Mr. Bad Karma

I just don’t get most open source CMS systems out there. I mean, god damn, they all seem to be perfect for showing off a demo of the CMS itself (using the default template). Try to build an actual web site using the CMS with your own layout and site structure will result in endless file stabbing, coding marathons, blood, sweat, tears, insanity and general mayhem. CMS stands for Content Management System, not Coding Myself Silly. I mean I want a simple tool to create and update a custom layout front page plus a set of identical layout individual pages. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong.

First of all I need to disable all kinds of pre-enabled calendars, news sections, contact forms, trackbacks, pingbacks, rss feeds, flying bats, asslicks and whatnots. Then I need to disassemble the default "simple" theme which is always a complicated tangle of tables or mile long css definitions in the flavor of Web 2.0. Oh and you need to be careful not to remove a specific block of html code around the very non descriptive template variables, if you do you never ever get that variable to show content properly again.

Only after this you can start to plan and implement your own layout that is much harder than it seems at the first because if you delete a component from the layout you really don’t need either something else stops working or then it just appears even though you think you’ve just removed it from the site. Not to mention your site layout has to be divided in to several different files because the CMS system expects that you have a left side menu, top menu, right menu, footer, content column. All other layout setups are just impossible. Oh and don’t even dream about having two language versions if you want to keep your sanity. That’s just not possible without rewriting half of the CMS code yourself.

Finally after you have somehow created a decent looking site, they publish a critical security fix for the CMS, your site stops working. Usually there goes your theme flying out the window, you can watch it fly but it also makes you cry.

For the around eight years I’ve lived on my own, I’ve had maybe three years of noise free living. And in the beginning of this month I’ve gotten a new neighbor, of course it might be that the old one has risen from the dead or at least bought a new home theater. So the peace is gone again although I must admit this has been the record long period of quite silent neighbors. So what about the other 5 years, let’s recount them, shall we? Oh yes we shall.

First year I moved to a dormitory after summer as I started college in another city. During the year, my roommate was never really a problem, he was a good lad and wasn’t there that often either. The problem was the house itself with wafer-thin walls, you could hear people cough, Windows start sounds, televisions, farting and of course music, a lot of it, on loud. In the summer the dormitory was quite empty so that was a relief for my ears.

As the second year started in the dormitory it was about the same except for some heavy metal fan moving to a floor above my room and on weekends there was not the slightest peace to study. Just after a month in to the semester my roommate told me that he is moving out for good as he’s dropping out from the college to start working full-time.
So I got a new roommate pretty soon. He was a high school aged kid that liked playing electric guitar during nighttime, and letting his noisy mates stay there over the weekend when he was away himself. Luckily he disappeared for good in the spring and I didn’t have anybody in the other room. Although with the heavy metal guy living upstairs it wasn’t excatly pleasant living there.

So at the end of the spring semester I started a study related work placement for six months in another city. I lived in a dormitory there but the rooms in one unit were single occupancy and the building was quite new with proper noise dampening in the walls and doors. Also my room was opposite of the three other rooms so I didn’t have any problems noisewise. However the place was hot as Hell during summer and absolutely freezing during fall / early winter. Also there was a fruit fly infestation towards the end of my stay as one of the guys in the unit started recycling biowaste but forgot to empty the trash for two weeks.

When I moved back to the college city, I decided to rent an apartment in the city center from a private renter. The nice sounding elderly woman who rented the place didn’t live there anymore herself. If I was her I wouldn’t have either. It was an old stone apartment building from the 1950’s. Every sound from other apartments were clearly audible. My immediate neighbors were alcoholics who trashed their place few times a week, fought each other and played crappy music loud day-and-night. Many times I was thinking about calling the cops but never dared in fear that they might physically attack me for it. Also in the downstairs a few floors down somebody seemed to keep a  professional carpentry workshop judging from the ongoing daily drilling, sawing and hammering. My sanity barely lasted the six months I spent there.

Then I had only few courses and thesis writing left at the college so I decided I move back to my home town and just travel back and forth for the few lessions left. In my hometown I went for a cheap semi-private landlord agency and my apartment was in a brick/concrete apartment building from the early 1970’s, first one build in that area. And apparently noise dampening wasn’t even considered in the building phase so I was able to hear my neighbors even talking, playing guitar and watching movies very well. What really started to bug me was that somebody would start their every Saturday and Sunday mornings by playing a classical piece with a woman soprano singing at around 7 am and not with a moderate volume. You could literally imagine you were in a concert rather than in your home

After I graduated I got a job in a different city so I was able to move out again after the six month hell. I got an apartment from an insurace company. Again to in a 70’s concrete bunker. The apartment was cold as hell except for summer. First half a year were quite silent in the building but then I got a new neighbor and it all changed. The new neighbor had a home theater system and most of the time it was on with maximum volume pretty much around the clock. I could easily hear the movies’ lines and knew what tv program they were watching. After two months I started to look for a new apartment and after few months I got lucky. I lived about a year in that place. 

