mobileCategory: work
04/04/08 05:24 - 43ºF - ID#43904
Frog Blast The Vent Core
I'm trying real, real, hard for the image of my infant son relying on me for food and shelter to get me past the image of the enormous, ridiculous brick wall that my predecessor's built into what I'm working on.
I have tried my damnedest to redirect these people I work for around this problem, and every attempt I make to take the loaded gun they're pointing at their foot out of their hands has led to one more loaded gun they manage to somehow pull out of their cavernous desks/other spaces.
No matter what workaround I try, it's just not good enough for them. Yeah, I could easily make something new that would solve their problems now and in the next 20 years, but that's making something new, and that's something that they don't want to do, even if during the timespan of me modifying something old I could have made at least three new things twice as better.
People, please, momentarily stop rearranging the f'ing deck chairs on the Titanic long enough to understand what the heck a tradeoff is. Yeah, things are far from perfect. Yes, I hate the way I to get around them as much as you do, if not more-so. What I'm working on has been so enormously damaged and limited for so long by the people who came before me that it should be expected that there's a whole freakin laundry list of stuff that is going to suck and that you're going to have to put up with.
In the tradeoff, you accept having to deal with one thing for the ability to acquire another; in the case of this business, it's putting up with lack of explicit detail they so crave yet don't understand themselves in order to get what they want working at all. In the case of me, it's putting up with this situation so I get money to support my family.
Maybe another job will come your way soon. Either way, I hope the best for you!
oh ho ho buddy I hear you on this one!!!! Sometimes you can't save people from their own stupidity. 
I hate that kind of situation. Here's to letting you rebuild.Permalink: Frog_Blast_The_Vent_Core.html
Words: 331
Location: Buffalo, NY
Category: life
03/14/08 05:30 - 47ºF - ID#43668
Opportunities
I need to remember that when I do this, it's often because I'm acting like a wuss and I'm concerned about what others might think of me, and also often because I lack the confidence to make full use of such an opportunity.
What I need to remember most of all is that when I don't take full advantage of an opportunity and water it down out of concern for others, the opportunity is utilized in a half-assed way, and the opportunity:
1. Either completely fizzles out with the net effect of the opportunity being nil and me not having another opportunity like it for a very long time.
2. The opportunity blowing up in my face and possibly in the face of the person to whom I was trying to show consideration, because half of an opportunity can be more unstable and explosive than a full one.
3. Both #1 and #2
4. #1, #2, and the people around me being dumbfounded as to why I made such a half-assed decision.
I guess that the best way to deal with my latest experience with this is to turn it into a learning experience. Yeah, it cost me something, but I'll learn to be smarter the next time around.
Permalink: Opportunities.html
Words: 226
Location: Buffalo, NY
Category: programming
03/09/08 08:18 - 22ºF - ID#43596
Longer Answer
I'm not a very well-paid programmer, as I make less than a buffalo elementary school teacher, and once the little one comes into the world, I might as well have my employer do a direct deposit to my landlord, daycare, univera, whatever infant daycare provider I manage to find, and the bank that does my car payments; after those get taken out, we're eating and buying baby clothes off of (e:inscrutable)'s paycheck, which is about half of mine. I'm not going to complain, because people in some other area of the world would kill for 1/100 of what I have, but the situation has me scared shitless.
I probably will end up getting an iPhone, because I can justify it with trying to earn extra money for my family by developing and selling iPhone apps by whatever mechanism Apple sets up. I'm also studying Google's Android phone development environment, so I can enter something into their contest, which has some pretty lucrative prizes. There's so much crap I have to cram into my head to make money on the side, but the more I can cram into my head better off things will be for us.
Screenshot of estrip on a simulated Google phone
Permalink: Longer_Answer.html
Words: 250
Location: Buffalo, NY
Category: job
03/07/08 02:19 - 32ºF - ID#43572
Dodged the bullet
I wanted to work for this one mobile content divider; they seemed cool, and I knew some people in the company who might put in a good word for me. I also really wanted this one social software engineer position at Apple. I got neither job, and ever since I came up here I always replayed in my mind the "what if they hired me" scenarios.
This week, I learned that the mobile company was laying off a lot of its staff and quitting the area I wanted to stay in.
