UpdateLog2004

12/24/04

I tried writing an update a couple months ago but it didn't save so here we go again:

Since the last update:

June -- began work programming and recruiting for a local IT Recruiting firm.

August -- began work as a Systems Admin at a mac/linux based design house (design is a very vague description of what they do there -- think all the advertising HBO did for the Sopranos -- that was this design firm's work). The firm was a 1.5 hour commute upstate from Brooklyn. This also involved me creating a new company -- Eclectic Tech, LLC -- and that took a LOT of time and resources.

September -- found a house to rent

But wait there is more...

5/1/04

Happy Beltane!!

I haven't heard back from the Apple Store in spite of writing to them several times, so now I've expanded my job hunt, still with a preference for part-time positions, mac positions, web positions...some side work I'm taking just either for the quick cash or to build my portfolio in spite of how silly the work or pay is. One thing I have NOT done is back off on my resume showing who and what I am. So far, I still have kinhost.org and otherkin.net down as reference material on my resume, and in my portfolio. I'm building towards a portfolio that shows business/commercial stuff because I might eventually become desperate. I'm also caving in and learning Flash (GAH!) -- so when I finally post a link to my portfolio, you'll see some Flash design, maybe some corporate sites, etc. I'm considering putting up an ad on Craig's List for 2 free pages of web design, with the rest at $15/hr negotiable and seeing what that bait hooks for portfolio work.

Kinhost.org however is doing very well. We have some new people adding content to the site, and I've been posting a lot of new content myself. As usual, just check out Main.AllRecentChanges for what's been newly posted to the site. Unfortunately that will only list the last update to a page, so if I correct someone's spelling error(s) or improve their page design, it's going to show me as the last person to author a page. Ah, well. In any case, we have a lot of new information up, some of it is incredibly practical stuff, stuff that could eventually help create Multiplicity: The Missing Workbook :P :) hehehe

I've finally finished the Frank W. Putnam book (Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder), and now I've started in on Internal Family Systems Therapy by Richard C. Schwartz. Talk about "And now for something completely different..." Night and day...but I'd still highly reccomend the Putnam book, it covers a LOT of ground in the experiences common to multiples, and some helpful stuff. More to come on the Schwartz book, however. I'm looking forward to it. In any case, I expect to put up quotes from our current reads.

I was trying to read Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity but I find the highly technical for-therapist psychology books far more readable than Judith Butler's high-strung philanthropizing (and the use of obscure terminology and awkward language to make you dive through mental hoops to try to follow what she's saying -- talk about making a book inaccessible to the reader!) which was assigned to me by a gay activist to get credit for GBLT Issues in school. I mean, just to give you an idea, look at the subtitle! "Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" HUH? LOL I have such a hard time grasping "feminism" which is, it seems, the entire point of the first 10 pages (which is all I read) of the book -- when such concepts could be as easily said in 3 or less pages. At least to me. She doesn't need to convince me by quoting Foucault and other philosophers about how there is no essential difference between male and female...although she doesn't even accept plumbing, hormonal balance, or childbirth as nominal divisions...but I find it tedious to have her literally cram her anti-feminizing crap into my head using a spiked mace when they are facts that I already believe. For a school project I might never complete? Why go through that pain? Nevermind...I'll find another way to graduate, thanks. I'll take a nice pleasant course, like Family Violence and Abuse any day over this type of enforced torment. In fact, I should probably call the gay activist in question and say "Look, hon, you might have a Ph.D. or something and really enjoy the mental torment being meted out by this writer, but she's inaccessible and she's running on and on about her basic assumption on which the rest of her book rides like she has something to prove. Maybe in 1990 there was something to prove, but I'm pretty inundated with androgynous gothbois and grrls who can't be told apart from a dying sapling, and I see plenty of evidence -- especially being gender dysphoric myself -- of the lack of gender being much of anything but a cultural construct for the convenience of people who have higher testosterone levels oppressing the ones more likely to give birth. Maybe there's some other way we can have me complete the assignment?"

Actually, come to think of it, I think there was one other book to choose from for that assignement. Maybe I ought to find it. I was looking forward to something about "Gender Trouble" -- maybe I can see fit to spend more time hauling my ass through every painstaking word of the other 140 pages of the book? Argh! If so, the school mental block will probably want it to be on my own time and not for some bloated assignment to prove things I already know.

