August 2004 Archives
August 30, 2004
Work is a sharp series of ups and downs lately. On the down side, I hate Mondays, especially Mondays that are nothing but a series of meetings (don't get me wrong, for meetings they weren't too bad...), and double especially meetings where the office manager ordered lunch--but no vegetarian sandwiches. Nice. Also on the downside, there's some kind of a memory leak in our major application, and every time we come up with a theory I manage to put together a test that shoots it down. Of course, the test suite is looking more complete every day... :-P And then of course there's the project where the primary piece of control equipment is on the fritz, and we've now systematically eliminated every single component of the system from the problem, to no apparent effect. Tomorrow I start eliminating combinations of components. Yay.
On the plus side, we have a contract to do the house of one of the ten richest people in the world. On the down side, it's in Phoenix. On the plus side, we're on track for probably half a dozen more projects this year. On the down side, they're all in Phoenix too. Also, I am too busy to take advantage of the free MCSD tests. Maybe next week I can take the second test--hey, I'm only 4 months overdue for it by now...
Actually, things are not as bad as I am probably making them sound right now. Yes, work is stressing me out, but I have two major projects I'm troubleshooting, one I'm trying to complete (and trying to get the phone system to talk to me is a bitch and a half) and four more I need to be gearing up on. It could be worse... I could be sitting at work and playing Solitaire all day. :) Instead, we discussed some neat new toys like the AMX MAX MMS, which is a content server that can store up to 7.3TB of straight-from-DVD-movies and/or CD music and stream up to 25 simultaneous feeds from a SATA RAID 5 array, over ethernet.
I wish I had something more interesting to say; I'll blame it on being up since 5:30 this morning, though. Maybe tomorrow will be better. And maybe I won't post again for 2 weeks. This site sort of goes like that. :-P Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a weblog like Chris Brumme or Cyrus N, where I could talk more or less specifically about my work, but unfortunately I don't know how many people out there are really interested in the intricacies of integrating with an Advent security panel, and the more generally interesting parts of my job (that would be the clients and their crazy, crazy houses) I'm not really supposed to discuss. :-P So ah well.
Also, because Jenny is sick and cranky I will humor her by mentioning her in this post. Right... ------> HERE <-------. See, my love? ;) Anyway, she is back in town, and I am glad to have her here, even if she is sick and cranky and makes me get up at 5:30 in the morning three days a week. Not least because she tells me I have sexy hair. ;) ;)
August 19, 2004
Jen flew off to Pittsburgh today to drive up to Boston with her sister and spend the weekend with her Nana, so it's just me [Ed: and the dogs, and the cat...] all weekend. I grilled up some Veat today (somehow managing to be grilling during the exact time period it rained... it started as I put the chicken on and ended 5 minutes after I took it off) with a new barbecue sauce I'm trying (Stubb's Spicy, if you're wondering). BBQ'd chicken is so incredibly yummy. It's fantastic hot off the grill, but I inevitably end up munching on the leftovers later that night... cold BBQ'd chicken is a leftover delight from my childhood. :)
Texas is having certain predictable results on my food, actually. No, I'm not eating steaks or anything like that, but since we moved here, I've completely lost my taste for Tostitos Salsa, once my favorite -- it just tastes too sweet to me now. Right now I'm digging Leal's salsa, which you probably can't get anywhere else but is really, really tasty. :) Same with the BBQ sauce, if to a lesser extent: I am getting spoiled by the variety, though the fact that most of them include Worcestershire Sauce (including anchovies) does keep the variety somewhat smaller than the salsa choices I have.
August 12, 2004
...Because I'm pretty sure they generally tell you that action stories need to have a climax.
So as Jen mentioned, we watched Hellboy last night. It was really kind of a strange movie, plot-wise. I mean, you have an over-the-top couple of heroes, Nazis trying to open a portal to Hell, Ian McKellen-look-alike as the wise, sage-like old man--it seems like you have all the components there for a silly, fun, summer movie--sort of Men in Black meets Indiana Jones or something. And the movie did have a couple of moments, I suppose (it probably would have been better on the big screen).
But sadly, whoever wrote the script sort of left out the climax. The climactic battle with the Great Big Hell Beast From Hell (which also owes something to the Alien movies, and quite a bit to MIB 1 and 2--I mean, come on, the monster bursts out of someone's chest, is huge and tentacley, and swallows the hero... you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out where that came from) takes all of thirty seconds. What the heck?
Actually that's kind of the movie in a nutshell. It could have been amusing, but there was just too little of everything (possibly too many things, so no one thing got enough resources). Too little character development. Too few really good action sequences. Too little exposition. Too little climax. It just left me wondering why they apparently cut out the actual good parts of the movie.
Ah well. On to School of Rock! ;)
