Dreams which are Just Not Fair, Yo:
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Waking up out of that is not fair.

Thursday night's dinner was at a place I'd not been before, but immediately decided should be added to our dinner rotation. I shared with Purple, who was in accordance, but also doubted how much parking there'd be on a Friday night. I think perhaps we'll try it some early weeknight.

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It was beer & shenanigans night, so I went down to hang out with some of the crew. R saw me first, and wandered over to say hi. She has a set of headphones similar to mine now -- she saw mine and decided they were amazingly cool (I have my doubts about the headphones but they're handy) so she got some. Hers are blue too. Purple arrived, and then Mr. Tux. Purple was late because he was saying goodbye to Mr. Netflix, who is headed off somewhere. (Perhaps he and J will be co-workers soonish?)

I saw W walking off towards the gym with her iPod and gym bag, and waved. She came over to the fire pit to say hello; we cheerfully continued our conversation about that brief window of time in 2010 when it was possible to get near-complete access to someone's LJ account using this one weird trick, and why internal documentation is super important.

I saw the Singing PM wander past, and hailed her. She met Mr. Tux, who is on the other side of the atrium in the same building as she is.

Eventually I happened to glance over at the right moment and saw the retreating ponytail of lb. I hollered after him, and he wandered over to say hello and spend some time chatting. There was various hilarity.

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Over lunch this week, the engineer from the Ukraine allowed as how knowing that software in general was developed by careless jerks just like him made him less confident in things like self-driving cars. "And how about planes?" (He is a pilot.) "They let just any asshole fly!" he said, or words to that effect.

This whole week has felt off-balance. The ice storm that hit the East Coast this past weekend delayed the processing of my car insurance payment, so while I had in fact paid twice (once manually, once automatically) neither had actually gone all the way through the computers due to things having been shut down.

A brief digression about computer rooms! (This is all simplified, though I know a chunk of my people know more about them than I do; anyone who knows more can leave helpful clarifications if they wish.) You might think that these days, computers are magical creatures that can stay up through all manner of physical insult, and you might be partly right! You can do amazing things to computers compared to what used to take them down, but there are a lot of moving parts behind that uptime.

First, modern management tools allow the people running the computers to switch which physical computer is doing the work, very very quickly across long distances. ( Read more... )

A lot of modern computer stuff happens in shiny modern data centers with fancy uptime promises, and the ability to automatically fail over to remote sites if something happens to the main site. Those are very shiny and new. The world of finance is ... not always on the bleeding edge of technology. They may have some somewhat older stuff. Plus, ice storms are serious business, and if you know it's a matter of time before the power goes out and you're not confident that the generators will hold out, and if the person responsible for making sure the machines stay up is snowed in at home ... maybe it just makes more sense to shut everything down gracefully for the long weekend, so even when the power goes out it won't matter. Then they can bring it back up once they get back in the office, and stuff won't be screwed up, even if it's late.

The customer service agent told me that everything was shut down on account of weather, so I very quickly saw why taking computer systems down would be a sensible move. I confirmed that my policy was active so I could legally drive to work. Yay people being sensible even when the computer is not cooperating.

Purple was not around for lunch this week much -- one day there was a leaving thing on his team, one day he was working from home with the sniffles, another day he had another offsite lunch, and then I had a leaving thing for someone on my team (Sparkles).

It's been the kind of week where people need walks.

Wednesday afternoon I got an email from a person at a company. We called and set up an in-person meeting for the following evening. That turned out to be a five-person interview; I realized that I actually missed the rush of uptime problems.

Other writers out there -- if you're ever beta-read or edited, you get to claim writing as an exercise in collaboration, if you're hard-pressed for an example while interviewing. I really ought to have pointed out the sit-down that lb and I had over a potential question that I was going to ask at a meeting, where we condensed from a large chunk of text to a few lines with bullet points. Writing for a goal means the occasional "I think the way you originally had it doesn't work" with optional "here's why" and "here's what I think you should do instead". lb at more than one point apologized and told me that he didn't want to trample all over what I was trying to say; I pointed out that this wasn't an exercise in my artistic employment of language, this was a text with a very specific goal and two very specific audiences. Therefore my ego about my original draft was irrelevant, and we only had an hour. We got it down to two post-its, eventually.

Friday was the aforementioned goodbye lunch for Sparkles. I was sitting next to the newest person. He quietly asked me if I could help him with the names of the people at the other end of the table. I confirmed the first one, but the second two people were people I interact with a lot less, and naturally their names weren't retrieving through my face. (I possibly could have typed their email addresses, and thereby come up with names, but there was no computer; I was stuck with face-based meat noises.) I apologized for the difficulty. He apologized for it as well, mentioning that he was bad with names. "And I'm moderately faceblind," I allowed.

The new guy lit up. "Oh, so you know exactly where I'm coming from; me too," he said. So we compared notes. If I have time, I may make him a book of flash cards.

