So I have been twittering for a while (romeosidvicious) and also hitting identi.ca and wondering if I should pick one. I know I will be posting here more since I found an easy way to do it from my phone so I will start my postings from the reading room again.
I may have mentioned I have a WM6 phone now, the Mogul from Sprint, and I have to say that if I reboot it twice a day it’s a stable device. I could probably only reboot once a day but I like to be safe. I would go iPhone but Jobs and co. are worse than MS at locking crap down. I am waiting patiently for the Andriod phones in Q4 and will snatch up an HTC dream and suffer the pains of early adoption for that but at least I’ll get geek cred for it.
I updated the romeosidvicious muxtape and think this one might be a final product, meaning that I will make another muxtape account for future mixes. It’s pretty damn slick right now and I can’t imagine I will get a better flow out of the songs I want!
I have to update the backend here and at Last Chance Diner this weekend and work a new theme for the diner as well. So the weekend is sort of packed as I also need to test Joomla for the family website as the specialized software has the wife in a tizzy.
We had the baby (figure everyone already knows but just in case) and the pics are up at Michelle’s gallery. So go gaze at the new little addition to the clan. A few more and I’ll be prepped for world domination.
And I can’t do this all on my own.
Quitting smoking is sucking balls.
Earlier this year I got a “Final Written Warning” at work. It hit me like a brick. I didn’t know anything was wrong. My boss never communicated anything to me. It got to be a “Final” warning only because I got written up in my first two weeks, yes a year ago, for not reporting that I had stumbled across a website that had pr0n on it. No I closed my browser and went on about my life. I got written up for it. So my boss hits me a few weeks back with this “Final” warning that has nothing to do with anything else in my file and I am on eggshells at work. The main gist of the write up was sloppiness in my work and she had three examples listed. Example one was me doing exactly and precisely what the vendor told me to do and it ended up being wrong. Yeah that was my fault. Example two was a technology I had never dealt with and I did make some mistakes, I made mistakes correcting her mistakes in the initial setup, yes again totally my fault. Thirdly was a project where I was sloppy. I was. I also caught it and slowed it down and recommended we hold off so I could regroup. Along with that I also found that we weren’t ready to go even if I hadn’t been sloppy. The same project on a different plate went horribly awry the very next weekend. All that said it is review time and I have really been head down but I know that the “Final” warning is going to play into it and I won’t get a bonus. I will likely be told I am lucky to have kept my job. The problem is that there were much larger projects that went without a hitch on my plate including projects that modified every single Linux server in the farm. It won’t matter because all she ever sees is what I do wrong.
It sounds petty but I have kept track of a co-workers mistakes recently. I don’t mean out of malice or to throw him under a bus but just to see if I am being paranoid. Out of fifteen projects since I started watching a total of five have gone off without a hitch. The rest all had problems and most of them were things that should have been seen in advance. He has not been written up once. I am not sure what it means but I am sure that I am not being treated fairly. Even the co-worker that I have been watching thinks the same. The whole team has said as much and yet there is nothing I can do about it.
So I am wasted tired, stressed, and the project on which I am working is a long and drawn out project and I am so bored with it. I have a couple other projects on my plate that are in the planning stages but they are a ways off. I need to get my head above the water again. I don’t want to leave this job and I have no plans to do so. I just want things to go a little easier. I may have a chance at a lateral move so I am waiting to see about that.
The stupid quitting smoking is really not helping all the stress. I do the gum through the worst part of the day and smoke it up whilst feeling guilty about it at home because I don’t have the stomach for the gum.
I have no outlet for stress right now. This sucks.
WHAT. THE. FUCK. OVER?
I can’t even get to sleep on time. I want to be in bed right now but the fact is that makes tomorrow get here even faster. And I honestly don’t want to deal with tomorrow.
So I am making it through the work day on gum. The problem is that it upsets my stomach in a massive way. This means I can barely drink by the time the day is over so I buy a pack on the way home. I am down to under half what I used to smoke but that’s not good enough. I am trying to cut back during the day so I can do the gum longer into the evening but I suspect that is not the best plan.
