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Starting with Flock on Jan 7th, 2008.
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This should be a LOT of fun. It helps that it'll be doing some stuff I've done before (supporting a browser team), and that it's all people I know, and quite like.
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*grins*
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Blogged with Flock
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Eyes tomorrow
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Tomorrow I get my eyes lasered.
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To call me nervous would be understating it more than a bit.
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My Christina had two teeth taken out today, to prepare for straightening the rest.
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She was so brave. I don't think I would've been able to do it.
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She's resting now, and I was able to help her.
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It was a good feeling.
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Ah hell, what's one more blog post?
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With so many empty spaces between them, one more surely won't hurt.
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It's extremely hot in my office right now. I wish it was cooler, but it's nearly time to go to sleep, so it really doesn't matter all that much.
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I'm getting a bit calmer where it comes to my job… perhaps it's just less of a feeling of personal attachment to the work. I've reached the point where I simply am not willing to feel bad when things screw up, and I'm long past the point where I'll accept the blame for things beyond my control.
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I don't think everyone's caught on yet. That's one benefit to working so far away from the rest of the office, it makes it more difficult to break into a round of swearing in front of them, and I usually have enough time to calm down before I talk to them next.
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I do wonder sometimes how long I can keep this schedule up though. I was working at 7:30 this morning, and it was nearly 7 when I stopped today. It's frustrating to have the whole day go by and be chained into my chair, to try and schedule a morning shower, and to see 1 o'clock come around before it actually happens. To gulp down my food, and never finish a meal with my wife. To never truly be off duty, and to lose the joy of getting some fresh air when the phone rings.
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We all make our choices though, and this one was mine. I'm going to have to change things within the next month or two, even I've got a breaking point, and I think I'll be nearer to it if I don't change things to get out of the house a bit more. Hell, even babies can't do more than 9 months in a little space without needing to bust out!
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Christina's been wonderful through out this. I can't imagine being sane after 6 months stuck at home by myself!
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We've talked to a financial expert this last week, and it's driven home a sad truth, I'm still not making enough money to ever be more than a renter. I'm going to have to earn about 40{99f4aabb8f9a8b7318031e7dd7e1d4d33a10ca1a288a083cef0cdea647a62112} more reliably to be able to afford a house AND food. It's quite an eye opener, but i'm going to keep trying as hard as i can. I know where I want to get to, and if i can drag myself out of the dirt, I can certainly drag myself a little farther.
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Dear reader, what were you expecting here? I often wonder who reads this stuff, at best it's overly wordy, and at worst it's pointlessly melancholic. Then again, where else am I going to pour this stuff out? The garden wouldn't like it, and this kind of fertilizer isn't what makes the flowers grow up straight and tall after all.
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Tomorrow Christina gets some rather serious dental work done. She's nervous, I'm nervous, and I'm just hoping for it all to go smoothly, and for a speedy recovery. Did i mention I hate problems I can't solve? Do the best I can I guess, and that's all that we can hope for.
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Mr. Man heads back to school next week. As one might imagine, he's absolutely thrilled and excited…. nah, I can't even finish that sentence. He's a bundle of nerves, and I'm just waiting for him to shake a patch out of the floor underneath him. New school, new town, new country, new curriculum… I think I can see a few reasons he might be tense, so I'm trying not to make it any worse… damn my tricky sense of humor…..
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I'm going to cut this short I think.. i have a little time before bed, time to sink into my book for a little.
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If you're actually reading this, as strange as that may be, stay tuned.
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Wow. Two posts within the same month. That's gotta be a record for this year.
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Seriously though, it's been tough to find the time where I *could* post, and actually have the enthusiasm at those moments to write about life instead of trying to live it.
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I woke up around 4:30 to a server alarm going off.. one of those stupid situations, where a running task caused an unavoidable outage.. basically nothing I could do about it, but it woke me up, and it was tough to get back to sleep.
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I've finally got my mis-ordered ink shipment ready to send back, the new order will be better, and thankfully i don't need it right now.
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It's been a long time between posts, and really I end up saying that each time, and each time it's correct.
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This weekend I built myself a new mail server, and moved all my messages to it. It's qmail, and it's amazingly fast, even with 1000781 messages, which is what transfered from my mail account. I apparently don't throw enough out.
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I've been working a lot. I don't get out much if at all, and I can't imagine that will be a viable lifestyle forever. For now it'll do, and it'll have to do. The family needs to be fed, and this is what I signed on for after all. I often give my stepson lectures about personal accountability and taking responsibility for your own choices. This one's mine, and until such a point as I'm ready to change it, there's no point in bemoaning the fact everything isn't 100{99f4aabb8f9a8b7318031e7dd7e1d4d33a10ca1a288a083cef0cdea647a62112} perfect. It could be a lot worse, and it had been in the past, so really, what the hell could you want?
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Christina's wonderful, as always, and the fact that I can see her whenever I want helps a lot.
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I've been working on my own projects most evenings, and I feel that I've learned a lot. Very little of it is directly useful to the work I'm doing now, but then again, that was never the point, was it? It's more important that it mean something to me, that it provide a feeling of accomplishment, especially on those days when the whole damn day feels wasted, and I wonder what the hell I'm doing.
