nick's site

what a week for hardware carnage:

• oil seepage from the back of the head, near the headgasket (loose headbolts or a headgasket, a compression test will tell for sure)
• right front adjustable strut, $300 new. i blame the 696w->telegraph/lodge/northwestern exit warzone/fiasco
• motherboard’s dead: ALL 5v+ atx connectors are melted.
  

  server is acting up at home. segfaults galore. machine won’t post after a while, so i began to rip it apart and ‘transition’ it to older backup hardware and discover the connector failure. everything is up and running on the old hardware

  ED, server has been up longer now than all night:

  nick@server:~$ uptime
  03:23:50 up 41 min, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00

• atx power supply dead (see above)
• digital camera on the plink.
  

  in an attempt to photograph the carnage above, the camera takes pictures like this (it’s a keyboard)

• xbox: no video.
  ED: Xbox is fine, a disconnected cable that I didn’t see.

👿
either way, it’s just stuff, frustrating that it all died at once.

i found this article, it directed me towards this “blog.”

a continuation of this..

i ran into my account rep for the company i work for and levelled with him. i told him i’m looking for work and that other contract houses wouldn’t touch me until i was out of the criteria for my no-compete clause. at that point, i asked him for an addendum to my employment agreement that would remove my no-compete clause.

he informed me that the contract they have with the customer where i am currently assigned currently prevents them from even marketing me to other companies.

i was informed back in june that, come review-time (november for me,) i am now allowed to request a billrate (raise) increase and they will consider it. the account rep says he’s going to fight some more again before then. we’ll see what happens.

i will have to get a letter of release or laid off to be removed from this contract.

ED: Make it worth my while to stay or let me go.