Back at the Shop

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I’m writing from the Tires Plus near the house today.  The Subaru has started to make ominous squealing noises when I turn left, and I’m wondering if I may be up for some brake work.  It actually began several weeks ago, and I was more than a little concerned last weekend when I was tooling down twisty mountain roads in NC and TN and wondering – not for the first time – what I could do if my brakes failed.  I think I’ve mentioned that the car doesn’t have a mechanical emergency brake.  It’s got a button that electronically turns on the parking brake, and it doesn’t work if the car is moving.

I really wonder who’d design something like that.

So I’m sitting here and letting them figure out what the problem might be.  Might also need a tire or two.  Or four.  Who knows?  At any rate, camping.  Brett and I drove up to Joyce Kilmer last Friday morning and spent the night in one of our favorite spots on the Santeetlah, giving me a chance finally to try out my new car camping setup.  It worked very well.  I’ve got a Napier Sportz Cove for the car, which is a great size for short trips (maybe longer ones if I combine it with my Noah’s Tarp).  With the Cove installed and two “don’t let the sun hit my kids” pantyhose over the rear windows, the car is essentially turned into a large screen room.  I also picked up a nice thick memory foam mattress for the back of the car.  Everything together worked great, and I slept like a dead man on Friday night.

Saturday, we’d planned to hike up to Bob Bald and spend the night there, but Brett wanted to check out Whiggs Bald first, so we drove up to it.  A terrible, horrible, very bad drive indeed, which lasted for a bit more than 6 miles – and had me really thinking about those brakes – but we finally pulled into a clearing near the bald (the end of the road), and it was incredible.  After a very short hike (maybe 200 yards), we found a fantastic place to set up tents and settled in.  360-degree views from the bald, creeks, a pond, and a very nice portion of the Benton McKay trail make this place a must-go-again destination for me.

Saturday was beautiful, weather-wise.  Bright sun (I got burned), but not too hot, and a non-stop breeze that developed into pretty strong winds by Saturday night.  Slept very well in the tent, though I have to admit that, once the sun went down, it got a bit chilly.  Brett, assisted by a healthy dose of Jamison’s, curled up in his sleeping bag on the ground and slept in the open all night.  Not sure how he didn’t freeze to death, but it probably helped that his new puppy, Luke, was in the bag with him.

I awoke fairly early on Sunday morning and took a nice walk on the BK trail.  Walked down the mountain for two miles or so, then turned around and went back to the campsite.  Got me thinking that I may be able to find a more car-accessible trailhead and get to the bald by hiking up from below on the BMT.

…..later…..

It is now Saturday, May 19th, and I’m just getting back to this post that I began at Tires Plus two weeks ago.  The problem with the car ended up with me needing new brakes, tie rod ends, and (I think) rotors.  Set me back about $850, which wasn’t at all thrilling.  I was no more thrilled when, a few days later, half of the outlets in my master bedroom – as well as that room’s ceiling fan – stopped working after I unplugged and then re-plugged my television.  Not a breaker situation, and I don’t mess with wires inside the walls, so I had my first experience with an electrician.  He was a nice kid, knew what he was doing, and ended up replacing all of the outlets and switches in my bedroom and bathroom (and did something so that they’re not tied to each other any more) and happily lightening me by another $750.

That tax refund was fun while it lasted.

The GBB played a concert with the Atlanta Wind Symphony, a group with which I once played, last Saturday – both groups did well, although the gig was in Kennesaw, so it was pretty much an all-day thing for me.  On Sunday (Mothers Day), Jenny and I went to a AAA baseball game here in Duluth with her Dad and one of her neighbors.  It was a nice day and the game was pretty good.  It also took most of my day, though.  I’d hoped to get a bit more work done around the house.  I need to finish clearing out my guest bedroom so that Dianne can use it in a couple of weeks, and I’m still emptying out my garage and music room.  Will be taking up those projects again this weekend, although we’ve gotten so much rain in the last week that I also need to mow the lawns again (if it doesn’t rain today).

I did finally reserve a hotel in Chattanooga for the week that I’ll be working up there (Memorial Day week).  Another $700, but at least I’ll get reimbursed for that.  It is months like this one that make me really miss the checks that I was getting from AT&T.  I have indeed learned to live on 50% of what I was making, but little surprises are no longer “little” when they happen.

