(Phaysis)

So, I’ve been negligent to this journal in the past month. Not unusual, but so much has happened and I haven’t shared. I know I should document at least some of the exciting and mundane things just to keep you people coming back. So negligent. For that, I’m sorry…but not that sorry.

Eh, five or six weeks back I quit IRC for good. I’m done. When I think of all the time I’ve wasted on that chat medium, I weep. That’s time I will never get back. Well, it wasn’t a total waste; there are some really awesome people on there. I mean IRC is just a tool for communication and nothing more, but the ratio of awesome people to absolute dicks (who are dicks just for the joy of it) makes the medium not worth the effort. I met some good people, and I really miss them. But the rest of the people, fuck ‘em.

I now have a lot of quality time available. I don’t have to expend so much mental energy constantly defending myself with wit and face-saving antics that I’m too fatigued and demoralized to be productive. Now I feel better about myself. It’s like turning up the squelch control on a noisy receiver; click, and it’s no more noise. It’s amazing. And oddly enough, I don’t feel lonely anymore since I’m now paying attention to the here-and-now. I’ve always felt like I was staring at the horizon on a long, dark, starless night trying to communicate with people just beyond, but now I’m looking at the campfire in front of me and finally connecting with the people who’ve been sitting next to me for so many years.

Case in point: I met a girl. Ok, actually, it’s more complicated than that. We’ve known each other for eight years back when she was in a shitty marriage. Saw each other for the first time in a while at a coffeeshop and decided to chat face-to-face; that evening, my laptop stayed in its bag. We’ve been hanging out quite a bit, nothing serious. Just good times and lots of laughs. Bringing some levity and sanity to things. People need more of that. IRC never gave me any of that.

And now, something that isn’t related to IRC: a month ago I noticed my eyeglasses were starting to break and it was only a matter of time before the whole thing came apart, so I went to the optometrist. Got a wild hare and decided to get contacts; it’d been ’93 since I wore them last, so I wanted to try again. Well, after the first 10 days, my eyes were so dry and irritated I had to stop wearing the contacts. Eyes got seriously bloodshot; looked as if I had pinkeye. Had to start wearing my new glasses.

Well, two nights ago I decided to try the contacts again; my eyes were finally clear, no redness. I put them on before going out for the evening; returned home four hours later and promptly removed them. Eyes were so dry that I scratched them while removing the contacts…I’m so out of practice. Woke up Saturday morning to the brightest red eyes I’d ever seen this side of the movies. They’re still embarrassingly red two days later. That’s all the evidence I need to tell me that I can’t wear contacts, which is a shitty realization considering how much I’d invested in those fuckers. I’m not sure if the contacts themselves are carrying a bacterial load or if their surface is rough from wearing them or if I’m allergic to the cleaning solution or whatever. All I know is that I can’t wear them, and I should probably consult my optodoc before trying anything else. Hmph.

In other news, my job lately is quite stressful. I don’t want to dwell too much on it considering this is Sunday night, the calm before the storm. My workload has been building up on me faster than I can process it, and I feel I’m on the verge of collapse. It’s not worth the 10% pay reduction I got (everybody got a paycut, thanks to the economy…whatever). It’s a job, and it supports the lifestyle to which I have grown accustomed, but the Depression-era rearing I had beaten into me tells me to not knock it because “I could be flipping burgers”. But c’mon. I’m getting new assignments and “side projects” every time I receive an email. And everybody wants their numbers in the early part of this week. Well I’m here to say that shit ain’t happening.

I went in for a few hours today (a Sunday!) to get a head start on the week. Hopefully I got the last part of the data collection for one of the tasks; spent three hours on it in the lab by myself with no distractions. I’ll crunch the numbers tomorrow after I kick off some benchmark runs for another task. Hopefully everything will have been for good. At the least, I got three of my required 40 hours done; everybody (on top of the paycuts) also has time limits if they’re hourly. Yeah, awesome. My checks are shitty; everybody’s is. Probably why my workload’s building up: nobody else has time left to do them. Feh.

Dammit. I’ve dwelt too much. Moving on.

The Ruby On Rails project I’m building for my site is progressing well. I have basic user functionality written and now I’m moving along into file uploads, doing all the groundwork for everything that stacks on top of it. Once I had my user and login admin code mostly finished, I decided — just for fun — to write a test harness to check it (I can’t check everything by clicking in a browser). Wouldn’t you know it, there were holes and flaws and errors and problems aplenty in my code. Who the hell put those there? I am so damned glad I worked up the testcases. Rails has a pretty powerful facility for writing tests. Now, since I’m starting work on the file upload feature, I think I’ll follow this programming methodology (some call it “extreme programming”) by sketching out an idea of what I want to the software to do, composing the tests to check for that functionality, and then writing the project code to make those tests pass. It’s a goal-oriented approach, and thankfully it’s keeping me on track.

