Rants and Stories – Page 17

The Beating Path

Yesterday was a banner day on the employment front…

meh.

So I spent all afternoon cleaning up after the behavior of an ostensibly professional member of the staff who, for whatever reason, decided it would be a good day to pull a psychobilly freakout on one of the more valuable members of my crew. This person gets old. Real fast. And no one at this fine institution does anything about it. Whatever it is she’s been drinking, I want some of that because if I could go around unhinged all day at work I would. So much easier. How the hell does she get away with it?

So today will prove to be exciting. In at 0700 for desk hours. More desk hours from 1200 – 1800. Likely more desk hours from 2100 – 2400. That’s 10 hours at the desk + 4 hours for actual work today. The sucktitude of this job escalates daily. The commitment I have to finishing the redesign project before seeking greener pastures is inversely related in a 1:1 ratio. The Auntship has been circulating tempting offers in my direction. It’s only a matter of time before one breeches the barrier.

On the other side, Elz is still fighting the chest cold which produces frequent and painful-sounding coughing. Sleep is difficult to come by. We do enjoy the new TV though. I never really thought much of HDTV but the difference truly is amazing. Seriously. And I hate TV.

Well, there is contract work to churn out and then actual work to be seen to. It’s a partial rant but I’m engaging in self-censorship because this URL is intimately tied to my professional existence. I’d start a blog elsewhere but I already have problems keeping this one going…

Back to the Grind

So it looks like I took a goodly amount of time off, not only from work, but from blogging. I buried myself in holiday celebrational activities like eating and visiting with relatives and playing games and programming at 3pm in nothing but a bathrobe. The highlight of all this fun?

I put a ball and chain on layaway.

That’s right, I’ve become engaged to the lovely and oh-so-talented Elz. It’s looking like a long and entertaining engagement what with all the hurdles (legal and otherwise) that must be overcome but I wanted to make my intentions known to her and the rest of the world. She’s a wonderful lady and a delicate flower (not) who shares many of my interests and accommodates many of my idiosyncrasies with aplomb.

There’s really naught else to discuss. My other happy gift is a USB-enabled turntable. I’ve been ripping vinyl for some time and am considering putting some of the more esoteric stuff up on my home server for downloady goodness. Lots of jazz lately but I am hoping to stop doing piecework shortly and just start the A-Z rip of my 13 shelves of vinyl. This project will probably take years, but what’s a good project without long-term commitments?

Stormy and the Like

The ice wasn’t too horrible out here and the snow has been nice. Then again I didn’t clean off the driveway before heading off to work. Work that started at noon.

Feeling really mellow and listening to a lot of Brubeck today. It’s nice.

Last night was an interesting night on the desk. Was propositioned by some lady who looked like my mother’s peer to come to [bar’s name] on Friday so that I could meet her mid-thirties-ish, single friend. All well and good—who doesn’t like to be found attractive, right? I deftly parried the request by alluding to my present girlfriend, with whom I live. Perhaps it was too deft because the request turned into some kind of hard sell. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer all the while I’m trying to help her locate some obscure article. Thank FSM the reference librarian wandered back to the desk so I could pass her off. Seriously weird moment in the life of a geekular wall flower.

Told Elz about it and she asked if she needed to mark me every morning before I head off to work. I replied that I think that could be kind of fun.

heh.

Ready. Steady. Go?

When did they start spelling ‘Monday’ w-e-d-n-e-s-d-a-y?

Another day, another meeting. Another meeting, another [uncompensated] responsibility. Another [uncompensated] responsibility, another step closer to the door. You don’t get a web app developer *and* a babysitter for substantially less than $40K/year. I don’t care if it’s BFE Nebraska. Take away the intangible benefits like regular working hours and there’s just not a whole lot exciting about this job.

I really need to bring this site re-engineering on line so I have something to point to after the past year and a half. Perfect job opened at UCSM but I’ve got nothing publicly accessible that I can point to.