And I guess that that’s all the news that’s fit to print for now.  Have a happy day.

The Taxman Leaveth

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Today’s featured image is one that was obviously taken quite a while ago.  The boys were still babies – I’d guess in the 4-months-old range – and Boo was still the biggest kitty in the house.  She is now dwarfed by them.

I was going to feature a panoramic shot that I took at Lake Huron last year, but it was just too large to be considered, so I’ll embed a smaller version of it here:

Now that that’s out of the way….what have I been doing with myself lately?  The answer to that is, basically, not a lot.  Settling into my life as an L1 lead at the X-Company is a bit challenging, having not had direct reports in over 10 years.  Last week, I completed three annual review with members of my team; somewhat awkward, considering that two of the three have been at the company longer than I have.  The toughest ones are still ahead.  I get to sit in judgement of two guys who basically trained me.  One of them can be confrontational at times.  Not looking forward to that, but it’s part of the gig.   I’ve also been doing a number of interviews every week – the L1 teams are going to be growing pretty dramatically, and we’ll probably end up hiring 20-30 new folks over the course of the year.  At least I’ve got a say in who the new people are, which is nice.

I’ve also been doing quite a bit more coding (which is what I really want to do anyway), putting together some scripts for my team.  I have to keep all of them on the down-low, as we’ve got a petty tyrant in an L3 role who doesn’t like for anybody to automate anything if they don’t report directly to him.  That being the case, I’m just very quietly writing, tweaking, and perfecting a few bullet-proof scripts for everyday tasks and letting a few of my folks use them until they become so engrained in the daily grind that it’ll be hell for the person who tries to take them away.  The new idea going around the L1 community is that the tyrant will say that my scripts are not allowed in our environment before magically releasing his OWN scripts a week later that do exactly the same thing.  Apparently, he’s done that in the past.  Should it happen, I will call him out on it.  Publically.

Tax season ends on the 17th, and everyone at the X-Company is looking forward to that.  With our growth and the merger and our infrastructure and development teams’ bad habit of rolling out changes without fully testing them, the last several months have been a long nightmare.  My main problem client (the one who sent at least two letters from their lawyer to complain) have formally announced that they will be leaving after the season (and the people praised the Lord), so I’m really looking forward to the 18th.  In the immediate aftermath of the season, the vast majority of CPA firms go on vacation for at least a few weeks, which means we’ll have the chance to clear out all of our old tickets, regroup, and get ready for the next season, which starts around August.

We’ll also be entering “project season,” which is when people like me go on the road and set up new clients.  The only project that I’ve volunteered for so far is one in Chattanooga (not THAT firm in Chattanooga…a different one) on the week of May 28th.  I didn’t realize when I signed up for it that that week includes Memorial Day, so I’m honestly not sure how that’s going to work.  I don’t know if I’ll have a day less to set things up or if I’ll get a comp day for working on the holiday or what.  In any case, I’ll be in Chatty for 4-5 days, away from the office and hopefully enjoying myself.

The GBB competed at the North American championships last weekend – and got thrashed.  It definitely didn’t help that we were scheduled as the second band to play in our section – the early bands generally get screwed by the judges, who are hyper-sensitive first thing in the morning and have to leave room for higher scores for later bands.  It also didn’t help that, frankly, we’re just not as good as we have been in the past.  We ended up coming in 12th out of 13 bands.  It was the first time since we started competing in around 2007 that we didn’t win or place 2nd – and we’re planning to move up to the highest section next year, so it was a bit of a wakeup call for the folks who were really pushing for that move.  Scores, should you be interested, are posted here.  Interestingly, the San Antonio Band, which won the section with a phenomenal score, was founded by two former members of the GBB who moved to SA several years ago.  They benefitted, I am told, from their late-in-the-day performance.  Since we played so early on Saturday, I hit the road almost immediately after our performance and didn’t hear any of the other bands.

So that was last weekend.  The week before that was devoted to rehearsals every night – preparation for the competition – and the weekend prior to that was Easter.  I had an Easter gig; that’s nice, but it pretty much spoiled any weekend plans I may have wanted to have.

