Wedding

I am getting excited about the big event. One more week.

It's been a while and we have to keep up the post in order to keep people thinking our lives are fascinating. Well, I've got the day off and I'm enjoying it. I took the rings out to Applied Lasers LLC in Concord to have them laser welded. I'm looking forward to seeing their work and really hoping that the rings work, ie. spin and the balls don't fall out because I was asking the machine shop for some very tight tolerances and small features. Looks like I'll be juggling at Willard in the afternoon...

I Would Never Have Thought

I would never have thought what an irritating and profound effect NOT having internet is right now. There's so many things I do through the internet, besides just using it to look up stuff.

Our internet has been down for over 2 days now and I've finally found a coffee shop where I paid $5 for internet for the next 24 hours. The good thing about that is that I can use it tomorrow to finish up what I still haven't done tonight. (This place closes in 45 minutes.)

Here I am blogging when I should be tackling this internet related list I created. It's so ridiculous.

Just so you all know, we don't have internet at home and I rarely do 'fun' internet stuff at work, so don't think there's some change in pattern with my blogging. I'll be back when the internet is back.

Just so nobody thinks I've forgotten about our fascinating blog, here I am. It's a stressful busy time and I don't see it lightening up until after the wedding. Oh well. I'm looking forward to it.

I don't have anything hilarious like Yar's spin class to tell about, but I did find some geese to hang out with at lunch, which makes me happy.

http://www.thefairest.info/top.html
http://www.xkcd.com/

I've become a lurker on my own blog

I should probably post more often, just so I don't have to start every post off with an apology. I have been lurking though, so thanks for keeping up with the posting while I've been busy.

I've been in ITIL training since Monday. Monday was 8:30-5:00, which is brutally early for me. Tuesday, Wednesday and tomorrow have been 7:30-4:30, which is just a little bit excessive. I woke up last night at 3:00AM and thought to myself, hey, it's completely dark, must be time to wake up! I was psyched that I had another two and a half hours more to sleep. It has been a weird couple of days, but maybe that's due to the sleep-dep.

Sunday was tough for me as well. I guess it started with me being sick at around 6AM. Showered, went to sleep again. Woke up at around 1PM. Made it out on my ride by around 3PM, which meant that it would have to be pretty quick if I wanted to beat the sunset. Kevlar said there were going to be a lot of cars on the road, but I figured that would clear up once the superbowl started. Was I wrong. Turned out the Queen Mary II was coming into SF and most of my bike route, from the Presidio to the Marin Headlands, was clotted with spectators. I didn't even know what it was about until I talked to a ranger on the Marin-side of the bridge. The boat was pretty big, but it wasn't like it hit the bridge or anything. Rode pretty slow since I was still feeling a bit of the hangover.

Then I've been in class. Class has been ok, but it's hard to stay focused for that long. I used to about twice the number of bathroom breaks normally, so just chilling and drinking water (which is the only thing you can actually do) is pretty excruciating.

On Tuesday, I went to spin class at my work. There were two very attractive girls, which is sort of unheard of (one is kind of unheard of), but kind of a nice change. Not an entirely positive change though, because the bikes are all in a half-circle, and you're pedaling for about an hour, and... you've got to look at something. So I had to try to not be a pervert (or be perceived to be a pervert) so I'm looking at the ground, my handlebars, the clock on the wall, but not too long over by the clock, because there was another girl on the treadmill who wasn't really all that attractive, but had a... an extreme bouncing issue. After she finally stopped bouncing away, another woman came over her to talk about something. The woman who came over casually leaned up against the treadmill and put her foot on the treadmill. Not realizing the treadmill was still running, she went from a relaxed lean to lump on the ground in about a millisecond. Everyone got quiet, but it turned out she was ok. It was hilarious, but I couldn't laugh since everyone was soooo concerned. It was totally something I could see myself doing.

On Tuesday I realized I was a week ahead. What I mean by that is that I was completely convinced that it was the 12th. I actually gained a week, which felt pretty awesome. It's like daylight savings x 168. Actually I was pretty psyched that Valentine's day was coming up so quick, so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore. I dread Feb 14th the way that some people dread Friday the 13th.

