Category: Uncategorized

Well, as you can probably tell by the lack of posting, I’m caught up in work again. I’ve got two projects running at the same time right now, and another two in the wings that could happen any day.

For one of the two running projects I’ll have a representative from the customer looking over my shoulder for the next three days. Have I mentioned how much I despise being watched while I work?

With me it’s pretty easy: If it requires interaction – be this in person, through email, or over a phone – with someone outside my core group of “known good” people I’m not going to be happy about it.

But, enough about work…

Jae and I saw the latest installment of “Batman” over the weekend…

Two words: Much Better.

Being a consumer of fine independent comics I’m not a huge fan of the DC or Marvel assembly-line rehash, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Batman… He’s just a normal Joe trying to save his town from a slew of chemically induced, radioactive, alien, time traveling super beings.

No super powers. No mutations. No excuses – Just a guy with a brain and lots of cool toys.

Kinda like America’s version of James Bond I suppose.

Anyways, it was a much better attempt at getting to the core of “Batman”. It was a much more base and humanistic telling of the story with a full half of the movie dedicated to Batman’s origin. We even get to see ‘lieutenant’ Gordon, long before he’s made ‘commissioner’ and the interplay between he and Batman that leads to their partnership in the latter years.

And the new Batmobile rocks! This isn’t some wimpy Val Kilmer Batmobile… This is the illegitimate love child of a Lamborghini and an Abrams tank…

Anyways, it’s time for me to trundle off to work. Have a great day out there folks.

It appears that my rather unique brand of rant can now be found almost anywhere. Here’s my “Mac vs. PC” featured on Jeff Powell’s site, complete with spiffy art!

http://radio.weblogs.com/0142035/2005/05/11.html

Jae and I saw “Madagascar” over the weekend… Amazingly funny movie and well worth the $10 to see it. There’s even an homage to Peter Seller’s “Indian Doctor” which is really funny too.

Today, in theory, Aryntha will be starting work where Jae and I work. This should be fun.

Other than those items above, there’s no new news from this little slice of space-time. So I’ll sign off and head for work…

Have a great day everyone.

And thus begins another week.

Not a lot to report from the weekend as I didn’t do much of anything except chores, read, and play World of Warcraft.

The tickets for the August 26th show of 1964 up at Red Rocks came in Friday. It should be a fun show to see.

Well, that’s about it from my end of the universe. Till next time, take care.

It’s Thursday, LANparty night at work, so I won’t be home till late.

I found out yesterday that there is a very good chance that I’ll be attending an Xbox360 conference in Tacoma Washington this month… I’ll be learning all about the quirks and foibles of Microsoft’s newest box as far as coding goes. This should be a big help in helping software engineers at game dev houses work out the issues that we find with their products.

I’ll have to look up Flinters while I’m there and get the latest scoop on his Convention and see how things are going in the art world. Federal Way shouldn’t be too far from SeaTac if I remember right, just south a ways on 99…

That’s about it for news. Till next time, stay safe…

And yet another week begins, though this one should be a bit short for it’s ilk with yesterday being a holiday and all.

Jae and I went over to Jon and Jen’s new house yesterday for the prerequisite Memorial Day BBQ. Jon made some great burgers and hotdogs, we watched a few movies, and there were the occasional “remember back in the military” topics such as tear gas training and the story of their cat which was found overseas somewhere in the bed of a 5-ton.

“Uncle” Jae got to play with Dorian; Jon and Jen’s 4 year old, who we discovered can turn a single “cheeto” into about 15 minutes of boundless energy… I had no idea that 4 year olds could be such fantastic matter to energy converters. At any rate it was funny to watch Dorian and Jae tear the house apart.

I tried to keep the World of Warcraft discussions to a minimum while we were there. Jae and I play WoW quite a bit, being single and none to happy with the current state of civilization will do that. Jen got into WoW because most of the folks at work play it, but Jon has his cars to work on and such and isn’t too horribly interested. But WoW isn’t something you just “play a little”, it’s a good game, and Jen has been pulled in completely… So I had to strive to keep things on a topic Jon could be involved with too, because the three of us left to our own devices would have taken off on some rant about the Alliance or our latest adventure in some instance and left Jon to talk with Dorian… Which at 4 years old can be quite the interesting conversation let me tell you.