Friday was also the day that the department that had suffered the intercision decided to meet for drinks at a local watering hole. I had been included in the invitation, and thought it important to show the colors (mostly blue). So I went, and after a little parking angst, found myself a place against the wall with a cider. I chatted and commiserated and reminisced and even may have uttered some language. One of the remote folks tried to join in via Facetime, but it was noisy and the connection was unreliable. There was some jocularity about one of them there newfangled presence robots, and how one might attempt to jury-rig same via hoverboard, broomstick, and iPad (someone objected as she did not want her iPad to go on fire), and then there was talk of remote control cars and the like.

There was standing around and talking outside. At a reasonable hour, I called Purple to see about dinner; he didn't pick up and I reckoned it was early yet and didn't leave a message. I tried again a half-hour later, and left a message. All told, at the two hour mark I was waiting patiently in the restaurant while getting the odd sympathetic glance from the intercised department (the nuances between "got stood up" and "the rest of the party is 25 minutes late" are mostly dependent on texting) and then there was dinner. Dinner was good. No standing around chatting this time, due to rain.

Various denizens of #cupcake decided that it would be a good idea to meet up socially. R decided that Saturday lunch at her house would be perfect. We had lunch and everyone except lb's girlfriend complained about work. (Sorry, lb's girlfriend!) Then we played cards (Purple had brought his deck) and there was hilarity; lb won and Purple and I had the same score. Every now and then Purple would fall over backwards laughing. Once someone played something meanish and Purple was sure it had been me; it had in fact been R.

Purple and I hung around chatting with R on our way out the door for "just a few minutes"; it was not just a few minutes. However, the moment that R and I started to sound like we were having a conference business meeting, Purple excused himself, gave me a hug, and scrammed. Heh.

A spider inside the "No Soliciting" sign is a nice touch. R needs to (quite literally) debug one of her little technology projects, as the spiders got inside that too.

As a result of the conversation, I started to contemplate a world in which StPatience runs a foundation for women in technology, with me as the administrative person and Nora running a lot of the people side. It's an interesting thought experiment.

(I was headed to bed, but then my brain was full.)

Woke up, stopped by aunt's but she wasn't there, got coffee, took morning pills, picked up prescription, hit work. Realized that having taken morning pills on 40g carb which was *also liquid and coffee* was not a suitable "snack"; effects were to make me owlish with a -17 modifier to my DEX. Fortunately I was rolling 19s pretty consistently until I got food, at which point the handicap started dropping precipitiously.

Purple and his crew opted for lunch inside Purple's building; Mr. Tux and I joined the three of them.

Even now, the ghost of Brad haunts us. I explained the 90% programmer (yet again): the one who says "This is 90% done, someone else can complete the other 10%" and the person/people tasked to complete the other 10% say: "What the shit were you smoking? This is 10% done." "But it's working!" "It's not usable." "*I* can use it!" "You're not a user."

I proceeded through my inbox, and popped out of my building with coffee at the appointed time. Two people from a friend's department were due a ducking in the duck pond. Two ducks were present, which I felt was a good omen. They did not fly off.

The first guy asked was he going to have to duck himself??? Eventually they got things straightened out, and people picked him up, waded out with him, and tossed him in. The other guy couldn't go actually in the duck pond for health reasons, but had cheerfully agreed to a "virtual ducking", where they took pictures in front of the pond, paraded him into the adjacent building and doused him in the convenient shower, then brought him back out for more pictures. I came down to offer both gentlemen cellophane-wrapped packets of boozecandies, and fairly terrible slide whistles.

One of the apparent traditions is also that the team provides dry clothing, often of a hilarious nature. Mr. Zune's Overlord, a dyed-in-the-wool Stanford man, had been given sports attire of a rival institution. One of the guys came out of the building wearing a red Angry Bird costume -- a red sack with a surly face on his belly -- with violently orange shorts. The other guy came out in a giant cigarette box and plaid pajama pants. He held the slide whistle in his teeth and clutched the packet of boozecandy, giving the effect of a box of cigarettes who was also smoking.

#3 suggested that I come back for cake, but I had a meeting and also blood sugar that said no.

The meeting was button construction with the Commandant. ( Breast cancer awareness! )

Exchange's message for when you accidentally put a period at the end of an email address contains, in point of fact, a period directly after the example of what an email address should look like. Since I had copied the address (period and all) from not!Facebook's email integration helpy dialog, I submitted a suggestion to the not!Facebook gods to risk the wrath of the commafuckers and remove the period from the email integration dialog (to help the careless copiers).

There will be a meeting tomorrow morning. I will be taking notes. I coaxed Purple out before the hour got too late.