So this weekend is really the first time in quite a while that I can relax a little bit.  Not much, mind you.  I need to mow the lawns and do some housekeeping, and I’m also in the middle of a long-term project of cleaning and organizing my garage.  So I’m going to do all of that stuff and get some sleep.  Next weekend, however, I’m headed to the woods.  Have already taken off next Friday in anticipation of this.  It will probably rain, of course, but just being able to kick back and sleep in the woods next to a stream will be fantastic.   And I might finally get to test out the car camping setup that I came up with late last year.

The Amazon Echo Dots that I mentioned in my last post have continued to be a source of fun for me.  I updated a number of the rooms in the house – and the garage – with Phillips Hue lights, and the Hue and the Amazon systems work really well together.  One cool thing about Hue is that it is aware of my phone location – so it will automatically turn off all of the lights in the house when I leave, and will turn on the garage and kitchen lights when I come home.  Since my garage door light gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, I’ve been coming home to a completely dark house.  It’s so much nicer to drive into a lit garage – and having the house light up for me is also pretty excellent.

That’s just the Hue system.  With Amazon/Alexa, I’ve also setup a number of routines – for example, the system turns on various lights in the morning and begins broadcasting NPR and the weather for me, then tells me what’s on my calendar for the day – and I’ve have had some fun playing “Jeopardy!” every night after work.  Also put in a couple of bluetooth speakers, and – thanks to my Amazon Prime account – I can tell the system to, for example, “Play Yorkshire Building Society Band,” and it’ll just kick off a random selection of that band playing throughout the house.

Being able to say, “Alexa, add toilet paper to my shopping list,” is pretty nice, since I have a terrible habit of forgetting what I need three seconds after I think of it.  Same with to-do items (“Alexa, put clean the garage on my to-do list”).  Definitely helpful for an old fart with a spastic memory.

The best things, however, are the various sleep sounds that I can have it play.  Not surprisingly, “Wind in the Trees” and “Icy Snowstorm” are my favorites, though I have over 50 white noises that I can tell it to play while I’m lying in bed (or, to be completely honest, when I’m not lying in bed); and I know – by checking my sleep patterns – that running those sounds at night is helping me sleep better, if not for longer.  My typical night used to consist of 2-3 hours of “restful” sleep and 4-5 of “light” sleep.  Those numbers have reversed since I started playing sleep sounds.  Also, if I concentrate, I can come close to believing that I’m in the woods when I play the “Wind in the Trees” sounds.

At any rate, I plan to add at least two more Phillips Hue lights (outside the front door) and am considering replacing the fluorescent tubes in my kitchen with some sort of recessed Phillips lights, and I’ll continue to experiment with gadgets and IFTT scenarios for the Dots.

So I guess I’ve kind of caught up with things, and I must now go tackle the lawn.  After that, I might do some shopping, then start in on housekeeping tasks – or maybe I’ll just go to a bar and play video golf.  It’s the weekend, dammit.

Finally.

 

That Was A Short Spring

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I mowed my lawns three days ago.  It was a beautiful sunny Sunday, with temperatures in the 70s and a wonderful little breeze keeping everything nice.  Monday, it rained.  Tuesday, it rained and began to get a bit chilly.  Today had no rain, but it’s back in the low 40s with 20+ MPH winds, and it’s freaking cold!  This winter is never going to end.

Before I continue, I must wish Dad and his bride a happy 7th (?) anniversary.  I wasn’t sure if this was the right day or not, but I had a picture from their wedding show up on my Facebook feed this morning and then saw another one posted by Dianne, so I guess it is!  Sorry, Dad.  You know I’m not really big on remember dates.

The GBB is plugging along, getting ready for the championships in a few weeks.  Hard to believe that we’re already up against it.  I’m not overly excited about the contest this year.  I don’t think we’re all that great, don’t particularly like the music, and don’t have the vacation time that I used to have.  Burning two days off to drive up to Fort Wayne and back doesn’t fill me with excitement, considering that I’ll probably want those two days back in the fall when I’ll – hopefully – take a decent break from work.  I’m planning on spending a week or 10 days in Canada in July, which is nice.  Truth be told, though, I’m really looking forward to what has become a tradition of heading to Michigan sometime in October.  Hoping I’ll have enough vacation time built up to spend a week or two there.

