July 2001 Archives

So the whole class reunion thing is over.  The whole live update thing didn't really happen.  I met up with some people that I should have lost contact with, and some people that I intentionally lost contact with.  That's what reunions are all about though.

The night before the "big" gathering at the hotel there was a "small" gathering in downtown Chico.  This was really great because it was forced mingling.  You couldn't get into your cliques, and if you did it got busted up really quickly.  A lot of work went into making it all happen, so if any of you are reading this, thanks again.

Nothing really shocking was discovered at the reunion, so there isn't really a good story here.  But like I said if was cool to meet some really good, old friends.

I'm too tired to rant.

Nohing has gone very well this week, except for my foot healing ahead of schedule. So let me take this opportunity to say:

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUdge.

Only I didn't really say fudge...

Friday is almost here and at least then I get to wear a nice Hawaiian shirt and try to feel festive.

Tune in this weekend for live updates from the 10 year reunion!

I've never had any spiritual faith. Don't tell the Boy Scouts. They might want all their Merit Badges back... I'm not really agnostic or atheist either. I'm removed from the whole thing. I don't accept or deny the existence of a god or gods. It just isn't something that has ever interested me. Which leads me to faith... Do I have faith and if I do, can I get federal funding?

All jokes aside, things have happened that have put me in a position where is seems like I have to have...well, faith that things will turn out okay. For some reason, and I don't know why, but I associated faith with religion. Being one of those silly people who believe that thoughts and emotions are indeed just chemical reactions, faith just seems to be something that I shouldn't want or need. Maybe all I need is hope.

Why do you need faith or hope if you think that everything is just a chemical reaction and there is no soul and you don't have to pray to some deity? I don't know. Maybe I'm just trying to take the easy way out. Faith will get my sorry ass chemical reactions through this tough time and then I can toss it aside when things are going good again.

Isn't that what most people do with religion anyways? How many people really pray when things are okay? I don't know, but I do know that it's a hell of a lot less then when things are bad.

Sometimes I also wonder if I suffer from blind faith. Maybe it's blind devotion and not faith. I don't know what the difference is really. But I might have one of them. But then I question if it's really "blind" when I know for a fact that I have limits to how far I would go to stay "on track" with my faith/devotion/what have you.

As long as I don't have to hear some lame pep rally speech tomorrow I think I'll be fine. As for everyone else...you gotta have faith.

I rant a lot. It isn't always coherent or linear, but it is a rant. That I can be sure of.

Not to start off on the wrong foot (har har) but my ankle is feeling a lot better. I can walk on it without much pain. I don't have to hobble around. The swelling has gone down. The bruising is still pretty bad, but I have a sock and shoe over it so nobody has to look at the ugly thing.

Sometimes things don't go the way you planned. I understand that schedules depend on so many variables that thinking that you are going to stick to it or else it just plain stupid...but it would be nice to have people realize that adding items to the schedule doesn't make it shorter.

But that might be asking too much... Actually what am I thinking? Of course it's asking too much. Of course more is less! What was I thinking? I know I have a measly three years of experience working on small/medium/large web projects, so what could I possibly know about delivering web projects?

Schedules for clients will always be problematic, especially now when you can't tell people to fuck off when they are obviously smoking crack. I was reading an article in a magazine at the doctor's office about this very subject, and one person mentioned they wanted clients to understand the technology involved. I feel his pain. But sometimes I think they do understand the technology and they ignore it. They want to see what they can squeeze out of you. Which is fine, unless you already work at a company that busts it's ass to give it's best all the time. You can't squeeze pudding from a lawn mower I always saw.

What is with women when they get hungry?

Anyway, I finally got in touch with one of my good friends from high school. Yeah, it's time for that 10 year. It was good to hear from him again. Turns out that he had lived here in San Rafael when we did. D'oh. Oh well, he is living in Chico with his wife now. They are both dentists. I better not tell him I haven't seen a dentist in 3 years. Or so...

Did you ever see Get Shorty? Remember the bit where they go to the restaurant to meet with DeVito's character and Travolta asks what kind of food they have, and Russo tells him not to worry because DeVito won't order from the menu. Sometimes my job is like the waiter at that restaurant. It doesn't matter what is on the menu, because nobody will order from that anyway. Everyone will want to make their own order up from scratch, make a big deal if they don't get it, and then when it comes they won't want it. If you haven't seen Get Shorty, check it out.

So besides going into SF and watching Kat play softball (and deftly managing to not break her foot) I spent a largo portion of the day on my butt (with my foot elevated, I swear) finishing off some NetFlix rentals. For those not in the know on NetFlix, just click on the title of this story to go to their homepage and get enlightened.

