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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Dream Service provider Change


      I dreamed that my Dream Service provider (DSP) went out of business. It sold its accounts to another DSP. The new DSPs staff wrote programs to transfer the old DSPs accounts to the new system, but I found that there were several annoying changes.
      My old DSP sent out a "sorry for the inconvenience" and then liquidated its servers and hard drives to pay its bills. Much of its antiquated equipment, I found out, went to a junk reseller. The reason I found out, is that I didn't like the new service provider's architecture or control much. I found myself walking along the row of equipment liquidators and second hand shops, pausing once to look at my reflection in the window of a second hand bakery goods shop. I'd been turned into a younger (Ok that was good) Chinese man with a Fu Manchu moustache. I looked at myself and shook my head. I wasn't sure how it was possible that this would be a similar dream avatar to my original fully bearded, blue-eyed, full head of curly brown hair. I continued on my search and came across the "Second Chance Electronica" shop.
      Inside the shop was a little bit musty. The proprietor was a portly man with thinning hair and a slight lisp to his voice. He was friendly enough. He knew exactly what I was looking for. He only had one of the servers left, still with the OS and application drives loaded on it. He also had the backup tower, an ancient looking tape drive unit. "It never had to be fast because they had all day to backup the nightly account activity."
      "What about Naptime activity?"
      "Always an issue in this field, but that was on a special unit, I've already sold it, though."
      We connected up the Dream Server and I watched the logo form on the screen. A stylized "C" and "A" with the holes arranged somehow in the shape of an eagle. Part of my brain was amazed that I couldn't remember the logo from the start of every recurring dream I've ever had until I saw it live here. Another part of my brain wondered if I'd ever seen it before.
      "What do you want this old stuff for?"
      I pointed to my face. "I'm a curly-haired, full-bearded, Norse looking man in middle age."
      "Oh!"
      "And I would think there should be some very pretty customers or a sales lady to chat up in here."
      "Sorry about that, not finding much like that around here with this DSP."
      I purchased the stuff, and the owner signaled me to follow him around back. In boxes next to the dumpster, awaiting recycling, were stacks of computer printouts of source code and handwritten notes. "If you're going to reverse engineer and mount your own DSP software, this could be a big help. It's yours, I was just going to recycle it."
      "Thanks, I don't know if I can get it all into my car." I thought about Little Red, my poor overloaded Honda Insight, then realized that I didn't really need the racks and UPSs, only the server and the data tower. Still, Little Red was definitely over her weight limit. I was frustrated a bit, in my old DSP I would have found myself in possession of and driving Cecil again (my old V-8 powered Plymouth Satellite) or Sean (Nan's Toyota Prius.)
      "If you get this working again let me know, I think I'd like to try it out. Some customers would be good, especially like you mentioned."

Naptime Dreams; Seven Hours Later


      Apparently I am still on the new DSP. Nothing but dreams involving Chinese or Japanese people, to its credit, I was still younger, and there were more women in the dreams. Sarah Prim was there, in a black wig and dark matrix style glasses, trying to fit in. Apparently I had managed to get the server up and running, but since there were large amounts of data missing I was only able to restore a small part of the database, something about needing a couple of Terebyte NAS Units to round things out. Sarah warned me not to eat anything. I pointed to the yummy looking matrix girls across the counter from me, she just sighed and empasized "ANYTHING!"
      "No kissing either!" She added.
      "Even you?"
      "That would be safe. I'm part of the old OS."
      I puckered up and leaned over to her, she yelped and slid off her stool. Giving me a "get back to work" look.

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