Life

[Kolzig]

Interesting weekend.

First of all I got an eye infection on my right eye on thursday, so friday morning was mostly spent at the company nurse and doctor appointments. They confirmed it was eye infection as my eye was completely red and had a lot of blood veins appearing over the white areas.

So they prescribed me some special eye drops for a week and also some weird lotion to put during nights inside the lower eyelid, creepy.

At least I got a sick leave day out of all that, it was impossible for me to look at bright lights or at computer screens during friday.

The eye is feeling better, no idea what caused it and the good doctor didn't investigate it further, nothing new there. It might the flu I'm having now and if I've by accident touched the eye with my fingers for example when those have been not clean.

Also it could be because of my contact lenses, which have never caused anything like this in the past 15 years that I've had contacts.

Saturday was fun, I went early in the morning to a local computer store to get rid of my Ati HD5770 as I've grown very pissed about it as it's causing too many problems lately relating to OpenGL. So the guy there offered me a super deal to change the Ati to Geforce GTX560Ti overclocked card. Mind you, this is the only place in my town that still accepts old junk in exchange to new junk.

The day continued with more success, my brother called and said he had found a car for me, I have been searching for one for over a year. I went to check that and a few hours later I have an awesome Toyota Corolla, just the kind of car I was hoping to find over a year ago!

For many it might not be big thing, but all my previous cars were from the 80's, so it's quite a mind exploding change to have a car that is only a few years old now.

Yay for productive weekends!

[Roderick]

Good stuff (except for the eye infection)!

[ThunderPeel2001]

I spent the weekend in a Los Angeles hotel suite trying to improve a sitcom script with four strangers. It was an awesome weekend! And then I met Jane Espenson... (head explodes)

Edited November 15, 2011 by ThunderPeel2001

[Roderick]

Running into Jane Espenson is not the most interesting part of that message. What were you doing writing a sitcom in a hotel with four strangers?

Also, was there crude pornography drawn on the wall and ketchup and mustard stains that had dried into a crust the next morning when you woke up with a dinosaur tail strapped to your body?

[subbes]

o_O

Bah. It's depressing when your chum's fans surpass your own accomplishments.

Edited November 16, 2011 by subbes

[ThunderPeel2001]

The simple answer is that I attended this

http://sitcomroom.com/

[subbes]

oh wow

wait, $1,500? Was it totally worth it? I mean, Ken Levine, whee! but that's quite a chunk of change.

(IGNORES FACT THAT HER RECENT TRIP TO VISIT HER PARENTS AND CHUMS COST $1,250.)

[ThunderPeel2001]

Yes, it was quite a lot of money, but I happened to have it and decided to buy myself a present A once in a lifetime kind of a deal. Very glad I did! Exhausting, though.

[Roderick]

Wow, that's an amazing program. I'm curious what your sitcom script turned out to be. I wrote a half hour screenplay for a series myself a few months ago that got some very positive coverage (though that is next to useless in Hollywood of course). I'd love to read your work.

[ThunderPeel2001]

That's cool, Rodi, I'd like to see your stuff, too. What we worked on is not really "mine" as it was room written. There's plenty of things I dislike about what we produced. Also, I can't share the script because it would reveal secrets about the weekend.

It was a great experience, though.

[elmuerte]

I'm getting more and more agitated and frustrated about a project going on at work. I've been working my ass of on that project for the last 3 months. I created a bunch of things that were sold but didn't exist at the time. I estimated I needed about 3 weeks to get some part of the proof of concept properly working for testing, but the other party started to call the bluff so I had 2 weeks to wrap it up for testing. I'd figure I would have time to do that stuff more properly in the weeks thereafter. Sadly, the testing part didn't went flawless, so it took me quite some time to get things rolling properly. Then there was the other thing I didn't know about which also needed to be build. Glancing over the specs I figured I could whip something up in a week or two. Which would be sort of on time for the testing of that part which was a little over a week away. Anyway, so I managed to cover the bluffs that were made. After that there was a bunch of stress on delivering some design documents on the mapping of messages from X to Y. Designs which eventually were more or less ignored or not checked by the other parties, and also wrong on various levels. After handling my support duties for a week and contributing some more on those designs, I took a vacation for a week.