I broke down and bought two Amazon Echo Dots a couple of weeks ago.  They were on sale for $30 each, and I figured it’d be nice to be able to turn my lights on and off with my voice rather than diddling around with my phone while I lie in bed.  I was right.  It’s very nice.  It’s also nice to be able to ask “Alexa” to play a podcast (or a list of them), or to play any of a number of calming noises (ocean, mountain brook, wind in the trees, etc.) or to just roll a little hypnosis at me to help me sleep.  I’ve also gotten into the habit of asking the thing for weather updates or a morning news brief, or to play the occasional game of Jeopardy.

The Dots came on the heels of me finally getting around to hooking up the Ring spotlights that I got for Christmas from the X-Company.  This is also a fun li’l toy for me.  It’s a motion detector with spotlights and a camera over my garage, which alerts me with indoor chimes (also on my phone) whenever it detects anything large in my driveway.  The large thing, as it turns out, is usually me – either leaving for work or coming home from work – and the cats have quickly figured out that, when the chimes sound in the evening, they’re about to get some food.  Other than being woken up by cats, there isn’t much better in life than coming into my driveway and seeing a little feline face (or two) peeking through the front windows at me.  I’m impressed enough with the spotlight that I may actually spring for a Ring doorbell to go with it.  I’ve got to admit that it’s nice to be able to keep an eye on my place when I’m not here.  There is the sporadic annoyance – like during a very windy day a week or two ago when I kept getting alerts because trees were throwing moving shadows across the driveway.  And I’ve been startled a couple of times on rainy nights when the glare of headlights going past on the street set off the motion alert; but through tweaking and modifying the motion zones, I’ve got it down to basically only letting me know when there’s an actual person (or car) in my driveway.

Also good for knowing when packages are delivered.

I have not yet figured out how to network the Echo Dots with the Ring.  For instance, if motion is detected after dark, turn on the lights downstairs.  But I assume that I will eventually.  For now, I’m just exploring the new gadgets and having some fun.

Speaking of fun, I’ve taken advantage of my new position at work to start doing a little bit of coding on the side again.  Nothing major, and I’m pretty much restricting myself to powershell scripts, but at least I can spend an hour trying to automate things without having to worry about my ticket closing numbers dropping.  In the end, the scripts that I write will end up helping my team to take care of things in a few seconds that might take other teams a few minutes.  Or maybe I’ll share the scripts with other teams and show what a great guy I am.

Nah.  I want my team to shine.

By the look on Joshua’s little face right now, I can gather that it’s time for bed.  So I guess I’ve written enough for now.  A warm bed sounds pretty good.

Back to Creation

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Today’s featured image is one that I took in July, 2011, of a couple of cats on my deck.  I have no particular reason for using it.  I just did.

Much of yesterday and this morning was dedicated to website design, build-out, and modification. You’ve probably noticed differences in this’yere blog – hamburger menu to categories, droplist for archives, etc.  I’m currently trying to get a plug-in to work that will allow me to embed files directly from my OneDrive, but have so far not had much luck.  Email has been sent to the plug-in’s developer.

Yesterday, I made some huge strides on getting GoPaladins.com to look more like I want it to look.  It’s now running completely on a BootStrap base, which is something that I’d just started learning about when AT&T dropped the hammer, and I haven’t had the time to fool around with stuff like that since joining the X-Company, so putting the big site on that code is forcing me to dig into it a bit and figure things out – which I enjoy doing.  Still a lot to do on that site if it’s even going to approach the functionality of the old one that GoDaddy broke; but the original was years in the making.  I’m taking baby steps with the new one.

One said baby step was the purchase of a new monitor yesterday morning.  The television that I was using wasn’t getting the job done, and is slowly failing (colors get all wonky, which is not good when you’re designing sites and/or editing photos), so I splurged and bought a 34″ curved display at MicroCenter.  Truth be told, I was considering doing that anyway, in order to make it not only possible but actually preferable to work from home, which I think I’ll now start doing one day a week.  The monitor is wide enough for me to treat it like two monitors, and it’s got software that lets me break it up into different windows – so I can use half of it for a browser and split the other side into quarters for two additional programs (a ticketing window and a remote control window, for example) and not have to spend my time hunting for the stuff that I need.  It’s also at a good height, which is very nice.  I spent 6 hours in front of it yesterday and didn’t have a headache OR a backache.  Money well spent.

