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The Blargh Part

Jason — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:55:14 +0000

And now for the second half of the post I wanted to make this morning. Less updating, more personal stuff.

Like I said, I’ve been feeling a bit blargh recently, for a variety of reasons. Some of which would be uninteresting to people who aren’t me, so I won’t get into it. But I want to go into some of the stuff.

A lot of it probably has to do with the situation at work. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that one of my bosses and myself just don’t see eye to eye on stuff and that conflict is gradually increasing over time. Not going to turn this into a big complaint session post or anything, but just in a nutshell, I’m in a situation where he’s given me some fairly complex projects to work on without understanding that they’re as complex as they are and expecting me to finish them faster than I can. So he either gets pissed at me for getting it done on time and not working like it should because the timeframe was unreasonable, or he gets pissed at me when I do it the right way and it takes longer than he thought it would. Or the fun part, when he gets pissed at me when it doesn’t work how he thinks it should work, even though he never told me he wanted it to work like that to begin with.

I’m just detecting over the past several weeks that conversations have started to become more adversarial. Even when I attempted to bring up my concerns with him it got turned around on me somehow. The situation is heading towards some sort of breaking point. I just don’t know when.

So yeah, that’s weighing on my mind. And it’s not like I particularly enjoy working here or anything. What I just mentioned is part of the reason why, plus other things. I’ve been trying to find another job that would either present me a new opportunity in my existing career or let me go back to school on a more full time basis and work towards a graphic design degree. But so far there’s nothing in this area that looks like it might work out. And I’ve been looking.

Which brings me to my second reason for blargh-ness. I’ve got several design related projects I’ve been working on, chiefly a book layout for a friend of mine that’s pretty extensive, and a redesign for my friend Wassy’s website. Lately I’ve been slacking a bit on this stuff due to mostly, City of Heroes Going Rogue expansion. I’ve been trying to get back on top of things though. Trying to would be the operative word. It’s kinda like there’s some sort of disconnect and I just can’t come up with anything that works. It’s getting to be incredibly frustrating at this point.

So those are the big things weighing on me right now. It’ll pass at some point, I know, but right now things are just kinda blargh.

On the bright side though, the photos I posted up earlier this week seem to have gone over well with the professor of the course. Well, the first one anyway. She’s working on commenting on the rest. So it’s not all bad!

5 Day Update

Jason — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:50:36 +0000

Woah, it seems I haven’t posted here in a couple days. Eeep.

So, time to catch up. First up, I got my bonus money on Thursday and it ended up being a bit more than I was anticipating it would be. So I went out searching for a new desk chair for my office. At Staples, after selecting the chair I wanted, purchasing it and getting it home…it ended up not being the chair I picked. However, after sitting it it…it ended up being more comfy than the chair I was interested in to begin with, so…a happy accident. I ended up with the Tillman Leather Executive Chair. It’s very comfy.

Friday was the official last day of the semester, so my friends and I celebrated by heading out to Tom Cavallo’s for their excellent chicken wings and the fact that they have Newcastle on tap for a bit of a celebratory dinner. Their wings are…out of this world. Their pizza is pretty bad, but they totally make up for it with the wings.

This weekend, aside from getting myself a haircut, I spent the time mostly relaxing due to the stressful work week that I had last week. Urgh. Basically if something could have gone wrong, it did.

I’m getting more interested in playing City of Heroes again after a discussion with Wassy where we figured out really neat story arc idea involving 2 of my characters and one of hers. We need to wait for the expansion pack to come out (sometime next year hopefully) in order to fully explore it, but it’s gotten me back interested in the characters again. I’m currently compiling a sort of story bible on my main characters in an attempt to define them better and work on some backstory stuff that I might be able to turn into in game story arcs.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Jason — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:26:56 +0000

4:00. The day before Thanksgiving. Sitting at my desk at work…watching the clock tick slowly by…

Yep, it’s that time again. The long wait before vacation begins. And after what I did today at work I could really use all 5 days that I took off (took off Monday just for good measure) to recover.

I had to delve into one of our old programs that’s technically unmaintained (it was never migrated over to our new development platform) but still in use to add a feature somebody requested. This program is held together by the coding equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum. In fact, when it was overheard that I would be working in this program, I was instructed to not go anywhere even remotely close to the printing code. Because, and I quote this exactly: “You’re just better off not going there…” spoken in a tone of voice suggesting some deep rooted trauma, suppressed by the ages suddenly bubbling to the surface.

