I am not allowed, at the moment, to tell you why work sucks, because the company is in the midst of a quiet period, and because I've revealed the name of the company I work for in past nodes. But suffice to say, I am not happy in the least with the way things are going down, nor is anybody I work with, and I think I'm going to start looking for a new job because this company is going to die a horrible, flaming, tortuous death.
I have recently become fascinated with nieken's Pizza Chronicles. Despite the fact that he has to work in the food service industry (which people keep telling me is terrible...I've never experienced it firsthand), he has such an interesting job! My job is terribly boring. I sit in front of a computer screen all day. That's it! About the most exciting thing that ever happens to me is when people laugh at the insipid comics I draw on my whiteboard. That is the high point of my day.
nieken's "adventures" intrigue me because interesting things keep happening to him. It's like some people just have interesting events following them around. Nothing interesting ever happens to me! Or at least, interesting things rarely happen to me. My life is so terribly boring that I have to make interesting things happen.
Last weekend, in a futile attempt to make something interesting happen, I drove to the beach at 2am. I parked my car in full view of the highway. After walking around on the pitch-black empty beach for a while (nothing interesting happened), I went and curled up under a trenchcoat in the backseat of my car, in hopes that some strange person would attempt to kill me, rob me, or at least just wake me up and ask me for the time. I seriously wanted this to happen. And guess what?
Nothing happened.
I drove home in the morning with nothing gained except a sore back and bloodshot eyes. I had some meager hopes that my apartment had caught on fire and burned the complex down, but alas, everything was perfectly intact, un-burnt, and un-burglarized when I returned.
Sigh.
Work achievements today: nil Contentment factor: zooming up rapidly.
I'll be spending a part of my weekend in here now, but it was worth it.
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10:30 BST
Well, I'm in work and trying to ease back into the flow of things. I am still really tired and achey, but the coffee is helping (a little).
Today? well, today is time to read about MHP and DVB standards in preparation for my coding work. I've also got to think about the sun server that I should be porting some apps to... Plus I've got to write a report (blech!) on my experience at the trade show.
14:30 BST
The office is nearly empty because of a combination of the petrol crisis and holidays. It's nice to read in peace without people singing or dropping things around my desk. Please Stop annoying me guy isn't in today; I am in a nice calm and happy mood. Serene would be a good word for it.
Wow. This MHP specification is immense, referencing RFCs and other standards left, right and centre. (I will node MHP at some point; it stands for Multimedia Home Platform and is a java based set top box standard defined by a european digital television standards body called DVB) I can see that this will take some time to get through; the PDF file is over 11 meg with hardly any diagrams :-(
More later, my little fondant centred chocolates
Note: Please remeber this is a daylog which is meant to hold what you did and what you thought today. If you mark me down, please /msg me and tell me why so I can fix the problem.
This is what I thought today (which is my explanation for it not making much sense):
Everything has its limitations, sometimes we find that these limitations can be bent, other can be broken. Do you really think that's air your breathe.coming now? (Source: Iains Head). Some days I feel like eating some sausages, other days jumping out of a plane would be the most suitable option.
Television, as a communication medium, is dieing a slow painful death. I am finding television to be an unproductive method of gathering (of developers) of information. The Internet however, is taking televisions place at the forefront of information interchange.
I don't know what I want to be, I am trying to decide if I am indecisive or not. How can I live with these pressures, expectations, responsibilities, and most important of all, how can I live with these people. Trying to blame other people for this life is useless, deep down, I am simply searching for reasons not to blame myself.
Things I hate about me:
I have grown and evolved this way, no longer can I do anything, I am truly a stupid-geek.
Roll on the Exit Music
Did you have lots of friends growing up? she asks
umm No most of the time no, sometimes just one because, I count the reasons on my fingers, I could never bring anyone home with me and well I would be moving away in a matter of months if not weeks so...
I answered 500 kajillion true/false questions. I left a lot blank because it's none of their business,or the statement didn't make any sense whatsoever,or didn't apply to my life.
The comic strip is the best part of the newspaper.
blank-- I don't read the newspaper
I have lots of secrets
blank --That's a secret.
I love my mother (or if she's dead) I loved my mother
crossed it out!!!
I don't like to talk about sex
blank--
I like to fix door latches.
True (if she only knew why)
Why is Freedom of the Press so important?
Brain gets a logjam. I have a lot of thoughts about the question they just won't organize themselves into an answer. No offense DMan but all I can hear are DMan rants in my head. Try harder to tell me, she encourages. I can't so I cry and she stopped, put it aside.
Whats missing in the picture?
The shadow on the chair
Points: What's the most important thing missing?
Me: Oh the rung on the chair
Shows me a picture of a boat I see a lot of things missing, the front bench, an oarlock and my grandfather
What's the most important thing missing?
Me:The person. I say
How would you describe your life?
Me: Flat loneliness
Dense knots formed in my head when I did the math part.
