Clan HoldTheFries

Today’s Earworm – ‘Queen Of The World’, Tina Cousins

 

Thinking of starting a WoW clan called ‘HoldTheFries’. We would not be exclusively low-carb, though we would be low carb friendly.  We probably would be banninated under current management though.

 

I’ve an internal interview today for another department so wish me luck. Damn I wish I could let on the real reasons I think I’ll perform better in a different department…. But you know, if you have nothing nice to say… etc.

 

I’m hopeful but I’m also wary of things falling through, so come Monday I could have those glorious few days-to-weeks off I’ve been fantasizing about since I transitioned here from $old_werk with no time in between. Except of course, for the problem of actually being unemployed, and the longer you’re out of the game, the harder it is to get back in.   

 

I need to line something else up before D starts sending filled application forms to fast-food joints on my behalf.

 

At least I’m at that point where lack of experience is no longer a problem, just lack of paperwork.

Wiped out

I was doing so well, I'd gotten the morning off ex-werk and had an interview with a recruiter scheduled for today. Then I got freaking *dysentry*. It's 50/50 as to whether I get to work tomorrow.
All I really feel like eating is bananas, an apple, or peanut butter, weirdly enough, and not available in our carb-avoidant household. If it means I can get through work tomorrow though I'll eat a bit off-plan.

The TroppoBook

iBook_dark
Originally uploaded by MidBlueMac.

Here's my iBook after I applied a flower decal over the Apple logo. My iBook's getting on a bit so I've been on the lookout for stickers for it, and I couldn't find anything that wouldn't get peeled off in a couple of days. But this is nice. Sort of a tropical theme to reflect the hot, hot summer days Melbourne has been having lately.

I've switched from coffee to tea or iced tea (mostly). It seems too hot for coffee, and tea doesn't rattle my nerves as much. And even at McDonalds, tea is served in a teapot with a jug of milk. It's a more deliberate, civilized sort of experience. The only problem is I can't drink tea without some sort of sweetener. I'll have to buy some more Stevia to carry around with me.

On that topic, weight loss continues, doing very well thank you very much.

On the job front, I'm encouraged by interest from recruiters and I'm applying for more jobs, in the likely event that the current roles I'm pursuing with them fall through.

The other thing I'm working on is swotting for my MCSE exams, I've been putting those off for an embarrassingly long time. At this stage, I have experience but not the certs, and those certs could mean the difference of about 10k in the job market. It means more flexibility too. I'd like to be able to *avoid* the sorts of jobs I've had up until now.

One could argue that doing the certifications once you *have* experience means you'll get more out of them, and God knows I need more confidence.

Without the certs, I'm doing the work of people who *did* get the certs and are getting paid more than me, and who needs that?

Gaming it

Listening to ‘Landed, Ben Folds’

 

Playing phone tag with recruiters today. Actually I’m fairly chuffed considering how many applications it took to get *one* phone call the last few times I’ve been down this road. Feeling hopeful. Which is good because once the buzz from my impulsive Recovery had worn off and I was starting to feel a bit silly.

 

 

Treating the process like an RPG as much as possible, in terms of strategy and trying vs failing. Seems to be working out so far.

Recovered

Well, one thing led to another and I made a decision to move on from
$current_werkplace. So now I'm looking around for some new
employment. I might put up a quasi-CV listing my 1337 sk1llz later
today. I was up to 2:30am hunting down leads in my bookmarked job sites.
Hey, if you shake enough trees something is going to fall out.
There's a Unix gig I have my eye on.

It is what it is

So I’m back after a couple of days on holiday.

 

I got asked to write some notes on the stuff I’d done. I wrote a beautiful phone book, and arriving here found none of my cases had been touched, and nothing I’d done had been acknowledged.

So tell me why I was here doing an hour’s overtime, again?

 

 

And so it begins

http://www.apple.com.au

 

 

 

On Interruptions

“Conversely, forcing someone to perform errands synchronously is bound to limit their productivity. The cost of an interruption is not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either side in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all.”

 

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

 

And if what you do is nothing *but* interruptions?

 

The other source of procrastination for me is just how long I spend avoiding other people (with some of the people I work with, understandable) if I’m depressed, which is most of the time lately.

In which KrisTheGrumpy survives a Random Spider Encounter, and discovers that she *really* signed on for paperwork, not computers

The day began with a Giant Spider Encounter in the shower. (I think the rude little bastard stole my towel, too). The fly plague is perpetuating a spider plague, and I predict in a month or so you won’t be able to leave anything on the floor without it sliding away a few minutes later on a lot of hairy little legs. I suppose I can hope that they don’t like 40 degree temperatures, and that would explain the tarantula lurking near the plughole.

