Eleven Days and Counting

I'm so ready for a vacation. I can't even begin to describe how badly I need this.

I was at work until 1 am on Tues, rewriting a part of a project that went live on Wed. It's a little crazy, but it was the right thing to do. The code was crap, and every time I tried to fix one bug, it would cause other bugs in this part of the project. So on Tues afternoon, knowing full well that we were launching on Wed afternoon, I got permission to rip it up and re-code it. In the end this feature was relatively bug free and it will be so much easier to use that class in other projects.

The crazy thing about it, beyond that it was so close to launch, is that I was sick. I worked from home on Monday because of it, and ended up taking a sick day on Thursday. But I worked 16 hours on Tues. (I'm feeling much better now)

I leave for my trip in 11 days! I'm so excited.

The trip planning is pretty insane with our group. There's very few of us arriving at the same time, at the same place. And there's currently 7 of us.

I have a good idea of what I want to do, but we'll see what works with the schedule.

In other news, I finally bought a new hard drive and have enough space to get all the music I have in one space, organized. I have over 141gb, thanks to yar (He has really good music, lost of hip hop too!). And I installed this program called SimplifyMedia so that we can play those files on other computers, even if they're not stored in iTunes. My honeypot dislikes iTunes and instead uses winamp. But I can still see, and play his music through my iTunes, and he can play mine using iTunes on his computer (without putting his music in iTunes). It's pretty sweet.

En-RAGED

So I've got my little habit. Around 2:00 in the afternoon, when I'm having trouble figuring out how I'm going to survive for the rest of the day, I take a break and go grab some coffee. Coffee at work means the Flavia machine. I grab a cup, go to the freezer, take about 4-5 ice cubes, load up the Flavia with a Sumatra packet, and in less than a minute, I have a nice, strong, ice coffee. Well, it's nice enough anyway, and it's free. For the past few months, this has been going well. Lately though, I've noticed little things that are making me a little suspicious. My Sumatra is being consumed at an unusual rate. I'll climb up (on a chair) to grab the cardboard box with the Sumatra packets, pull down about 20-30 of them, and put them in the drawer. The next day, they're all gone. This has happened for about 3-4 days in a row. Somebody's fucking with my fucking Flavia fix. My guess is that some selfish (and apparantly not very resourceful) person is taking the Sumatra packets back to his or her desk. Either that, or they are deliberatily trying to drive me crazy. I don't think I'm being paranoid. Not sure what I can do about it though, unless I'm willing to do a stakeout. Any ideas?

And the Bull is Born.

A while ago a friend of mine suggested using Picasa. I downloaded it and played with it a little bit and moved on. But I never solved the problem of a good tool to manage my digital pictures. Now, many months later, I'm using Picasa. The more I use it the more I like it. It's actually a really useful program. My favorite feature about it is that it will 'monitor' particular folders and automatically add any new pictures from those folders into your photo storage spot. It's useful when there are two people shooting pictures and storing them in different places, like my honeypot and me. To those of you out there who don't have a good way of looking at your digital images, go check out Picasa.

This weekend was pretty fun and mellow. I went to a friend's baby shower, had a poker night with lots of Sherry, figured out the list of activities I want to do in New Zealand, finally fixed my super slow desktop computer, and got lots of other errands done too.
(New Zealand is 16 days and counting!)

Loyalty and Terpitude

What causes family loyalty? What I'm asking is this: Why do we put up with behaviors from our family members we wouldn't put up with from a friend?

Every so often I repeat a similar situation, by deliberate act of will, and during and after the event I think about the above question. It brings me to this quote:

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results. -Albert Einstein

Here I am, in the same depressing, miserable situation wondering why I even bother. And as I've gotten older, I've bothered less. Perhaps, someday I'll stop bothering at all.

Terpitude is defined as:

Inherent baseness or vileness of principle, words, or actions; depravity.

Another Day in Paradise

This past week or so has been basic hell at my work. And I don't mean due to unreasonable work loads, unreasonable management, or unreasonable expectations. No, this past week was unlucky engineering hell. So many things went wrong that you'd think we were cursed or something. Maybe we collectively have enough disbelief in god that we were put through the wrath of hell as punishment. I'm not really sure. But as my boss said "things are really falling apart." That might be an understatement.