Anyways, we all had a pretty good time and their new house is really quite nice. It’s really a new house too, as the developer is still building houses around them and their back yard isn’t finished yet. Jon calls is his “desert ops” yard, as it’s pretty much a large square of dirt.

All in all it was a good weekend.

So, now I get to head back to Aurora and get to work. I’ll bid you all a pleasant day and sign off here.

Just a quick note this morning:

It is official, Voyager one has entered the “final frontier”…

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/voyager_agu.html

Music most fitting for the Voyager Program –

Kyrie – Mr. Mister

Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison, kyrie

The wind blows hard against this mountain side
Across the sea into my soul
It reaches into where I cannot hide
Setting my feet upon the road

My heart is old, it holds my memories
My body burns a gemlike flame
Somewhere between the soul and some machine
Is where I find myself again

CHORUS:
Kyrie eleison, down the road that I must travel
Kyrie eleison, through the darkness of the night
Kyrie eleison, where I’m going will you follow
Kyrie eleison, on a highway in the light

When I was young I thought of growing old
Of what my life would mean to me
Would I have followed down my chosen road
Or only wished what I could be

CHORUS

Thus begins another week.

Not a lot to report from the weekend… As Aryntha once said, “Nothing wrong with a big bowl of relax” and that’s exactly what I did, once I got the kitchen clean and a few other weekend chores out of the way.

I made 30th level with my priest in World of Warcraft. I’d have several level 60 characters by now, but there was a lot of server swapping as folks from work started playing and we all migrated to the same server. There were also a few false starts with character class as I fine tuned what I was playing to fill in the gaps in the group.

The guild we started now has 16 people in it and ten of those are folks from work, so you can imagine the talks around the water cooler we have there:

“Damn Alliance… I was out questing with Ryan and two level 60s came outta nowhere and flattened us.” Or “Anyone wanna do Wailing Caverns tonight after work?”

With Joe and I being level 30 now and everyone else being in the 22-27 category, here soon we’ll be able to do some bigger things on the Thursday Raid Night… That’s when a lot of us truck our computers into work, order a few pizzas, drain the soda machine, and play about 4-5 hours with everyone in the same room. A good time to be sure. 🙂

But, for now I have to pack my lunch and scoot off to work. Have a great day out there!

Much like everyone else in the northern hemisphere of the planet Earth, Jae and I saw Star Wars “Episode III” Thursday. I’m not much for crowds, but the local cinemegauberplex was showing it on at least five screens when we got there so it wasn’t too bad. We even managed to trade in the tickets I bought online for a 5:25 show for seats in a 4:15 show, and still got relatively decent seats.

Overall it’s probably the best of the new releases of the Star Wars franchise as it definitely had the most action per square minute of the three.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled journal entry…

Yesterday Jae and I got our first Schwan’s delivery. For those of you who don’t know, Schwan’s is a grocery delivery place that has a lot of similarities to Sysco for restaurants, but is much better quality and tailored to house-sized requirements. So we now have two freezers full of block-frozen goods like steaks, chicken, fish, and veggies… I’m officially ready for weekend grilling sessions on the deck now. 🙂

And that’s about it for updates. I’m off to clean the kitchen a bit and start a big pot of beef stew for dinner.

Have a great weekend folks!

The big news for the last 24 hours is that I replaced the pads in my swamp cooler and fixed the pump.

Yeah, exciting isn’t it?

Ahh the wonders of being a homeowner… But I can now cool the house down when I get home, which is nice. Evaporative coolers are nice when you live in a desert like Colorado becuase for the cost of running a fan I can keep the house at a nice 70 degrees. That and the cooler adds some much needed humidity to the air which keeps the static down.

My next hardware store purchase will have to be a ladder… I’ve got several bulbs out around the upstairs and with the 20-something foot ceilings I need a ladder. Maybe I’ll pick one up and an assortment of bulbs on the way home tonight.

The car is running fine and work is slowly returning to “fun” which means things are just about back to normal around here.

