Well, it’s been a while, and some non-interesting stuff has gone on in the last 10 days or so, but I’ll tell you anyway.
The new desk is working well… for the first time in a while I feel comfortable working here. Or playing for that matter. The playing part has been helped along by <another drum roll> a new computer! Thanks to a program at work, I now have two complete and wack-ass fast boxen, perfect for gaming, lan parties, etc. It’s all very comforting to be surrounded by more megahertz than most third world nations. Of course, the box that this is being served from is a P133, going through a P166 firewall, but I digress.
Specs on da box:
- AMD K7-900
- 60G total storage space on two 7200rpm Maxtor [archive.org link] drives, both sitting on an UDMA66 driver (meaning that among other things, I can have up to 8 drives at once!)
- nVidia GeForce2 GTS video card, with 32 mb RAM and a ton of features, including amazing speed for rendering. Q3@1024/32bit/full everything and 90fps sounds good to me!
- Sony CDR. Finally I can burn! Burn!
- Monsoon [archive.org link] MM-700 speakers (2 flat panel speakers and a huge ass sub).
Yes, I do like it, in case you were wondering 🙂
On a less technical side of things, christmas is coming. Again, I’m not ready for it. Hell, I’ve barely started getting ready for it and it’s the 21st already. No wonder people get depressed over the holidays. I got some christmas cards out, all of which I’m sure will be late, and that’s my accomplishment for the season so far. My folks are going “somewhere warm” for the holidays, and I got a couple of my gifts early. I kicked and screamed, but finally gave in and opened them early. Sheets! Duvet! Pillows! A warm and fuzzy bed is finally mine!
The spoils of war from the last week though, are still apparent. Wrapping paper, bags, empty boxes dating back to the desk are still sitting in the living room. It’s 100% cleaner than it was a week ago, but still not acceptable. Since nothing is overly broken, it’s probably safe to throw out or flatten the majority of the boxes (yes, I keep the reciepts). Other things, like my old desk (still sitting on the porch) will be cleaned up RSN(tm).
Things lately have been unkindly busy. Up till last night, when I got to bed around 11:30, I was up till 2 or 4am every night. More the 2am on the work nights, but there were a couple of nights where I just thought “I’m going to be tired, so what could one more game hurt?”. See, not only do I have a new computer to play with, but I have a new computer that is fast to play with. And things like Elite Forces [archive.org link] and Oni (demo) came out. I’m getting better.
In addition to the play that’s done, there’s also work. Things are coming down to the wire there constantly it seems, so on more than one night the 2am thing has been me sitting and playing with code or firewall rules. Nothing like telling the customers that the new [wiz bang feature] was done by a hairy hacker sitting in his underwear at 4am huh?
There was also a project to get one of our customers upgraded from out old [archive.org link] hardware to our new stuff. It was my baby, and my performance was (IMO) less than wonderful. Basically I left it to the last minute, and reaped the “benefits” (stress, guilt, annoyance) from that. I think I need to start surfing for “how to be a manager that doesn’t suck” pages out there. Some of it though, outside of it all being done at 5:30pm the night before, sucked in general. The hardware that was given to us as “working” for putting the system on was a Compaq [archive.org link] rack peiceshit, with SCSI only hard drives (we don’t support SCSI), and an IDE CDROM. No, you can’t put an IDE hard drive on instead of the CDROM, it doesn’t work, sorry. One of the guys at work, Brian, spent a fair chunk of today fscking with it before I told him to forget it and told the customer that we didn’t have the time or resources to screw around with his hardware, and that our requirements were that he provide working hardware. I didn’t say it quite like that (though I was told I should have). Part of not being a hardass manager I guess. It’s not that I like people and don’t want to be mean to them, just part of that shy personality (and the incredularity that I be put in any place of authority… I still consider myself a “kid” you know).
We get next week off, so aside from doing code that needs to be done, testing, and general mucking around trying to get things checked off my todo list (as well as enjoying christmas and happy crappy stuff like that), I get free time! I think maybe I’ll try to work 8 hours one or two of those days, but from home and on my own time (start at noon, end at 10pm sort of thing), and see how that goes. Maybe it’ll work better than this “wake up early” thing.
Along those lines, I found http://www.dbeat.com/28 [archive.org link] which describes what would be great, or interesting, or just plain stupid, I’m not quite sure which yet….
So I’ll sit here a while longer, sipping my green tea, downloading the patches needed for reiserfs, nvidia GLX drivers, and truetype fonts that don’t suck, and then go to bed, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow is going to suck more than any other day of the year, as it’s the night I plan to go christmas shopping.
Wish me luck, and if I don’t make it back, please bury me with my new box 🙂