Category: Rant

My Stack Floweth Over

I spend most of the time that I’m waiting for things to happen (compiles, application start ups, etc) reading and answering questions on StackOverflow, the best site for programming related questions bar none. One of the things that makes StackOverflow so good is their “reputation” system (although I keep calling it “XP” just to see if anybody will start copying me). You get XP when other users vote up your questions or answers, and when you “level up” to certain levels you are trusted to do various book-keeping tasks on the site like editing other people’s posts or closing them. There are also various badges you can get (or “Achievements” ) when you accomplish various things like getting a certain amount of up-votes on an answer. It’s a great system, and I don’t just say that because I am in the top 15 for XP. But one of the things they do is limit the amount of XP you can get in a single day. And overnight, some of my older answers got a whole bunch of up-votes, so I started off the day with nearly my limit, and I’ve now hit my limit for the day. Which means that for the rest of the day, I’ll be answering questions out of the goodness of my heart (and a design to show-off) rather than for XP.

This also means that I might have to actually be productive at work today. Sigh.

Buggrit, millenium hand and shrimp

I just tore my pants open at the pocket sitting down at my chair – the arms of the chair tilt inward and this isn’t the first time they’ve caught my pockets, but this time the pants are torn right open and I’m showing rather too much leg (and underwear) for the dress code.

Worst of all, I need to go to the washroom and I can’t risk walking past everybody.

The State of the Paul

My elbows are hurting much more than usual. The pain level has been rising for weeks now, so I suspect al the extra exercise is doing me harm. Hopefully all it will take is scaling it back.

I’ve been sneezing a lot today. I think I’m catching what Vicki’s got.

Work still sucks.

Blergh

I didn’t sleep last night. My elbows were killing me, and I had a very acid stomach. As a matter of fact, sometime around breakfast time I figured out there might be a common cause – if I didn’t take enough water with my evening Aleve, it doesn’t go down all the way and gives me acid and doesn’t help my joints. On top of that I’m tired as hell. I couldn’t get comfortable all night – my legs were always cold and my trunk was always too hot. And I had a bunch of stuff running around my head.

Right now I’m not 100% sure if I’m going to have explosive diarrhea or vomit. So I’ve come home. Maybe I can get some sleep.

Yeah, you don’t want to dare me that

I’ve written earlier about how I have flown so little this year that I’m seriously considering going “inactive” in the club? Well, on top of that, I’ve been Secretary for the club for most of the time I’ve been a member – I think it started soon after I created a web site for the club on my own. I suck at it. I’m not organized enough, and I don’t like doing it. I got free of it once, but the person who took it on quit after a year or two and dumped it back on me.

And the club communications are now totally dysfunctional. There is a “officers” mailing list for officers and board members to communicate, but the current president of the club, and a couple of others, totally refuse to use it. Instead, they send email to long lists of CCs, which means that you personally have no control over what email address you receive the message, or in what format. It also means that sometimes you find out that a conversation is going on because sometime in the middle of it somebody stops hitting “Reply All” and uses their own address list. One extremely annoying example of this happened when the club officers and BOD were discussing selling the Lance (which I knew about) but didn’t include me in most of a long thread about some of the details in spite of the fact that I was one of three members of the club who used the Lance, I was one of two officers who used the Lance, and the detail they were discussing had to do with on-line advertising. Anyway, the President last year said “I can see why people would want the email list, but I’ll continue to use my own list”, and subscribed. But sometime between then and now he’s unsubscribed again (which I didn’t know). Meanwhile, he’s stubbornly using his alias list (which includes people who haven’t been officers in 4 or 5 years and who don’t live in the US any more), and I’m stubbornly using the mailing list.

So last night (it’s now 3:30am and I haven’t been able to sleep all night because I’m so riled up about this) he sent me an email basically saying “communicate with me my way, or we’ll replace you as secretary”, and talking about how he didn’t want to be president but it was thrust upon him because nobody else would take it. I responded with an ecstatic “YES, PLEASE DO” and explained how I didn’t want to be secretary, have had it thrust upon me twice, and have been doing it for about 10 years total of my 15 years in the club.

I guess I’ll have to wait to see if I’ve called his bluff or whether I’m really going to be free of this horrible task. Maybe I’ll spend some time converting the club web site to Joomla so I can hand off more of that to others in the club.