The nice lady from Job Developement didn't call this week about that job I was interested in.
My husband gave the lady our address so she could mail us a check to cover the vet bills from the dog attack. Nothing yet and the court date is September 20th. Two more hours of tests next week. I hope it's worth it because it's been hard on me and my family.
Living with a chronic unpredictable illness is a challenge. I want to be able to function as I once did, with energy and enthusiasm. Instead, some days the simplest chores requires more stength than I'm able to muster. Frustrating? Aggravating? Discouraging? You bet, but I don't have to be overwhelmed by these feelings.
I'm sure it's not the limitations themselves, but the thoughts I entertain about them that are the most likely to cause me trouble. It's so easy for me to give in to feelings of uselessness, worthlessness and self-pity. I remind myself that I rest in God's love, he loves me just because I'm his child and that thought alone fills me with hope. I seek out God's peace and I'm restored again. Instead of giving into complete discouragement, I can acknowledge my complete dependence on God, who encourages me to go on.
If my thoughts are hope-filled, so will my life be!
Devotion
Heh.. A kind of short node, but there isn't much interesting stuff in my life.
Nodes: Added some lyrics to my eye in the sky node..
All of my days have been virtually the same during my battle with this infernal thing called "mono". I wake myself up usually at some point in the morning to force-feed myself some pills, namely amoxicillin and motrin ib. I say force feed because I have to drink water to get them down, and it almost always makes me want to cry because swallowing anything causes me incredible pain. Then I usually go to sleep again, and then wake up to watch a couple of soap operas because that's all that my mind can process. I try to eat something, like a banana, but it's usually too abrasive and I just don't eat anything the whole day.
I haven't been outside since I got back from the hospital to be tested for mono, which was three days ago. I haven't seen any people whatsoever except for my family, which I don't really count. I don't really think, I try sometimes to read or write but then I end up falling asleep. In fact, the time spent writing this node is probably the longest I've been fully awake. There is no cure for mono, and it stays with you for weeks if not months. Great...
The power in my dorm blinked this morning.
"Ha!", I thought to myself, as my roommate's computer rebooted, and all the clocks started flashing 12:00. "Glad I've got that UPS box!"
Little did I know, I was soon to learn the terrible price of hubris. The power shortage must have taken out a router momentarily, because Mozilla complained of reset connections, and then promptly crashed.
Irked by Mozilla, I took the risk of firing up Netscape instead. For those of you who don't run Linux, Netscape on Linux is even more of a slow, resource hogging, buggy beast than it is on Windows. About half an hour later, Netscape decided to freeze up, and take X Windows with it. Since my roommate was asleep, and I didn't want to borrow his computer without asking, and I didn't feel like walking across campus to a public computer lab to SSH in and kill -9 X, I just hard rebooted. Unfortunately, when my system came back up, I had the unpleasant surprise of watching dhcpcd fail to obtain an IP address for me. The DHCP server must have been taken out by the power blink. (This has happened before).
It took them 7 hours to fix this.
That's 7 hours without Everything. 7 hours without Slashdot. 7 hours without email! Shudder.
Thank goodness for A-Team reruns, and occasional breaks to go to class, or I'd have gone insane.
I also beat the ~42,000 mark on Pac-Man in the OU arcade. Too bad the tourney ended yesterday.
Besides that, it was amazingly uneventful. The language department is in a state of complete disarray, meaning our German test was delayed until Monday. Huh. That's about it.
At home? Huh, just as uneventful. I started a noding spree which died out when the suggestion was made to go out and get some Dr Pepper and Vernor's. I'll get back to it, though... *evil cackle*
NEW NODES TODAY: You Don't Know Jack, Nate Shapiro, Buzz Shapiro, Guy Towers, Cookie Masterson, Josh 'Schmitty' Schmitstinstein
The Torch Relay was due to return to Circular Quay this afternoon for its last stop in the city before setting off for the Opening Ceremony at the Stadium. In the morning it crossed the Harbor Bridge to the northern suburbs, including the Zoo. According to the website (www.olympics.com) timetable: "4.24 p.m. The Olympic flame will be carried on a Sydney Ferry between Manly and Circular Quay with the cauldron burning on the bow of the ferry."
Wandered through the city center. There's a Versace exhibition in a building formerly occupied by a bank. Decided to give it a miss today. Was told at the post office that Australian Olympic-issue stamps are for domestic use only. Stamps for international use have the word "International" on them, and these don't include Olympic ones. Sounds nuts to me. It's not going to stop me using the Olympics stamps on my internationally-bound postcards.
At Circular Quay an ocean liner was berthed near the Museum of Contemporary Art (2 others are at the Naval Dockyards). Swiss flags draped from some balconies of the new apartment complex. The American Express bureau showing the A$ dropping in value. In front of the Opera House were tiers of seats waiting for tomorrow's triathlon event. Sightseers of all nationalities, many with the ubiquitous plastic-cased access IDs and whatnot dangling from their necks. Some Sydney residents have become so irritated by these IDS (gratuitously worn everywhere by Olympics staff and tourists even when unnecessary) that they've taken to making and wearing ones of their own. Took up a spot on the forecourt steps of the Opera House, near the water.