Only 2 days after I returned from holiday there was the first panic meeting. Apparently were not going to meet the deadlines (according to the other party). Which was a bit odd to me considering we would have 4 weeks of development available. But as it turned out, one party wanted to do some testing before we would start the complete technical testing. And for some reason we agreed to that, sort of. The schedules our project management had didn't align up for the project management from the other teams. So we had to scramble and get things done in 3 weeks. Of course, testing the communication of different systems also means that configuration of those systems should be ok, and some custom work should be operational. Those things were scheduled to be finished a few weeks later. Another weird thing.

So, eventually we managed to get a lot of stuff done, and full "technical" testing could be done this week.

However, as it appeared, quite a bunch of things on our side with one party (which was supposed to be ok according to the testing last weeks) wasn't really done after all. So some people were sleeping and slacking.

But not a big problem, we would have 5 days for technical testing and rework of the various elements. Right? Wrong!

That other party, that wanted the communication between us and them tested before this week, decided that their test environment would be offline for maintenance this Thursday. So testing would need to be finished by the end of today. Cutting our time window with 40%. And of course, our project management agreed.

So halfway the afternoon the asked me to stay in late (again, because Tuesday I also put in an extra hour) till maybe 20:00. I said no, because my part of the work is pretty much done. Up to 17:00 I didn't receive any remarks on the stuff I was responsible for. So, everything should be ok. While I was starting to pack up, they came to me that there was something wrong in one part of the thing I was responsible for. But how could that be, my last change was over 2 hours ago, and I didn't receive any remarks. From 15:00 till 17:00 helped with other things to finish. And in fact, the last 30 minutes I spend more or less staring at the screen because everything I could work on for this project was "ok". So, I fixed that one issue, and at 17:40 I left. Project management was still in the conference call (till 20:00). I saw their faces, and I saw they weren't happy about me leaving (after I worked 9 hours).

About 2 minutes after I left the CEO called me (we're a small company), and wanted to talk about this. I give him a piece of my mind about my reason to go home and what not.

We'll probably have a chat about this incident tomorrow. I wonder how high my pay raise will be.

[Roderick]

That sucks balls, Elmuerte. But it seems like this type of thing is typical. At my company we're also still in the midst of development while there is already an entire testing team on the product on the publisher's side flooding us (= me) with bug reports because, hey there's a surprise, we're not done developing yet.

[subbes]

At my shop it turns out we're going to have to integrate with the state's new case management system, which will be fun (NOTE: NOT FUN) since we have no tech specs for it.

And as I griped on Twitter this morning, my machine grinds to a halt trying to run SQL Server Management Suite, Outlook, and Google Chrome at the same time. Heaven help me if I pop open something as resource-intensive as Notepad.

[Wubbles]

I submitted my scientific paper to the Intel STS. Aw, yeah/Oh, God.

[MrHoatzin]

I have a first-world story of petty triumph to share. Pull up a chair, stranger!

The other day I managed to finally destroy the firm's old website—which was built close to six years ago and hasn't been touched since. I have been at the company for four years, the site looked clunky when I started working here. There have been at least four reboots of the new website portfolio while I've been here, and none of those went anywhere. There were always too many stakeholders and everyone wanted to please everyone and people vetoed random things. And it was the worst kind of design by committee situation. We couldn't figure out how to present ourselves outwardly, how to best organize the website, what sets us apart from the others, how much to say (without appearing condescending towards our potential clients), how little to say ("Here's our work: :buyme: :buyme: <Contact Us> gottahaveballs.com" - a hypothetical "brave" option that was suggested)... sometimes it would be so weird, these wizened people, competent in ways of branding and marketing would be making some utterly beginner mistakes, like wanting to model the site on a competitor in Austin to a degree that would look embarrassingly conspicuous. But ultimately, every one of those sites failed to get made and was buried because we didn't have time to work on them, and client work came first. Barefoot cobblers, and so on.

