🏷️ work

Argh, I wish I could just take back the last five years of my life and replace my thankless deskjob with something more exciting and profitable. Its like there was/is this internet goldmine and I had a pick and some land staked and did nothing with it.

It all started when I was looking at and I read their about page

It really made me question why I did what I did when there were like 10 billion other possibilities if I just had some more people to work with. I guess I was just always averse to risk, but like they say you can never gain anything if you don't risk anything.

I am so bored with my job right now. I am having to re-write a bunch of existing code instead of working on anything new because a vendor product purchase changed the way we store employee position information.

Just about all of the other web apps depend on my directory service JSON RPC2 API so just about everything needs to be tested again.

Sometimes its fun to revisit old code and refactor but in this case, the code was very optimized and now I am just having to re-write and test a lot, in the end nothing will seem much different, just that my life will be sucked away a little more.

This probably won't make any sense but I will know what its about when I read it ten years later.

Imagine there is this self important, needy, gold digger who lives in your neighborhood. Not only is she loud and obnoxious, she also only speaks a foreign language with a irritating, sharp accent.

Then imagine all of a sudden, you find out she is possibly moving in with you and you may have to dedicate your life to her needs and wants. To make it worse she comes with this whole entourage of loud pimps and they are going to rip out the gardens you built and replace them with a asphalt pad and a vending machine which sells even more things that attract even more pimps.

Then imagine everyone around you saying, well if she lives with you, you no longer have the neighborhood restrictions on your property. You can rent the attic without a fire escape or even build a freaking waterslide out the front window. Would you hate her any less? What if it meant you had to give up english?

I saw @tinypliny added a new topic to the topic suggester. I would have been a botanist if everything went as planned.

I went to college for Botany originally. In high school biology was my focus. I was so into it, I wanted to be a scientist going all the way back to my first microscope kit. I got a 5 on my AP bio exam. I did my internship at the Botanical Gardens and then the Botany department at UB. They were doing this interesting study trying to figure out what chemicals in smoke get some native dessert cotton plan to bloom. Apparently, it only bloomed after fire.

If I had really had my way I would have gone to Davis in CA for viticulture. Unfortunately, I was not able to afford it. Around the same time my uncle had a heart attack and we went down to SC. While there I applied to Winthrop and get a full scholarship.

So Winthrop didn't have a botany program so I ended up in general Biology which included zoology and dissection. This was a big issue for me as I was vegan at the time. I ended up finding a teacher who was botanist/anthropologist and got involved in her project of collecting editable plants from former slave housing areas on plantations. The idea was that their rations list only included corn mash and bacon which is not enough to survive so they wanted to determine what else they were eating. We found lots of editable plants near their former dwellings and I sketched them out and pressed them. I really enjoyed that.

At the same time I continued taking German. The German teacher I had was an exchange teacher from Flensburg, Germany. She told me the school there had a botany program and was looking for exchange students. So I applied and got in. I ever got a stipend to live there. It was perhaps the greatest year of my life. While there, I studied Naturheilkuende (Natural Healing) which was all about humans using herbs for food and medicine. I love it but I really liked speaking german too. The classes with the teacher there were the most interesting I have ever taken.

Unfortunately, when I got back to SC, they had canceled their German program. My friend Amy who studied with me at Winthrop went to school at Northern Arizona University. So I took some time off working lame temp jobs in Buffalo (that was the worst time of my life.) Then I headed of to AZ for school where I also met @terry. I met up with a german professor who was very interested in computers and language acquisition software, got a job in his lab and started computer programming. I mean I had been programming my whole life but never for any sort of purpose and we all know where that lead. At this point I had so many German credits. Most of my botany credits would not count toward an american biology degree but they did end up counting as german classes.

I decided it was time to end college and went for a degree in German. I applied for the NAU exchange program and once again I was over in Germany, this time with @terry in Jena, Thuergingen for a year - another great time.

I went back to taking more Botany classes and a few local history/language classes. At that point I was probably not so good at botany in english but I was pretty good at it in German, lol. The one thing I regret is that the Botany professor I interned for at UB, where the whole interest started, was in Jena at one point - but I never met up with him. I wonder if that could have changed my direction.

