Month: December 2014

Dubious victory

Is there really a sense of accomplishment in clearing the “immediate needs” support list just so I have time tomorrow to sit through two classes on secure coding and write my annual self-evaluation?

Definitely unrelated: have I recently grumbled about how much I hate the make-work foo-fah that is the annual self-evaluation? In terms of my actual review and associated merit raise (assuming there are merit raises to be had), it has no weight. I honestly fill these damn things out hoping that I’m not too far above or below where my manager is going to rate me instead of how I actually feel. Because it would be weird to have a giant discrepancy, no?

Also, the goals we set at the beginning of the year (theoretically, but actually sometime near the beginning of the second quarter) always get updated right before the review process starts to match what we actually did during the year. So really the whole thing is a sham.

And stupid.

And an utter waste of my time.

Because when I waste time at work, I want it to be on my terms!

Another sign of kids needing to get off my lawn post-haste

The goa mix [1] is 20 years old. I was more ska/jazz/CMJ at the time but this mix was my gateway into the world of electronica. It was a seed that didn’t really sprout for another decade but that fact left me in a place where I could follow the trajectory backward and also launch fully into where various scenes were going.

Trance is, ultimately, okay for me. My preferences run more IDM/cliq-hop/whatever-the-hell box you want to use to contain Richard James. I also like more chill/ambient noise stuff. The goa mix is at the edge of where I want to be in terms of what I’d call a ‘clubby’ feel. It’s also beautifully flawed in a way that a derivative DJ would never allow. BPM is all over the place. Key changes are sometimes abrupt. Yet every transition feels organic and as a whole it stands up against anything put out today.

And if you want to hear it without the commentary (because, frankly, Mr. Oakenfold sounds a bit addled throughout) you can grab that here [2].

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01nkgbd
[2] https://soundcloud.com/pauloakenfold/paul-oakenfold-radio-1-1

Support site hell

  1. Go to Microsoft’s support page regarding VisualStudio 2013 Update 3
  2. Look for a link to download VisualStudio 2013 Update 3
  3. In lieu of finding said link, find a link “Download the latest Visual Studio 2013 update package now”
  4. Click that link
  5. Find yourself looking at the download page for VisualStudio 2013 Update 4
  6. Pray to the higher power of one’s choice that someone else managed to grab Update 3 and stash it somewhere
  7. Rejoice bemusedly when that proves to be the case
  8. Continue on with the rabbiting away in the Cube Farm unphased because this obviates crawling through Microsoft’s support site’s labyrinth of automated page generation hell with URLs that are impossible to game. This is the best possible outcome one can expect and is the harbinger of a good day.