Have a rehearsal with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony this afternoon, which should be interesting.  Haven’t touched my tuba in probably 6 months, and we’re playing Schoenberg and some other weird stuff.  Atonal garbage for the most part, but I need to get my tuba chops in shape for an upcoming Easter gig.  The concert, by the way, is next week.

I felt terrible this morning because I woke up convinced that it was Monday and I’d forgotten to go to the one rehearsal that I told the director I would make.  Put me into kind of a funk as I fed the cats, did my potty business, and prepared to take a shower before finally realizing that it’s Sunday.  Once I figured that out, I went back to bed, much to the delight of all three cats.

I’m considering mowing the front lawn today.  Also need to do some laundry.  And maybe try making some cheesy beef macaroni stuff in a crock pot just to see if it’ll work.  Or I could do it the regular way.  Rehearsal goes from 6-8, so I doubt I’ll be eating afterwards.

Well….that ought to do it for today.  Not much to put down here other than the fact that it was in the 30s this morning, which blew me away.  It has since gone up to nearly 70 in the sun, but still feels rather chilly.  I must be getting old.

A Day Away

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My buddy Brett and I decided last week that we had to get away from Atlanta, so he sent me a text saying, “How about the Chatooga?”   That was pretty much all of the planning.  I knew it wouldn’t give me a chance to try out my new car-camping setup, but I honestly thought we might go canoeing.  After a day or so, I figured out that he meant he wanted to go to Burrell’s Ford, near Walhalla, SC.

That was good enough.

I brought along my digital audio recorder, as I’ve done on a few other camping trips (with some half-assed plan about putting together a ridiculous podcast), and we had a great time recording ourselves getting rather cronked in five-minute segments. I also recorded some stuff on my phone. I’ve discovered that I tend to lapse into a somewhat idiotic southern drawl when I record myself on these camping trips – see for yourself (video will take a while to load):  Southern Camping Podcast

It was a quite short, but enjoyable trip.  I arrived about an hour before Brett at around 9:00 Saturday morning.  Took a hike down the river looking for (and finding) a nice spot to pitch a couple of tents, but when Brett got there I learned that he’d brought a cooler with him and didn’t want to walk very far.  So we set up pretty close to the parking lot in a site next to one that we’ve used many times (there was already a group in our “regular” spot).

Saturday afternoon and evening were absolutely gorgeous.  Sunny, warm, quiet.  The water in the river was pretty cold, but I had no intention of swimming in it.  I just used it to keep my beer cold.

Hit the sack fairly early and slept until nearly 7 Sunday morning, when I packed up in a drizzle (Brett had already left) and came home.

At some point, I’ll do some (heavy) editing of the audio that recorded and upload it.  I listened to it at home on Sunday morning and cackled to myself.

 

It’s Finally Saturday

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I percolated some coffee last night.  I’m not positive, but I think that was the first time I’ve ever done so when I wasn’t camping.  While I do love the speed and convenience of my little pod-based coffee machine, there’s something about percolating that I’ve always like; and something nudged me to brew a pot when I got home last night.  It was good.  It’s also good this morning.

Spent some quality time lying in bed with the cats this morning.  5:15 came incredibly early, so I got up to feed the cats (Ocean Whitefish today – Boo was not pleased), then went back to bed for a few hours.  I would dearly love to spend most of the day there – checked my sleep activity yesterday, and I haven’t gotten more than 7 hours in two weeks – but I’ve got a concert with the brass band at Kennesaw State this afternoon.  Next weekend is also booked with band stuff, all NABBA-related rehearsals.  Friday night, Saturday morning, all day Sunday.  I suppose I should be looking forward to that.  To some extent, I am; but I really just want a weekend with nothing planned.  Preferably a sunny one (it’s raining again today and is forecast to do the same tomorrow) so that I could head for the woods and try out the new car-camping setup that I put together several months ago and have yet to try.  I’ve got a new Napier rear-gate cover, similar to the tent that I’ve used for a few years, but without the tent.  It just slips over the back of the car, and provides a screen window and a very shallow awning.  Also picked up a couple of door window condoms – I think they’re supposed to be used to keep sun off of babies or something, but they also function as fast and sturdy door screens (to replace the netting & magnets that I’ve been using).  The only thing I’m still looking for, to have what I think will be the perfect car-camp setup, is a kid-sized memory-foam mattress.  The air mattress that I normally use is great, but I’d like to get something a little firmer and less prone to leaking.