Yay!

Anyways, I once again have to run off to work, so I’ll bid you all a pleasant day and get moving.

Believe it or not, getting the plates put on the car was astonishingly painless. Sure, I needed two forms of ID, a current DNA sample, and there was this odd paper I had to sign in blood… But I now have Colorado plates on my car.

Beyond that it was just another day at work. Jae and I went over to Microcenter to tempt ourselves with all sorts of gizmos we didn’t need, but sure would like to have.

I keep looking at this absolutely huge computer case that I might transplant all of my current gear into. It’s a $200 case, but it’s so large that no matter what direction PC hardware goes, I’ll never have to buy a different case.

After that I picked up about $200 worth of groceries, which included this very ‘nerd’ toaster… It’s stainless steel and looks like a circa 1950’s toaster, but it’s all digital on the front and has lots of LEDs. 🙂

Anyways, I have to head for work. Have a great day out there folks!

I’ve got about one more week of this current project then I’ll get my life back… I sure hope I never get another one of these.

See, the reason I don’t do government contract work anymore is that I don’t deal well with stress; I don’t like it and I want nothing to do with it. So I tend to take on lower paying jobs than the industry standard for what I do just to simply avoid it.

See, I’m old enough now to know that “stress free” in the job title is worth about $10k a year. So even if I’m making $1000 a month less than someone else in my field, at least I get to go home at night and enjoy the money I do make without being on call, having to take work home, being expected to put in 60 hour weeks. This is the whole reason I hired on where I work now, that and it’s a truly great group of people there.

Then this current project happened and I got shipped off to Broomfield for 3 months… Which has been something akin to being cast out of heaven: While being the guy in charge has it’s perks, managing the demons and getting everyone to stick to the torture schedule I created has been a real nightmare.

Humor aside it’s been hell, really. A short list of issues would include:

• The customer is clueless as far as software development is concerned.
• The product I was there to test back in February as of yesterday still can’t handle one tenth of the load it’s going to have to handle in production next month.
• I keep having to field complaints that “we aren’t doing our job”, which is testing, and I keep having to politically say that it’s due to their inability to create working code to test.
• The customer skipped functionality testing thinking that L&P testing would do the same thing, and has since discovered (as I told them) that it doesn’t.
• There are the constant requests for “reports” on the testing we cant do because nothing works.
• The fact that no one there can actually make it into the building for five consecutive days during the week as they all work from home, but when there is a deadline I’m expected to work ten hour days and weekends.
• The fact that because the company is on a cost center model there are no less than 15 departments, all trying to keep their jobs, involved in this project and none of them know that there are other departments involved.
• The overall manager of this project on the customer’s side was non-existent till two weeks ago, and once he realized he was in charge, still only makes it into the building 2-3 days a week.
• The data center the customer chose for this project is a bunch of clown shoes… The environment there has yet to work completely, and when they do manage to get a piece working we can’t test it because of some security issue or access failure.
• And on and on… I could write a book citing this one project as an example of everything you shouldn’t do to produce software.

It’s been hell. And it’s been my life for the last three months.

So, this is the reason I’ve just simply not been around for months now. But it will all be over soon and I’ll go back to my nice simple job of breaking software and web sites. 🙂

And with that I should head for work. Have a great day folks, I’ll try to as well.

What an absolutely amazing couple of months…

This project I’m on will finally be drawing to a close in the next few weeks and I’m working on it only part time now from my office rather than the customer’s site… I feel there is a chance I’ll live through this thing.

I have to wait until the end of the project before I can really rant about all that has gone on in the last 2.5 months, and even then I have to protect the guilty and not name names. So those of you who are curious as to what I believe to be the worst QA project -ever-, will just have to wait a little longer.

Closer to home I, like most everyone else, have been fighting with Comcast for the last week or so. And in an attempt to alleviate some of the Comcast problems I’ve been having here since they upgraded things to DOCSIS 2.0, I picked up a new Motorola SB5100 cable modem and a very slick D-Link DGL-4100 router… After two hours of talking to Comcast tech support people who simply have no clue I managed to figure out the new provisioning scheme and get things running. The new gear does make Comcast a bit more stable…

So that’s about it for updates, or at least all that I can talk about right now. As I’ve been waking up pissed off the last week or so, I think I need to grab my camera, jump in the car, and spend the weekend away from people and try to get centered. So chances are I won’t be around this weekend.

