i just wiped about a rice-grain's worth of orange, pasty, mold-stuff from the inner rim of my work water bottle. now, suddenly, my water tastes much better.
still, i do think this bottle is coming home for a dish wash tonight.
bleh.
Recently in work Category
i had a nice cup of ceylon tea with a coworker, from a bag.
it had a little bitterness at the end, which got me to remembering why i generally stay away from tea: like coffee, tobacco, beermaking, audio gear, barbecue, or software, it's exactly the sort of thing i will geek out on, buy a bunch of crap, finally have a great cup, and then drop the hobby. that's a rabbit hole i've been down too many times.
still, i wonder what i'd have to do to improve that cup? i'm sure it would have been better in a real mug, with proper water.
commentator #2 on my lunch expressed surprise at its diminutive size.
"that's a small lunch for a big guy like you!" he said.
i pointed out that I eat about 5 of those per day.
more smoked tri-tip today. as good as it is, there's room for improvement.
i swear to saint norton that the next person who comes into my cube, dawdles awaiting my attention, employs some method of distraction to get me to turn around and acknowledge them, and then finally, once my headphones are off, suggests that I install a device that would allow me to effortlessly notice their presence without all the waiting, stamping, and arm waving, will be met with the following reply:
"why, so that i can throw you a ticker tape parade for visiting me?"
(blog readers are excluded from this offer)
do it your damn self, i'm not your sed monkey.
i have a bug to fix but i can't concentrate without all my clutter.
today was bring-a-sandwich-to-work day. it failed on many levels.
my sandwich, from bottom to top:
12 grain bread
bourbon mustard
jarlsberg lite
heirloom tomato
romaine lettuce
yellow bell pepper
soprasetta
toscano salame
yellow bell pepper
romaine lettuce
heirloom tomato
turkey slices
bourbon mustard
12 grain bread
now, the turkey and the cheese were designed to shield the bread from the tomato, but they failed utterly and the bread was completely destroyed. i ended up scooping the last half of my sandwich out of the container. you might wonder why i didn't put the lettuce in between the bread and the tomato -- i simply don't like lettuce that close to the bread, and the lettuce, having been washed, was also wet. in the future though, i may have to go that route, devoid of choice.
the italian meats were cut way too thick. i cut them myself with a sausage knife, but that's really no substitute for deli-sliced. i guess next time i'll have that done, rearrange my sandwich, and hope for the best.
it's 3pm on a friday, 1 week from the announced deadline for layoffs.
my manager is out on vacation.
phone rings. caller id says it's my manager's manager, our division VP.
"OH CRAP", i think, "THIS IS IT FOR ME".
i answered, and he wanted to talk about a new, somewhat exciting web service i've created, sort of on a whim, for the company. he has feature requests.
huzzah!
fred brooks wrote some books about how to design software. i read them in college and refer to them all the time, even though management doesn't listen, which is one of the things fred wrote about.
his book was written in the early 1970s about the development of an IBM mainframe OS. amazingly, not only are his lessons still relevant, they may be more relevant now than they were back then, if only because in the 40 intervening years, people haven't listened to his lessons much at all.
in addition to telling us how to develop software, fred makes a compelling explanation of why we write software.
i could not have said it better myself.
i just said to a coworker:
would you kindly verify that when you get a chance?
i dunno if he's played through bioshock. i wonder if he'll spot the joke?