Had a pretty decent day at work yesterday, although I learned in the late afternoon that the client who had previously sent a letter from their lawyer has now sent another.  They’re unhappy.  I get it.  They want to get out of their 5-year contract.  I get that, too.  I really sort of hope that we just let them go.  I’m tired of hearing their complaints, and I’m tired of them blaming me for stuff that I can’t control.  I’m told that I’m not mentioned by name in this second legal missive.  That’s a good thing, I guess.

Still thinking about retirement and how to go about it.  It’s dawning on me that I may have to postpone it for a bit – mainly because of the cats, although if I can put up a big enough shack, they should be fine.  Questions about pooping (mine, not the cats’) have me vexed for the moment.  I know I’m hiking & camping guy, but I really don’t want to just have a composting toilet as my primary john.  I’d be completely happy with a pit toilet in a separate shack, but if I do go to the place in SC that I’ve been thinking about, I don’t know if that would be allowed.  If it would be, I’d have to find out how much it would cost to put it up.  Understand that I don’t want just a hole in the ground with a wooden one-seater over it.  I’d want a cement vault, as you might find in some decent wilderness campgrounds.

I’ve also decided that I want a hot shower, which my friends who’ve retired early have so far forgone.  They’ve been bathing in a tub resembling a small horse trough and heating the water with a huge heating element.  Yeah.  No.  I want hot showers on demand.  Propane could do this, I guess.  Or a tank-less water heater.

It’s basically all coming down to “what am I allowed to do, and what will the start-up costs be?”  I’ll continue to work it out in my head and then start putting things on paper before deciding if and when I can actually take the plunge.  It’s always in the back of my mind.

Today’s featured image, by the way, is – I think – one that I took during a weekend in Waukegan a few years ago.  Amy and I spent a good part of an afternoon at a little coffee shop and took a shot of the wall.  Or maybe it’s a stock photo, but I don’t think so.  I can’t imagine why I would save it if it is.  Nah.  Pretty sure that I took it.

Since mentioning a few weeks ago that I intended to start walking in the mornings again, I have yet to actually do so.  I’m usually dog-tired in the mornings.  I guess that getting out of bed and walking for 45 minutes or so would help with that, but I just don’t have the energy or the desire to bundle up and go out into the (relative) cold.  Maybe next week.

Well, I must do something productive before getting ready for the gig.  Still working on the football site, and I have to figure out why the images from my migration blog aren’t showing up in my media library on this one.

Need to start taking back my guestroom, too.  It’s still full of boxes that got thrown into it when Mary moved in.  Really want to clean that room out and make it usable again. It’s a nice room.

 

Consolidation

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I think I mentioned a few days ago that GoDaddy had completely screwed up my website.  If I didn’t, well…they did.   And I, being the go-getter that I am, decided, basically, “To hell with them.”

To that end, I signed up with a new host, and you’re seeing the first tentative steps that I’m taking towards getting everything off of GoDaddy.  My new hosts have – wait for it – actual daily backup service.  They have integrated WordPress service.  They allow subdomains (and if you’re here, you’re on one of them).  And they seem to have pretty fast servers.  So I’m moving everything here.  My blogs.  My forums. My sandboxes.  Not only that, but I’m pulling in all of my OLD blogs, too.  How cool is that?  Remember the original “Stuff Nobody Reads”?  It’s here.  So’s “Frowzy Noise.”  And the ever-popular “Lives of Our Days.”  With the exception of a few very short startup attempts, everything I’ve ever written in blog format is now under this virtual roof.

I’m sure the historians will thank me, although I still have to bring over some photos that are still on the migration site.  If you peruse posts, you’ll see a lot without photos, even though I may reference photos in them.

Today’s featured photo, by the way, is an old picture that I found of Chamberlain.