I've have Seven Samurai sitting around for ages and never really felt like watching it, but didn't have the heart to send it back. It was a "classic" that I "had to watch" so I couldn't abandon it so easily. It was very long and the main samurai reminded me of Colonel Potter from M*A*S*H. Call me crazy...but he looked just like him...sorta. It was good, but damn was it long.

Next up, The Great Escape. I've seen it on TNT before, but never the full thing, uncut, with no commercials, and not edited to fit my TV. God I hate that...pan and scanned movies blow chunks. Good flick. Again, it was a "classic" that couldn't be ignored.

I tried to get through Bullets Over Broadway but couldn't and we still have Duck Soup to watch. Overall, it was almost a productive Sunday...

Lately I have been using linux (Mandrake and RedHat) and windows (2000) more and more. As far as usability they both still suck. I can always go back to my mac and have the simplest things "just work" as they should. Granted, I'm beyond biased on this since I've been using a mac since 1991 (yeah yeah...I'm no 31337 Apple build-your-own-from-Radio-Shack hax0r...so piss off).

What led me to this amazing plonk of clarity all of a sudden?

Well, I was reading mail on my linux box through a telnet session (this is where a number of you will point out that Mac OS 9.x and all previous version didn't come with a built-in telnet like windows or linux, which is fine because I downloaded a better one for mac) and came across a URL in a message. Now if you are on windows or linux you can copy the URL, then switch to a browser and paste the URL and you are happy (this again is a place where users of Evolution, Eudora, or even Outlook will point out that those uber-email readers highlight the URL and let you simply click on them as if they were web page links...or maybe you are a gnome-terminal user and like that stupid way you can right-click on a URL and get a new browser window with that URL...whatever). But all I do is command+click (a pretty common thing for mac users) and it opens in the foremost IE window. But I can also double-click, which highlights the URL and then drag the highlighted text to a browser window of my choice and drop it on the window and it loads the URL.

Drag and drop folks. It still only works right on one platform. Mac OS. Mac OS X is still kinda weird about it, but it is still better than Windows or Linux.

Thursday night my mom came down from Chico to hang out with us for a while.  She works at a middle school, so she has the summer off.  Thursday night we went to our standard trivia event at the Mayflower Inn.  The regular guy is gone on vacation, he too works at a school and has the summer off, so the subs ran things different.  The Mayflower trivia crowd is a tough crowd, who can only really be handled by a high school teacher.

We play as Team Gonzo.  Normally we do pretty well, but not so much lately.  We we're hoping my mom would really give us an edge.  She did, just not enough this week.  Back to the drawing board.

Friday she went in to the city with Kat and I to see our offices and get some shopping done in downtown SF.  She really isn't used to the amount of crazy people we have on the streets.

She got up this morning at 6am and took off for home and that will probably be her visit for the year.

So this week has pretty much sucked...as long as you let the week start on Sunday when I "broke" my ankle.  I missed two days of work.  While that is great for getting my vacation time under the new cap, it sucks for meetings and project due dates.  It turns out this week was also not our finest hour in client communications...

Communication problems are hardly ever the fault of only one side.  But I feel we found an exception.  One project in particular has caused a lot of grief.  Being told one day that expectations had been met, then finding out that the person whose decision really mattered didn't think we met expectations really sucked.

Another project was already live and not performing all that well.  Turns out we were giving incorrect information to use in the project, therefore people could buy the damn thing if they wanted to.  Sigh...

Our T1 went down Friday morning.  We have a pretty good setup, the only hitch is that our ISP maintains the routers on their end and the main external router on our end as well.  So when our router on their end got un-plugged, they discovered that something was wrong and IPs had to be changed on their end and our end.  This would be fine except we are running mail, web, and dns services on our end.  Changing IPs would really, really suck for us and probably would have ended up in some breach-of-contract lawsuit.  Nobody wanted that.  Luckily they had a solution and sent someone over to fix it.  We were up in two hours.  It would have sucked less for me if the IT guru of whoop-ass hadn't been layed off earlier this month.

Right on. I finally got to get out of the house. I know...it's only work...but hey, I like my job. Even if things are a bit bleak in the advertising industry. We've made it through tough times before. Of course, to make it through now we have to lay people off when things are really bad. Welcome to the real world...

The back-log of email wasn't that bad.

Getting around the office on crutches is interesting to say the least. It seems as though rubber pads at the end of my crutches act as suction cups on our concrete floor, which has a layer of paint that helps I'm sure.

The one bad thing about being back is everyone wants to hear how it happened. Normally I love to go on for hours and hours talking about myself...but now about this. How many times can you tell a story about how stupid you are?