Meh-nday

So you get in to work after an okay if not amazing weekend and start rabbiting away with the shuffling of email and checking up on reports and the managing of log files and whatever else it is you do to start getting into the work groove. Then you get a phone call from your boss who wants to talk with you about what her peer has to say about working with your staff. I’ll give you a second to trace that out on the mental org chart…

One the one, you’ve got the most awesomest new hire in recent memory. On the two you’ve got a history of bad blood and seeming personal vendetta. Two staff members, one quasi-boss, two wildly divergent reviews. So what do you do?

Well, what can you do? You don’t hear anything about the one so you assume everything is hunky dory. You didn’t get all panty-wadded when the one didn’t show up for work because (a) the one called you to say the icy weather made travel from the one’s neighborhood unsafe and (b) no one else in their right friggin’ mind would be traveling to a library or otherwise unless they were under some sort of professional responsibility to do so. That the quasi-boss hadn’t had one of my staff on hand three times this semester might be somewhat revelatory given sufficient introspection. While the other two might brook some level of consternation, with every other institution in the area closed or running on an afternoon-only schedule, I feel this latest episode was completely justified. After all, upon learning of my staff’s impending non-arrival I made the attempt myself. Living on the edge of the edge of town means that I don’t get ice/gravel applied until well after the rest of the city is sufficiently cared for however. With half an inch of ice on the pavement I elected to not sally forth myself…

What really grinds my gears though is that this is then rolled into any number of other complaints that are never voiced to me but for which I am crucified nonetheless. I especially savor the “if we can’t keep one desk staffed before the renovation, what makes us think that we’ll be able to staff two desks?” Because, you know, if you don’t hire unqualified help you have to wait for the qualified ones to show up. But if you wait for the qualified help to show up you take flack for not staffing the desk. This, despite the fact that the desk was staffed whenever there wasn’t someone of my quasi-boss’s ilk around to staff the desk. Not to mention that these hours are before 8 am or after 9 pm. Students just queuing up around the block to take these wonderful hours…

Anyway, the rant is getting progressively more scattershot which is unsurprising given the way in which all this information was more or less dumped on me this morning. I’d love to just collect all the imagined slights over the past four months and dump them on my co-workers without fear of retribution given my position in the institution. Seriously, though, the crap isn’t worth it. The pay is suck ass. The only benefit to the position being the theoretical lack of product release deadlines and reasonable hours. Take one of those away and add in the political crap and I think I’ll go back to programming for cash.

So how was your Monday?

Reasonably lacking in fun

What passes for the mothership-in-law will be staying with us this evening. Here are some ways in which this promises to not be fun:

She self-diagnosed her sinus infection as a mini-stroke
Incessant demands for all and sundry to “feel my forehead. Isn’t it hot?”
Requests to “just hold my hand” made almost as frequently
Reportedly her attempt at a bath this afternoon lasted for approximately 120 seconds

This added to the fun of having to clean the house top to bottom, rearrange said house to accommodate a sit down meal for a baker’s dozen, and plan and shop for an elaborate meal in anticipation of hosting the first joint family holiday celebration. Elz recently recovered from a bout with pneumonia and is now nursing someone with a raging sinus infection and getting increasingly run down from it all. Thereby opening herself to further ailments and possible hospitalization.

I’ll save further editorializing for off-list conversations. I will say that I’ve spent nearly an hour on the phone with Elz here at work calming her down.

Why do people insist that holidays are fun?

Word Bites, #483 in a series

How to control the page numbering in a Word document

This could also be titled “how to finally put to rest a stupid, recurring problem that plagued you all morning because a patron was trying to conform to some byzantine thesis submission guidelines someone else in your work place drafted.”

Not mentioned in this article as extra bonus stupidity: If you start numbering in a section in the middle of the document, it will bork it’s way back into other sections that should not be numbered. I could be wrong about this though as the patron’s document was so filled with page and section breaks by the time I got there who knows what flipping rules were being applied.

Which gets me on the brink of yet another rant about Word and the academic community. Suffice it to say, there are other, more appropriately engineered and time-tested environments for someone who wants to publish a bound manuscript. The fact that you need to learn an additional markup language is apparently sufficient enough barrier to 99% of all academics—faculty and student—these days. The pain and suffering that comes with corrupt files, capricious layout quirks, and multi-layered kludging are apparently more abstract than LaTeX.