I’m also moving the football forums here, though that’s going to take quite a bit more effort than this did.  I had them set up, briefly, but realized too late that I’d made a few stupid mistakes, so blew away what was there and I’m starting over.

Oh – I accepted that job today.  The Level 1 Lead for the X-Company.  It’s not a huge step up, but it’ll be an extra $4K a year.  That will be helpful for retirement.

 

Hockey night in Duluth

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Today’s featured image is – what a surprise! – my cats.  It’s not often that I can get all three of them in a photo together.

February has arrived.  As far as I’m concerned, that just means that the year is about 1/12th over, and I’m good with that.  Work has been a disaster since late December and the closer we get to the end of tax season, the happier I’ll be.  I’m actually updating this on this lovely Saturday morning while I’m also working at home.  I’ve got a huge client in Chattanooga & Memphis (surely you remember the story about setting THEM up) which has been having nothing but trouble since things started ramping up for the season several weeks ago.  As usual, someone made a major chance to their environment a few days ago.  Didn’t document it.  Apparently didn’t test it.  The result being that, since Thursday morning, a high percentage of the users at this particular client can’t get any work done.  So they’re losing tens of thousands of dollars daily, they’re yelling at me, and I’m saying, “Not much I can do to help you.”

Oddly enough, in the middle of all of this, I was indeed approached about taking a level 1 lead role, which will put me into more of an administrative/teaching capacity.  I interviewed for it – seemed to go okay.  Waiting for an offer letter to see what kind of salary bump we’re talking.  If nothing else, it will take me out of the first line of fire from clients like the one I mentioned – but it will also put me into the middle of problems with a lot more firms, as the L1s on my team will start sending their problem children to me.  I figure, “What the hell?”  If I don’t like it…well…I don’t like what I’m doing now, but I’ll be making more.

GoDaddy has once again managed to destroy a few years of my life.  They did something to my website early last week – said they were moving my source files and it would only take a day or two.  Most importantly, they swore that they weren’t moving the database.  After several days of not having database access, I called and asked them what the deal was.  They said they’d take care of it.  Yesterday, connectivity to the database was restored – only the database in question was missing about a year’s worth of data.  This includes not only messageboard posts, but also statistics, custom code, forum modifications, vital links….the site is pretty much dead in the water.  I put up a message last night to tell my users what’s going on and today I’ve been contemplating what to do next. Starting over is the logical step, as it would take – literally – a year or more to get things back to where they were last week.  I still have two years left on my contract with GoDaddy, but I’m honestly not thrilled about the chance of this happening again, so I’m looking at alternatives.

Should you be wondering, THIS site is also hosted on GoDaddy.  Don’t be suprised if it just disappears one day.  I’m trying to keep local backups of the database with this, at least.  Doing so with the football site was nearly impossible due to its size.

Jenny and I are slated to take in a minor league hockey game tonight.  Truth be told, I’d really rather sleep; but it should be fun.

Year 1

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No featured photo today.  Not because I don’t have any, but because I’m sitting in bed and typing on my old Surface Pro and screen space is limited.

Yesterday, I quietly passed a year of working at the X-Company.  I’d forgotten all about it until of the leads sent me a Skype wishing me a happy workaversary.  He was one of the ones who declared that I had a bad attitude 8 or 9 months ago, but now seems to like me a little bit.  Strange.  As for the rest of the day, I continued to try to dig out from under a pile of tickets.  More of that today.  I’ve finally started to get the feeling that I might be able to get back on top of things, though.  So there’s that.

It hasn’t been as cold for the last several days as it was for the weeks before that, but it has still been chilly enough for a jacket and the occasional shiver when I’m walking around our building.  Hate to say it, but I wish it’d get up into the 50s or 60s for a few days and let me thaw out.  The best part of my day at this point is the 5 minutes I spend in the shower under hot water.

The GBB had our first NABBA rehearsal last night and learned just how difficult the pieces we’re playing are.  Lots of notes.  For everyone.  Lots of accidentals and awkward fingerings and fast tempos.  We’ve got an all-day rehearsal (with sectionals) this Saturday.  Should be fun.  I have no idea, however, if we’ll be able to pull this stuff together.  It’s, as a friend of mine used to say, “Stupid hard.”

