Tag: work

Playing Hooky

Random Thoughts

Sometimes I just feels good and right to blow off responsibility and do something else. Today I decided that it just wasn’t really worth my time and effort to actually go to work. My boss and our main backend programmer are both on vacation, and my immediate responsibilities involve redesigning a page layout so that its “printer friendly”. So last night, in a burst of brilliance, I turned off my alarm and slept the sleep of the contented soul. I woke up and did my best to do nothing upwardly productive all day long. I played computer games, I browsed the web, I went out for lunch, I went to a bookstore and bought crappy books off the bargain table by authors whom by sheer virtue of their being published I respect but by the fact that they were only published once I figure from their work I can get a taste, perhaps, of how not to write.

Damn, I think when I bought those books I did something that might be considered productive. Crap. Now I’ll have to skip another day in a couple weeks and try again.

There are days when I love being a contract programmer, and confident in the knowledge that no amount of work they can throw at me will ever be more than I can deliver on time.

I Got a New Toy

Pictures

My New Toy… and I took a photo to show it off. I decided I needed an organizer, and a way to write stuff on the go, and a way to get around the firewall at work (bastards and their need to ban everything!)… so I went to Sprint and got myself an Audiovox 6600. Its a phone, and a PDA, and a camera, and its all kinds of neat.

About the only thing it doesn’t do is play MP3s… well, I think it can, but I’ve heard its not so good at them. It runs Windows Pocket XP, even includes a Terminal Services client should I feel the need to do some server maintenance on the go.

There’s a ton of free software out there for it, and I’m sifting through all of it… now I just need a PocketMMO and I’m set!

Approaching Perfection

Gaming

I play alot of Freecell at work. Basically, my job is interesting and hard when there is work to do, but there are days when there is no work to do. I take my time when playing Freecell. I try to think out my moves eight or ten moves out, making sure I’m not getting myself blocked up. As such, I have ridiculous winning streaks like forty or fifty wins before I take a loss. The game keeps track of your wins and losses, and tracks the percentage wins. Mathematically, it round up at the half. So when I had 72.5% wins, it displayed 73%.

So I got to thinking… given that I can’t clear my scores (actually, I could probably hack the registry and ‘fix’ it), how many wins will I need in order to achieve 99.5% … or visually, 100%.

This exercise quickly illustrates the ideas of diminishing returns, and approaching infinity. Each win carries less weight on the percentage than the last. So, when I was trying to claw myself over the 70% mark, a handful of wins could put me over the top, while one loss would drop me back a bit. As of Monday afternoon, I have 972 wins and 359 losses. Its just more than 73% true, which makes it a 73% rounded. If I never lose again, I have to win 70,469 more times in order to get 99.5% so that the screen will show me a 100% win ratio. If I manage a similar play rate to the last six months, I should be able to get that in… twenty-nine years.

Perfection is a work in progress.

3rd time’s a charm

Random Thoughts

Its a good thing I don’t write on Mondays, because if I did, yesterday would have been a venomous stream of epithets denegrating the upbringing of a portion of society and a slander of the dubious pedigree of their mothers.

For the third time in six months, I exited work with a skip in my step. Having completed a good solid day of work and embarking on my journey home, ahead of schedule and ahead of the traffic, I came upon my car in the parking lot, minus one window and a stereo. In the morning, I’d had visions of program code dancing in my head, and absentmindedly forgot to take the faceplate of my stereo with me. When I returned in the afternoon, I found my rear passenger door was missing a window, and my dashboard had been skillfully disassembled and my stereo deftly removed. I say ‘skillfully’ and ‘deftly’ because the thieves, as always, caused no damage to the dash or the wiring in removing the stereo. They just popped the dash, pulled the stereo and unhooked all the wires.

As with before, its largely an exercise in annoyance to me… my insurance has been in great standing for years. I haven’t had a speeding ticket in almost a decade, have had only one accident and that was eight years ago, I pay my premiums on time. The last two thefts caused no change in my insurance. This one won’t either. I have a zero deductable for glass damage, and the stereo is fully covered. As of today, just one day later, the glass is already fixed, and the check is in the mail for the stereo. By the end of the week, I’ll actually have a better stereo than the one they stole, for less money than I paid for the last one (and certainly less than what the check will cover). I just don’t get it though… is there really a market for stolen stereos? The one they took, you can buy new for about $100. So the thief will hock it for maybe $20 to a fence or pawn, who will turn around and sell it for… $50? I get $200, buy a new $100 stereo and pocket $100. Hell, if I could just get them to steal my stereo every week, I’d make $5200 a year in non-taxable income.

I could do a lot with $5200. But its still annoying, especially when you consider that I would actually prefer to take public transportation if I could get from here to work with transfer silliness and dealing with two systems that seem to want to refuse to work together. And annoyance leads to fantasy, and I dream of car alarms… no. I dream of theft deterant systems. I dream of spinning blades that cut perpatrators off at the knees, simultaneously cauterizing the wound, leaving them to run away on their stumps.

I’ll sleep pretty well for the next few weeks…

Collateral

Reviews

Tom Cruise as the bad guy. That was the big selling point of this movie. And I think he did a very good job of it.

The story is that Jamie Foxx plays a cab driver who picks up a passenger who turns out to be a hired assassin who forces Jamie to drive him around town while he does his work. Tom plays the assassin, of course. The movie is very beatifully shot, and everyone does a good job playing their parts… but the story did drag a time or two, mostly drawn out by the cinematography.