But, as I said, it is a common rant if you happen to work near me. No need to spill over into my blog and the wider universe. So I’ll stop here.

But, fercryinoutloud, Word can feel so hemorrhoidal sometimes.

Ubuntu Oddity

I’ve been using Ubuntu server edition for my end-of-lifecycle PC turned headless web/file server for the past year and change. For the most part I like it. What you lose in hardware-specific tuning in Gentoo you generally more than make up for in easy of install and use. I rather like Gentoo’s portage and have since come to appreciate the utility of apt-get. What I don’t like, however, is Unbuntu / Debian’s insistence on renaming popular modules in what I would assume is some misguided attempt at making the whole OS human readable.

For example, I spent an unreasonable amount of time yesterday hunting for PyXML, a bog-standard and widely used 3rd party Python module. It wasn’t until I finally decided to step outside the apt-get process and install myself from source that I found a reference indicating that PyXML is actually referred to as python-xml in Ubuntu.

In the grand scheme of things, it rates a meh. Still, there is always a small window of opportunity for programming projects on the weekend and the more time I have to spend configging my environment, the less time and energy I have for doing what it is I want. If you’re going to fudge with the package names, please include a thesaurus.

That is all.

A Dolphin Named Tired

When I was a much younger man, I went on a family vacation to Worlds of Fun. It was maybe the first or second time I’d been there and it was mostly as advertised. Then again, I was 15 going on 16 at the time—an age more or less squarely in their target demographic. The important thing, however, is that I was a skeeball aficionado. I parlayed a few dollars in tokens into a stuffed dolphin which, being a boy without a girl, I gave to my sister.

On the 4 hour car ride home I fell asleep resting my head on the dolphin which was perched on my shoulder. My sister fell asleep leaning again me (small car). And thus the dolphin was christened “Tired.”

After closing the desk down at midnight last night and returning to open this morning at 6:30 I am in need of some Tired therapy.

Watusi Redux

So I offered to help my pops throw together a poster that he is presenting at a conference in October. It’s his master’s thesis work and he’s noticeably nervous about the whole ordeal. I’ve put together an assfull of posters both for myself and for others at the previous jobby job so it’s not a huge deal. Bold yet neutral colors. Delineate segments without walling section off. No font smaller than 18pt (preferrably 24pt). Yadda yadda yadda.

And while I’m not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination, I have always had a curiosity about typography and read about it in my spare time. So no skin off my back. After a few iterations, I’ve got something I’m okay with and the pops is pleased it would seem. Hopefully it’ll give the guy some added confidence.

But my bone to pick is as follows—and there is always a bone to pick, no? No bones makes for a saggy blog. Anyway, so he works for an unmentioned federal agency that deals with cereal grains and the like. This is fine and good. But WTF is up with their technical requirements? Seriously. I had no idea—and again, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while, albeit in a one-off manner—that PowerPoint is the preferred poster file format. Seriously. Not Illustrator / Photoshop / whatever-the-heck Gimp uses / SVG / LaTeXT or even PDF. No. They require their posters be done in ppt.

They’re friggin’ scientists! They ought to know better. The file format isn’t designed for this kind of use. It generates big (not massive at least) files and is prone to corruption, freezes, crashing, raping your daughter. My work rendered as PPT == 14.7 MB. The same rendered in PDF == just over 900Kb.

Unbelievable. Which, when you get down to it, totally is believable. I hear about graduate students writing their thesis in Word. I’ve seen relational databases erected in Excel. I’ve seen web pages served as JPG or PDF. There is one project that I was forced into linking to the web site at work that was a set of HTML pages done as PPT. They were so excited because they could click text in one slide and it would flip to some other arbitrary slide in their presentation. Seriously.

I know, technology prima donna and all that. Yes. I am guilty. But, and I really hate to type this out…

what.the.fuck?

I don’t pull the boat with my Prius. I don’t use a spark plug as a standard blade screwdriver. I don’t mow the yard with a weed whacker. And I don’t mess around with Jim. There are tasks and there are tools that might get the task done as well as tools that are designed to complete that task. Use the designed tools and you will be a happier person.

That, and I won’t have to type this rant again.