Ugh...  Stupid Daylight Savings Time.  What are we saving?  Oh, right.  NOTHING. A friend pointed out that "standard" time is now a misnomer, as it only exists for 1/3 of the year.

Got a new desk at work.  An actual desk, not a cube.  With a phone (yay?).  This is partially to make room for our new person that we finally got transferred in from another department (despite our hiring freeze), but also to give me and the other guy that I've been working on "special projects" with a more private area.

Picture of my new desk:

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Our VP announced a "reduction in force" that happened on Thursday, quite unexpectedly.  His email said that no further cuts were planned...  Of course every other message he ever sent said that no cuts were planned at all, so this makes that a little harder to believe.  I guess that's the way things go in shitty economies, though.

Last week I was tipped off to a sale that Best Buy was having a super-crazy sale on the Asus EeePC 900A which was too good to pass up, so I ordered one...  The 900A is almost identical specs to my 701, but it has a 9-inch screen (1024x600) and an Intel Atom N270 processor.  It's slightly larger overall and slightly heavier, but for that minor tradeoff, I get a machine with a 60% larger screen and a CPU nearly three times as fast.  And since I sold the 701, the upgrade only cost me a little over $100.  Not too shabby.

Oh, and it is so much more useful to have a 1024 pixel wide screen...  So many web pages are designed for 1024 pixels it's not funny...  Having pages actually fit on the screen is a very nice thing.

The Jimmy John's downtown closed.  And the Subway that was displaced by a stupid bank never relocated.  Now the only sub shop near my office that isn't painfully slow is Quiznos.  And I don't really like Quiznos.  And oh yeah, they're painfully slow.  And they're probably going to get slower now that they're going to have more customers.  I WANT MY SUB SHOPS BACK.

Haven't posted in a while.  We've been remodeling the dining room.  I think it's all done now, except for actually decorating the walls.  Really nice feeling to have it all done.

Work has been... work.  My super huge project is done, kind of.  We're just waiting to actually get it launched.

FInally got flat panel monitors at work.  My desk looks so much nicer now.

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Also snapped this picture of a really nice sunset the other day out the window at my office...  Too bad my mobile's camera sucks so much (I've decided that 'phone' isn't the right term anymore).

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Hmmm...  Haven't posted in a while.  That seems unfair to all of you faithful readers.  All... um... how many of you are there?

My super-huge-mega-project at work is finally almost nearly three microns away from done.  Which is exactly the same place it's been for like 3 months.  I swear... we haven't done any real work on it in months, but we're still constantly working on it.  Every time we fix one bug or relieve one bottleneck, another pops up right behind it.  And they're all really little problems.  This latest problem actually makes me feel like the project is mocking me.  Now that we've fixed so many bottlenecks, the program runs so fast that we can't handle the amount of data that its generating.  Talk about irony.  It'll be nice when this is finally done and I can move onto the next project.

I just logged into my benefits site to see how my 401(k) is braving this recession-that-isn't-really-a-recession... thing.  Apparently my investment picks aren't very brave.  My 401(k) is apparently down 10% this month.  Awesome.  Good thing I don't need to retire for another 40 years.
Ugh...  Retirement...  I get bored on a long weekend.  What am I going to do with myself for potentially decades?

I can't believe college hockey season starts so soon...  Just last weekend it was still in the 80s (though right now it's a more seasonable 53).  But according to my fantastic website http://isthererpihockeytonight.com, the RPI Women's team opens their season in 8 days.  A September hockey game...  That doesn't sound right...  But I've got season tickets lined up for this year (finally retiring from the band), and a bunch of us are trekking up to Quebec for the game RPI is playing against Vermont (don't ask why it's in Quebec).  I'm excited.

Ok, enough rambling for now.  Until next time...

I've lost confidence in my boss.

When I got in, I told him I was late because 3 of my oxen and my daughter drowned while I was attempting to ford the river I-90.  He didn't get it.

Apparently the most important thing I have to work on it to fix the formatting in a stupid report.  Not fix the content in the report.  Fix the FORMATTING.

This is more important than the other 8 work requests in our queue that ACTUALLY NEED WORK DONE.