The new website is nowhere near done, in fact it is bogged down in a mire of content and direction tweakery as is to be expected. It is closer than ever, tho. I did manage to take the old one down and replace it with a fairly snazzy, minimal site that says the barest minimum of things it needs to say, and uses some really nice new technology in a fresh, understated way. I don't want the google analytics to track me back here, so you can check out the new website through my linkedin profile. You will need a CSS3-friendly browser.

[Roderick]

I found it. It looks very sleek and professional. I'm glad you got that hair out of your throat.

[toblix]

Oh, very nice. Really like the subtle background stuff. However, event.layerX and event.layerY are broken and deprecated in WebKit. They will be removed from the engine in the near future.

[MrHoatzin]

I don't think I am using event.layerX and event.layerY...

[miffy495]

Very pretty!

I've been completely buried in school and my increasingly shitty job for the past month or so. There are currently rumours that the Cinematheque is in talks to buy my theatre as their new home-base, which would be fucking fantastic as the guy who is currently running things is garbage at it. I would be more than happy with this, especially as the Cinematheque people love me and run amazing shows (they've rented us out tonight for a reel-to-reel screening of "A Woman Under the Influence", for example) on a monthly basis. If they took over the lease, they'd keep doing amazing shows, do a lot more of them, and make the place a fantastic community theatre for when they're not using it. A member of their board even approached me and asked if, "hypothetically", I'd be willing to stay on if they took over. Hell yes.

On the other hand, now that I've been out teaching for a little bit, it's fucking suffocating to be back taking university classes and working for a shitty boss. I went out and worked for two weeks. I feel like, rather than merely kinda wanting to teach, I've now completely found my calling. Being pulled out of that so abruptly sorta hurts. I gotta get myself back in the classroom, but won't be teaching again until March. I'm already counting down the days.

[elmuerte]

It gets better. One of the "project managers" send an email to ... well at least the CEO that the overtime thingy sort of payed off but not thanks to me. He didn't literally say that, but it was implied: "In case you wondered which of the engineers gets compliments here... it were <first name of colleague> and mister <last name of the same colleague> ;-)".

Sure, trash on all the extra effort I put into this project a month before you even started to lift a finger in this company. Jackass.

So I responded to the COs and the engineering team lead that if this is they way they want to do business they don't have to count on me for this project. And that I don't appreciate be treated this way.

I know for a fact that the COs and team leads talked about the incident of last night this morning. But I haven't received any response from them yet, the COs were not in the rest of the day.

They haven't heard the last of me (about this) yet.

[toblix]

I don't think I am using event.layerX and event.layerY...

Maybe one of the libraries you're using does, then, or a Chome extension of mine, though I don't think I've installed any... anyway I got that message in the console.

[Roderick]

I don't think I am using event.layerX and event.layerY...

Buddy, you have event.layerX written aaaall over your face. Would you mind stepping out of the car please?

[subbes]

I have spent 14 hours today up to my elbows in Balsamiq. It is making a hideous task - a major re-architecture and UX overhaul of a messy learning management setup - less terrible.

I still came close to smacking someone when I examined at the existing report generation module. Up until now I had only been looking at it out of the corner of my eye, out of the hope that if it didn't know I was looking at it, it wouldn't shine its full nightmare gaze on me like a college-sponsored Medusa.

My god... it's full of awful.

[MrHoatzin]

Buddy, you have event.layerX written aaaall over your face. Would you mind stepping out of the car please?

Maybe one of the libraries you're using does, then, or a Chome extension of mine, though I don't think I've installed any... anyway I got that message in the console.

I searched for the expression in all but the externally-linked libraries, jquery and maybe google analytics? In any case, I suspect it might be fallback code or something like that for backwards compatibility or whatever. I am not getting these console log readings in anything anyway.

I do get a bunch of other weird shit tho. ¬¬

[toblix]

I searched for the expression in all but the externally-linked libraries, jquery and maybe google analytics? In any case, I suspect it might be fallback code or something like that for backwards compatibility or whatever. I am not getting these console log readings in anything anyway.

I do get a bunch of other weird shit tho. ¬¬

Apparently it's a known issue with jQuery 1.6. Also, it's apparently fixed in 1.7.