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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • An Interesting Week Ahead

    Not that I’ve been a frantic, every-day poster lately, but don’t expect much from me this coming week. Tomorrow afternoon I head to Denver (where they’re experiencing temperatures merely “around” 90 degrees, but they get thunderstorms as a bonus) and I won’t return until Thursday night… after which I’ll turn around and go to work bright and early Friday morning.

    This is a training excursion for my new boss and me. He’s been using the system in question for a while now; I’ve been using it for about three weeks. Guess who’s going to be taking notes like crazy? Luckily I bought new pens and a notebook just for this occasion. I also picked up some other travel supplies, so there’s a chance I’ll actually be ready for this little jaunt.

    Oh, and I took the Leatherman Micra and the Swiss Army USB Drive out of my pants pocket. No point arguing with those friendly folks at the airport about whether or not I’d use them to hijack a plane, right?

    I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping this thing updated like I originally stated I would at the beginning of the year. Events have run away with me since mid-March, and until I settle in at my new job I’m probably going to continue experiencing low energy levels coupled with high anxiety levels. I no longer go into a complete panic attack at the mere thought of going to work, but I’m certainly far from comfortable in my new role. I labor constantly with a sneaking suspicion that I’m simply not suited for the job. Not that I won’t give it my best shot, mind you. I want this to work, and not just because I don’t want to be unemployed again. If I can really settle into this job, it’ll be an awfully cool gig.

    Which brings us back to the need for training in the main software system I use to do my job. I’ll let you know how it goes.

  • My OCD is showing, twenty-four-seven

    One of those “buzzwords” we’ve learned to live with over the years is “24×7” (aka 24/7) which, of course, indicates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I’ve never really liked this term, but that’s just a personal quirk. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it.

    I’ve bumped into an expansion of that term that bothers me a fair bit, though. It’s cheesy, and what’s worse is that it doesn’t even make sense. If 24 is the number of hours in the day, and 7 is the number of days in the week, if you want to expand that logic then you’d have to use the number of weeks in the year, right? So where does “24×7×365” come from? Last time I checked, there aren’t over three hundred weeks in a given year. By all rights it should be “24×7×52,” and even then I wouldn’t exactly be happy with it… but it wouldn’t make me quite so actively unhappy.

    I can hardly expect any sort of widespread, meaningful change just because some random nutjob on the Internet has pointed out the inherent absurdity in play. Complaining about it provides some amusement value, though.

  • Mouse Identification Training

    The product is called “VMware.” It is, in effect, a server that allows you to host a number of virtual computers on a single machine. The geek value for something like this is through the roof, which makes the following instructions found in the upgrade documentation terribly amusing.

    8. Select your mouse.

    Here are some helpful mouse identification hints:

    • If the connector is round, your mouse is a PS/2 or a Bus mouse.
    • If the connector is trapezoidal with nine holes, it is a serial mouse.
    • If the connector is a flat rectangle with a slot, it is a USB mouse.

    I’ll grant you that their instructions are wholly accurate. However, I question the judgement of the person who thinks (s)he has any business at all installing or upgrading a sophisticated piece of software but doesn’t know how to tell one type of pointing device from another!

  • It’s that time of year again.

    Blogathon 2006!

    I can’t participate this year, unfortunately. I just came off of nearly four solid months of stress and panic and am now adjusting to a whole new kind of job and the new sleep schedule that comes with it. So. Who’s going to take my place, eh?

    Do it for me. Do it for Cat. Do it for whatever charity you see fit. Just, do it!

  • Bizarre Coincidence, Wot?

    This week marks the 17th anniversary of my arrival in Portland. I moved here from Concrete, WA when I was 17 years old, so I’ve made the Rose City my home for an entire half of my life now. Before Concrete (the town in which I spent my senior year) I spent a brief time in Anacortes, WA preceeded by another brief stint in Des Moines, WA. Oddly enough, my girlfriend currently lives in Des Moines, albeit not on a small boat like I did. My junior year (and my absolute favorite year of school, ever) was spent in Bellevue, WA and my sophomore year took place in Kent, WA.

    We moved to Kent from Hillsboro, OR after Mom hooked up with her newest husband at the time. Now, here’s where it gets weird. I attended Poynter Middle School, located just off Cornell Road. Our apartment was right across Cornell from the school’s athletic field. (I used to watch Robotech in the morning until the moment the credits rolled, at which point I’d grab my things and scamper at high speed so as not to be late for school.)

    Yesterday I started work at Resource One, which is located… well, let’s just say it’s incredibly close. Check this out:


    (Image courtesy of Google Maps, with minor edits by Yours Truly)

    The green arrow is my current workplace. The blue arrow marks the approximate location (it was a long time ago, so maybe I got the wrong building) of the apartment that Mom, Sis and I lived in… about twenty years ago. The purple arrow indicates the middle school I attended at that time. (For reference, if you could “scroll” the image above so you could see what’s just off to the right, you’d find the Hillsboro airport.)

    Consider that I’ve barely set foot in Hillsboro more than a couple of times since I moved away, and then consider that I’m now working a figurative stone’s throw from where I used to live. Freaky, isn’t it?

  • Morning person? Me?

    I face a number of challenges in my new job. For instance, I need to learn one arcane system around which our tasking and billing revolve and another slightly less arcane system around which my primary job description revolves. I also need to learn and become comfortable with the process by which I accept, resolve and document individual tasks. There’s also the matter of tracking what I’m doing (and for whom) for any given quarter-hour of the workday.

    All of this pales in comparison to my biggest challenge, however. You see, it turns out that my schedule is to work from 8:00am to 5:00pm each weekday. Factor in the hour and a half of transit time (walk to MAX station, wait for and catch MAX, ride MAX for about 50 minutes, walk from station to office) and that means I need to get out of bed no later than twenty minutes after five o’clock in the morning.

    5:20 in the A.M.? Are you kidding me? I’m going to be a zombie! I may be getting home at nearly the same time that I used to when I worked at “that other place,” but I’m getting out of bed a whole two hours earlier.

    Well, maybe I’ll adjust beautifully. I won’t know until I try. Suffice to say that the prospect is daunting, which when added to all of the other daunting parts of my new job results in my having to fight down the occasional wave of feeling utterly out of my depth.

    We’ll find out, won’t we?

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