In the end though, it was a decent movie. Worth the watching.

Corporate Security

Random Thoughts

Its one of those things that on one hand I can understand, but on the other hand its really overstepping: Browsing the Internet from work and security. Now, I completely agree… block porn sites and other stuff that people should not be doing at work. But I’m a programmer, and there are a number of times that I come across the need to do something that I don’t know how to do. I check with my co-workers, and none of them know either… so I head to the internet. However, where I’m working now, they have a content review department. They log the urls of sites that everyone visits and they audit it for content. The more often you visit, the sooner the audit. Anything they deem “not good” they block. Many of the best programming sites on the net have ads to support paying for the site. The companies that pay the most for ads are those “scam-like” sites where their promise you “a FREE iPod*” if you punch the monkey. The review department bans any site with those ads. So, the more useful I find a website, the sooner it gets banned.

What?

I mean, I could understand if they reviewed the content, then banned it because its not work appropriate. But banning a site because of the people who buy ads on the site? Huh?

Whatever happened to monitoring people’s usage, then warning or firing them when they do something wrong? If someone wants to visit porn at work, you should let them, once, then fire them. But if they use the Internet in order to do their job better, why the hell are you trying to stop them? Why?

The AXE Effect

Random Thoughts

My fiancee did the grocery shopping this week, and I was in need of deodorant. Normally I just pick myself up a stick of Degree or something, whatever is on sale. But she picked up a stick of AXE. Now, I’d seen the commercials, and I warned her before I used it, but she said it was okay.

Well, the drive to work was fine, but walking from the parking lot to the office I was already fending off the women. I eventually had to break into a run and get inside. The food court area was tough, and I lost my jacket to the mob. And at the security desk is where it finally happened, she wouldn’t let me past until I allowed her to service me.

Zipping up my pants I quickly stepped into the nearest elevator. Damn, occupied. The other two gentlemen with us looked uncomfortable as the woman attacked me. Three more stops just from the elevator to my desk. That’s when the line started to form.

After a while I really needed to get some work done, so I started taking the women in twosomes and threesomes, eventually moving up to foursomes by mid-afternoon. Finally five o’clock rolled around and I stole down the fire stairs. Twenty-two floors just to avoid them.

I got lucky and made it to my car without incident, and once inside with the windows up and the air conditioning set on internal air, I was safe.

Monday’s going to be rough.

(None of this really happened. Turns out the AXE Effect is just smelling like deodorant.)

24

Reviews

Around Thanksgiving I happened to stumble on to a sale and some coupons that allowed me to pick up the first season of the TV show ’24’ on DVD for about $12. I missed the show when it was on… I mean, I tried to watch it, but I missed the first episode, then while trying to track down a friend who had it on tape I missed the second, at which point it became too much work, so I gave up. I gave it as a gift to my brother a couple years ago, but he still hasn’t opened it, and he has a “you can’t watch my stuff until I watch my stuff” policy. So, it took a while, but I finally started watching it…

Wow. I had heard good things about the show, but just… wow. I’m only about 9 hours in the 24 and every episode has been interesting and exciting. I am enraptured.

I’m really looking forward to the rest of the season, and hoping later seasons are just as good. I recommend the show to anyone who hasn’t seen it. Its worth it.

What happened to .plans?

Site News

Many moons ago, when technogeeks were first beginning to form within the webs of what would one day be called the Internet, people with shell accounts on company systems could manage a ‘.plan’ file. In it they would keep a list of projects they were working on, tasks for the day. And system admins could poll the .plan files to see what people were up to (when they weren’t looking at porn).

Later, as the technogeeks formed their own companies… gaming companies… some of them still maintained .plans. They would write about the work they were doing, graphics, game engines, world physics, pasta recipes… all the important things (like porn). This was when I started. As a fan of all the gaming sites, I read the .plans of the guys at id and the other game companies daily, and decided to start my own. First in IRC, then on a GeoCities site, then one of my own sites… through loadfix.com, squadleader.com and on to probablynot.com.

Somewhere along the way, retards started abusing the internet. They didn’t understand ‘.plan’ and because most of them read like journals they just called them weblogs. Then more retards came, and ‘weblog’ was just too long a word, so they called them blogs. And now, with the internet bursting at the seems with retards (and porn), blogging has become a national passtime… (why couldn’t they have chosen porn?)

I’ve given up on calling mine a ‘.plan’ because… well.. its not anymore. But I flat out refuse to call it a blog… weblog is as far as I will go. The line in the sand has been drawn. This is my weblog.

Enjoy.

The Night Before…

Random Thoughts

You know… usually this time of year I put up special Christmas logos and decorations on the site, but I’ve been so busy with work, family, and actually doing stuff for and of the season I just haven’t had time.

Its Christmas Eve, and I’m about to head over to my father’s house to spend a few hours with my family. Jodi and I will return home tonight, and spend some time together, then tomorrow she’ll work, I’ll clean house and run other errands, and then we’ll return to my father’s for Christmas Day.

Tonight, I hope that each and every person out there has someone… a husband, a wife, a friend, a lover, a father, a mother, a daughter or son… someone to share the night with… and to everyone, whether they have someone or not, Merry Christmas.