So Kat and I went to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Overall it was pretty cool. Of course there were some points of the plot that were slightly confusing, or at least just glossed over. Hence the title "The Missing Manual." Although I hope you don't expect me to explain anything, because I'm sure I'm just as lost as you.

Some un-intentionally funny parts were the CGI "actors". The main guy looked like Ben Afleck and Steve Bushemi's character looked like Jason Priestly. It was fun picking out all the voices. It took me a while to remember Donald Sutherland's name though. Which is dumb because I just saw him in "Kelly's Heroes."

James Woods cannot play any other role than bad guy now. He is so type cast...

It seems to be the only advice I hear now. Actually this entry was just an excuse to use the title. You see it's funny because...oh never mind.

Okay...

So I spent three and a half hours in the emergency room to get X-rays and a plaster splint. The doc told me I had to see my Primary Care Physician so I could get refered to a Orthepedist. That sounds fun. Guess I don't need to go to work or anything. I can hang out all day and bounce around doctor's offices. Yeah, that's the ticket. That's the way you do it. Health care for nothing and your chips for free.

So I made an appointment with my PCP for Tuesday at 11:30am. I finally got to see him at 12:40pm. Not bad. I guess PCPs have a pretty hellish schedule seeing idiots like me all day.

I had been looking at my X-rays and I really didn't see where my ankle was supposed to be broken. I'm not a doctor, but I play on in the Internet. The thing is, my PCP didn't see it either. He saw something that might be, but the X-rays were inconclusive. The sprain is for real though.

The good news out of all of this is that I get my plaster splint off Friday and hopefully I will be able to put weight on my ankle and get a walking splint and I can get rid of these damn crutches...

Oh and for some reason I didn't post the last story to the homepage until today, even though I wrote it Monday.

Fuck. I rolled my ankle. This time my left foot. I guess it's fractured or something. I'm in a temp cast and wobbling around on crutches.

Softball this time. It was basketball last time. So now I go into HMO limbo. I'm waiting to see my Primary Care Physician to get refered to someone who can actually deal with my busted up foot. Makes sense? I didn't think so.

One softball game down, one to go. We won again. Of course we now have two wins by forfeit. Which sucks, but we always stick around a scrimmage with the team and we've won both of those. We have some really good players. Today I almost had a homerun, but I was held up at 3rd. I could of made it. Of well. My other two at-bats we deep fly-outs. Guess they figured out where to play me.

Kat made it to the game after the AIDS Walk, and even though her feet were really sore from the walk, I made her play. She only had to bat though, she didn't have to play a field position. She went 1 for 2 and scored a run.

It's fun finally winning at softball. I know it's all about just getting out and doing something...but losing all the time sucks ass.

Today I also had to format/re-install. Which wouldn't be that much of a news story except that it was my mac. Well, my old mac, which had been accumulating cruft for quite some time now. Had an old beta Mac OS X install fucking everything up... Well that's gone now and the mass software re-install has begun. At least I have my laptop to work on while that goes down.

All the engineers should be back from Def.Con tomorrow and the 'Lone IT Guy' should be back as well. Which is good. Now all that stuff that would have landed on my desk can land where it is supposed to! We'll see how it goes...

The day off worked. I felt like I could take on anything at work. Which was good because all the engineers, except Keith, were off at Def.Con. So if anything went wrong it was going to land on my desk. Also Greg, the last remaining IT guy, was at home waiting for something to be delivered to his house. So if anything went wrong it was going to land on my desk.

See a trend?

But I made it through Friday. So enough about work.

Today Kat and I went into San Francisco to go to one of her co-workers pig roast. Yup. I said pig roast. The dug a pit in the backyard and roasted a whole pig. When you think about it, it's no different that a whole turkey at Thanksgiving. Well, except that you usually don't leave the head on the turkey.

Tomorrow Kat does the AIDS Walk and I've got two softball games.

So last night instead of putting a news story up I watched a re-run of West Wing and then South Park. Then I was really tired and went to bed.

Things at work went a little better, so having today off should help out my psyche a little. It isn't any one thing that is getting me down. It's the whole package. Things are crazy because there is still some adjustment going on from some of the lay offs. It's hard for anyone to just step in and know all the contacts and all the personal information that helps make projects go smoother. But you just have to do you best. You have to take it one day at a time... Ugh. Right now you have to take it one minute at a time to keep from going nuts.

The on thing that worried me most is that three of the people that are now going did a lot of work. Obviously we have to maintain the same amount of output or else we will end up in the same situation again. Hence people that are left have more work to do. What happens when these people were already really busy though? Stress shoots through the roof and everyone gets all edgy and pissy. Then it becomes a "morale" problem when really it is a work-load problem at this point. Stress compounds feeling all bummed about your buddies getting the axe. It's a big mess and until it stabilizes people are going to be like this. I know because I'm one of them...