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I still haven't met any of my co-workers, and getting my passport has been an incredible pain in the ass. It's still not done in fact, I've had to resubmit, so I'm playing the waiting game again. I hope I'm still useful to these people by the time I can actually meet them… it's hard to say for sure.
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All the more reason to keep learning, and keep meeting people, to keep making a reputation as someone who can just get the job done.
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Growing up I was foolish, and I believed the lies they tell you. From the beginning, from the moment you start getting trained with ABC and 123, it's emphasized that WHAT you know is the most important thing. Remembering facts and figures, science, math, and funny looking islands that look like crumpled socks. All those little bits are repeated and drilled in, and you're compared against a score, a yardstick that makes you smart or dumb.
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It's not enough though. It's not enough to KNOW, or even to be able to find out how to know. Knowledge and learning aptitude might allow you to create amazing things, but they're almost secondary concerns.
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Far more important seems to be the ability to interact with other people. To form bonds, associations, a rapport. Without connections to other people, it's difficult to actually succeed. Most of the best and funnest jobs require that you are chosen, on the basis of knowing someone who knows someone… with the way words lie on a piece of paper, nepotism has as much of a chance of succeeding as interviewing hundreds.
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Did you ever get told that? I missed that explanation entirely, and tried for the “know stuff” route for years… and amazingly enough… it wasn't at all successful. Sooner or later you'll find someone who needs skilled people. Skilled people are the foundation of any business.
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You ever notice that the foundations stay at the bottom, and usually out of sight? What makes it to the top? Art, beauty, shiny stuff. Not necessarily the practical nuts and bolts, but then again who needs to see the machine at work?
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Every now and then you see a hybrid out there though.. something both beautiful and practical.
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I want to be that thing, something wonderful to behold, and USEFUL.
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Here's to the struggle.
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It's been a long time.
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I haven't posted in quite a long time, but I'll tell you about what's happened, and it should make some sense.
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* I quit my job at the end of february.
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Early in february the boss came in and dropped the axe. About 25 people sent home, and everyone converted suddenly to hourly. Everything got pushed through so quickly I didn't realize how illegal it was until a few days later. It really upset me, all of a sudden *poof* goes my job security. The switch to hourly will make my next paycheck realliy bad, and without any kind of buffer time. WTF?
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On February 15th, I didn't get paid on time. This had happened before as well, but it hadn't bugged me the same way. There was no notice, no advance warning, no nothing until nearly the middle of that day. All i could think was “Thank god for contract work, or I would've just been f@cked.” This was totally it for me. I can't work somewhere where I'm afraid I'm not going to get paid on time, or paid at all! I don't have wiggle room, I'm sitting at a zero bank balance between paychecks and doing without a lot of the time to keep from breaking the bank… *sigh*
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I called Tom the same day. He's been my point of contact at AffinityLabs, and I'd been doing contract work with them since January. In fact, the money coming in from them was the ONLY reason I could handle the screwups at work, because actually that money was much more than my paychecks from Mercurial.
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I asked him to make me an offer, and I'd take it VERY seriously. He came back with 75K USD, and I accepted.
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I gave my notice that day, targetted for the end of the month. I figured that would allow Mercurial enough time to get answers to all their pressing questions, and give me enough time to train a replacement.
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They didn't ask any questions.
They wouldn't authorize off-hours documentation.
My replacement started the day after I left.
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WTF? That whole combination of crap just confused the hell out of me, and really made me feel a little frustrated. It was similar to the written authorization I'd been trying to get since DECEMBER, which would give blanket approval by Merc for me to work for Affinity on contract. Not entirely needed, just a nice little CYA signoff document. I didn't get that, despite weekly promises. Hell, 3 months later, when I left, I STILL didn't have it. How the hell can that be an effective business strategy? My biggest hope is still that that kind of situation isn't passed on to the customers!
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Anyway, I left Feb 28th for the last time, and it's been a wonderful time.
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* My wife and stepson moved in with me.
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They actually moved in on the 23rd of February, so it was a REALLY busy last week.
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Now it's been a month + together, and it's been a wonderful time. There has been so much to do! I moved a 1 bedroom apartment into a 4 bedroom house, and they brought over only portable stuff (because immigration STILL hasn't gotten around to sending us final approvals), so every week there's a new shopping list of household items, and it's LARGE!
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We've got Ty all set up in his space though, and that's working out well. He's got the biggest bedroom, it's downstairs at the other end of the house, so I can happily say I haven't had to threaten to strangle him at 3 am because he woke me up. In fact, he's pretty bloody reasonable about keeping the noise down, and our most common arguements are about bedtimes, not noise.
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His birthday happened this last month, and damn, we spoiled him. It was very cool, and I don't have any regrets. Who knows how often we'll be able to cut loose like that? Plus the fact he's now 14, we'll only have 4 more years of these, and on the last one he'll probably want a car or some such 🙂
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Christina has been turning this house into a home. I have managed to put things in fairly logical places, but she makes it look good. I've taken a step back from organizing the house, she's got it down pat, and it's an absolute pleasure to see the results of all of her hard work.
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Hmm… It's nearly lunch.. It's time to wake the family, I'll write more eventually.
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Cheers.
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*sigh*
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I don't have the patience or the interest to customize the LJ layout, I think I'm just going to stick with this, it's served well thusfar.
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