#50

So at this moment, my mother and step-father are in Alaska on a cruise. As a part of this trip, my mom is making a special pilgrimage to Juneau, which will be the last of the 50 state capitals she’s visited in her life, and the only one that my father never made it to.

My brother just made an offer on a house. I’m so proud.

As for myself, life continues on. As is the recent tradition, it’s been six months so it’s time for me to have another boss. I’m still doing the same job as the last year and a half, but now they did a little re-org.

I finally rectified a shortcoming in my life and I purchased Okami for the Wii. I’m probably about 2/3rds of the way through if my item list is any indication and it’s everything people have said it was. I also picked up (i.e. downloaded via Steam) the Secret of Monkey Island remake. As I’m getting further in, things are seeming less and less familiar, I either played it once through way back when and replayed only the first bit, or I never finished it at all. Admitting this possibility probably loses me some nerd points.

The summer game drought is still going strong for me, with Shadow Complex coming out tomorrow and then an explosion in September. Hopefully I can finish Okami and Dragon Warrior V DS soon, and I’d like to finish my second playthrough of FF12 as well, seeing as how I bought a PS2 slim pretty much for the purpose of playing it again. (Although my library of PS2 games is full of reasons).

The WoW expansion news is starting to get exciting — I bought the DirecTV PPV to watch Blizzcon. I just hope that it doesn’t come out anywhere near FFXIV, because that would be a strain on my free time….

The post I made in my mind

I hate it when I get a whole post thought out in my head, but then forget to actually post it.

This weekend was the first for a while that I didn’t have to go into to work at some point, which was good. Last weekend, I had something weird happen. So I’m in the office on Saturday, spinning my wheels trying to figure out this code so I can fix a bug in it which may or may not have been in the code itself or with Struts/OGNL being the bastard that it usually is and just silently refusing to accept data passed to it for some arcane reason. The code is like quite a bit on this project, where it started out simple and elegant, but had so many other things tacked on to it that it becomes almost impossible to trace through how its supposed to work. (The fact that JavaScript is mostly event-based makes it even harder to figure out.)

I’ve been at it for four or five hours, iterating each time takes about 15-20 minutes as usual (compile, install, restart, navigate to page) so I’m already a bit frustrated, having only sort of nailed down one part of the error (an event wasn’t being fired when it should have been), and all of a sudden my monitor goes blank. Then my computer starts beeping. Four short beeps. I tried turning it off and on, and it beeps again.

The motherboard had died.

Spaghetti code killed my computer.

I feel old.

Because I was curious, I looked at the entire corporate directory and sorted by employee number (a number which, up to a certain point, indicated the order in which you joined the company).

I am currently the 89th most senior person at Yahoo!, by tenure. Not bad out of a company of 12,000.

The post I keep forgetting to make…

… since last Friday.

I made it through passover this year, it was made easier when I realized that El Pollo Loco was fair game if I didn’t get tortillas and I got the correct sides.

It turns out I’m getting money back from the government this year. This was a welcome surprise.

Today is the last day of one of my coworkers, a fellow back-end engineer. He’s going to work at Gaia Online, in a weird twist of fate.

Ugh.

Yesterday, this is what I did at work:

10-11: Meeting (Presentation of last two week’s worth of work)
11-12: Meeting (Review of last two week’s worth of work)
12-12:30: Lunch
12:30-2: Email, small amount of work
2-3: Meeting (Bi-weekly staff meeting)
3-6: Meeting (Planning of next two week’s worth of work)

I feel sorry for the guy who was in every single one of those meetings as me, and also had a 1-2 meeting.

And on a side note, I watched the first episode of Heroes last night, and at some point I realized, “Hey, that looks like Tim Sale’s art…”

So much work to do, and so much sleep deprivation so I can’t concentrate on the work.

The fact that I’m going to be out of the office for Thursday, Friday and Monday this and next week (for Anime Overdose) isn’t helping, either.

Yay Windows 2000

So, since Windows XP finally released, that was the signal for the IS department to realize that they could probably get away with starting to install Windows 2000 on machines.

I got it installed on my machine here, which means… USB! Which means… Webcam!

Yes, it’s the HamsterCam: At Work Edition. This one might just stay on all the time, so you may see an empty cube quite a bit of the time. And yes, it’s freaky to see me as if I’m in two places at once.

Of course, I only own one webcam, so I might be moving it around. Then again, since Intel’s stopping their consumer electronics line, I might be able to pick up another one cheaps.

Ants!

Someone left a salad out over the weekend, and there’s now an infestation of ants on the next row over.

Keep in mind, we’re on the third floor.

Aieeeeee.

Oh man…

The referee just showed up and I can hear his whistle.

And someone is making cup o’ noodles in the kitchen… smell reminds me of high school lunch.