So after getting the morning trying to get the program to actually run properly on my machine (setting the tone for what was to come), I set about trying to wedge a new feature into the 5 year old, horribly documented and strung together code.

Can I go home now?

I spent last night poking around photoshop and trying some things out. I ended up creating a neat looking (in my opinion anyway) outer space nebula/star field background that I’m not quite sure what to do with. I was thinking of trying to transform it into some sort of desktop wallpaper for the heck of it. Maybe put in a (bright) star and a couple planets or something. See if I can turn it into an artsy type project as a break from bashing my head against the wall with web design things.

It’ll expand my photoshop skillz at any rate, even if it ends up sucking. I’m already using some stuff I never got into before (adjustment and clipping layers, specifically. Extremely useful little features). I’ll probably spend some time over my vacation poking away at it and seeing what I can do.

International Foods Week

Jason — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:41:32 +0000

Man, it’s the second half of november and I’ve only made 3 posts here this month. Well, 4 counting this one. I’m slacking off :-/

Well, really I’m having trouble coming up with stuff to write about as my daily activities have been quite mundane for a while.

As it turns out this week’s food choices have been quite global. We started out we some good ol’ american hamburger helper and then we had Indian last night. Tonight we’re having greek (gyros). Skipping over to saturday we’re having salsa chicken tacos and sunday I’m cooking up some chicken riggies. Those last two choices are only…sorta international, but they still count I think! I’m looking forward to cooking up the riggies as my first attempt revealed some things that need modification, so hopefully I can refine it properly this time around.

Lets see, random news time…work has been pretty rocky the past couple days. Lots of stuff going wrong and I’m finding I’m having increasingly little patience for it. Probably shouldn’t go into that too much, but it’s been pretty un-good recently. And to top it all off, we’re getting new health insurance plans for next year that suck worse than the ones we have now. Increased co-pays (even some co-pays that didn’t exist before, like a $40 X-ray co-pay), the deductible doubled, and the ER visit copay went up from like $50 to $150. All of which the benefits e-mail touted as “features” of the plan. Seems like they were trying to sugar coat it.

I just hope I never have to go to the emergency room.

In relaxation news, I’ve played a couple of games of battletech to ease back into it. I’m playing against myself (which I know is lame), but I dunno if I’ll really be able to do anything different as, like I mentioned, nobody around here really plays at all. It’s just something nice and different that I can do for an hour or so. I’m really more interested in the fiction of the universe at this point than the actual playing.

More Meetings Than You Can Shake A Stick At

Jason — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:52:56 +0000

This week is turning into an ordeal.

Normally at work I don’t get too pulled into meetings. I can go about my business without wasting too much time. Except this week I have 3 meetings to deal with. One happened today already and tomorrow I have 2 meetings. One a training session on the new thingy I’ve been working on and the second a status update meeting on the same thingy.

What made this even more of an ordeal was the fact that the training session that I thought I was just sitting in on…as it turns out I’m actually doing the presenting for that. Yeah. Fun. Wish somebody would have told me before now about that little hiccup…

So yeah, there’s a gigantic roadblock between me and the weekend which is unfortunate because this weekend I’ll be traveling out to Philadelphia to see Porcupine Tree and King’s X in concert. Been looking forward to that. Well, actually mostly looking forward to getting out of town for a weekend. The concert is just a bonus at this point. The venue kinda sucks so I’m not expecting being able to see anything or for it to have great sound quality. I just want to go and hang out with my friends and have a good time.

Long Week…

Jason — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:25:04 +0000

Man, I’m glad it’s the weekend. This week at work was really hectic. We’re extremely busy right now with stuff…we could use a couple extra employees but that’s not going to happen due to the money crunch we’re under. And that was before they cut our hours. Now it’s even worse. I have a bunch of projects going on at once that are taking up all my time and then they add some other stuff on top of it… Sigh. It’s just frustrating.

Makes me kinda wish that I could just stop and do the school thing full time, but that doesn’t work for me financially either. I’m more interested in doing that than anything at work right now. Ah well. Just need to keep on plugging.

At least my work has gotten recognition by the president of the company. He apparently really likes what I’ve been doing on my web billing project. So that’s a definite plus right there.

I’m going to take this weekend to relax and decompress a bit. I want to work on some design stuff this weekend too since it’s been a little while since I’ve touched some of these things I’m working on. My mom’s website particularly, as I started that a looong time ago and haven’t really gotten anywhere. Hopefully I can get moving on it somehow…

Hey, IT Department!