And all this because of the free time I have available after I ditched IRC. Can you believe that? I certainly can.

First week of the new year. 51 more until the next.

Sitting at Epoch having some much-needed caffeine. Yeah, you heard me…I am at Epoch. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s something about every coffee shop that just bugs the shit out of me, and over time, it all evens out. Every place sucks. So much so that I bought a french press, but even though my apartment has fucking awesome wireless, great seating, killer music, and absolutely no problem with parking, it’s practically empty. There’s nobody there. So over the holiday break, I got epically bored out of my mind and decided to break my personal ban on Epoch. Now it’s just another humdrum option out of a handful of other humdrum options.

So anyway, I’m having coffee. I think it’s starting to kick in. Usually some time around 5 o’clock my head just caves in and I feel like all my sugar and will and concentration and vision just goes away like wet ashes. And that’s when I need coffee. Usually, by the time I leave work an hour or so later, I’m at wits end trying to concentrate on the road home.

I’ve got a big project at work, and it finally started after three days of false starts. A coworker has spent the past year writing on a suite of tools to allow the automation of some of our hardware data collection efforts. We finally had a reason to apply his software to our setup, and after several fits and starts while trying to fit the hammer to the nail, it’s finally up and working.

Right now, it’s banging away in the lab and doing nicely. We got it running at 5:30, and I decided that instead of letting it run for part of its cycle before killing it when I leave for the weekend, I would go ahead and let it finish its full run since the data is so important to those who deem it so. I would’ve done that regardless except the actual testbed setup needs to be shut down afterwards. There are parts of the equipment that don’t need to be running idle all weekend, so my plan is to return to work tonight at 10 and shut it down when it’s done.

Which is why I’m here having coffee and a slice of pizza. I got time to kill, and a need to fill. Sucks that I have to go back to work on a friday night, but I’ll be there for, what, half an hour.

Speaking of work and billable time, I got an extension on my contract. My manager has been pressing Human Resources to get me converted to permanent for the past few months, and now that the company’s on hard times, the economy’s in the dumps, blah blah blah, HR has frozen all open requisitions company-wide. So I can’t get converted, at least not this quarter. So instead of hiring me permanently, they extended my contract another six months…which puts me over the company-standard 24-month limit on contracts. So, if anything happens in May (the 24th month), it happens. Elsewise, I finish the contract extension and see what happens at the next end.

I’m glad that my manager was able to impress upon HR how important my position is. I just hope that I can live up to that.

I am finally getting over my cold. We broke up a few days ago. She tried to hook me up with her sister Bronchitis, but I said “NO! I’m not interested. Let’s just pretend to be friends and never call each other ever again.” I’m also getting over my angry cough; for two nights it’s been getting me up at 3am in a fit of dream-coughing that gets so bad I wake up and have to do something about it. Disrupts my sleep. But I take some robo, double up my pillows to elevate my head, and make another pass at sleep. Maybe tonight will prove successful.

Work is hectic. My department is in the middle of a move to the new campus, so my coworkers and I have been pulling crap out of the corners, piling papers, sorting them into stacks, and then throwing away all the stacks. Every wire, cable, heat sink, component, processor, screw, server, everything has to be sorted, returned to its place and packed up by 5pm next wednesday. So far, it’s all a clusterfuck: trying to motivate and organize a department of ~75 people to get their stuff straight, and trying to get the movers to understand what we need moved, and trying to have all parties communicate what actually has to happen (versus what people think needs to happen) is a herculean effort. AND my coworker and I have to keep producing numbers. So, when all our equipment is over in the new campus across town, we’ll be with our test servers and offline test equipment in the old campus trying to do our work for two days, and then we’ll pack it all up and carry it all across town.

Predicting a huge pain in the ass.

While writing this, I remembered that I needed to update my timesheet, so I tabbed over to my Google Notes page to note the time I left today. What the hell…when I clicked on the note that contained all my clock-in/clock-out times for this week, the note disappeared. Deleted. So I clicked “Undo”, and the note came back, then I clicked on the note again to select it for editing…it deleted again. So I clicked “Undo”. It didn’t come back. It wasn’t in the deleted bin. It just…vanished. What the hell. All my timepoints lost, and I hadn’t had the chance to enter it all into my real timesheet app. So, I tried to remember and re-entered everything.

Maybe I should not be so trusting. Maybe if I say “Google sucks!” they’ll find this entry in their results for the search “Google sucks” (companies have departments that do this) and they’ll contact me to see what they can do to help make it right. Maybe I should file a bug report. Maybe I should just get over it.

I hate computers.

Stagnation.

I’ve been a little twisted up inside of late. Holding a lot of stuff back. Suppose it’s for the best. Dunno. Verdict’s still out.