Wednesday was uneventful, tomorrow will probably be fairly uneventful too. Going to probably go indoor rock climbing with my friend that's back from Colorado tomorrow night, so that's something to look forward to.

It's 10:30PM now, so I better get ready for bed!

Okay People, Where Are You?

It's almost two minutes before the 7th of Feb begins and I have to ask this:

Where are you people?

It's been a while and I'm starting to think you've all just fizzled out with all this. Yar, where are you? Note the direct question.

My life has been okay. Yesterday was really stressful for me because I started to realize just how bad it was that I was so hung over Sunday that I wasn't able to get anything done. I think it would be fair to say that I started freakin out.
Here's what's stressing me out:

• Our wedding in 17 days. And I still have no idea of what costume or otherwise I'm going to wear. And there's so many things that we haven't finalized yet. Tick Tock, we are fast running out of time.
  
• Dealing with a house closing in another state that should have closed on Monday that did no due to an escrow officer that made a large mistake. (Yup, it's true folks, it really does matter which paper pusher you choose to use. They can screw up your life and have you worrying about large amounts of money.) Ours wasn't quite like that, but you get the idea. It should close on Thursday now.
  
• Handling the early days of work. Which while I must say I'm getting more comfortable there and more used to everything, I'm still a little worried about my first projects. It's a general fear, there's no real reason for it. I do what I do well, and I do know that. Or as Punkinpie likes to have me say "I'm a smart cookie."
• The general lack of free time that my current working full-time life and dragging my butt to SF to do it in has, as compared to working at home and not concerning myself with making phone calls or handling personal business during regular working hours. I can do this now, but I don't think it's okay to deal with say, 10 phone calls, in a day - which is what Monday, will all that house crap, was about.
  
  

which brings me back to this point:

Where are you people? Am I all lone here?

Rough Weekend

My weekend was actually pretty fun. We got up late on Saturday and went to breakfast. Then later on we went to the city and had a yummie dinner. After dinner we met up with some folks for our friend's birthday and began drinking. We went to a show at this place, and moved on to this bar, and then went here.

I drank too much. I was painfully hung over today. My body still hurts. I haven't been able to eat much either. Today was pretty much shot. I'll be glad when I wake up tomorrow and feel normal again.

I had book club today. Yes, I know it's the super bowl, and we didn't even care. At one point I laid on ground because my head was pulsating.

Being hung over sucks.

Sleepy Friday and Work Ethics

I can't believe I'm still awake this late. It's not actually that late, but I was quite sure I would drop down into a deep slumber almost immediately after we checked out the new exhibit where we're having our wedding in a mere 21 days. I'm just that whipped.

Notice I didn't link to our wedding website. Those of you who know me, already know where that is. But I had this interesting experience today where a fellow employee mentioned finding this blog because he monitors who's linking to our company. I know this is public. I mean .. dah! But for some reason it still caught my attention. I know better than to write something that's too public. But, like a story this person told me, it wouldn't be that hard to get all comfy in blog land and maybe come home a little inebriated and write something I really shouldn't have. Anyway, this interaction today gave me pause and made me think. It's a good thing.
I'll have to figure out what the right balance is with all this.

We had an interesting project at work which started yesterday at 4pm and lasted exactly 24 hours. They put us all in mixed discipline teams and we had to do something specific, but creative. It's not released yet, so I'll skip the details.

The project started at 4pm yesterday and I had come in early that day because my ride (Punkinpie) had an early investors meeting on Thurs. I was really surprised how willing folks were to work all night. After being at work for more than 10 hours, and I felt like our brainstorming session was just rehashing the same things, I put my foot down and left. We also had plans last night. As I made my way home, I felt bad about not being dedicated enough to this company. I questioned my priorities, and I ended up bailing on my plans and staying home working on implementing one of our group's ideas. I also questioned my fit with this dot com company and exactly what "dot com" really means.

