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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Life

  • Post-vacation post-mortem post.

    So why didn’t I get in any journal entries for the last two days? I’m so glad you asked.

    Wednesday was Kiddie Day. I had Hannah as well as little Najoni to mind, then Hannah’s mother and I watched over a houseful of rugrats. Later she went to pick up Wendi and Bernie from the airport, after which we all hung out until late in the evening. There just wasn’t any time for the Internet that day.

    Yesterday was my first day back at the office. You wouldn’t know it by the amount of work I got done, though. John Graefe, my Corporate Boss, was in town to meet with the company’s Internet Director and myself. We discussed issues with website hosting, domain management, in-house audio streaming and the forthcoming intranet project. Let’s just say I have a lot of interesting work ahead of me between now and next summer. After we “did lunch” I showed him around the offices. He met Daria Landar (my trusted comrade over in West Sales), both Jacks (Hutchison the GM and Hernvall the Controller), and Dan Harbison (Dot-com-Dan, the webmaster for KNRK). All in all it was a busy, talkative, brainstorming, chatting, stimulating kind of day. I even managed to get a few small tasks out of the way.

    All that talking made hell out of my throat, though. By the time I left I felt totally raw, and that didn’t get better when we had to spend a couple of hours at the school or when Amy and Michael came over for three hours of Diablo II. (Fun, though. Midnight rolled around before we could find out how badly The Big Pink Teddy Bear was gonna maul our haphazard group of intrepid warriors. We’ve got skill and equipment issues…)

    Today was something a bit more like a normal day. Lots of small fires needed extinguishing. I’m caught up on my email at long last. Most of the people who were having the biggest problems are happy once more. Just about the only really major problem today was that Pacifier/Northwest Link/Europa had a truly stupendous downtime today. The problem first manifested at about 10:25am and was finally resolved just before 3:15pm. I’m not pleased with their technical capabilities right now, you could say.

    I’m looking forward to going home, resting my sore throat and relaxing until Sunday’s marathon project session. I have the usual email maintenance to do, the usual tape backups to run, and a couple of unusual tasks that will fill the long stretches when tape is running…

  • So, Karel, how’s your vacation?

    As some of you may know, I’m on something resembling a vacation. While it is true that I won’t be leaving the house more than once or twice during my long break from work, I think I’ll still manage to enjoy myself.

    Wendi and Bernie left at noon Wednesday. The balance of that day was spent minding various children, going to a cub scout activity and then sacking out for the night. Yesterday was our first full day without Mom and Grandpa around. I managed to deal with the three-year-old munchkin that I was dragooned into babysitting, and also managed not to screw up dinner too badly.

    The kids and I are looking forward to a nice long weekend of fun and frolic, including all the gaming we can stand. I’m also hoping to finish up TMTT by the end of my vacation and possibly get some more work done on my next music video.

    I’ve also got a bit of a hankering to tinker with the website a little. I’m not sure what I want to do, but I want to do something. Be afraid, be very… no, I suppose there’s nothing to really be afraid of. Nevermind. Let’s put it this way: Right now the only thing on this site that represents my anime-fanboy side is TMTT, and I think I’d like to do something about that. I’m not thinking of cluttering up the design of the main site, mind you. What I have (very vaguely) in mind is more like a sub-site with all kinds of anime geegaws and what-not.

    Or maybe I should wait until I have a high-speed Internet connection at my disposal once more. Blah. Stupid modem.

  • Tomorrow Comes Today

    Nostalgia is a powerful sensation. I woke up at 7:00 this morning in a strange bed. That’s not the nostalgia part, you silly reader you. My hour-long morning jaunt around the quiet golf resort provided me with waves upon waves of homesickness.

    So where’s home, you ask? Good question. I grew up in the wilds of central Washington state. I couldn’t point to a particular town or location and say, “Here is what I think of when I say ‘home’,” but there is a collection of places that figure strongly in my memories of youth.

    Somewhere on the other side of the Columbia river from here is the Lewis River campgrounds. At one point our family was involved in taking care of those grounds, and I have surpringly fond memories of the place. There’s also the Samish Island (really a peninsula) campgrounds. Apparently I spent a lot of quality time at church camping activities. Who knew?

    The resort at which the retreat was held reminded me partly of Lewis River and partly of the Cascade foothills we frequented often when we lived near Brewster, WA. Everywhere you looked there were pine trees, cedar trees, hills and rocks and underbrush. I don’t miss my childhood, but I miss those places. I’m probably not smart or wise enough to resolve this apparent conundrum. Ah well.

    The retreat ended after lunch, so Gary and I took off for the office. I wanted to get the Qualitap issue resolved at long last, and thankfully a fresh CD-ROM was waiting in my mail slot. With that completed and instructions emailed out to the relevant parties, I feel relatively safe in entering my vacation week.