Let’s start with the inane:

I bought a new computer keyboard. The old one was four years old, and after the two hours of cleaning I did on it last Saturday, it was less a rubber membrane and the key action went from bad to very rough. I got seriously tired of having to communicate through keys that didn’t want to go down. With the anger I was feeling over the last weekend, not being able to express it added fuel to the fire. So Tuesday I bought a new keyboard, and I’m so loving it. Typing is a pleasure. A finger orgy. Party at the computer.

I bought a wireless access point for the apartment a week ago. Got it configured with encryption (weak, as it were) and access control. Got my laptop to work with it, and my roomate bought a wireless card for his laptop so he could take advantage of it as well. We’re all configured now. Everyone happy. Party in the street.

Remember the journal entry I made a few months back listing people I went to college with? One of them randomly emailed me last weekend with my message gateway. It was excellent to hear from her. She said that she was looking up some data on her family history, and her full name appeared. She followed the link to my site, and was astonished to hear her nickname. See, that’s exactly why I made that entry. I banked on the gamble that someone from that list, some how some way would search for their name and find that entry and the message to them. And it worked. We’re emailing each other, catching up. Is good. Party in the email client.

Work is picking up, slowly but surely. I’m still not so happy with the job, but it’s work, it’s a steady paycheck, it’s security, it’s something to get me away from the drama that follows me. Tomorrow looks to be a busy day, which is completely within the Friday idiom. Much happiness. A party in the bindery room.

‘Scuse me, but I really like Digital Gunfire. You don’t like industrial music? You can suck it. Wait, you do? Go there. Love it. Caress it. Put it in vinyl and whip it. It’s your choice. Party in the dungeon.

I made some strides with one of my ongoing programming projects last weekend. It works. I’m happy. Party in the login script.

Maybe this weekend will be less, um, shitty. Party in your pants.

Things at work are still boring, stale, and dry. Irritating. Annoying. The other day I was talking with a coworker in passing, chit-chat kind of stuff. She was complaining about being on the tail-end of a chest cold, congestion problems. I remarked that there were some weeks I felt OK on monday morning, but by the time Friday came around, my chest was tight and my breathing was kinda rough. I mused about it either being fumes, falling insulation fiber, whatever. Doesn’t happen all the time. We shrugged our shoulders, I walked on to continue working, and that was that.

Around 4:30pm the bosslady calls me into her office. I hate when that happens, because she’s always got a serious look when she does it, and she’s called coworkers into her office quite a bit for no pleasant reason. So I was cringing, at best, and angry at worst, about what I could’ve possibly done to deserve punishment. So, I get in there, she pulls the door closed, and she begins asking me about a rumor from an unnamed source that’s floating around that I’m talking about possible health problems from the work environment, that she wants to “nip this in the bud”, and so on. I remembered thinking to myself, “Well, I know better than to trust that coworker again with chit-chat.” Either she relayed the chat, or the bosslady overheard, I don’t know. But I’m being asked about what I meant when I stated that. I told her it was only an observation, not a claim, not a fact. Whether it was environmental, or mental, I knew not. And now that I am living more healthily, it’ll be a span of time before I can make another assessment about it. Give my chest time to heal, then if it happens again, we’ll talk.

Talk about butterflies under the magnifying glass.

So, she’s got that “nipped”, and the conversation leads on to my attitude, my demeanor when I’m at work, my goal, what I’m trying to get out of working there. I’m there to earn a paycheck. That job facilitates my lifestyle, plain and simple. It’s not a career. Printing isn’t a career choice. It’s a job. Anything I do is just a job. But I can’t tell her that. She has a hand on the company pursestrings. I tell her that yes I enjoy working there, that yes my gruff and distant attitude is just a trait of my personality, and that as of late I’ve been having a mindset change, a slump. She tried to sum up my flat answers as best as she could, and she came up, rather accurately, with a flatline. And that’s exactly how I feel about life, about everything. Especially that job. It’s just, bleh. I have no ten-year plan. No five-year plan. No plans at all. She stated that I was smart, productive, and an odd fit for the job, and she started to question why I was there at all. I had no answers for her, simply because I didn’t want to paint myself into a corner. I didn’t want to provide ammunition, to hand her the pen to write my pink slip. She’s the bosslady. I tell her what will keep me earning pay. You can’t expect any other kind of honesty.

Flatline. I’m not happy there. Haven’t been in a while. She says she can’t imagine living a life where she’s not excited about what’s going on at work, about what she’s able to contribute to. If you ask me, I can see that people like that do exist, but I can’t, for my life, imagine what that position in life is like. I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t get excited about work. I rarely get excited about things these days. There are expectations there, everywhere, and I hate performing. Simple as that. Give me a task, show me a corner, hand me a machine, and leave me the hell alone. That’s when I’ll work. That’s where I work best.

But now, it appears I’m working under that magnifying glass.

Butterflies and wind.