Sarah pointed out something to me on our way home from dinner...  Work has been getting increasingly stressful lately.  Our clients have been getting more and more demanding of us, and it's really starting to show.  People are getting really snappy at each other, and a number of people are showing signs of burnout.  We've also lost a number of people recently, including some people higher up.

I signed on this morning and took a look at my work queue to find that not one of the ten work requests sitting there was marked anything other than "critical" priority.  This is pretty much the norm now.  Non-critical requests either need to get snuck in while working on other requests, or get sidelined until the person that entered them raises their priority because they were sitting too long.

My department has been so busy lately that we're all working non-insignificant amounts of overtime...  We have these side-projects that we're all supposed to be working on, many of which are designed to automate repetitive work requests or make it possible for other people to do work rather than us, but we've been so busy working on the work requests that we're trying to eliminate we don't have time to implement the automations.

This new office setup isn't really helping either.  It's very obvious that corporate cut just about every corner they could.  The cubes are shoddily built and many are broken already.  They won't buy my department new flat panel monitors because they say that since we now have larger desks there is no need.  The HVAC system issues still aren't worked out (it's nearly always uncomfortably hot in my area)...  The lack of creature comforts do not help morale...

I don't know.  It's a good job.  I like the work.  I like the people I work with.  It's just getting rather stressful...  Hopefully things will improve.

Gah...  Week from hell at work.  I was put in charge of a relatively major project (migrating data for a client moving from a competitor to us).  Everything was going smoothly last week (or so I thought), but all kinds of problems this week.

I took Sunday off, since I worked last Friday instead...  Monday went ok.  Not crazy.  Tuesday I worked probably 2 hours after I got home to try and finish things.

Wednesday, I found out that a major component of the migration was skipped (not my fault), but that I was going to have to do the work to get that part loaded...  I left work early (at 5) and went home.  Started working after I got home at about 7, and didn't go to bed until about 2:30 (AM).  Set my alarm to wake me back up at 4 so I could finish what I told the databases to start doing for me at 2.  Went back to sleep at about 4:30 (now Thursday morning).

Slept in for a bit on Thursday, finally getting up and going in at about 12:30.  I thought that everything was done at this point, but found out at 6:15 that there was a major problem with something that I did.  I identified the problem before leaving shortly after 7, but told people that I was too tired to fix it and would fix it Friday.  On the ride home, however, I figured out a solution to the problem, and decided I was better off fixing it then and sleeping on Friday instead.  So I spent about 3 hours fixing it, and then went to bed.

Got a call from by boss today (Friday, yeah, it's not really Friday anymore) at 5:15 (shortly before I was planning to leave for the hockey game) indicating that there was another problem.  Quickly hopped on the VPN and determined that it wasn't actually another problem, it was actually the same problem as yesterday, except in a different place (I previously assumed that the problem yesterday was limited to one location).  So... I told him I could fix it, but not until later.  Went to the hockey game, and then out to dinner with Mike, Yuri, and Rob (who's up for Pep Band Alumni Night tomorrow), got home at about 11, and signed back on...  Just finished working a little while ago.  Hopefully it's not all done.

So, adding that all up, it looks like I worked nearly 50 hours this week, but supposedly only worked 4 days.  Great.

I just better not get any calls tomorrow.  Maybe I should just "forget" my phone at home.

Wooooo!  I haven't been this happy at work on a Sunday in quite a while.

First of all, I discovered this morning that my department has usurped a different area in the new office.  We are no longer in the cramped little 2x4 cubes, right in the middle of the other departments.  We have apparently taken over the large mostly unused back area of the floor, which is somewhat secluded, and includes 6x6 L-desk cubes.  We still have windows, but they're somewhat obscured, and the view isn't very good, but I'll take the privacy and space over the view any day.  This space is much more conducive to the collaborative work we do.

I picked up my computer from my old desk this morning, and using my chair as a push-cart, hauled it upstairs.  I am now reasonably settled, and I really can't complain.  I think this'll be nice.  Photo taken with my cellphone's shitty camera:

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And in other good work-related news...  There was a rumor floating around our department that our annoying, clueless, incompetent new guy was leaving for another job with the State, which made all of us happy, but there was no official word about anything, so we were all a bit confused.  Well... it turns out that the truth was even better than the rumors.