I also read the blog by the guy who got the social software engineer position, and he says the position was pretty limiting. I guess the point of this post is that it's kinda weird to look back and see the smoking craters of decisions I might have made if my life had gone exactly way I wanted it to, and to feel I'm lucky that it didn't.
Permalink: Dodged_the_bullet.html
Words: 189
Location: Buffalo, NY
Category: baby, sick
02/24/08 02:55 - 17ºF - ID#43442
today
(e:inscrutable) and I went to the childbirth class at Children's Hospital. We did the whole breathing thing, the whole pillow thing, and the identify-various-baby-hygiene-ointments-and-potions thing. We ate at the Cafeteria, which wasn't awful but doesn't really deserve a Visco-style food porn pictorial.
Missed Bedouin Soundclash at Mohawk Place because the cold I've been having the last several weeks re-intensified and I had to stay in bed. I hate being sick; it always seems to happen when there's something that I really want to do that I can't do very often, like seeing my favorite band perform in Buffalo.
Permalink: today.html
Words: 103
Location: Buffalo, NY
Category: corporate nonsense
02/07/08 01:42 - 24ºF - ID#43231
I officially hate all Buffalo utilities
In fact, they pretty much kept on billing me until Dec. 14th. So between Nov. 1st and now (my last and hopefully final bill from the old place), I've been paying/owing those idiots $300 for the privilege of heating the old place I no longer live in. And they say they "have no record of a cut-off request".
I am so unbelievably pissed right now.
Why can't any utility company in Buffalo get anything right? And where is the copious amounts of money that we pay them going that they can't fix the most basic website/computer/customer service problems?
Permalink: I_officially_hate_all_Buffalo_utilities.html
Words: 124
Location: Buffalo, NY
Category: filler
01/30/08 04:10 - 20ºF - ID#43097
Observation
Like digital bubble wrap
Strangely addictive.
Permalink: Observation.html
Words: 9
Location: Buffalo, NY
Category: programming
01/29/08 11:13 - 44ºF - ID#43078
Work Success
This occasion calls for a beer. Too bad my throat's sore and I can't eat/drink anything.
Permalink: Work_Success.html
Words: 37
Location: Buffalo, NY
Category: funny
01/23/08 01:24 - 21ºF - ID#42999
Board Game
It makes me chuckle, especially since I've ended up literally playing the game backwards, moving from Raleigh, then seeing Lance diamond the first week I got here, to seeing the American side of Niagara Falls, and finally looking for someone cheap to live.
Permalink: Board_Game.html
Words: 56
Location: Buffalo, NY
Category: computers
01/09/08 12:48 - 41ºF - ID#42806
Macworld Hump Day Rant
I am a 40 hr/wk mac/Cocoa programmer and I've never been able to afford the time and money to go to either Macworld or, more importantly, WWDC (Apple's yearly Worldwide Developer Conference for mac programmers). My current employer certain won't pay for me to go to WWDC, because the previous programmers turned down the offer for the company to pay them to go to it (and then proceeded not to renew the company's Apple Developer Program), which pretty much shut the door for me when I came after them.
The only opportunity I ever had to get a free ticket for WWDC(which costs $1500+) was when I was in college working in my mac programming work-study job, and I had to pass that up because it was summer school and I couldn't take time away from the last class I needed to graduate.
In short, I think I hold the monopoly on (e:strip) of sucktastic experiences missing Apple conferences, unless I happen to share a duopoly in that industry with (e:zobar).
Why am I complaining? Because it's hump day, that's why. I'm allowed to gripe like a 3 yr/old and shake my fist at the world, as well as having delusions of grandeur like starting my own mac developers conference in Buffalo and starting a Buffalo chapter of CocoaHeads where I am the sole member, the president, and still find time to call for my own impeachment.
Time for positives now. I:
Am employed
Have a decent-paying, fairly challenging job
In fairly decent health
Am well/over-fed
Have people who love me
I am living a life that 95% of the world's population can only dream about
Will get to see my son when he pops out in 4 months
Okay, so there probably are more important things in my life than going to nerd conferences and I'm making way too big a deal about missing them.
Permalink: Macworld_Hump_Day_Rant.html
Words: 346
Location: Buffalo, NY
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