I'm sure I will post a few more today to make up for yesterday to make up for my slacking last night. Ciao.

Like that would happen...

It's one thing to have a tough project with a really aggressive time scale...but it always makes things so much easier when you have someone reminding you of that fact everyday. Especially when you can't start on your part until some previous phase is completed by someone else. All you can do is sit there and stare at them like a rabbit in the headlights, hoping they will go away and not remind you again tomorrow.

I expect to hear a lot of the following:
"Can't you start without any assets?"
"How hard could it be?"
"What do you mean that isn't in the original scope of the project?"
"What do you mean there is no ice? I have to drink this coffee hot?"

Oh poor me. Boo hoo hoo.

Shut up...

Tomorrow at work we get to go out to lunch. Even though we know that the cost of the lunch is pretty insignificant compared to one persons pay check, it doesn't help that four people got laid off last week. Sure not going out to lunch won't bring them back, but for me it's just a matter of at least letting the body cool a bit.

I'm way too bitter, cynical, and jaded right now to do much good for anyone. All the more reason to take a day off... I'm afraid one more thing will push me over the edge and I will snap and throw a monkey at someone...or worse...a nerf dart.

"Everyone has to just do their best." You can only hear it so many times before it becomes meaningless. Of course we've all been doing our best. Did it look like I was sitting around with my finger in my ear? Might as well start throwing baseball cliches at us...take it one game at a time, I'm just trying to help the team, and the winner: I'm just happy to be here.

I felt really good after the softball game yesterday. Today I feel like crap. My ribs, shoulders and arms are all pretty sore. I've got a great bruise going frrom a ground ball that came off the cow pasture, err...I mean softball field, funny and plonked me in the shoulder.

Oh well. We won. That's what it's all about right? Oh wait, we had fun too.

Typical Monday though. At least traffic was okay on the way home. I only saw my life flash before my eyes twice from near-MUNI encounters on Van Ness.

Funny thing about being a small company and letting your IT guy go...you know have this nice, well built IT infrastructure to use and nobody to maintain it. Guess was happens to nice things when you don't maintain them? Nuff said.

I'm taking Thursday off to try and relax a little. I've only been to work one day this week and I'm already wound up pretty tight.

We shall see how it goes...

What an odd day. But since I'm so tired I will keep it short.

I got a bay area bridge hat trick today. Made it over the Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge and the 580 Bridge all today. First from San Rafael to SF for my softball game (which we won, yippee), then over the Walnut Creek for Shin and Lisa's BBQ, then home from there. Whew...

Stayed up too late last night. Was in Berekely with Beej and Kathleen until midnight or so, then came home and finished watching The General's Daughter. Eh...it was so-so. Then crash for the night.

7:30am the phone rings. I stumble to the phone. It's Anne. We pick her up on our way into work in the morning and she just wanted to let me know she was running a little late. I almost didn't have the heart to tell her it was Sunday and that she didn't have to go to work today. Back to bed...

Well, I guess I didn't keep it that short, or even in chronological order. Oh well...

Why has it taken this long to come up with something so great? Mountain Dew Slurpees! My life is complete.

Ah, nothing like a lazy Saturday to deal with. Unfortunately I have a ton of stuff to do. So of course I'm procrastinating. Where else would you start?

First off, since Kat is gone for the weekend she will expect me to clean the house. That is always tops on my list of things to wait till the last minute for. I have a softball game tomorrow, so I need to go to the batting cages today. Of course I will be crap in the field, but as long as I get some hits maybe people won't notice. Right after the game I have to jam over to the east bay for a BBQ at Shin's house. Note to self: don't get too sweaty at the game because you aren't taking a shower before you go the Shin's.

I'm also putting together a PC for Kat. Karim helped me out with all the icky stuff like getting the mother board in the case and getting the big-ass fan on the CPU (An Athlon 1.33GHz). But now I have to install Windows. Which can, at time, be like shoving bamboo shoots under your fingernails and then dipping them in a nice batch of hydrocholric acid (HCL if you're nasty). What I need now is a newer video card, and a case fan. Of course she wants a new monitor now too, which is okay because mine is busted and I can get her old one.

Enough procrastination...

We got hit again this week. The company I work for had to let four more people go. The first "round" six people were let go. This is the second "round" so it was less shocking and more generally disapointing to see the people go.

Of course the main thing on peoples mind was who would have been the fifth person, if they had to let more go...

The economy blows. What more can be said. I guess when a Bush is in office we can look forward to a bad economy, fighting with other countries and a whopping $4 a month extra in my paycheck. Thanks Shrub...