as I had to learn about the machines under my influence. IRIX, SunOS, OSF/1, BSD, SCO, linux, .., you name it I had a machine somewhere around the world with it, all driven by my need to use IRC with a higher availability. I was a mostly good hacker though, I didn't destroy anybodies data and secured their machines after I got in, so one could call me an elf that worked when nobody was looking :). It was all about being able to have the resources at my disposal and not have the legit admin aware of my presence.

The last mile:
After having hundreds of Unix machines under my belt I went back to the basics and focused on just programming and using IRC. At this point in time, 2004, I was just out of university and working as a C programmer writing code for verifone terminals. I was referenced by friends online and got small jobs writing security and OS applications for shell companies then providing me with legit access to unix machines, thanks to my abilities and the friends who suggested me.

Bang bang, you're dead:
Of course will all that experience my resume was a little bit more interesting that other recent grads of UWI and this caught the eyes of my current employers, I was interviewed for a unix systems administrators position and got the job. The tables had turned, I was now the person I had for so many years tried to outsmart and hack. I have become exactly like every other admin out there, I am sure there could be a hacker on one of my servers and I wouldn't realize it for now. Also since the start of this job my programming has gone to the dogs, yesterday I was looking at some snmp code and saw a variable being defined as size_t I had to rack my brains to figure out what that was before I eventually remembered what it was.

I did manage to work away at the years of atrophy and managed to code a program over the previous two days that will collect data to automate a new report which my supervisor now requires that takes out a good hour or so out of my Friday mornings. Now I can go back to doing nothing at all, yup on Fridays again :) but this coding reminded me of my hay day and when the internet was fun. Is this enough for me to leave my life of a well paid sys admin to be a programmer just scraping by? or a broke student with no care in the world hacking the planet? hells no.. ain't nothing going on but the rent + I am good at what I currently do.

I always knew in the back of my mind one day I would outgrow IRC, I just didn't believe it would actually happen. Hopefully I can find my friends via email but if not I am sending my final greetz to m[X], tannsi, badassy, ashay, Geewhzz, d3p and BringMe.

On a side note: while we are on the topic of the past I notice this snapshot of my old site from 2001 shows my old somewhat blog getting more hits than this one there was more content than that there but the snapshot didn't capture it. Hopefully I still have a copy of that site on my hard drive :)

Friday happenings

After a mostly dull week at work last week my Friday was booked. Auditors from KPMG passed by and took up 4 hours of my time evaluating our data backup procedures for the data center.. I hope we weren't lacking much. Of course during the audit requests kept coming to poor me having to do the job of 3 people as the rest of my dept. had been off on training, I guess the universe was making up for all the time I wasted, all the days left early and I came in late earlier that week.

My attempts for leaving early on Friday were thwarted by a last minute request from the cayman office to transfer some files. I was hearing talk all day about these files.. I even got a few emails about them and how much they needed them but of course the actual useful information needed by me to give them the files weren't provided until 4:40pm when I am preparing to jet. By the time I left work (10 minutes later :) traffic was at a stand still. My normally 30 minute drive home became a 40 minute stop and go in bumper to bumper traffic to complete only 70% of my journey where a guy decides to run into my newly repainted bumper.

To be fair I switched lanes and was in front of him and shortly after the guy in front of me stopped to turn into the Texaco at the intersection of Old Hope road and Mountain View road so I stopped suddenly, my car stops on a dime, what I need to remember is that other peoples cars don't. Anyway I'm not sure what this guy was doing but he managed to swerve and he bumped into the back left corner of my bumper. We pulled over to the side of the road and he started arguing, it looked like he was even trying to insist I was wrong and I should have stayed in my lane. I kept it cool but I did raise my voice at him to keep him in his place as it seems he was trying to intimidate me. Of course he didn't want to pay for the damages and didn't surrender any insurance documents so I told him I wouldn't hesitate to report the hit and run to the police which was only 3 minutes up the road. In a big dramatic exit he threw his arms open and said "si mi license plate numba yah" I walked back to my car and wrote down what I saw, he jumped in his car and made a hastily get away.