I have no problem working my tail off for a defined goal. In fact, I almost work better when I'm working on something obsessively all day and all night for some period of time. But somehow I originally didn't see the need to stay all night and work on Thurs. I'm glad I did end up working for hours last night, but it's still a weird situation in my mind. To meet our goal, I worked faster and harder than I've really worked in a long time, like years. Programmers can't work like that for very long before they lose their mind. (I think the official word is: burnout) The phrase fast and furious comes to mind.



The project delivery meeting went well and was fun. This group really is pretty amazing and funny. After the meeting was finished I left. Again today I had gone into work early because we had a 7:45am meeting to sign papers today. (We bought another house!) And I left early too. I was so tired.

I think something for me that I'll have to work on is the balance between work, life and hours. This place has a correct policy about it not being the input but output. Basically, they're saying that they don't watch your hours, instead they care about you getting your work done. And I am totally on that page. But I also feel like I should be able to get my projects finished and polished in a normal 40 hour work week. (Maybe more like the average of the hours I work over a year should be around 40 because of course things ebb and flow.) I guess what it really comes down to is that I didn't really understand the value of this 24 hour project and why it should be superseding my personal, previously scheduled life. I now see a lot more value in doing this project this way, but this same value could be attained with several weeks notice to a 24 hour project like this. I can only hope that those employees that were around before this week, had actually gotten this notice.

Cool Links for Today:
ExxonMobile and Bush Affiliates Pay Scientists to Refute Global Warming Report
Yellow Arrow - More Than Meets the Eye
The Underground Tech Scammer Life
Guerrilla Marketing Plan Gone Awry - or Has It?

Long week

First of all, I want to apologize for flaking on the blog for the past few days. Things have actually been pretty busy at work, so I haven't had the time to put up any updates. I'm actually so tired right now, that I'm not sure I could even give a run through on what's been going on.

Next week I'm in training from M-W 8:30-5 and Th 8:30-12:00. If you remember from one of my emails from a couple of days ago, I was trying to kick an annoying useless person off a project that I was working on. Well, that girl is now taking the next month off, probably on disability. We still think she's faking. I've replaced her on the project, and I'll probably end up PM'ing the project when the current project manager goes on maturnity leave in April. So that's relatively good new for me. As a result, I've had a lot of new work trying to get the project back on path before I go out on training next week. I have been holding "use case" meetings pretty much every day.

Basically, a use case meeting consists of getting a bunch of people in a room, going through a particular task, and document the steps necessary to complete a task. You document all the alternate flows and exceptions to the "happy path." It's good, because as you go through the use cases, you get the whole working team to actually agree on how the system you're developing is supposed to actually work. Not so much the design itself, but what the end product should look like functionally. It helps a lot with building a set of requirements that actually have to do with the system that you're building. But it's pretty painful since most people don't really know what the point is, and a lot of them don't really want to participate. It's also particularly difficult, since team members are distributed globally, so all the meetings are over the telephone and webex.

Yesterday I had to represent the Tools and Automation services group to the UNIX and Storage group during their offsite meeting. It was about 10 of them to three of us, with one of our people teleconferenced in. It went ok, I guess. My manager was out of town, and I'm not really one for evangelizing the group, so it dragged a little. We managed to get out of there about 20 minutes early. Unfortunately, I had to stick around for another meeting, where the CIO showed appreciation for the IT people that worked during the Christmas break on a virus outbreak. They gave us carrot cake and ice cream. I was hoping for a check, but I guess that'll come later.

I found out today that our director got rid of another admin after only about two weeks. I guess admin is the currently PC term for secretary, but it also opens them up to doing all sorts of shit work. Our director wants the admin to be a secretary, project manager, and party planner. I think what she really wants is a valet. I was pretty bummed when the last one (who made it a few months) got canned, because she was actually pretty cute. There aren't a lot of cute girls around the IT department. On the upside, since the director fired the admin, the first Friday of the month Green Shirt day reminder didn't go out, and almost nobody wore one. Maybe the whole Green shirt day thing will finally die.

Ugh, I'm going to shutdown and get the hell out of here. Hope everyone's week has been fun...