I’ve gotten into World Of Warcraft, and if I wasn’t spending 8hrs a day shuffling papers this entry would look a whole lot more like ‘NElf Druid, lvl 10,  lvl grinding atm, gg’.

On the paper shuffling, I think I’ve gotten myself pigeon holed here, set up a situation where I’m not going to be able to extricate myself.

See, I didn’t get hired as an engineer. I got hired as tech support, at the time an estrogen-only zone. There’s arcane rituals, filing,  answers to questions that sound suspiciously like ‘because I *said* so,’ and ‘do as you’re told’ , bonding over shoes, and a pecking order. It’s a feminized environment, and not in a good way.  It’s the checkouts at Woolworths, or the typing pool.

In a different department, or a different company, where there’s a more male style of communication and expectations I do well. Blame my chart for having Mercury in Gemini.  I know the geek community gets a lot of crap for ‘RTFM!’ but IRL I’ve never found it to be excessive unless your query really did go ‘HELP ME PLZ’.  Knowledge is power, so they express it by sharing information. Sometimes too much information, but the point I’m getting to is that it’s a different psychology.

 

 

 

Today's quote of the day

From one of our beloved customers -

Why do I need to (follow procedure to get replacement copy and reinstall software)? I have already done all that. Are you guys trying to punish me because your software didn't work properly.

Lets do a multiple choice 'MAD Magazine's snappy answers to stupid questions.' It writes itself.

a) No, but damn, I really wish I could.

b) Letting you live is punishment enough.

c) The correct question is why are you punishing me.

d) You better believe it, worm. You can't have your software until Mistress says you can.

Happy Holidays

Today's Earworm- Wires, Athlete


And how was your giftmas?

Mine was pretty quiet. I spent Christmas Dinner with family in Geelong. Mostly stayed off the carbohydrates, but I had some pudding. I've also been working my way through the light beer my mother had sent, and the occasional vodka. Doesn't seem to have done me any harm. D remained strict on what he ate and he's doing really well as a result.

I bought D a 200G Western Digital drive for Xmas, and installed it. Arconis True Image didn't properly clone over the boot sector, or so it seemed, and in the end after trying to clone the original drive a couple of times I gave up and added the new drive as a slave. It turned out that the original 30G drive was a WD 7200 RPM anyway, so replacing it with the new one without a fresh XP install would have negligible benefit.

Turned out too that the video card was running Too Damn Hot so I prised off the original wussy fan, and replaced it with a Blue Orb I had lying around. I wish I hadn't spent several hours scowling at the computer, and probably D too as he lurked in the doorway, waiting to get his computer back.

I mentioned up that I was thinking of upgrading the hdd on my iBook, he agreed with me that it was probably a very bad idea on a stress level. It's my primary machine now and full of tiny, tiny parts packed into a very small space that will cause me many hours of fun (panic, take a deep breath, try again, panic, etc etc).

Like most non-geeks he doesn't appreciate *why* its necessary to do these things that stress us out (or, frankly, why, for example, a video card periodically freezing WinXP is an unacceptable situation that must be *immediately* rectified. Possibly expensively). I know why I got stressed out over the hard drive thing, I've been in happy Mac land so long I'm worried I'm losing my hardware mojo. Also, at work, my whole world is brittle proprietry software. I do sometimes deal with Linux but its usually through a human filter who likes to click on irrelevant things and has a small seizure when I suggest we'll need to modify httpd.conf. (Cue usual whine on Pakled sysadmins.)

Funniest Spam Subject Today

Still have microsoft? Have big and hard!

Ooook....

I need a holiday from the holiday

I just spent about a week and a half  walking a teenage girl around pretty much every shopping destination in Melbourne. Physically I’m exhausted, but mentally things aren’t too bad, or at least I’ve been able to sweep the stress deitrus under a mental rug.

Dialtone was out from Friday to Tuesday due to some hardware upgrades at our exchange.  It’s a long, ugly story. *sigh* At least it’s back up. I’m too scared to ask what happened to the ADSL speed upgrade that supposedly caused this because we’re still connecting at 1500, but as I *like* having dialtone that one can wait.

I’ve deferred my postgrad studies for now, possibly permanently. I think its all of questionable value to me at the moment, and what would be beneficial is some ‘cake’ certs like the Security+. I’ll need that for later.

 

 

Yeah, I have a problem

Yeah, I have a problem
Originally uploaded by MidBlueMac.

Listening to: International Date LIne, Ladytron


And these aren't all of them. Not by a long shot. These aren't even the three or four I carry in my bag. I have a lip gloss problem. Shiny, sparkly, flavored, wine, pink, occasionally red or purple, I have a weakness for them all.
Its like the NEXT lipgloss I see, perched fetchingly on a shelf in its fresh pink packaging, will be the Holy Grail of lipglosses, and I can forsake the other fifty in approximately the same color and texture.

