Tag: Work

That kind of day

So among the tabs open in my browser currently:

  1. Office Space on IMDB
  2. A Google image search for “whale tail women”
  3. A Google image search for “unnaturally polish -nail -finger -toe”

It’s been that sort of day. I don’t know what category it gets sorted into, mind, but whatever category that is, this day gets sorted into it.

  1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804
  2. https://www.google.com/search?q=whale+tail+women
  3. https://www.google.com/search?q=unnaturally+polish+-nail+-finger+-toe

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!

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.

Roosting at home

All those years I advocated for doing XML namespaces by the book. We’re going to want to do stuff with namespaces in the future. All those years no one else thought there was no way we’d ever want to do that and that namespaces introduce unnecessary complexity. All those years of being outvoted.

Today, bitches. Today is what I was trying to prevent. And who is going to clean this up?

Sometimes being right sucks.

That moment when

That moment when you’ve managed to crawl so far back up the rabbit hole of interrupts that you forgot what you were working on before the interruption just satisfied. I cannot remember if there is another question I’m supposed to be answering or task to complete or if I can go back to doing code reviews and then go back to what I said I’d be working on today.

Lesson learned: stop working LIFO and have a process that dumps input into a properly prioritized and annotated queue.