After that I had no real way to apply german+botany to anything so I went all computers and went grad school for Media Studies which lead the the next 10 years of non-stop programming and my fairly boring life now that involves little to no nature. In the end my school loans for grad school were so expensive, I almost wish I had just taken out the crazy loans for undergraduate in viticulture at Davis.

I have to burn up my remaining vacation time before it expires April 1. I am not actually going anywhere because I can't afford to, plus @hodown and @lilho are coming to town and it is @matthew and @KeithT's birthday.

So day one, I ended up working from 12-5PM. Great.

It started with an emergency phone call about a system that was not working. I didn't change anything so I really didn't expect it was my system. It wasn't, then it was just one thing after another.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be better.

So we bought a new car, fixed the imac by replacing the hard drive, got a replacement part for the furnace and today the oven and television repair guys are coming. What is next?

-- Well, the oven repair guy just came. Of course, when he got here the oven is no longer locking itself and and making the F43 locked door shriek. He is ordering us a new controller and lock that should come in 10 days.

The television guy is yet to come. Eventually, this will all be done. I can't wait, then again I seriously worked till like 4am. Luckily, I enjoyed what I was doing to some degree.

This morning National Grid called because the tenants downstairs at Nonna's never transferred the electricity over to their name and they want me to let them in to shut down the power today - friday.

How can the tenants be so dumb to let this happen. They will have no heat. Tony told me they have known about this for months. He also said National Grid threatened to turn it off at the pole which I can't understand. Wouldn't that shut off electricity to the whole house?

Tonight at midnight is my birthday and I still have no plans/ideas. There was honestly nothing I wanted or wanted to do. I hope 34 doesn't suck.

I was doing some research for a court case I am an expert computer witness for. Part of that research involved searching for pharmaceutical advertisements on blogs within a specific domain. Anyhow, after searching viagra and other pharmaceuticals in like 216 million different ways I realized I was still logged into my work VPN on my computer at home. If anyone reviews those records they must think I have a serious need for viagra, lol.

Anyways, the court case in is two hours. The guy is is totally innocent based on my analysis of the records. Lets see how the justice system works it out. I am so curious.

The crazy part is that my work VPN did not block it at all but after a little bit of searching, google stopped working and made my confirm I was actually conducting the searches as they were not usual for my computer. I can't decide if that is awesome or scary. I mean normal in compared to what?

It is getting to the point that I work as much on the weekend as during the week. This week I worked ~60 hours. The few minutes I am not working I don't get to spend having fun because I am too exhausted and/or nervous I will need to handle some work emergency.

Its like being a doctor on call with no other doctors around. I handle all of my own issues and then everyone comes to me for their own. I need an assistant so bad. I asked for one. Let's hope there is money for it in the budget in April. Honestly, if I don't get one - I give myself two more years and I am finding another job or having a heart attack.

A picture is worth a thousand words. This is how I feel.

At work I designed and programmed the new intranet over the last year. Instead of jamming a color scheme down people's throats I decided to let people choose there own color and then created a formula to scheme from there.

People seem to like it because out of the ~1,500 people that use a computer each day, almost 1,000 chose a color.

You would be surprised at how many people pick hot pink/peach and bright oranges. There are even a few hot sea foam greens. To be fair there are many more woman, but even some guys have pinks and purples.

Its funny because the corporate push/marketing designers would be for corporate blues and boring greys but clearly, the people voting with colors picked much brighter hues.

This fire orange, I copied from @tinypliny who had it for a while.


The saturated areas are the parts you kind of ignore, like you links to most used content, etc. The white space is then focused on things like the search and content areas.

You can pick pastels too but I really like the bright colors.


Each one of those dots on the quilt represent a color swatch that people chose. The color scheme is from one of the users.


Today the videographer told me that my work is ugly because I am not a designer. Ugly is so subjective. The ironic part is I actually have an MFA in computer media studies. I wonder if he does?

Last year the the toys were just on the dock. But this year they're locked behind the cage. I wonder if that means people were stealing.