At work I am stuck playing with a technology I know and love. The problem is that anything gets boring after you have done it too long. I am head down in Nagios all the time. I have learned a lot and am still learning but damn it I am bored. I am about to write some check plugins so I will get to play with perl which is never a bad thing.
I am trying to get approved to go to Brainshare this year and I will likely know today whether that is happening or not. We will wait and see.
That’s all for now but more later for sure.
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Well it’s right after lunch and I am posting from the men’s room on the blackberry. The day is half over and shows no signs of ending. The new Lotus Notes client came out today with a borked installer so I haven’t got to play with it. I am overloading myself with two late night changes this week to install firewalls on a bunch of servers! It will be hell but I want to move on to the next project and soon. This has been killing me! The drudgery and boredom past the initial research is just insane.
See I can whine about work without saying one bad word about anyone! That felt good…
One more tight, but not broke, pay period and we are out of the woods. I am looking forward to that for sure.
Fry’s is going to kill me. But they did take months to fix my computer so they can wait a while for me to pick it up.
So randmon and so cheap. What did you expect from the men’s room?
Well I added a forum today. Right here is the link. It’s also over in the left sidebar as I Hate These Forums. It’s just one forum right now to see if there will be any use. You can post anything at all. It doesn’t have to be about anything I have posted or even anything I care about. You can invite your friends or your enemies. I am keeping the rules to a minimum as I always have on my forums. Feel free to use them. I am still working on the colors so if you notice anything that needs work just drop a comment here and I will get around to it. I also added a link up top, the tabs don’t change color yet but that’s because I suck at css and the guy who wrote the base theme sucks worse at documentation than I suck at css. So as soon as the wife helps me out maybe it will start working. The link works but the tabs don’t change color.
Quitting smoking sucks. I mean it sucks really bad. For me it’s not the nicotine though. I can go without nicotine without too much of a problem. The ritual however is just about killing me. I am not bothering this weekend because I failed every day Wed to Fri this week. I got the gum and that completely takes care of the nicotine and then some. It’s when things get boring that I break. I don’t know what to do with my hands at all. I can’t even drive without a smoke. So I am sitting here puffin away instead of chewing gum and all because my hands don’t know what to do with themselves. I know it sounds weird, hell, it feels weird. It’s like being a guest in your own body. Quitting caffeine was painful when I did it for Lent but this is something different. I can’t just fight through a headache for a day or two and be done. It’s killing me. It is hard to breathe with pretty much any physical activity. I am down to one pack a day but it’s not enough I have to quit. I want to play ball with my son and right now I am grateful his attention span is shorter than my stamina but that won’t last. The price just went up here as well and that sucks. Dumbass lawmakers taxing us so they can do more bullshit. They claim it’s for schools but we all know the students won’t see any improvement. I don’t want to get sidetracked though. I could go on and on about the futility of dumping money into education without revamping the system from the top down but I need to quit smoking worse than I need to rant right now.
I have to finish getting the urchins ready for church right now so I have to whining about everything. If you are so inclined then say a prayer for my efforts to quit smoking.
Well it is that time of year and for the first time in half a decade I am unemployed. Technically I have a job but it doesn’t start until Jan 8 which will be too late to pay rent. Yeah I was overestimating our finances for rent time. We didn’t spend a dime of our own on Christmas for the kids even. Just bills, food, and such. It sucks. To be honest I fight depression every year around this time and it’s really hard to keep my head up right now. Last time I was unemployed an angel sent me money and it helped. I have to go to various organizations and ask for help and while I shouldn’t feel this way I so don’t want to. It’s a blow to my pride. The last job loss wasn’t anything I did and as such I feel I should still be employed. The bastards as Veritas DGC fired me while my wife was in labor for God’s sake! I can only think it was the three days I asked to have off for the new baby. Yeah that’s right I asked for three days. Of course they get around all the federal labor laws since I am a contractor.
