Hump day!
June 23, 2004
My goal of exercising all five mornings this week died this morning at 5:14 AM, exactly one minute before my alarm was set to go off. I decided that with multiple sore muscle groups (from different exercises) and a sore hip likely from jogging too much, I would reset my alarm for 6 AM and go back to sleep. Hey, if I’m going to sabotage my own efforts, I might as well get something useful out of it, like a bit of extra rest.
As I was driving home from work yesterday afternoon, I was reminded of one of the coolest things you can see while driving. I don’t know how good people are about it in other states, but in the Portland area when an ambulance or fire truck hit a road with the lights and siren on, man, cars scatter like roaches in a kitchen when the light goes on. People are always so good about it, and there’s nothing I like seeing more than whole lanes on highways squeezing every last inch of space so an emergency vehicle can go by at 60 MPH while they’ve been chugging along at 45 or 50 in heavy traffic. In my case yesterday, it was actually a fire engine that got on the highway at an exit where the stop lights were letting cars on in sequence, so it just went around and everyone moved over. Traffic was light up at that end of the highway, though, and since it didn’t get in the lane I was in I could keep going at full speed for the most part. I felt like I was riding its coattails, to be honest, but I can’t help it if the engine doesn’t want to go faster than 65 up a slight incline. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t right behind it, maybe a good 500-600 feet away, but since I’d passed most of the traffic it felt like just the two of us out here. What a neat thing to see.
I got a nice surprise today at work. Cards were handed out to all of the employees, and inside was a sort of thank-you card from the boss for a good first half of the year (even though I’ve only been here for a month and a half or so), a well-wish for the 4th of July and our three-day weekend, and a crisp $100 bill. Excellent. Combine that with my last paycheck from Martin and I have over half a paycheck to do with what I will. Sadly, though, I can’t think of anything really good to spend it on, either a big ticket blow-it-all-at-once thing, or a bunch of piddle-it-away-on-little-things items. There isn’t any computer hardware I want at the moment, there isn’t any software I want, I could always pick up a couple of additional ‘Farscape” DVDs to continue rounding out my collection–and I still need a few seasons of “Babylon 5″, but I just don’t feel like blowing it all on DVDs. I’ve thought about picking up either a used Xbox, Playstation 2, or Gamecube and a few games, but I’m not sure that I could put any of those to good use. I’m not entertaining as much like I was in college when it made sense to have multiplayer games, and I just can’t get into single player games on consoles much anymore. I’ve been spoiled on PC games, I suppose. Sure, there are games on each platform that I’d like to be able to play, but the question is, do I want to play them, or actually OWN them, too? The going rate tends to be around $125-$150 for a Nintendo Gamecube and a bunch of games, so that’s a possibility. The Gamecube would let me play the new Mario games, plus some excellent Star Wars titles, Starfox, Metroid, etc. But a PS2 would have backwards compatibility with the original Playstation, and I could finally return my sister’s PSX to her and keep my PSX games that I bought.
eBay, here I come. Show me your magic.
Yeah, yeah, or I could save it. I look at it this way, I could save it, but I’d also be not much better off than I was before since between the bonus and the last check it’s essentially “found” money. I don’t NEED it for anything like I do my normal paycheck money. Yes, I could be spending all my disposable income on beer or something else that I wouldn’t get much long-term use out of, but that’s not how I operate anymore. Even with computer stuff I’m much more conservative in my buying habits than I was say, six or seven years ago. I blew money left and right on computer stuff back then, and like with this money, I’m no better off now than I was beforehand, before I bought that stuff.
Of course, that was also in the time period in which I’d pay full price for a game I’d play once and never again. As I said last summer, I have no qualms about downloading a game off the Internet if I’m going to play it once. Hell, if someone pioneered a method to pay only a fraction of the cost for a game to play only once, I’d be into that. I just want the experience, and only a few games have real replay value to me. I must have blown more than $500 on games alone over the years that I either got no use out of or only a very small amount. I just look at it now as a shifting of finances to more important things.
Like beer and DVDs. Always back to the beer and movies…..
They’ve had me working on something here at work for the last day that’s right up my alley: hardware troubleshooting in older versions of Windows. It’s like a trip back in time for me. The six machines in my office (not including my main work PC) are all full of crap from the other QA people in the past, and I have this urge to just wipe them clean and reinstall Windows on each, setting them up so that I’m comfortable using them and they’re all up-to-date. ut six machines is a lot, and since my boss just left for 18 days today, I’ll have to wait around to get his permission before I do anything drastic. Speaking of getting his permission, I forgot to ask him before he left about my lighting idea for my office. Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I just moved in a few things while he’s gone….
I like Wednesdays. They’re not quite the beginning of the week, and you know that after sleeping you’ll be close to the end of the week. And the end of the week means a couple of days off. Not this weekend, but NEXT weekend, even though it falls on the weekend itself, is a three day weekend for me with a paid holiday. I like this company. I get a paid day off even when it’s not technically a holiday! Alas, we are open the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas, though, and I hear that’s our busiest season for calls. Well hey, I got told yesterday that I’m not supposed to take so many calls, so I’ve pretty much such been ignoring the phone while I work. It helps me get a lot more done, but I have a feeling that everyone else may be grumbling about it because if I’m not on the phone, it just means that someone else has to be. With our current system of two offices (one here, one in southern Oregon), it’s difficult to have the two techs there take the calls that come here without transferring them down there, but since the sales number that rings to down there rolls over to up here I would think that it would be possible to have the tech calls roll down there if no one picks them up here. Either that, or we need another full-time tech so I can keep working and if there are three or four calls coming in, we don’t pull EVERYONE off tasks.
Eh, probably not going to happen, though. The guy who they hired at the same time as me is still working as a full-time tech, and eventually he’s slated to become another QA person, I believe, but that’s not going to be for awhile. Two of the other techs are programmer trainees who eventually won’t be taking calls like the two full-time programmers we have now, so that leaves only one tech. We have to be hiring more techs at some point. And by doubling the QA staff and doubling the programmers, sounds like we’re expanding again. well, we’ll see.
That’s about all I have for now. Tune in later, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.
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