And that’s enough for now.  As I said, I’m sitting in bed.  And I’m tired.  And I think I’m going to sleep now.

The Big Game

Aside

It’s the night of The Big Game.  Starts in 11 minutes, I think.  I don’t have ESPN anymore, so if I do watch it, I’ll be doing so through the free portion of the ESPN app, which follows all of the action using only those overhead cameras that zoom up and down the field for the whole game.  No commentary at all.  Believe it or not, I prefer to watch the games that way, so it works out for me.

Should you not know, The Big Game is the championship game of the joke of a college football playoff known as “The College Football Playoffs.”  The actual college football playoffs, which has 24 teams and determines the actual Division I college football champion, ended last Saturday, with North Dakota State eking out a win over James Madison University.  I watched it.  It was a good game.  I might, as I said, watch a bit of the game tonight between Georgia and Alabama, but it’s not something about which I’m overly-excited.

I had a decent day at work today.  Knocked out a couple of problems that had been bothering me for the last week and continued to slice into my mountain of open tickets.  I was not helped by the fact that – yet again – one of the Level 2 people ran updates on numerous firms yesterday and didn’t bother to fully test said updates; so that, when we arrived at work this morning, there were already more than 25 of said firms who couldn’t use one of their most vital applications until we, the Level 1 team, manually patched all of their servers.

I don’t understand this trend – and it is a trend.  It happens all the time.  Somebody who has the job of updating applications does so, but doesn’t take the simple step of launching the applications after they’ve been updated.  I know that they don’t take this step because many applications will give a pretty obvious hint (i.e., they won’t launch) if you haven’t completed the update successfully.  Rule #1 for all application updates, going back to the dawn of the computer age: have a rollback plan.  The X-Company just doesn’t seem to grasp that concept; and, frankly, it really pisses me off.  It’s tough to guess just how many man-hours are lost – by us and by the clients – every time they do this, and they do it at least twice a month.

Enough about that.   Today’s featured photo is of my boy Joshua.  The tiny little runt of a Maine Coon who I chose – with no close second – out of a little of 11 when he was two days old.  He and his brother, Chamberlain, are coming up on (I think) their fourth birthday next month.  Both tilt the scales at around 15 pounds and, while both are incredibly sweet and loving, Joshua is still the daddy’s boy that he was on the day I brought them home.  The photo up there shows Josh lounging on my Kelti 20-degree sleeping bag on a Sunday morning a few weeks back.  He was there because…well….because I was there.  Joshua wants to be with me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  He wakes me up every morning, he follows me around the house until I leave, he sleeps on my pillow.  If I’m in a room, there’s a 95% chance that he’s in the same room.  At the moment, I’m at my desk and he’s on his little cat tree about three feet to my left.  A few minutes ago, I went downstairs to get a drink, and he followed me down.  When I came back up to my office after all of 5 seconds in the kitchen, he came back up with me.  There is no dog more loyal to his master than Joshua is to me.

He also plays fetch as well as any dog, and it is a constant source of amusement and, in a way, solace for me when I come home and find one of his favorite toys (he has three that he prefers far more than the 200 or so others in the cats’ toy box) at the top of the stairs or on my bed – evidence that he’s been entertaining himself while I’ve been away, by playing a game of solitaire fetch.  Every night before bed, he begs me to throw just a few tosses down the stairs.  He is a remarkable little animal.

So is Chamberlain, and Chamberlain will get his own write-up one of these days.

It has been outlandishly chilly in Atlanta for an extended time, and I’m almost ashamed to admit that.  I generally like to be a bit chilly.  I hate being hot.  I’ve got no problem with camping in the mountains in the winter or driving to the Upper Peninsula in October.  This month, though, has been different.  It’s just been cold. It reminds me of one of our last winters in Shoreham, when Dad commented to me something along the lines of, “It hasn’t gotten really cold – like 20 below – this winter, but this month-long stretch of 5-degree days really takes it out of you.”  Well…this month-long stretch of 30-degrees has really taken it out me, too.  To that end, I broke down last week and bought two pairs of flannel-lined pants from Duluth Trading company.

Naturally, they make me sweat.  But they’ll be good for winter camping.

Well, I must go watch a bit of this Big Game and fall asleep.  Joshua will be waking me up in just under 9 hours.