Friday, August 31, 2007

What's in a name?

Some grocery store commercial on the radio had this farmer guy talking about “pluots”. Pluot? That’s a fruit? Sound more like a radioactive isotope of somekind. Turns out that it’s a cross between an apricot and a plum. Plum + Apricot = Pluot. There has to be a better combination. Like apricum. Heh. Okay maybe not that one. How about apriplum? Not very inventive, but it’s quite obvious what this fruit is a mix of. You’ll probably even be able to guess that it’s a fruit in the first place. Not like “pluot”, which as far as I’m concerned could be a rare shorebird from South America.

While we’re on the subject of fruity names, did you know the kiwifruit used to be known as a chinese gooseberry? Its name was changed in the 50s both because of the cold war (silly Americans), because berries were subject to high tariffs, and thirdly because “gooseberry” just isn’t all that appealing.  “Kiwifruit” was much more exotic and sold much better after the name change. Fascinating, huh?

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Looking forward

Work has been… well, work. SSDD—Same Shit, Different Day. But instead of working and blogging, I’ve been working and job searching. I’ve got a promising prospect with a spinoff company of Experian that specializes in producing HTML emails for marketing purposes. The phone interview went well, they said they liked my resume, so I’ve got an in-person interview set up for Friday. It isn’t far from my house and I’m guessing the salary will be pretty decent since it’s part of a big company. It’ll be so awesome to get back to real coding again, away from all this content administration monkey-work.

If I do get hired away in the next two months, however, I will feel bad for leaving my current job at this point in time. We’re nearing the end of a huge migration to a new system (the never-ending project that began over a year ago!) and one guy has already left the team. No replacement has been found yet. I may find the job to be a drag, but the people are still nice. I do have a conscience you know. But that guilt won’t last long. In the end, the company will have to be reasonable and move deadlines for them. More importantly, I’ll be moving on to a job I actually enjoy doing, so who cares about them! They aren’t my personal friends.

This is all theoretically speaking of course. I often get ahead of myself and start imagining the future when it actually starts to become a tangible possibility. I haven’t even met these people yet and I’m already looking forward to the new job. Let’s hope they aren’t assholes.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Motivation

I’m feeling a severe lack of motivation these days. The work load isn’t any different, but my butt has been dragging. The work is easy, I should be able to breeze through it all in half the time I’ve been taking… but I just… don’t want to. I wouldn’t call it depression—I’m not easily prone to that self-indulgent way of thinking—but I do feel a little burned out.  My home life is happy as can be, which is what keeps me sane. It’s the 40 hours spent chained at my desk that has me feeling less than satisfied.

So instead of working, I spent the morning Googling “lack of motivation”. People seem to have lots of different solutions. Hypnosis was one. No thanks, I’m a control freak and prefer to have all my decisions made consciously, not subconsciously. Another one was to write down your goals. What do you want to achive in a year? Two years? Five years? My only goal is to be happy. I have no lofty career goals. I’d love to make lots of money doing next to nothing, but ironically I’m not rich enough. Rich would be nice, but it isn’t necessary to be happy. I have love, and don’t need much else. Unfortunately love doesn’t pay bills or motivate me to work harder.

Probably the most realistic article I read was by one game programmer who was feeling a bit unmotivated himself. His solution was to simply bite the bullet and just start working. He said he immediately felt better after he made himself start programming again. Sometimes this works for me, and sometimes I just fall back into the old funk again. I suppose motivation is a state of mind. Forcing yourself to do the thing you are putting off is one way to pull yourself out of it.

My sweety got laid off last week. I’m almost jealous that it wasn’t me. I think it’s a sign that I should be more serious about finding a different job. 

Monday, August 20, 2007

I broke my Categories

The problem is, I have no idea when this happened, or why. It’s probably been this way for over a year and no one said anything! I guess no one cared about my categories until now, when I mentioned my Warm-n-Fuzzy Pets category.  I spent an hour troubleshooting already, and no love. Well, I did fix my Search so the results don’t link to the comment page anymore. (What an odd thing for this blog software to default to.) I’ve searched my blog’s admin console as well as Google and could not find any correct path to list a particular category. I saw various examples, but none of those worked. I’m very frustrated (and my boss is probably wondering why no requests are being completed this morning, pfft, whatever).

I’m annoyed, but in the meantime, those who are interested can click on the “Category Archives” link that is tucked just above the Categories dropdown. At least that works.  I’m going to examine the code for that page and see if I can figure out what the correct path is.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

How can anyone like this movie?

I’ve never seen Napoleon Dynamite. I keep hearing references to it, and apparently a lot of people seem to like this movie, so when it came on TV I decided to give it a try. The opening credits were interesting enough, but after that… WTF.  I managed to sit through the first half hour of this drivel and for the life of me I cannot figure out what the plot is. It’s just a series of totally pointless scenes with the biggest bunch of expressionless losers I’ve ever seen. What exactly is the point of this movie?? More importantly, what can anyone possibly like about it? It’s just plain stupid. 

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Bad Dog

Big Pest, despite his incessant whining whenever he wants something (which is all the time), would be wonderful dog if not for two things:

1. He barks at anyone who walks by the house, and he’ll go completely nuts when a dog walks by the house. The hair on the back of his neck stands up and everything. Funny thing is, if he actually ends up standing next to one of these other dogs, he’ll stand absolutely still, as if he knows these other dogs could squash him under their meaty paws. The barking is really annoying though. Makes it hard to leave the front door open for air. There’s a screen door to keep them in, but if he can see outside he’ll bark at everything.

