Merlin @ El Divan de Alicia, Tijuana, BC, Mexico (Sabados/Saturdays)

Bonded by Blood - July 8th, 2011 / Divan de Alicia, Tijuana, Baja California

Interview: Divan de Alicia

I ended up getting smashed enough to not be able to perform the interview with the guys from Soldiery at the Divan. In all honesty the beer was good and you can't beat one liter of beer, one third of a gallon for you gringo, for 1.50 bucks each.

Also due to the unfortunate event of me acquiring a passport I could not stay long enough to interview everybody and could not afford it, beer even though decently cheap was quickly draining my pocket and I could not afford that so woe unto me.

I did get a quick verbal interview with the owner of the Divan which unfortunately I could not record because my cell phone was being shitty and music was pretty high enough for it to distort whatever was being recorded, so the interview went something like this:

VS: So they call you Perro.

Perro: Yeah, that's me.

VS: What are you, the owner?

Perro: I'm the manager of the Divan.

VS: Who's the owner?

Perro: There used to be 4 (5?) of us but in the end me and another person bought everything off from the rest of the guys and here we are. Funny fact, I was the one that invested the least on the bar so I told the other guys that I should be the manager and here you have me 2 years later.

VS: That's awesome!

Perro: Yeah, and back then we weren't sure what to expect but we went for it since there was not a place like this dedicated to Metal where you could at least listen to the commercial stuff all day long. It took some time for Metal that wasn't the black album from Metallica to be accepted at La Plaza and once that began to happen the idea of the Divan became "profitable" and we went for it.

VS: So you started at La Plaza? (La Plaza is what we know as Plaza Fiesta or La Plaza del Balazo, funny fact is that there's been some people shot and stabbed over there but all places keep opening as if nothing had happened)

Perro: We started there and we had two floors. Below it was dedicated to the headbangers in general and upstairs we had DJ's coming in with the heavier stuff.

VS: Dark? Psycho?

Perro: Dark, Psycho, Trance, it varied but yeah we had it and it worked for us!

VS: Then you decided to move down here.

Perro: We decided to move down here and continue with the what we have. We're making some promotions to bring more people in like Metal bands for free on Friday and beer at half the price from 8 to 10.

VS: Yep, that's why we come down here and stay! (Note: December saw a change in the promotion with beer being at half the price all day from Thursday to Saturday. Go for it!)

And this is roughly how it went. There are some minor additional details but most importantly is the fact that the Divan lets local bands play, sometimes giving them some cut, provides you with cheap beer and good music. Also you've got two mini-marts just across the street so what else could you ask for?

Ohh yeah that's right, that guy that comes in when we're really drunk and sells us pizzas freshly baked. Hmmmmmmmm... pizza.

6th time is the suckiest one

I didn't want to rant about work here but this deserves an honorable mention.

I work IT from 7 to 6 on a Factory which I won't disclose here but we do medical stuff which pretty much makes for an interesting experience since you actually have to know how the whole process works to understand what you're doing to the PC and how it'll affect the whole thing.

For over a year now we've tried 6 times to get these old ass Windows 2000 PC's running on obsolete workstations to move from our main network into a segregated one over a VLAN.

Woah, wait, what is all this shit I'm talking about? Let me explain it to you.

Our company has a policy that states that obsolete PC's should not be inside our network since they're a haven for viruses and the like so we have to get them out of the way or move them to a segregated section of the network with no access to any other computers or the internet so they'll remain there until they rot into fucking extintion... it is most likely that the extition of humanity will happen first but regardless of the point we still have to do it.

So how do you pull out this technical mumbo-jumbo I'm talking about?

You make the network think they're not there. Sounds weird? Not really, computers and switches or routers can do amazing things nowadays that could have never been performed some 10 years ago and let's not even go back to the 60's because that's fucking scary.

Inside the switch, a Cisco Switch, which is the device that allows you to connect multiple PC's into your network you do this crazy magical voodoo shit. Think of it as a river that has a delta and keeps forking everywhere but you have to cut out one of the forks because it is in danger of being infested with mosquitos with malaria or some other really fucked up disease you're only supposed to see over in Africa. You do this by putting a dam on its way and that is exactly what we are trying to do, putting up a dam on it so it won't go back up and we can only control what and how much exactly goes down there.

Now this sounds easy but apparently it is not since I've stated before that this is our sixth time trying this out and let me tell you everytime it has been the same shit. We segregate, we reboot and we pray it works but unfortunately God, a Deity, an Icon or whatever it is that you or the IT people praise, maybe the Machine God, hates us like you have no clue.

We've had people look directly into the code for the program, built in fucking Visual Basic 6 which has been obsolete now for some good... 10 years maybe and scares the fuck out of me since we're not supposed to be seeing this kind of things on this time and age, but anyway they fucked around with it and got it to work on a test environment but as soon as you pass it into the real deal it blows up and nothing works. First time we were confused and scared shitless since NOTHING, FUCKING, WORKED, even after returning them they wouldn't work but to our luck some asiatic chick from Texas figured it out and we were saved...

Since then it has downspiralled into an orgy of ideas, tweaking and fucking around with things that as I've mentioned before SHOULD BE LEFT AS THEY ARE. In IT there's a Golden rule that I believe is also a Golden rule everywhere, if it works DO NOT FUCK WITH IT. But yeah you get those assholes upstairs to understand that and they'll tell you Windows 2000 just came out yesterday and that McAfee is the best antivirus ever... right.

So today was our sixth try, yeah sixth, and guess what? It failed... wow I'm surprised guys, I thought the third time we would have understood that we're outgunned and outmatched by something probably built back in '98 by someone that doesn't work for our customer anymore that had too much caffeine injected into his veins to kill a cow or maybe even a complete herd.

What is the plan of action then? Call in the guy that did the setup for this thing, who charges the modest amount of 200 dlls an hour, to get this working for us. And my veredict is that he'll fix it in five minutes or some such and he'll shit all over us, and oh he likes to shit on whoever stands on his way whenever he can, because we were too stupid to do it ourselves.

In brief kids, our lesson for today is if it works DON'T FUCK AROUND WITH IT and if you, for some god forsaken reason need to then call the guy who did it because you never know what kind of sacrifice or pact he had with Satan himself to make it work.

I'm going to deviate a little also to do a quick review of this Black Metal band from TJ, wow go figure, I'm listening to right now.

Black Blasphemy.

I've heard some Black Metal back in the day and there's a lot of shit, you'll hear this from EVERYONE including people that are deep into it and will all concur that it is like finding a diamond in a pile of shit. Fortunately I'm kind of lucky to find said diamonds around all the shit and this happens to be the case.

What does it sound like? Well... Black Metal, but the good kind and I recommend giving it a try if you want to hear something new with a nice vibe of the good ol' fuck Christianity in the ass and burn Churches, I'm looking at you Varg Vikernes, then you should give this a try.

It's raw, not raw as hell though, raspy vocals, a drum kit that sounds decent enough for Black Metal or Metal in general and guitars you can actually listen too instead of just hearing hissing everywhere.

Here's the link to their MySpace (fuck I thought that thing had died years ago): http://www.myspace.com/blackblasphemyofficial

Also there's another note of interest for this Friday, the Divan de Alicia over at 7th street Downtown is having a free gig, quite excellent and cool of them as usual, and with happy hour from 5 to 10 so you can get shit smashed and bang your head like a fucking maniac when the guys come out to play.

Here's a flyer from said event, have fun guys and hope to see you there, Vico out!