Still down in it…

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though and things on this current project are going a bit better now… I’ve actually gotten things accomplished in the last few days, contrary to their best efforts. 🙂

I finally managed to get my SAVA-500’s down from Vail and have them hooked back up to my computer… Right now I’m sure my neighbors across the way are loathing my existence right now.

For those of you who don’t know, SAVA-500’s are four foot tall, 80 pound, 500 watt, self powered űber-speakers. Sony originally created them for home theater use using the same technology that they use in their commercial theaters including THX certification… But they also just happen to make the best computer speakers on Earth.

I’m happily jamming out right now. 🙂

Other than that, it’s another week. Hopefully my stress levels will be lowering now and I’ll have more enthusiasm for things other than sleeping now.

Anyways, I’m gonna head back to my music. Have a great evening everyone!

Well, it finally happened…

As my humble journal was ranking higher on Google as far as my employer is concerned than a recent partnership announcement, I was asked to remove all references to my employer, customers, projects, etc… Which I can understand really; a Google search for “XXXXX” that lands you on the journal of some crazy person isn’t the effect I think they are after. 🙂

Also I got word the other day that the project I’m currently on has been extended till May… That doesn’t exactly make me “happy”, but we all do what we have to do I suppose.

So, that’s about it from this little slice of the space/time continuum. Til the next time I have a few minutes to write, take care out there.

While the reports of my death are not exactly exagerated, I’m not actually dead either.

I guess that makes me undead… A project-based creature of the night I suppose.

Humor aside, I’ve just been mind numbingly busy with this latest project and just haven’t had the time or the enthusiasm to do much of anything beyond work.

Fortunately this project ends on or around the first, and at that time I’ll try to get back into life.

I got off work early today. The data center the customer is using couldn’t find their butt with both hands and a GPS, and as such they’ve brought everything to a screeching halt… So here I am at home, preparing to enjoy a 2.5 day weekend.

On the way home I stopped by the new ‘Chick-fil-A’ up the road, which is somewhere I’ve not eaten since my last trip to Virginia. See, I like the chicken there and as the folks who know me know, if it’s not salad it’s chicken for me as far as meals go. It was nice, and while the Colorado incarnation of CFA tastes a little different, it was still good bird. 🙂

Other than that, everything is doing ok here. The several hundred dollars in repairs to the Toyota two weeks ago seem to have been money well spent and it’s making the trips from south Littleton to Broomfield without issue.

So I guess I’ll go grab my book and do some reading before Jae gets home.

Nothing new to report, just letting everyone know I’m still alive…

Long hours on this current project; no headway, but long hours.

Something interesting might happen before the weekend though… One never knows.

Today went better than I expected, though it was still fairly arduous… I still don’t see how we will be ready to test Monday, but I guess I’ll worry about that come Monday.

I’ve got a new hired gun coming in tomorrow, who used to work for the customer till he was laid off back in 2002. I’m hoping he’s “all that”, because I haven’t even had a chance to talk to him before he was hired.

Other than that, it was another day and I think I’m going to sign off early and do something silly like sleep.

Have a good evening out there…

It’s time for the weekend update:

Friday: Work as usual. Picked up a new cell phone on the way home (Nextel i860) so now I have a local number, emails to follow. The day ended with a drive up to Aryntha and Rai’s place for an hour or two while we plotted the Saturday phone trip.

Saturday: Left the house at 9 and was in Limon by noon… We got about 2 miles from Kansas, then drove back home, stopping by “3 Margaritas” for dinner. Got lots of neat photos too.

Sunday: Played Worlds of Warcraft all day with Jae, with a short pause to gas up the rental and run it through a car wash – twice.

Today: Dropped the rental off, paid the $250 for it, and drove to work.

It doesn’t seem like much, but it was a good weekend overall.

But now I’m at work, so I supposed I should get working… Have a great day everyone.