2. The worst thing by far is the marking behavior that did not disappear after he got neutered. It’s infuriating! Just look at this!

He does it on the trash can, the recycle bin and random corners of the house. Dude, you live here, no need to pee on everything, geez! We hate it with a passion. He knows it’s wrong too. He never does it when we’re watching, and when we find a yellow puddle, I’ll point to it and say, “What’s this?” He’ll immediately put his ears and head down and very slowly slink away to hide. That part is actually quite funny. He walks really, really slowly, as if hoping I won’t notice him leaving, then he’ll go hide under a table or behind something. Just look at him…

He definitely looks guilty. He might even feel bad about it, who knows? But why does the little bastard insist on doing this stuff all the time? He really is a big pest. But a cute one.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

The Plan

A new job is definitely in The Future Plan, but not just yet.  My current outdated (though broad) skillset qualify me for junior positions. Unless I find a similar position in another corporation, I’d be taking a major cut in pay. Like up to $20,000 less. Yeah I know, I’m better off kicking around in corporate hell than being poor again.

One good thing about being part of such a large corporation is they’ll usually pay for classes and seminars to help you improve your on-the-job skills. Though my current skills are more than enough for this monkey job, they wouldn’t mind if I got even better skills. So I’m going to start requesting some training. And after I’ve gotten my free training and am once again current with the job market, my options will be much broader.

When I was down in the dumps I did consider just quitting the whole computer thing altogether and doing something completely different, even if it meant starting over.  Here are some possibilities that passed through my mind…

Carpenter - Pros: I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands and you can make so many different useful things out of wood. And in a post-nuclear holocost world, after all the computers have been fried extra crispy, my skills will be quite in demand. Cons: The only carpenters I see driving nice cars and living in nice houses are the ones who own successful contracting businesses. Everyone else is in a beat-up truck and a run-down apartment.

Electrician/Electronics Repair - Pros: Again I like working with my hands, and it would be so cool to be able to fix that broken DVD player instead of throwing it out. Cons: I’ve fiddled with wires before, and getting shocked is totally not fun. Also, the whole being poor thing, again, does not appeal to me.

Forest Ranger - Pros: Hiking around in a park for a living sounds great, doesn’t it? Cons: That’s not actually what they do all day. It’s actually a branch of law enforcement, and that means lots of paperwork and dealing with all kinds of people, including low-lifes.

Trainer - Pros: I could totally teach peeople how to use their computers and software and stuff. I help people all the time and am pretty good at writing step-by-step documentation on how to do things. Cons: Do I really want to be blabbering all day? And sometimes I hate people and don’t want to be around them. I wouldn’t have the option of clamping on my headphones and ignoring them.

In the end I decided it was better to just keep doing what I know and just find a better environment when the time was right. So what do you think… what occupations would YOU like to try if you had the chance?

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Mid-career crisis

I was given my mid-year review yesterday. I was depressed the rest of the day after that. It started out fine. They said my performance was outstanding and impressive after that web team member left for another job. I’ve been picking up the slack and generally kicking ass.  But before that, apparently, my productivity has been “steadily declining” and I’ve “demonstrated a sense of non-urgency in completing daily postings.”

First of all, when I first started this job I was told our “service level agreement” was two days, unless it is marked urgent. So at the end of the day sometimes there are still some non-urgent things to do that haven’t been done yet. I figure I’ve got a whole other day to complete them. Well apparently I don’t. They want us to demonstrate “superior customer service” by completing everything ASAP. So every fucking thing is urgent. Well this would have been nice to know sooner!

Needless to say my inquiry about the job opening was declined because they don’t think I’m “ready”. Morons. I could do that job easily. Might even get me motivated. Did they think maybe my productivity is declining because I’m bored to death? A fucking monkey could do this damn job. There’s no design, no thinking, no problem-solving, absolutely nothing to stimulate my brain. Just “make this change here” and “put that document there” all day long. I’m stagnating, and it’s hurting my chances to get a better job somewhere else.

Which makes me think about just leaving the industry altogether. It’s killing my shoulders anyway. Every single day I go home with multiple knots in my muscles from computing all day. I stretch and have ergonomic equipment, but the fact remains the muscles still get overworked by the end of the day. I need to do something different. I need a month off. Too bad I can’t afford it.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Sock eater

You’d think that with one guy coming back from vacation, I wouldn’t be as busy. Ha! Weird how that works. So he comes back, and they decide it’s okay to open the floodgates and drown us with requests. I guess they were holding back a bit when it was just me by myself. Well that was nice, but we’re not exactly staffed up just yet. We’re still one guy short.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been. The only thing I’ve had time to ponder is why on earth one of my toes is a sock eater. First, a photo:

See how the right big toe is peeking out? That’s the sock eater. Over a relatively short period of time, it’ll work a hole into my sock. So I’ll switch socks and it’ll start working a new hole in the other sock. If you look at the left foot, you can see the hole that the sock eater left before I switched socks. My left big toe does not do this. It happens even after I trim it down, and I trim both at the same time. It’s not like I leave one to grow to a wild length. Ew. So what’s with the one toe deciding it needs air conditioning? It’s a mystery, but it’s funny how all my black socks have holes on the left side. I need to buy some more socks soon.

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