    I am home now. There are rugrats galore, two of which are even mine. Wendi and Bernie leave tomorrow morning. I’ll be babysitting one rugrat on weekdays, and then just Alex and Erica on the weekend. (Having them at home isn’t really babysitting. They’re not babies anymore.) I’ll probably check my work email occasionally, if only to prune the metric ton of spam I get every day. Other than that, I have no plans. I’m tied to the house for a week, so I should just try to make the best of it.

  • Retreat! Retreat!

    It’s just about 10:00 Monday night as I write this. I won’t be able to post the entry until I get back to the office in the morning, however, as my room is apparently one of the ones not yet blessed with DSL internet connections. Ah well, it could have been a lot worse.

    First, the resort. It’s in the foothills, nicely situated in heavily wooded surroundings. Some time when I have lots and lots of money I’ll come back and explore what hiking opportunities may be nearby. I won’t get that chance on this trip, unfortunately.

    The meetings themselves went about as well as any other department heads’ shindig. We talked a lot about what our goals are. We took a valiant stab at creating a mission statement for our local cluster. Positive and negative aspects of our workplace were brought to light. We even talked a little bit about The Tipping Point, the book that served as the catalyst for this event to begin with. Towards the end we were given colored hats and fresh new logoed shirts.

    Why colored hats, you ask? Our “scheduled fun” took the form of croquet. This isn’t the backyard variety, either. The layout and rules are a bit different, and rather strict. We originally were broken up into teams with the intent of holding a sort of tournament, but most folks really wanted to eat, watch a game on TV and get blitzed at one of the condos. Some of us got better accomodations than others, you see. (I’m not complaining: I’m tucked away in a small and quiet portion of the resort… far away from the noise and frivolity. Praise the goddesses.)

    There was a last-minute rally by a sizable group of us to get some more use out of those nice (lamplit) croquet greens. An idea borne of alcohol and pure contrariness led us to play “double green croquet.” Four wickets up, four wickets back, four down the middle, both posts. The eight of us had a complete blast. (Score? Seven wickets to five, the team with seven hit both posts. Who knew I was a croquet savant?) After we lost and gained personnel, one more regulation-style game was assayed. The teaming of David Lichtman, Keevin Wagner and myself remains undefeated, thank you, thank you.

    And now I’m out on my feet and have to get up at 7:00 or so if I want to have a nice full breakfast on the company dime. There’s one more meeting, then lunch, and after that we are encouraged to enjoy the available facilities at will. Gary Hilliard (Chief Engineer) is my ride, though, and we both agreed to bail for the office as soon as possible. (He’s got work to do, I have a vacation to prepare for.)

    All in all, there are worse ways I can imagine spending a day in the Cascade foothills.

  • Where I stand, or more accurately where I sit.

    As things stand at about 4pm Pacific time, the massive file transfer is just over halfway done. My phone will let me know if for some reason the Samba share on Beast disappears (a clear sign that the 3Ware RAID controller has barfed again). Knocking on wood, if I get no such message then I’ll be able to confidently walk into the office tomorrow and prepare to finish this damnable project. After a decent night’s sleep, of course. (So far I’ve clocked about two hours’ sleep in the last 35.)

    Then I can prepare for the retreat. Turns out I’m staying overnight at this mountain resort. (It really is. The place is named “The Resort At The Mountain.” And I’d love to know how they got their hands on that domain, since I’m sure that other resort owners would gladly kill for it. But I digress.) Wendi is sure that I’ll end up sharing a room with somebody. I think that if that were the case we’d have been asked about who we want to buddy with, but then again communications isn’t always the strongest part of our company hierarchy. We’ll see. I’d really really like to have a room of my own. I like my fellow department heads well enough, but I’m almost certain I don’t want to sleep near any of them… and I can almost guarantee they feel the same way about me.

    Note to self: Don’t forget to dub that tape, change your voicemail greeting and look at Matt Lund’s PC. Okay, self? Do you think you can handle all of that? Good boy.

    I could really use a decent night’s sleep. Or hadn’t you noticed?

  • Dribs and drabs

    Let’s see, a recap (oh no!) of recent events:

    I’m starting a new music video. It’s on the order of a special request, and as soon as the idea took hold in what passes for my brain I couldn’t resist the idea of making it work. Film at eleven, as it were.

    Wendi has her airline tickets, as does her father. Next Wednesday afternoon they’ll be leaving for a week. I’ll be on vacation, more or less. For me the word “vacation” tends to translate as “watches kids for a few days while praying the phone never rings.” I’ll manage to enjoy my time off anyway, have no fear.

    The itinerary for the Dept. Heads retreat next week has been distributed. Meetings, meals, repeat. Oh, and there’s some golf scheduled, but I opted out of that. There are worse ways to spend the two days before my vacation starts…

    I have tried Winamp 3. There are some inventive skins available for it, but do they all have to be impossible to actually use? Note to skinners: We want to actually use the software too.

    I’m taking the laptop home this evening. If all goes well, I’ll get a chance at finishing off my remaining TMTT episodes over the next few days. I’d like to have that project completed for my own peace of mind, thank you. I’m still closer to completing my Thumbnail Theater than EK is on hers, though. Nyah nyah nyah!

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