Recently in work Category

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?

in english, ' and " are not interchangeable.

i should write it 10 times on the blackboard.

for i in xrange(0, 10) :
blackboard.write("""' and " are not interchangeable""")

whenever i have to try to change an option in outlook, i feel like i'm entering The Pit Of Despair. as soon as that options window opens i know my day is ruined.

i won't find what i'm looking for. it's in there, buried 6 levels deep in some inappropriately named sub-dialog. but i won't find it. and if i do, i'll wish i hadn't, because it'll have unintended side-effects that i really won't like.

i'm in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.

and there's a grue lurking in here somewhere. ugh.

i spent saturday morning bottling beer, it's going in to work.

last time i did that i sent a mass email and got a poor response.

this time, i shall abuse my position as maintainer of a major internal website and put up a big banner ad.

this time, it's fresh beer that people will like.

i am 1/2 quarter behind on the schedule i presented 1 and 1/2 quarters ago, but i am 1 week ahead on the revised schedule i created 2 weeks ago.

meh.

my package from sparkfun was a "personal package" but the one from digi-key was a "business package".

wha?

i think i radiate a certain air of "you ought to learn python".