Jason — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:22:01 +0000

NOTE: This blog is moving to a new address. It will be located at http://www.nopurpose.org/blog/. I'm going to be stopping my posting on Vox in the near future.

Oh what I wouldn't give for a new laptop at work. This thing that I'm running now is dog slow. I mean, we're talking I change a file on one of the programs I'm writing, hit save and then I can go run some laps around the building and come back…and then maybe it'll be done.

It was nice back when I first got it, but now it's showing it's age and it's become a definite drain on my productivity here. I can't even start any programs for 15-20 minutes after I start it up.

But money is tight these days around the company, so I doubt they'll authorize a new laptop purchase for me. This thing will have to die first.

…

Hrrrrm….

Nah, I wouldn't do that.

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Hey, IT Department!

Jason — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:16:49 +0000

Oh what I wouldn’t give for a new laptop at work. This thing that I’m running now is dog slow. I mean, we’re talking I change a file on one of the programs I’m writing, hit save and then I can go run some laps around the building and come back…and then maybe it’ll be done.

It was nice back when I first got it, but now it’s showing it’s age and it’s become a definite drain on my productivity here. I can’t even start any programs for 15-20 minutes after I start it up.

But money is tight these days around the company, so I doubt they’ll authorize a new laptop purchase for me. This thing will have to die first.

…

Hrrrrm….

Nah, I wouldn’t do that.

Phew!

Jason — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:55:43 +0000

I just finished a majority of the new development on this large project that I've been doing for work. Just in time for my 4 day vacation. Woohoo!

I've been pushing up against this deadline (after sorta missing the first one. Oops) all week and I didn't know if I was going to be able to make it. But I spent pretty much all last night working on finishing up one section of the project at home and all day today getting the rest done…and it's done. Major stress level decrease.

The stress levels weren't helped at all though by the fact that the host of my personal website nopurpose.org was hacked Wednesday evening. This wouldn't be a big deal, since I don't really use the website for anything critical, except that I DO use the e-mail as my main account. So I've been without reliable e-mail for the past couple days.

I eventually decided I was going to jump ship to a different (more reliable) host that I've been using for several years already. And that I was going to move my domain's e-mail over to Google Apps. So now my main e-mail address is powered by Gmail pretty much. It's working pretty well so far. I've had it set up for 4-5 hours. It's pretty neat having gmail be your webmail interface.

Which clears the deck for a relaxing little vacation. My friends and I are going to go out to Whetstone Gulf state park on Monday. Whetstone is the source of a lot of childhood memories for me since my family went up there camping fairly often when I was younger. It's been a VERY long time since I've been there. But we're going up Monday to do some hiking and some grilling of steaks for dinner. Looking forward to that a lot. Also some other activities planned, but I've been looking forward to the trip to the park so much that the other stuff has slipped my mind…

I'll be sure to post some pictures from the trip up here later in the week.

EDIT: Oh, maintenance situation update. We got our oven fixed, thankfully. The leak situation still remains, but they're putting gutters up this weekend…so they say. I'll believe it when I see it, of course.

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Budgetary Figurings

Jason — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:04:09 +0000

This week marks the first week where our reduced hours are in effect at work. I've elected to take Monday afternoons off. If there's one thing that I could do with less of, it's Monday afternoons at work. Although all things considered I'd rather be working than not.

I did some calculations, figurings and general budgetary voodoo and I've come to conclude that I should be ok with the reduced income. I'll need to curtail my entertainment spending quite a bit and try to watch my unnecessary food expenses (as well as try to keep dinner costs around the level of spending that we've been doing for the past several weeks). I'm probaly playing it safer than I have to but it's hard estimating expenses due to the move and not having a good idea of how the budget is going to totally shape up with that. And now I have less cash per month to play with too. I'd rather err on the side of caution until I'm really sure of the numbers.

So it's not quite as bad as I had feared but definitely not ideal My already limited play money supplies have been nearly eliminated. I also ended up curtailing my contributions to my 401k plan for the time being. I'm still young and I already couldn't afford to drop the kind of money that I really needed to put into it. So it's not like that'll make a huge impact in my retirement savings. And there's no company match, so there's no incentive to keep it going. I'll readjust it when my financial situation improves, one way or another.

This week is going to feel pretty long as we already have plans for Friday. Wassy's finishing up her current semester of school this week so we're going to have a little celebration to commemerate the ending of her very annoying Digital Illuistration course. So there's going to be a week ending party situation going down here. Should be very fun.

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