I am not having a good time of it right now. I cannot stomach this for much longer. I am headed back into webhosting because I know that industry. It’s not near as much money and we will have to change a few things but I have to get my confidence back. I am done in. I wish I could just give up to be completely honest. No music this time folks…
Not today. I had to skip the Austin trip for various and numerous reasons.
1. Michelle has been showing more and more signs of being ready to pop. I would never forgive myself if I left town and the baby came. I have been there for every birth and this one ain’t gonna be any different.
2. The weather is pretty much teh suck and as much as I want to see the boys I would be miserable for most of the day.
3. I feel like utter and complete hammered crap today.
4. Even with the wonderful gift the possibility of the baby coming early is a budget concern since I will miss about a week of work.
5. Transportation wasn’t going to be an easy issue to tackle.
So for all those reasons and more I didn’t get to go to the music festival, have lunch with UberLutheran, crash on Jake’s couch and pretend I am eighteen for two days, or drive to Austin with Freddy. I am not depressed about this at all to be honest. I made a responsible decision and I am proud of myself for that.
Yeah I know it’s a goofy title. But one for the reasons my ‘doze partition has continued to exist is PCDJ FX. Well since I have Ultramix, which is cross platform, I have no need for the MS hell. All the games I play run perfectly under Cedega so that isn’t an issue. Yes even warcraft is perfectly capable of running under it and getting great framerates. So I will be moving files around to create larger partitions and get all of the important files over to EXT3 partitions. Ok I am a huge geek but everything I do I can do in Linux and some it I can do better in Linux. Given equal ground I see no reason to keep around the ‘doze partition and everything is equal in my environment at this time. I do love my tweaking….
So the new job. It’s boring right now. I don’t have the access to do the things I need to be doing so it’s roughly a job where sitting and staring at the wall is the complete and total norm. I run some service calls with other engineers (a misnomer) but mostly it is sitting around and trying not to fall asleep. The same can be said for those with access to tickets right now. We are overstaffed but that doesn’t mean my job is in danger. We are overstaffed for a reason. A reason that none of us actually know but will likely find out tomorrow during a meeting.
We have lots of meetings. Monday morning and Thursday afternoon are pre-scheduled and then there are other random meetings in between. It’s pretty corporate. Of course at a company this large everything is corporate in nature. We service a specific set of clients on a specifc set of operating system with a very specific scope of support. Some days we are just ticket jockeys making sure the right departments get the problems that were assigned to us. Other days we are lifesavers to the clients. There won’t be anything challenging here for me as the scope is so limited but I think that will be alright for a couple of years.
I don’t want to stagnate so I have to find new projects. Since karaoke is a hobby of mine I plan to learn C++ by writing a karaoke suite for Linux. By suite I mean player, cataloging, ripper, and so on. Once it is done I plan on making it a bootable CD distro. A complete karaoke system by just putting a CD in your box and rebooting. It’s actually a very huge project to be honest but I have been wanting to learn C++ for a long time. I could do it in perl most likely but I want to have a nice compiled system that is graphical and can be used by a novice with a simple reboot. I have to decide on KDE or Gnome but that is academic to be honest. It will work on either when I am done so all that matters is what libs I want to use.
So the drudgery of daily work in a large corporation carries on. Evidenced by the fact I had time to write this post to begin with. This is not a fast paced environment at all. Everything moves through levels of bureaucracy with such quickness it reminds me of an iceberg. That is not to say that the job isn’t important but rather to say that my job has absolutely nothing at all to do with affecting any change. All I have to do is make sure the clients OS and hardware are working right and then hand off to the right group. I have to do this rather quickly according to those that work here but our SLA is pretty laughably far out. It might seem fast to those used to a corporate environment but to those of used to demanding clients this is a cakewalk.
Maybe I’ll take some pics of the new office digs and post them later. Of course I will have to edit out all of the indentifying marks since I am not saying where I work but that takes mere seconds. I am off to stare some more at the wall and maybe read more Sluggy.
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