What actually happened is that he went out to interview for other jobs in an attempt to get a second offer as leverage for a raise.  Well, he got that offer.  He took it back to my boss, who promptly replied that it would be in his best interest to take that other offer.  I can't even begin to explain how amused I am by this.  I'm loving it.  Really.

So... that's work so far today.

I snuck up to our new office (ok... I took the elevator up to the 9th floor and walked into the wide-open door).  The view is very nice.  I think the layout is pretty good, too.  The lack of walls will be... well... we'll see how that turns out.  But so far I think it's ok.

It's also a very reasonable temperature upstairs, as opposed to freezing, like it is in my office now.

Pictures to come once we move.

The move to the new office was put off...  Apparently we haven't received a certificate of occupancy from the city yet.  Stupid laws.

Also, our clients suck.  Expecting us to be able to do a busy week's worth of work between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening is somewhat unreasonable.

Been crazy busy lately, hence the no updating.

Last week was fun.  Fun in that "having your garage door tear its track off of the wall and having the basement flood on the same day" kind of way.  Yeah...  Fortunately, no damage to the basement, the car was not in the garage, and we're installing a new garage door this weekend.

Just got a message from the boss^4 today...  Starting on Monday, we are finally moving to our new office, 6 floors above our current office (we're expanding into that space, but my whole department is being moved).  I found out that not only do I get to retain a window desk, I get a window desk on the nicer side of the building.  I'm not sure how the sight lines are, given the proximity of the other buildings, but it is conceivable that I may be able to see the river from my desk, which would be mucho cool.  The actual moving process is probably going to be a pain in the ass, though, and will result in several days of very little productivity, but that happens.  Should be nice.  I'll attempt to get a camera in at some point so I can get pictures.

The cloth cover on my keyboard wrist rest tore...  I was going to just throw it out, but I decided it would be interesting to see what the gel inside is like, so I pulled it out.  It came out in one big, stretchy, squishy piece.  So now I have a wrist rest-shaped blob of silicone sitting on my desk.  Surprisingly, it's actually more comfortable than when it was in the cover.

I've returned from my cruise. It was pretty fun. Good to be able to spend time with my family, since I don't really see that side all that often. The entire trip was also very relaxing, which is definitely a good thing. I'm not entirely sure I would do another Caribbean cruise, but it was still definitely a good time. I still would like to do an Alaskan cruise at some point.

I took a bunch of pictures, but I've not had a chance to download them from my camera's memory card, so I'll go through them all and post them tonight.

One of the "activities" onboard was an art auction (actually... several art auctions). Sarah and I ended up spending... um... a bit on some art. So I guess that makes us art collectors. Very nice pieces, though some of them we don't currently have space to display. We'll need to buy some more walls.

We also took the opportunity to acquire cheap liquor to get the comically largest bottle we could find for Yuri and Tim (it ended up being a completely ridiculous-looking 4.5 liter bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label).

My drive home, however, wasn't quite as nice... I seem to be having some kind of major electrical problem. My car made it home, but I'm not sure by how much. The battery light was flashing on and off for pretty much the whole trip, the electrical system voltage was bouncing all over the place, and when I had my headlights on, they were kind of pulsing on and off. There were also a few points where I think the voltage dropped low enough that I started losing the onboard computer, as the speedometer dropped to zero a few times. So... I have no idea what's wrong with my car, nor do I know if it will even start right now (I didn't try this morning), and since it's a holiday weekend, I can't get it looked at until Tuesday at best. My best guess right now is that my alternator is either dead or VERY close, or there's some kind of short somewhere.

To make things even better, my backup server at home informed me that the same hard drive that I just replaced is dead with exactly the same error message, which leads me to believe that it's not the hard drive at all, but the RAID card itself that's dying. So... I need to get a new RAID card. But wait, that's not all. I currently have an ATA RAID card, but I'm not going to replace it with another ATA RAID card, I'm going to replace it with a SATA one. And guess what that means! I need all new hard drives, too. At least this gives me an excuse to increase my storage capacity by a factor of over 4. Oh well...