It wasn't until then that I remembered that the Manly-Circular Quay ferry trip takes about 30 minutes, and it'd probably be even longer today. This didn't seem to have occurred to other sightseers either, who at 4.24 p.m. huddled at the steps railing and turned their gaze north-east over the water and waited in vain for the Torch ferry to appear. Shivered in the east wind blowing from the Harbor. Two people near me looked at photographs of their recent holiday in Greece and Italy. A young woman in a dress made out of a Union Jack, her boyfriend in Union Jack hat and cape. Watched a police dog and divers variously examine the nearby Man O'War Jetty, to which the Torch would be brought by launch after its arrival at the Quay. Police boats stationed themselves near Bennelong Point. Special Squad cops patrolled the area.
At last in the north-east distance we spotted a Water Police tugboat spouting huge jets of water, which seemed to herald the appearance of the ferry. It soon came into sight around a headland, surrounded by civilian craft. The ever-present helicopters. The flotilla came closer and we saw there was a small boat ahead of it, flying the Aboriginal flag. We strained to catch sight of the flame--no sign of it. As the ferry passed the Naval Dockyards one of the ocean liners hooted 3 times, the ferry hooted back, and the liner replied--Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The ferry disappeared from our eyes behind the Opera House; we'd not expected to see it again, but, standing on the forecourt steps with our back to the water, we caught sight of the ferry docking at the Quay and--"There it is!"--in a vessel on the bow, was, indeed the Olympic flame.
It then travelled (in the form of two lit lanterns) by police launch in a short trip from the Quay at the left of the Opera House to the Man O' War Jetty at the right. The lantern carriers disembarked and vanished into the bowels of the Opera House, to the puzzlement of the assembled crowds who seemed at a loss as to where to go next. People rushed from one part of the forecourt to another. I was hungry and frozen stiff, all I wanted to do was get down the steps and back to the city (the image of a hamburger with hot salty fries was beckoning); and as all the other avenues were blocked off, the only way to do it was to take the long way round the waterfront at the back of the Opera House. Here were more crowds, looking up at the Opera House sails as if waiting for somebody to jump off them--but there was nobody there. At ground level to the left of the Opera House were even more people, all mysteriously also staring up. An Australian network TV crew were filming a reporter, people cramming in to stand behind him and wave their flags madly, their cheers and the sound of the helicopters above almost drowning out his words. German tourists laughed at the sight. Near and above us the crowds on the edge of the forecourt steps watched and waved and photographed us. Then, suddenly, was what everyone including the TV crew had ostensibly been waiting for: the appearance of the Torch carrier on top of one of the Opera House sails. She was a tiny figure against the clouded sky, holding up the Torch, the seemingly-fluorescent flame visible even at that distance. More loud cheering and waving. Helicopters hovered near.
It was 6.15 p.m. Time to leave. I and hundreds of people hurried back to the central business district--some to take public transport home to their TV sets, others to parties, others to open-air party-type venues around the city where the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony would be broadcast live on video screens. I'd forgotten that Martin Place was one such site, and made the mistake of taking a "shortcut" through, a big mistake. Before I realized it I was in the midst of thousands of people sitting on the ground in Martin Place between Macquarie and Phillip Streets, in front of the video screen below the Olympic Rings installation. Many others standing at the side. Found out afterwards that site officials turned away late arrivals because there just wasn't any room left. There, at the time, I figured the only way out was to get across to the other side. Once you've committed yourself to traversing a large public square by stepping gingerly across a sea of seated people, hundreds of pairs of eyes watching you amusedly or with resentment, the only thing to do is get to the other side as fast as possible while treading on the least number of people's extremities. A relief to be out of the spotlight of attention and into a quiet side street.
Further on I passed carefree revellers making their way to Martin Place (poor deluded fools) with cases of beer. A long line waiting to enter a liquor store; the streets otherwise emptying fast. At 7 p.m. began the event I'm told Sydneysiders have waited 7 years (it seemed a lifetime) for: the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony. Which needs no description by me.
September 9, 2000September 12, 2000September 14, 2000September 18, 2000September 24,2000September 29, 2000September 30, 2000October 1, 2000October 2, 2000
This entry was made monday morning.
Around 5pM I give notice of my intent to leave my job. Not quite the flat threat of two weeks notice, but one of those "I'd like a decent recommendation, so here's fair warning." This has been something that I've been considering for weeks, if not months. Since returning from my vacation, I've been trying to just roll over, and stick it out. It's not like I don't get paid for my work, mind, but at this point, I really can't imagine staying here another week...
I curse this place.
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