I moved in to my current apartment in a mid 1990’s apartment building with some noise dampening. I have been living here just over two years without bigger noise annoyances until now (and I am not even really that bothered by the sound of vomiting coming from floor up every few Saturday mornings). I hope these few random disturbances by a neighbor using home theater at night time lately have been isolated incidents and not signs of what is coming. I just couldn’t be bothered to move out just yet and I doubit it could get better all that much unless the new place is in an apartment building that is less than ten years old. And even with semi-private landlord agencies those have high rents and long waiting queues. Rents in the free rent market are way too high to even consider that option.

What I really need is to win the national lottery and buy my own house. But with my luck that is a dream and will stay as such.

 
People know me by my uncanny ability to break things especially if I have bought them myself. And I’ve been like that always, boy and man. Usually if I buy something myself it is either already broken or it breaks on first use. These include but are not limited to: toys (as a child it was a standard), a VCR, CD player, clothing and computers (+ games). There was a point where, if it was at all possible, I made somebody else to choose the product package from the shelf if I wanted to buy something more expensive - and even that didn’t always work.   

Lately my speciality has been coffee cups and glasses. During the little over year I’ve been in the service of my current employer I’ve broken five or six coffee cups, all that I bought myself.
At home I rarely drink anything out of a coffee cup though so I demolish glasses. I think I’ve broken around six glasses this year alone. They say that glass splinters bring good fortune. If that was to be true, I should be a billionaire and living in the Bahamas. And obviously I am not.

About my working breaking career still. In my first job I got a brand new laptop as my work equipment. It was perfectly good laptop except that the keyboard was faulty and it didn’t register pressing certain keys on the first stroke. So it was a bit of a drag trying to work on the machine. Luckily the keyboard was later replaced. In my current job I succeeded to destroy my laptop there by knocking over a half full cup of coffee on my table and the laptop just couldn’t handle all the caffeine.

There was a long period in my life where I never was on any list despite that I had registered beforehand and depending on the situation, even paid some fee.

It all really started when I was going to my first ever school day. We had moved to a new neighborhood few months back and I had been enrolled to the new school by my parents. However on the first day when I went to the school nobody had me on any lists so in the end I spend 5 minute of the beginning of my learning career by having two teachers fighting over me. So I had to choose which teacher’s class I’d want to go and I think I may have chosen the less psycho teacher that time.

Then I can clearly remember of not being on any list was the start of some summer camp few yers later (and I think that might have happened on two summers in a row) even though we had paid up and gotten the information sheets. The were really close at least on the first time of not letting me into the bus without proof that we had paid the camp fee.

Next bigger one that I remember was the start of the high school. I had been accepted to the school only 3 days before it started so my first day was spent by going in to different classes and having to explain in the each one that no I am not on your list and yes I will be on your list and yes I am 100% sure I am in the right school and yes I was told to take this class and I can’t help if you like it or not.

Also a summer language prep course before high school senior year started with me having to explain that I have been enrolled well in advance and having to exhibit all the related documents. That confusion landed me a room with a dude that during camp concentrated mostly on acting psycho, drinking beer and playing heavy metal on loud regardless of the hour. Needless to say I wasn’t enjoying it all that much. 

At somepoint I just gave up. Wherever I would go that needed preregistration I just introduced myself as "I am Mr. Bad Karma and most likely I am not on your list." And I was right almost without exceptions.

I don’t know what happened in the end but for last couple years I haven’t had this problem anymore. I can go to any course or event and trust that my name is on the roll call list … for now.

Just to prove that I’ve always been the black sheep, I’ll entertain you with a story from the past around just over ten years ago. See, me and my brother were riding back home from the city in my dad’s car, my brother drove. I was still in junior high so I wasn’t old enough to drive.

Well we arrived to our garage and I got up to open the doors (side hinged) so my brother could just drive in. One of the doors had a brace bar with a handle on the forehead level that needed to be pulled downwards in order to open the door. Well when I was opening the doors my brother revved the engine and started to crawl the car towards the garage as he used to do. So I thought I better get the hell out of the way and took a sharp right turn. Too sharp. I hit my head to the handle and it punctured right side of the head. Blood started to spray out with moderate pressure - enough for me to start fucking panicking somewhat. So I got in to our home quickly as I can and we tried to get the blood spray down by using a cold shower and towels and it somewhat did.

With a bloodied and wet towel against the wound my brother drove me to the emergency room and the doctor there asked what the hell happened while he was stiching me up. I told him what happened and it seemed that he couldn’t grasp the idea that somebody could actually hurt himself like that to a garage door brace bar handle and I think he never quite believed my story. Anyways he told me that I’d been lucky, less than one centimeter upper and I would have punctured an artery and the blood spray could have been serious, even fatal.

So in the end I ended  up with a few stiches and wearing a huge "glue bandage" over my head for about a week or two. But seriously: Who hurts their head accidentally to a door handle, I mean really?