*sigh* "Some day I'll finish school!"

4/29/04

WhatColorIsOurParachute?

4/18/04

There are new 3d renditions of my internal landscape scattered throughout the pages linked-to from there and from my interfaces pages. [They're making a brief stop-off at Whos Who &/or the internal landscape page while I'm putting links on the other pages where they belong, or editing crops in Photoshop to highlight individual features.] I'm really excited about having done this! :) They were rendered in Bryce, and I have to figure out which models I downloaded need mention of copyrights...for now, suffice to say I did not create every object on the jpg's, only the whole compositions would be copyrighted to me, with the important note of that, unless my copyrighting the entire composition would be in violation of anyone else's copyright :) .

4/15/04

I think I may have found my perfect job. I was at an Open House at the SoHo, NYC Apple Store today and I think I'm in love. LOL Get this: great benefits, to help people with problems, be around macs and more macs and more macs for hours upon hours a day, and I get paid too!

This job's ideal. I still get to be uber-geek-mistress (read: Mac Genius) without breaking my wrists rush-typing 17 page final papers and going blind photoediting nude people in lewd positions in Photoshop making my mouse hand whither and die. Yeah, I've done both of those. Editing porn photos is only exciting for the first half hour...and only if you get to enjoy yourself at the same time. After 7 straight hours of putting black dots on the appropriate genetalia and positioning photos in magazine layouts, you don't even want to go home and look at your partner tied up and sweaty and begging for you anymore. Puts a real damper on the sex life. And let's not go into the 17 page final paper episodes....these are not "helping people with problems" -- they're helping people who bit off more than they could chew or procrastinated beat the hell out of you so they can come out smelling like a rose. Not my ideal jobs.

So -- I went to an Open House? So what?

Well -- I think I did fairly well. They gave a test, they wanted my resume, they wanted me to fill out some paperwork authorizing credit and background checks, etc. I have a bankruptcy on file as of 12/2000 and no further debt other than $5000 in school loans. That's a start. I have excellent references, an excellent employment history although I've been out of work for the last 7 years due to Hector. I answered their techie questionairre and I think I got a couple things wrong -- mostly self-admitted that I needed to find out more -- and a lot of things right enough to impress them. I'll see.

What's next?

Background check. They will then pick the canidates they like best to schedule interviews with. If I'm accepted after the interview process, they hire me and I do 1 week of at-home OS X study for a certification followed by two weeks [all-expense-paid-kick-ass-trainin--uh vacation] in Cupertino, CA for hardware/repair certifications -- d00ds, that so(!) rocks! I'm excited. I'm rarely so hyped up about a job, but Apple's been doing things I really feel I can get behind and support in my own miniscule way.

If you know me you know why I have to say it's a vacation. I train and study in my sleep. I'm getting more and more up on the linux side of the mac platform, I put my mind to something and I can do something with it. If they want to hand me a proven methodology for learning hardware and repair for mac on a plate so I don't have to do it the long hard way, I'm so there. That's a f'n vacation! Immerse me in geeks, tar and feathers and call me a happy birdie! And What? include (round-trip all expense paid) FLYING in that? Oh, yeah, like we'd be able to keep Erin from fronting, urging the pilot to do loop-de-loops, and taking extensive notes! Bah!!

So now all you faithful little Crisses-fans -- cross your fingers for your favorite geek-mutliple-whatever-it-is-you-love-about-me and maybe click your ruby slippered heels because this Dorothy is hoping to go home. *mmmmMMMmmmmMMacs!*

Oh, oh, OH and even better -- after I use my 25% employee discount to get me a new mac (or do SOMETHING to fix Doorstop), I can also wave around my 15% friend and family discount and try to get the linux geeks in my life to switch to linux-on-ppc! :) Muhahahah! It's all a part of my sinister plan. *nods emphatically*

4/12/04

I still need a job but I'm not sure if I'm moving to PA or not :/ that's not looking particularly good right now.

In any case, there's a preliminary shot of my internal landscape that was not very far along yet linked to the Whos Who page.

There's been some more development on the M:tMM project, I've actually bothered filling in some of the pages that are -- for me -- some of the harder pages, and had been sitting there for a long time not getting done -- notably TheSystem, Sub-Systems, Veils, Gatekeepers, etc. I forget when I did those, but there's timestamps if anyone's that curious.

