World Series �05
October 27, 2005, 3:43 P.M.
SOX WIN! SOX WIN! SOX WIN! SOX WIN! SOX WIN!SOX WIN!
And old school, too�four straight. None of this dicking around to run it out to a full seven games.
With my time situation what it is lately, I have not been able to keep up with all the blogs I usually read. I had tried to manage this at first by no longer taking time to comment, in order to read more. That didn�t help enough. So I tried narrowing my list down to just a few voices I couldn�t live without. Well, the problem with that is the people I love to read the most seem to post the least coughcoughweetabixcoughmimicough. And I really miss the others more than I thought I would.So now I�m going to take another tack. I�m putting my bookmarks into sub-folders for each weekday, and cycling through my list that way. There will be (frequent) days, through the end of the year, when I have to miss a day�s folder. Or pick and choose blogs within a folder. Or posts within a blog.
But right now, these are the people who are keeping me alive.
They remind me that, despite all evidence to the contrary, I do not live in a breath-sucking vacuum, or a world peopled entirely by asshats. They give me perspective, and keep me aware that no one has a perfect life. And that there is occasional joy even in an imperfect life. Their writing nourishes me in a way that is immediate and satisfying.
I need them too desperately to cut any of them out of my life. And I care about them too much to give any of them a brush-off. I want to know what�s going on in their lives.
By Thursday, it is almost impossible to accomplish any thing at work, even if you really want to. Everyone is so burned out that all they want to do is chat and slack off and be generally unproductive�and be all social. So even if you want to keep your nose to the grindstone, they keep interrupting and bugging you. Or if you need them for something�you know, something work related? You either can�t find them, or can�t keep their attention. I�m feeling some relief today, in that I was finally able to finalize a project that I have had to spend far too much time and effort on. The baggage attached to the issue:
A) Urgency�the bug is currently costing us money.
B) Overpopulation. Too many people attached to this project, including two managers, neither of whom wanted to take responsibility for making a decision.
C) Incompetence. The person who was a dismal failure as my supervisor is now reprising the role in programming.
D) Confusion. Every single person affiliated with the project (all �too many� of them) had a different idea of how it was supposed to work. And no one bothered with a silly little thing like documentation, so there was no authoritative voice to say what the expectations were for the program performance.
E) Complexity. The process being fixed is extremely complex, requiring a multitude of factors to be �just so� in order to test it. Some of which could not be controlled or influenced by manipulation of data.
BUT�finally, I was able to produce enough examples to see that the fix was buggy, and now, at long last (and about four weeks later than I�d planned for)�I�m able to proclaim it viable. Whew.
Of course, the relief was blasted into dust by the news of a new project that will probably be the one that succeeds in killing me. My job sucks so bad some of most of all of the time.
Oh�and there�s no gym report today�I had to work through my lunch hour. Not that I get paid to�I just couldn�t get everything done otherwise. (Can you say �Uncompensated Overtime�?)
Reading: "If You Don't Buy This Book, We'll Kill This Dog!": Life, Laughs, Love, and Death at the National Lampoon by Matty Simmons. So far it�s been a little light on the laughs and the love�Listening: XM, On Broadway. Songs from Company, Tenderloin, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Beading: In between at the moment.
One Year Ago, I was beginning to dread the holidays.
At Random: click here
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