Collectively, in the past week the following things occurred.

We lost 2 development servers, including our source control, bug management software, wiki and other resources running from these machines. Of course we had backups and we were able to reassembly our development lives on another machine. But that took many, many hours and we weren't complete recovered several days later when, BAM!, it happened again. The second time it happened was the last day we had to work before a very large deadline.

To those of you less technical, this situation is the equivalent of being a good driver and blowing out three tires on the same wheel, each occurring about 20 minutes after the previous one had been replaced. It's bad and unlucky. It's probably statistically worst than unlucky. It's down right weird.

We had another situation that I won't get into here, that essentially caused all of our account permissions to be changed in such a drastic way that I couldn't get on the servers I needed to be on to do my work. This caused a large waste of time for all of our developers as we waited and worked towards resolution.

We had a huge deadline late last night and I got up especially early (before 7am) to get to work early so I could possibly not work all night long. I was there for 12 hours before I could do any work because of the second development server that was lost, which I already mentioned above. 12 freakin hours!! Then finally, about dinner time, we were back in business for work. It sucked. The worst thing about it was knowing this huge deadline was so near, and not being able to work towards it. I worked until about 2AM until I was so tired that I wasn't programming well anymore.

Then, lucky me (but not my other co-workers) I was so tired that I slept in this morning and showed up to work about noon. This being just mere minutes before the internet at our office was repaired, because it had been down all morning. So, most people in our office couldn't work. Did I mention that our phone system is also on the internet? There were no phones either. It was a rough day for the whole office.

And! The cream on the cake was that while we had no internet in our office, Google maps changed their API which resulted in the maps on our live website to break. But, we didn't have any internet so it was near impossible to fix. It was fixed by breaking every programming rule in the book. We edited live code on live web servers. Scary. Did I mention how scary that is yet? Well, sometimes you got to do what you got to do.

There are a couple more happenings that belong in this pile of unbelievable bad luck, but the mundane details aren't really worth your time. All you need to know is that I might be cursed so pary to god before you see me next.

In other news, the yard that we're working on clearing out the vines from is doing well. In no time at all we'll be able to build some food gardening beds and start growing our own food. I'm looking forward to that. Also, this past weekend punkinpie and I got together and prototyped custom homemade blinds for our living room windows. I did the sewing and he did the wood working and it came out really cool. Did I mention that their top down bottom up ones?

Burning Man and Back to Work

Punkinpie and I just got back from Burning Man. I had a good time even though the weather was bad. There were several really severe storms (60 mph winds! that lasted hours) and at one point it even rained. The last time I saw rain out there was in 2001.

Other than that, it was interesting to note how much of the novelty wore off. I got out and explored just as much as I wanted to, but it seemed like a lot less than past years. I suppose some of that could be caused by just how blazing hot it was out there. But at night I also wasn't as active as I remember being in the past too. I think part of that had to do with just how tired I was from my 'real' life. I basically arrived at bm with a sleep deficit, and I caught up out there. It was so nice to sleep, even it it was in a camping situation.

A couple things that I really love about bm is the creativity and do-it-yourself attitude out there. There are so many creative projects and art installations. It's really inspiring. I also really enjoy camping with a group. It's cool to see how everyone works together and make it all work.

We got home on Monday around 7am after leaving the event around 6pm the previous evening. It was slow getting out because of the backup at the gate (~2+ hours), and then the two lane road to interstate 80 is always really slow with the large amount of traffic. That took us another 2 or so hours. Then we stopped in Reno for dinner and were so tired driving through the pass that we pulled over and slept.

I really wish I had the time to stay through Monday or later like we used to. For one thing it's so much faster to get out because you don't have to deal with the thousands of people leaving, trying to make it to work. I guess on the other hand staying while everybody is packing gets old because there's so much extra dust in the air due to the cars driving around. This year was an especially dusty year with the storms and such.

Today at work was really nice because I was so much calmer. I had gotten away from a lot of the stress and had that just-back-from-a-vacation mellowness. I hope I can keep that going for a while. Lucky for me, the big gnarly project that we're in the midst of is doing well, and is completely on schedule for the launch next week. That's really nice too.

(They said the population at bm this year was over 48,000)