As promised I stopped at the police station on the way home and now who ever owner of that car is has a bench warrant out on their head. I don't expect much to come of it but I am satisfied as the damage isn't much and if the police ever stops that car again and decides to do a check he will face some jail time. It's a slim chance but it does happen, one of my x-neighbours did tell me about his warrant and how he got to spend a night in jail for it. I didn't get a chance to take a picture of the damage nor the back before the accident so this will have to do. I took this picture the week before, so just imagine the back and one will see what I'm talking about ;)

Later on that night we went out to the strip club, 4 of us, wingman me and two girls. The girls have been hounding me to go to the club since they have never been before and wingman has been hounding me to go with them since he has never been to a strip club with girls before. I'm not sure what he was expecting but I am 101% sure he is disappointed now, at least I hooked him up with a VIP card so now he can get in free all the time without me. Going to the club, all guys is fun. He must have thought that throwing girls into the mix that he didn't know would get him some action.. lol silly rabbit. Taking a girl 1 on 1 with you to a strip club will yield interesting results though, hopefully one day he will learn that 4 is a crowd.

Its been a while since I've been to the strip club, I must say the dancers had my blood flowing.. all except one who I affectionately refereed to as Fatty. Everybody knows I absolutely love slim girls and all of the girls there were mostly that so I was quite happy until about 1 am two fat girls walked into the club in plain clothes only to appear a few minutes later in their costumes. These girls looked like they were pregnant with their 8th baby and in their 3rd trimester. I thought to myself its cool, I would just ignore them and that plan was working fine until Fatty who decided to take a hands on approach on getting tips. I saw fatty walk up to two guys and gave them a lap dance. I was shocked that the first lap dance I saw from the night was from her given she was at the bottom of the barrel compared to the other dancers. It all became clear to me when she came over to me and asked me for money, I replied with a firm no quickly as she was visibly scaring the girl I came with and she walked away as expected. This was not the case with everybody else though, for the rest of the night I watched as she walked around the club and forced herself on the patrons and they all gave her money.. every last one of them. Even wingman was a victim, she came up to him and started to wine upside down on her head in front of him and in the end I saw him give her $100. When I was teasing him after he said he gave her the money so she would leave him alone lol. It may be sad but it is true, I suspect all the other patrons gave her money to leave them alone.. I am proud she got nada out of me.

Sand, sleep and not-so-right-ducks

My boss called me a few weeks ago and asked me to take some of my vacation soon as I had to carry over 1 week from last year since the dept. (all 3 of us) had a heavy work load and one person going off could throw a fatal blow the already not so smooth operations of I.T. in my company. So I sent in my electronic leave application last Thursday then called him on Friday only to hear him tell me "yeah I saw your leave app. yesterday, are you sure you want to go off next week?" I stuck to my guns and said yes, even though I had no real plans for my leave. He spent the next minute making strange noises, I am assuming he was digging deep for a reason to keep me in office yet again but couldn't come up with anything, then gave me the go ahead to take the week off.

The first day of my vacation I went down to the tax office in Cross Roads at 10am to renew my car registration.. big mistake. One would assume that at that time it would be fairly empty as most people would be at work on a Monday morning but the building was full to the brim. I then circled around the the Inland revenue dept in Constant spring only to find a long line of cars in the parking lot trying to find parking %$#. I asked my shadow to jump out and hold a space for me in the line while I looked for a parking space and proceeded to wait 20 minutes in slow moving traffic throughout their large parking lot. I was lucky that a space opened up for me before the traffic lead me out of the lot again and I rushed inside of the building to see her near the front of the line :) It only took me 8 minutes and we were out! I am proud of the team work!

The rest of the week was spent trying to tie up loose ends in my apartment, clearing out junk that I've been meaning to for months. I made a trip to Fort Clarence too but apparently they don't open every week day so we just drove over to the next beach Hellshire. Most of my friends seem not to like this beach but I don't really mind as it has the three S's I look for: sea, sand and sun. I must say though it was no private island as I experienced on my not so decent trip to the beach on my last week off, lol I noticed the details of the two liquored up girls and myself on an empty Lime Cay were too juicy to write about back then.

This week I also passed through the park up the road with my camera to see if there was anything worth taking a picture of. It was a good learning experience as my camera isn't really too good in point and shoot mode but shines when you tweak the settings, so I am slowly learning the hard way what iso, aperture, shutter speed, flash and zoom to use on this new baby to get the best results so bear with me if the pictures aren't too hot for now. Anyway I was talking to my shadow on the bridge over the pond when I spotted a duck looking at us from the entrance about 10' away. I know that ducks have been known to chase people so we walked over to the other side of the bridge only to see this duck waddling towards us. Shadow freaked out at this point in time and ran far away as I think she has had first hand experience with the when ducks attack scenario.


I refused to have a duck chase me around the park and stood my ground, the duck walked right by me and was on its way to my friend as seen in the last picture above. I must say I love this park, I need to start spending more time up there.