Other than sorting my drawers (thats what prompted the lipgloss navel-gazing) I've got other things on at present. I'll probaly defer my postgrad stuff indefinitely after I finish the current subject. I took it on because I wasn't sure what to do, and now I've got a few projects on I'm really interested in I just don't have the time.
I have a few more website projects that need attention, and my main site of course.
There are other courses that interest me more, too. But they'll need to wait until I do something about work, either do something part-time, or get a shorter commute, or God knows, take a course I'm actually interested in, because the upload is a lot slower on business speak waffle than it is on geek stuff.

The shrew and karma

Watching 'Airline' as Joanna the 'journalist' in the trashy red
leather coat throws a tanty about the flight she missed. No,
sweetheart, nobody is going to be flexible. Nobody is going to break
flight regulations or displace somebody else on a plane just to fit
your over-privileged arse. Know why? Look in the mirror.
I guess her bratty behaviour is really hitting a nerve because there
seems to be so very many people who were never taught that
tantrums are not cool after two years old or so. Other people must
just keep letting them get away with it.
Do us all a favor, if you have an encounter with the lawyer who
needs to grow the fuck up or the whining consultant who keeps
quoting his hourly rate, if you're not going to get fired for
telling them to pull their head in, please do it? For the sake of those
who would get fired?
It takes a village to raise a child, after all.

Goals

Here’s a few little goals I have in mind for the next few months…

 

1)       Pay of my debts, so if I want to start a biz, move to London, open a funky café, etc we’re more agile and can do it

2)       Grow my hair.

3)       Lose the *remaining* 5 kg  (15 melts off like butter, the last few are a bitch though)

4)       Remember current gig is a means to an end, so remember to treat it like a particularly brutal SSL/PKI course.

5)       Don’t stop studying new tech

6)       Take some certification exams, dammit.

7)        Don’t overspend over Xmas

8)       Sock away some money for my Intel Powerbook

9)    Don’t kill anybody before I get a better job

Public Service Announcement

On behalf of all CS reps, everywhere,

If you are a contractor, or other generic humanoid carbon unit who is hired to maintain a server running, say, MongyServer Pro (don’t take that literally, I know some of you do have problems with abstraction. This is for all servers wearing hats, servers named after fruit, servers made of glass, and Blue servers among others) please understand you may one day have to crack a book or  manpage about MongyServer Pro.

Any server, no matter how lickable the interface, requires an understanding of Where the server keeps its Important Bits, and where you might need to start looking in the event of Bad Things Happening.

This goes double if you’re actually working for MongySoft, ok?

Divas and heat

In the space of about three days, the weather has turned from ‘chilly’ to ‘I need a beer and air-conditioning, stat’. 

The streets teem with people. This is something I don’t quite understand. I don’t mean in comparison to *yesterday*, which was quite busy anyway thank you very much (I think we were so popular because nobody else in Melbourne was picking up the phone). I mean there are cars and people everywhere, normally quiet streets are full of cars, and I had to wait for tram #2 this morning. Tram #1 was completely packed except for that dead space in the middle of the tram into which the sheeple are terrified to step. Could have barged through but I had time to spare. Besides, tram #2 was empty enough that I didn’t have to concern myself with some commuting Melburnians’ shaky grasp of the concept of deodorant.

Don’t know where the hell the extra people are from, they can’t all be tourists.

I did some damage on the iTunes AU music store last night. The bloke knew I’d had a real horse-cookie of a day so he greeted we with food, iced tea, Body Shop swag, and an iTunes music voucher. I got the new NIN album while I tried to get an assignment in on time (Hmm. NIN, Uni, unbearable stifling heat, I must be 22 again!).

Yesterday was perfect café weather, today the f-ing thermostat is set way too high. I won’t even discuss co-werkers who didn’t turn on the airconditioning until 9:15-ish.

Day’s not over yet and I’m already fairly snippy. But then again, most of these people calling up haven’t learned anything when I walked them through everything the first time yesterday.

 

 

 

15% less grumpy

15% of my body weight. Gone. Foomp. Still a way to go but damn, feels good hitting a milestone.

 

Decided to make this more of a feelgood post. I had a fairly snarky one up before but I thought better of it and pulled it down before it got indexed. The truth is, I don’t care if I’m popular at work, or what people think of me there. It’s not exactly under my control. And not a permanent situation from the looks of things.

It’s true. Not a permanent situation. I can take action to make the end result more positive, but the situation – as it stands now – with my work relationships and my role here – is subject to change no matter what I do.

For a procrastinator like myself, who needs justification, lots of it, to initiate change, that’s a very comforting thought. I will land on my feet. I always do.

All flights cancelled

 

My Airport Express is dead.

 

And to say that things couldn’t get worse this week is dangerously optimistic. And it’s only *Tuesday*.

More later.