4/4/04 - 9a EST+DST

I need a job. A good job. Preferably telecommuting, because of an upcoming move to Eastern Pennsylvania (now scheduled for late June -- that date's getting more and more solid) -- about 120 miles from where I live now. Something with health insurance would totally rock, then I could maybe bother getting a "real" therapist. Yesterday was tough... something set off Shane and we spent a little time curled up in bed, in the dark, with stuffies. *sigh* Poor Shane. :(

In the meantime, I'm going to keep working on the website, and thus my head. Hopefully Shane feels better. :/

4/4/04 - 1a

New headmaps. Linked on the Crisses/WhosWho page. Exhausting amounts of work on defining who is in here and what they do...slow going, but it's getting somewhere. Trying to work on a topographical map of our internal landscape. Whee.

3/24/04

I took the plunge and added a Donations page to my area of the website. Check it out. At least you'll be amused that I have the balls to ask for some of that stuff. ;)

I've been helping Otherkin.net work on their wiki. It's not open yet, but it's working pretty well. :)

I've also been doing some minor work on other wikis. Soon we'll have a whole open-edit geeky nightmare network muhahahahah! :) lol Feel free to ask me for space of your own on the wiki....

*A bouncy Crisses!*

3/21/04

After much grueling work, the website has been moved, all the changes for the moment have been made, and it seems to be stable for the moment. Phew! :)

I've been dedicating time to working on Live-On-Line offerings, and working on Otherkin.net. I'm also seeing about starting school again, or finding a job, prepping to move, helping my kids in school, fixing up several wiki installations, putting my poems into a database program so that they're searchable, sortable, and can be group selected out of the database. We'll see how that all goes.

3/4/04

Another thing: the poetry pages are going to be put into a MySQL database and I'm going to have to work out some way to put them into an annex off the wiki. I've been working on that as well, and so far so good.

Over the last few days, a sidebar was added to the wiki template, but I still haven't fixed the website template to compensate properly for different browser settings -- apologies to people who don't have their monitor set for finer resolutions :/ It's going to take some work for me to fix it, so it's going to wait on functionality of the site. If you need to, you can always turn off the backgrounds in your browser. :/ ick.

I guess that's about it for now. *waves*

2/26/04

Lots of changes have been taking place because of server moves. I've decided to update the wiki program to the latest code, fix up a template for the pages that includes a sidebar, update the top navigation bar to point to the wiki instead of to the old website pages, and to move the old website pages -- except the poetry pages -- to the wiki.

Some of this will take time.

Meanwhile, the site is blossoming, people have contributed a great deal of content, although I'm still the writer for most of the information on the website.

Enjoy!

• New splash page at http://www.kinhost.org/ which includes a type of "status report" on the site, which is currently broken. Hopefully the new logo works for you: I like it. "Hotel California", indeed!
• There are more new people in my head -- in fact, we went through all the people we've seen in our head or strongly suspect are present whether we've confirmed a sighting of them or not, and we've come up with 65 names. Assuming that people who "left" or "died" are still here *somewhere* that means there ought to be 65 people in here.
• On that note: those 65 people are in several different "subsystems" -- the one that has been outted on our website for the longest time is only one of them, and harbors the gatekeepers to several other subsystems. Lately -- the last 6 months maybe more -- a different subsystem has been running our life/body than the one that's been written about on the site. Hed (now "Rane") and Hart are part of that subsystem, but we're going to have to write about Lillith, Nobody, Robot, etc. to be able to explain everything, even to ourselves. We've been confused, dazed, and concerned that our life is being run essentially by a pair of 2-4 year olds and a set of hands. :P
• Because of the change in subsystem running our personal show, information has fallen through the cracks, and we've had to brush up on PHP, we've fallen out of school because we can't find where we put all the stuff we learned in our psych courses and have a hard time getting toddlers to study....etc. It's like someone turned our brain inside out and the lint fell out...and it was very important lint.
• We're considering a move to the Philly suburbs. More on that when it achieves some discernable momentum.
• All in all, however, we're very happy. The knowledge of 65 people in our head is due to self-work that looks promising, even if it's stalling for a long time in our half-awake state. Digging around and finding all these names/people, and letting the younger set(s) out to air their issues is simply par for the course of healing in OUR book.

See Also