How the time does fly, eh? Seems like it was only about 6 weeks ago that I was posting something here about having a shaky job situation and here it is 6 weeks later and I’ve got a slightly less shaky job situation, although it still has a sever case of the jitters.
Enough about that for now. It’s still football season. My team, though having some shaky Saturdays of their own, are now 5-2 on the season – much better than most people thought they’d be by now. After the opening week warm-up against a fairly weak opponent, they travelled to take on Virginia Tech, a ranked BCS team (that means they’re better than us), and really gave them all that they could handle in a 24-7 loss. Really. It was 3-0 at halftime.
The following week, we flew to Colgate to take on the Raiders. Very pretty little town (Hamilton, NY), and the college reminded me of Middlebury. Also got to spend about an hour at the baseball hall of fame in nearby Cooperstown, which was interesting. Oh, yeah. We won that game. That was one that many had predicted we’d lose.
Entertained the University of Delaware in Greenville the following week and beat them in a sloppy game. Another one that had been a predicted loss. Next up was the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Another sloppy game, but another win.
Then came Elon, which hadn’t beaten us in 8 years. They demolished us, but we rebounded with a win over Western Carolina, and The Citadel is up next.
There you have it. Your football season in a nutshell. My best pictures of the year probably came from the Colgate game. It was beautifully overcast all day and I really couldn’t take a bad picture. Adding to that was the fact that Colgate plays on one of these “flubber” fields – fake grass over a bed of rubber pellets. The pellets on these fields tend to fly up when a shoe or a knee or a face gets rubbed across them, and it really adds some nice motion to the photos. Most of the other games were shot in very bright sunlight, which leads to massive overexposure. And lots of sweat.
The days are definitely getting cooler in Atlanta, however, and the nights are approaching those temperatures that happen for about 1 week out of the year and make sleeping a wonderful thing.
Anyway, on to the job situation. After being told that I shouldn’t reinvent the wheel, I was sort of in a dead zone for about a month. My boss couldn’t really tell me what to do, because he wasn’t sure how to go about it, and HIS boss didnt’ really know, either. I spent most days surfing the internet, channel scanning, and putting out the ocassional fire.
Then about a week ago, I was informed by my new boss in Kansas that I’d been traded to a new boss in Texas – the group that I’d initially contacted about doing work for my new boss in Kansas (everybody still with me?). I had a brief chat with my new Texas boss about what was expected and learned the following:
I need to create metrics reports from an Oracle database using a ColdFusion server located in Plano., TX.
No problem, right? Except that I didn’t have any real specs for the reports (still don’t, but I’ve got a meeting scheduled for tomorrow), I have *extremely* limited exposure to Oracle, I’ve never used (or seen) ColdFusion in my life, and I could not navigate the corporate network to get to the resources that I need in Texas. Oh, and the big boss (who is requesting the reports) wants to see some progress by the end of this month.
Great.
I have finally managed to get to the Texas servers, but it appears that I can only do so via a VPN connection (sort of like a souped-up dial-up connection) from my house. I have managed to attach the the ColdFusion servers and can see the existing documents on it using Dreamweaver software. I still don’t know how to write CF code, but I’ve been told that I can learn it. I have not been able to connect to the Oracle databases yet, but I’m getting closer.
The biggest problem with a VPN is that it’s very slow. I’ve been downloading the Oracle client for about three hours so far. Which is why I’ve got time to be typing all this drivel while I’m presumably working.
I am very VERY ready for a weekend off and have tentatively scheduled a trip to Standing Indian Mountain, NC, for the weekend of November 8th. It appears to be a beautiful place to hike along the NC/GA border in the Nantahala forest, and I’m looking forward to it.
Also recently joined Facebook.com – something that I’d pretty much sworn I’d never do. It’s a social networking site where you can see what old friends are doing. I joined it because I got a note out of the blue from the wife of a guy I knew in college, so I set myself up an account to see how he was doing. I then promptly forgot both my account name and password. This was on a Friday.
On the following Monday, my email was jammed with “Friend Requests” – people from Facebook who had seen my account and wanted to be able to converse with me. Turns out that half of the people I knew in high school and college – along with several members of my family – use facebook. There are also some decent discussion forums setup so folks can talk about, for example, camping and hiking. Or the Furman band in the 1980s. Or the Georgia Brass Band. It’s sort of interesting.
What else, what else….
We’ve almost completed the third season of the in-house Rusty Nail Dart League, and my team will not win for the second time in those three seasons (we did win the first one). Hopefully, we won’t come in last, either. That remains to be seen, as we battle for next-to-last next Monday. This league is interesting in that it’s the only one I’ve seen where players all come from (and go to) the same bar. No travelling, which got so ridiculous in the Atlanta leagues that I had to quit. And no strangers. We all know each other and have been playing against each other for years.
Julie is now looking at moving to Minnesota around next April, I think. Hopefully, she’ll stick around long enough to finish painting all of the rooms in the house. She did a WONDERFUL job on my second guest room (and I’m not just saying that because I know she reads this), and is now ripping the wallpaper out of my half-bath. Maybe I’ll help her on one of these rooms, but she does such a nice job by herself….
I had scrambled egg whites for breakfast this morning. I’m so healthy.
And I’m obviously out of things to write about. You’uns have a good day, now, ya hear?
TWD