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Tom Parmenter used to sign off his 'Desperado' messages with Hide the Emacs gesture set everywhere...our fingers will find it. The Netscape form editor that I use to post to LJ implements just enough of the 'Emacs gesture set' to get me in trouble. Usually when I f*ck up, it's innocuous, but this time I was trying to insert a tab character, which I would do with ctrl-Q ctrl-I. Except that ctrl-Q is 'Quit' in Netscape.
So you missed a bunch of whining. Picture it, if you please: whine whine whine. United Airlines has eliminated their meal service, so I didn't get a free lunch on my business trip to California. I took the red-eye home, and arrived zombified. I've become one of the Mack trucks in the aikido dojo, and I got chewed out for being too much of a hard-ass in Vicka's freestyle demo. Whine whine.
And I hadn't even gotten to the point of talking about Super Tuesday, where Dean beat out Kuchinich and Sharpton, who are still nominally in the race, and Carol Mosely Braun tied with Lyndon Larouche with 3 votes each in our town.
But I came to talk about the draft. The draft that's blowing through our back yard. They haven't gotten to tearing down the house next door, but they've already done most of the tree clearing for the subdivision, starting at the far end. Photo-essay to follow.
In other exciting home news, we put in a looks-like-stone-concrete-block retaining wall along the road and the side of the driveway a little over a year ago. That's not the news. The news is that half of the wall along the road collapsed last night. It had been noticeably bowed out for a couple months, but I wasn't expecting this. Anyway, the contractor is responsive, responsible, and everything you might wish for - by the time I got home from work, he had cleaned up the rubble, and there were two pallets of blocks for the re-installation. Mind, he works from March-December; we had the wall put in at the end of December a year ago, and now it's just gone March, so he's not in the middle of a lot of other work. But he called us back at 8:15am, 20 minutes after we left voice mail.
OTOH, in the department of whining, I'm supposed to take our fine product to the Moonv6 interoperability test next week. Problem is that we're in the middle of a Chinese fire drill of upgrading our OS, our development tools, our network stack, and every other damn thing, all at the same time. I'm supposed to be taking a router configuration, but I can't get the routing code to build. The routing team is in Ottawa, the IPsec team is in Calgary, the bulk of the company is in California, and I'm not. The stench of doom is in the air. Leaving aside whether I can actually build our fine bug-free code by Monday AM, there's the matter that I know dick about routers, and we don't have a Cisco-like interface for configuring our fine routing code. 'Cause we don't sell routers, we sell software components. Happens that one of them is a routing stack, and another is a device management toolkit with web and CLI, but we don't actually integrate them as a router.
Eh. For the last year+, I've been working for a manager in Alameda (CA, that is). From Jan '03 to Jan '04, it was a man named Shankar Jayaraman, a man who I had never met. Never even seen a picture of him. I finally met him on this trip, now than I'm no longer working for him. He even took me out to lunch. And I have to say, he's not at all as a I pictured him from a year of phone conversations - he's short, with a mustache. But now I'm back to working for Jan Provan, who I had met before. But I'm going to be transferring back to working for a local manager, with a local group, at least as of June. Really, having the local cow-orkers that's more important than having the local manager. Jan has 17 direct reports, and 16 of them are in Alameda; I get no daily interaction with my group; I have no idea what they're working on, and I end up either frustrated or duplicating work, or both. I've been working on network stack for 14 years, but it's just not working for me any more.
So. This weekend, I'll start the tomato seeds, and/or clean house, and/or practice aikido, and/or go riding, and/or install my new handlebar, and/or whine about my job.
So you missed a bunch of whining. Picture it, if you please: whine whine whine. United Airlines has eliminated their meal service, so I didn't get a free lunch on my business trip to California. I took the red-eye home, and arrived zombified. I've become one of the Mack trucks in the aikido dojo, and I got chewed out for being too much of a hard-ass in Vicka's freestyle demo. Whine whine.
And I hadn't even gotten to the point of talking about Super Tuesday, where Dean beat out Kuchinich and Sharpton, who are still nominally in the race, and Carol Mosely Braun tied with Lyndon Larouche with 3 votes each in our town.
But I came to talk about the draft. The draft that's blowing through our back yard. They haven't gotten to tearing down the house next door, but they've already done most of the tree clearing for the subdivision, starting at the far end. Photo-essay to follow.
In other exciting home news, we put in a looks-like-stone-concrete-block retaining wall along the road and the side of the driveway a little over a year ago. That's not the news. The news is that half of the wall along the road collapsed last night. It had been noticeably bowed out for a couple months, but I wasn't expecting this. Anyway, the contractor is responsive, responsible, and everything you might wish for - by the time I got home from work, he had cleaned up the rubble, and there were two pallets of blocks for the re-installation. Mind, he works from March-December; we had the wall put in at the end of December a year ago, and now it's just gone March, so he's not in the middle of a lot of other work. But he called us back at 8:15am, 20 minutes after we left voice mail.
OTOH, in the department of whining, I'm supposed to take our fine product to the Moonv6 interoperability test next week. Problem is that we're in the middle of a Chinese fire drill of upgrading our OS, our development tools, our network stack, and every other damn thing, all at the same time. I'm supposed to be taking a router configuration, but I can't get the routing code to build. The routing team is in Ottawa, the IPsec team is in Calgary, the bulk of the company is in California, and I'm not. The stench of doom is in the air. Leaving aside whether I can actually build our fine bug-free code by Monday AM, there's the matter that I know dick about routers, and we don't have a Cisco-like interface for configuring our fine routing code. 'Cause we don't sell routers, we sell software components. Happens that one of them is a routing stack, and another is a device management toolkit with web and CLI, but we don't actually integrate them as a router.
Eh. For the last year+, I've been working for a manager in Alameda (CA, that is). From Jan '03 to Jan '04, it was a man named Shankar Jayaraman, a man who I had never met. Never even seen a picture of him. I finally met him on this trip, now than I'm no longer working for him. He even took me out to lunch. And I have to say, he's not at all as a I pictured him from a year of phone conversations - he's short, with a mustache. But now I'm back to working for Jan Provan, who I had met before. But I'm going to be transferring back to working for a local manager, with a local group, at least as of June. Really, having the local cow-orkers that's more important than having the local manager. Jan has 17 direct reports, and 16 of them are in Alameda; I get no daily interaction with my group; I have no idea what they're working on, and I end up either frustrated or duplicating work, or both. I've been working on network stack for 14 years, but it's just not working for me any more.
So. This weekend, I'll start the tomato seeds, and/or clean house, and/or practice aikido, and/or go riding, and/or install my new handlebar, and/or whine about my job.
