This must be Blog Week. I don't normally post everyday. But I'm waiting for things to happen (stupid servers), so I'm going to waste some time blogging.

At this very moment, I'm forcefully resisting the urge to tell this guy, "Tell it to someone who cares!" He just asked me to look at this bug again after discussing it with some other people, and they've decided it's going to prevent the product from shipping. We were slated to ship tomorrow. Probably won't happen unless A) a miracle happens, B) I stay up all night working on it (yeah, right!), or C) they decide it's not that important. Unfortunately, a prospective customer has already run into the problem (!) so it's likely they'll only buy if it's fixed.

OK, so say I fix it in the next 2 hours. What happens? We ship tomorrow, upper management's happy, the customer's happy and they fork over truckloads of money, and I continue to sit in my chair just like every other day like nothing happened. Standard operating procedure. You can guess why I have absolutely no motivation whatsoever to work on this.

So say I don't fix it by the end of tomorrow. All weekend I'll have people breathing down my neck, asking for status reports every 10 minutes, and I'll be even more likely to go postal. Then come Monday morning, more status reports, more micromanagement, people thrown at me to help me fix this stupid bug. Either these guys need to just go away and leave me alone, or I need to get out of here.

What about culinary school? Well, currently there's some debate as to whether that would happen soon. I'm hearing rumblings in the coffee shop of possible full-time opportunities. So do I want to go full-time at the coffee shop, while going on sabbatical from engineering, and delay culinary school for a bit? I could just as well self-study some of the textbooks to get ahead -- that's worked really well for me so far. Or stick around and save up some more money, then plan for school in January/February?



Gaaa! *#($%&Q server, piece of #(@% @#(*%ing slow $*@ network @(*#$!!!! I get way more than 240Kbps upstream at home, dang it!! Suddenly, Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice is playing in my head. That's some great music there.

<sigh/>


UPDATE: 30 Sept 2005 11:09: Here's a good one. I stayed till 9pm last night working on that &$%*ing bug. I come in this morning to find out we're not shipping a fix for that today. It's a good thing the people who decided that are not within 100m of me right now.

¶ 4:39 PM 0 comments

I came across an article about Job Burnout the other day. It was published June/2004, but obviously still holds relevance over a year later. The article discusses what job burnout is, what causes it, how to identify the warning signs, and how to remedy the situation. It's a very informative article.

The article includes a simple test to determine your burnout level, but unfortunately you have to keep track of your score manually. So I took the liberty of creating an online version of the test to make it easy for you. Take the test and see how you fare.

For each of the questions below, rate your answer from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Rarely True", and 5 being "Usually True". Be honest with your answers, and if you have multiple jobs (like I do), focus on the one that is most likely to be burning you out.



In case you're wondering, I scored a 105, which means I'm pretty well burnt out at my engineering job. Of the 6 warning signs, I've hit 5 of them.

¶ 8:50 PM 0 comments

Whenever I get around to finishing my Midtown saga (so far I only have Act 1), I think I may turn it into a movie... or at least a screenplay or something. Gonna have to figure out how to put it on screen -- live-action, or computer animation, or clay animation...? It has to have the visual element to really work (I have storyboards and camera angles floating around in my head), so a radio play wouldn't cut it (though I still have a radio play that I was working on years and years ago). Might even be able to get away with no dialogue -- action only (you know, since pigeons and squirrels can't talk). Or I could do a silly Monty Python-esque version.

I'm definitely gonna have to come up with some better character names if I develop the story further. I'm thinking it's going to evolve into a twist on West Side Story, to go along with the plethora of other Romeo and Juliet adaptations, but with my own creative spin.

Oh, to have the time to finish such an undertaking!

¶ 4:22 PM 1 comments

What would you do if you encountered one of these?



Do you feel lucky, punk?

¶ 3:56 PM 1 comments

I'm bored. It's Friday, it's almost time to go home, I finished my work 3 days ahead of schedule.

La-dee-dah...

Hm-hm-hmmm-hm-hmmm-hmm....

<twiddle>
  <finger digit="thumb" hand="left"/>
  <finger digit="thumb" hand="right"/>
</twiddle>

Ooo! Shiny!

¶ 3:24 PM 1 comments

Yes, I think too hard. Call it force-of-habit -- six years of habit. All that computer science training made me into a coder who thinks too hard. Don't worry, I'll explain.

I've been charged with enhancing a particular function of our software product. After three days of fiddling around with a state diagram, then 2 days of fiddling around with a thread timing diagram, I finally stumbled upon an elegant solution. However, in the design two threads are joined at the elbow, which doesn't allow for proper modularization and reusability of the code. So I have to find a way to decouple the threads, which I might be able to do now.

The solution probably should have been much simpler, and probably should have been done by now. But leave it to my guru status to try to design this code properly.

<sigh/>


UPDATE: 6 Sept 2005, 16:29: And after all that, the stupid API calls don't even work right. So for all those state diagrams and thread timing diagrams, I have pretty pictures.

¶ 2:13 PM 0 comments

So I'm standing in the kitchen of the coffee shop, running down my mental checklist of things I need to do this morning. I look up, and there's the little red-headed German woman standing in the door.

Me: in shock, frantically trying to figure out what's going on Uh, hi.

She blows me a kiss.

Me: still in shock, confusedly smiling Um, thanks...?
Her: Are you making carrot cake?
Me: Um, well, not right now.
Her: pouts
Me: But there's still some out there, and there's carrot muffins, too.
Her: smiling ear-to-ear So I can have an orgasmic experience later today?
Self: Whaaaa? pause Oh! Smile and nod! Smile and nod, dang it!
Me: *blink* *blink* Uh, yeah.

Then she turned, and bounced away, clapping and giggling all the while.

Me: *blink* *blink* Uh... ... ...What just happened here?
Coworker: dutifully controlling own laughter Different culture.
Me: *blink* *blink* I guess....


Also, apparently, on Sunday while I was at the hoe-down, everyone else went to dinner and were discussing how to market me. "Award-Winning Chef!" "Award-Winning Carrot Cake!" After this morning's incident, the coworker who witnessed the whole interchange said, "Award-Winning, Orgasmic Carrot Cake!" Hey, this is a family establishment! <sigh/>

¶ 1:44 PM 5 comments