I was driving to work this morning, admiring that unfamiliar shiny yellow orb in the sky and thinking that if I wasn’t overburdened by work and it wasn’t windy as hell, this would be a good day to go out flying. But then I saw a pickup truck with a ladder in the back backing down the shoulder. “Why would he be doing that?” I wondered to myself, when suddenly the van in front of me ran over another ladder that was lying the road, causing it to pop up into the air menacingly. I swerved around it without hitting either it or any surrounding cars, and afterwards had time to wonder if it would have hit my grill or come in through the windshield if I’d hit it.
Category: Rant
0wnzord
Vicki asked me to stay home this morning because the furnace guy was coming to do one of the inspections on the hideously expensive maintenance contract we signed up for due to a hard sell sales pitch. She wanted me to stay because she says the furnace guy gives her a real hard sell every time for something that we absolutely must replace or we’re killing babies and torturing puppies. I’m not sure where she’s been for the last 11 years, but by now you’d think she’d realize that I’m no better at resisting those sorts of sales pitches either. But hey, this spreads the blame around for the stupid stuff we get talked into and takes the pressure off her, so I’m willing to do it for her sake.
The guy came, did the usual poking around in the basement, and came up and said “Your ignitor unit is testing at 99 ohms and we recommend replacing it any time it gets to 100 ohms, so you’re due”. I asked for a price, and he showed me it woud be $160 now, or $280 if it was an off-hours call. So I thought I’d outsmart him and ask if he had one in stock, and he said no, he’d checked the truck and he didn’t have one. I figured that would mean that if it *did* fail in middle of the night, we’d have to wait for a day or more while they ordered the part, and we’d risk the birds dying if that happened, so I said to go ahead and order it. A few minutes later, as he’s leaving, I asked when they were coming to install the part, and he said “I had another look around the truck, and found one, so it’s installed already”.
Dammit, he played me for a chump. He must have known that if he’d said they had one in the truck that I would figure they’re easy to come by and so I could afford to wait until it failed, but if they didn’t I’d want to replace it pre-emptively. I’m such a sucker.
Ouch
My back spasmed up in the middle of the night. Actually, it was about 5:30am so I just got up. But because I’m working on my Functional Spec, instead of spending the day lying down to relieve the pain, I’m going from chair to chair trying to find a comfortable position to type.
If life is so good, why am I so sad?
I’m terribly depressed, and I’m not entirely sure why. I mentioned this to Vicki, and she started listing off dozens of reasons why I should be happy with no signs of stopping until I conceded the point. And I have to agree with every one of them. I should be happy. And yet, I am not.
There is one thing hanging over me right now – a Functional Spec that I promised would be done by Wednesday, and which I haven’t done nearly enough work on. The more I’m working on it, the bigger a job it looks. And the more impossible seems the deadlines both for having the Functional Spec and even more important, the code that I’m spec-ing. And with my project manager and my current product manager, that’s not going to go over well. Before, I might have been praised for giving information that would allow the schedule to be adjusted, but with these two I’m not sure. I feel like neither of them trust me, and because of that I don’t entirely trust them.
But I’ve been in bad situations at work here – hell, I survived a year and a half at SunGard without cracking up. Oh wait, I didn’t – I spent two years in therapy around that time. So never mind Sungard. But I did survive a year at Gandalf, where my boss’s boss thought his whole department should be shut down so I had to spend half the time writing long descriptions of what we were doing and how much we were saving the company.
So anyway, I don’t know why I’m so sad. And being sad isn’t helping write the Functional Spec.
Stupid DVD drive, semi-stupid SpamKarma2
The DVD drive in my Powerbook has been a pain in the ass. It frequently refuses to eject a disk in the drive completely, sometimes showing me just a sliver of the disk which if I’m sufficiently alert I can grab before it gets sucked back in, and sometimes refusing to show anything before it acts as if it had just been re-inserted and mounting it again. Last time I took it to Apple, they replaced the drive under Apple Care, but said that because the laptop’s case has a bit of a dent in it, next time it happens they’re not going to cover it because it’s probably caused by damage to the frame of the case. (Yes, I admit I’ve dropped the laptop a few times. Being a geek means being hard on equipment.[1])
I got a couple of multi-disk audiobooks for Christmas, and I’m in the process of ripping them to MP3 so I can listen to them on my iPod. But in the 6 disks that I’ve ripped so far, I’ve had the computer pull the “Here’s a sliver, and there it’s gone again” trick several times, it’s locked up ripping a track once, and iTunes has gone into a “Not responding” state 3 times. I’ve had to reboot three times so far, two of those times I’ve had to use the power switch to reboot because iTunes wouldn’t quit. This last time I rebooted it, neither Finder, iTunes, nor Disk Utility will recognize that there was a disk in the drive. But it’s there, all right. I can just see it if I pry the disk slot open a little. Oh well, time to reboot into OpenFirmware and try the eject command there. But if I remember the last time correctly, that won’t work either. And then it’s back to the Apple store to price out a new case and frame for an “obsolete” Powerbook.
In other stupid news, I use SpamKarma2 to protect this blog against spam. I also recently started to use Akismet, but I think SK2 does a good job so I’m reluctant to switch entirely over to Akismet, in spite of the fact that SK2 isn’t actively maintained any more and doesn’t work well with the OpenID plugin. Every day SK2 is supposed to send me an email telling me how many spams it caught since the last report, and whether any have a score between 0 and -20 (which means it flagged them as spam, but it’s not 100% sure). I click the link, look at those doubtful ones, and then tell it to purge everything. For some reason, it doesn’t come the same time every day – I think it’s on a 25 hour cycle. Last night, for some bizarre reason, it sent me 5 copies of the daily report, all within minutes of each other and all identical. Strange. It’s not even like there was a time change or end of the month or something that would explain it.
Footnote [1]: Let me explain the logic behind that statement. Geeks are hard on equipment because they need to have it around all the time, which means that laptops don’t get put in fancy padded sleeves or left on desks, they get balanced on the arms of chairs or put on the floor sideways with the hinge open, with power cords running across the floor where they can be tripped over or run into by small dogs. iPods and cell phones get crammed into your pockets instead of living in some nice padded case or locked in a desk drawer, which means they fall out when you reach into your pocket to get your keys out (said keys also scratching the screens and doing other damage), and in one case, even falling in the toilet when they fall out of your pocket as you’re putting your pants back on. Keyboards accumulate crud because you don’t put them aside to eat, and TiVos and desktop computers never get their cases screwed back on because you’re always opening them up to do yet another upgrade or using them to do other work.