Since every employee who chooses to go to the Halloween extravaganza gets to bring two guests, Purple had claimed a wristband for me (as well as his own and one for his buddy from the condo board) and dropped it on my desk while I was off with the Commandant. I tried it on. Wow, was it tight. I concluded from that and from something someone said on [off-topic] that the guest wristbands were sized for kids. I left feedback, that maybe there should be some non-kid-sized wristbands next year. The person replied (in a way that wouldn't inform anyone else of what to do) that in fact there were two sizes. So I wandered down to the security office to swap mine for a grown-up sized wristband. The security guy hadn't realized there were two sizes.

Purple and I are comfortable enough to twit each other about gender a bit. He showed up to walk out, and I mentioned that I'd got the wristband thing sorted out. "What kind of woman are you?" he teased.

"I'm a man," I declared in my lowest comfortable speaking voice.

Purple busted out laughing in sheer surprise. He hadn't been expecting that. Mind, he didn't know what he had been expecting, but it hadn't been that.

My gender is a miasma of incandescent plasma.

12:13 PM * Azz ambles in a Silly Valley-ward direction
12:25 PM <Purple> hope Azz isn't going to work


Azz was, in fact, going to work. Partly because a conference week is not the world's most bountiful paycheck week (and therefore a four-day week the next week isn't the best choice) and partly because work has air conditioning.

I proceeded to turn on my disco lights and blast* Abney Park while catching up on the paperwork that drives my normal uncanny ability to remember arbitrary weird things.

* for values of "blast" that became nearly inaudible once you reached the bathrooms.

radius was also at work enjoying the air conditioning, as I learned once I checked in on IRC. He'd gone down to Curmudgeon* City to hack on some fun stuff, since it was a weekend.

* They're not jerks per se, but their group's team chat has an honorable history of being displayed in the team area using Microsoft Comic Chat.

The security guy came through and poked at the door, which was unlocking itself, accompanied by irritated beeping when you tried to lock it, again. He was seen on the phone, with some gesticulation. He went away. He returned with a buddy. They both poked at the door, which was no longer doing the thing. They went away.

Eventually it became closer to evening. radius and I made plans for dinner. Sensibly, he proposed that I drive us both, rather than having him go separately on his bike, as bike and dinner dress codes often differ. I was agreeable, but added that I would have to unearth the front seat of the car.

"I can sit on it," he demurred, not having seen what was in the seat.

"No, you cannot," I said, and proceeded to shuffle an amazing number of things out of my front seat: one of those fabric boxes that goes in the big IKEA cube shelves (filled with all manner of road trip snacks and less edible items such as alcohol wipes), any number of soft drink cups, cans, and bottles, a few used napkins, the empty container of blueberries that figured so prominently in Sunday's digestive misadventures*, a box of tampons, several cherry pits, an expended alcohol wipe, a household size fire extinguisher, and about five blueberries that had fallen down behind the snack box. The fire extinguisher wasn't exactly a surprise, because I knew it was there, but I'd sort of glossed over it in my mental accounting, which was mostly "all god's soda cans". radius helped by relaying a few trips to the bins. Mostly the fire extinguisher is in the car because you don't want a car to do something terrible without you have a fire extinguisher; not that I'm expecting him to do something terrible, but it would be just like a car to go ahead and do something like that if you didn't have one handy. So.

* 2 pounds of blueberries eaten over the course of about 11 hours of Saturday without actual solid food? after 2pm-ish? Not my best life choice.

We then went for dinner and gossip. I introduced him to the Book of Wholesome Hobbies. It's starting to get unwieldy, and I may have to start categorizing. There are an awful lot of prohibitions based on fire.

Eventually we traipsed back to work. I spent some more time whacking chunks of text around. The door started doing the thing again, of course when the other security guard wasn't looking. The first guy seemed frustrated. After he left, I went and poked at it myself. I went outside and badged the door, but didn't open it. The unlock window timed out, and the master door locked itself. Somewhat hesitantly, the problem door followed suit. So I may have figured out how to make it stop doing the thing. Next I need to figure out how to make it do the thing on command.

My notes are in better shape. Hooray!

My plans for tomorrow are approximately:

* Make ice.
* Fetch strawberries.
* Wait for evening to set in.
* Take ice, strawberries, liquid, and a lawn chair down the waterfront and set up.
* Watch other people let off fireworks.
* Share strawberries as appropriate.

There were leftover cupcakes from the party. I brought them in to share.

Meeting shenanigans. 11am meeting was postponed, then canceled. Tomorrow, perhaps.

Lunch outside with Purple and the abbreviated crew, with chatter about the evils of Comcast and its wifi, and modem choices. The John Wayne joke, and how it does not work over the phone. My knee started acting up on my way back from lunch. Alas.

I learned the secret identity of the magnificent bastard troll behind the "GULLIBLE" signs. I am pleased.

A side effect of sharing your journal with #cupcake is #cupcake reading your journal. Heh.

Researcher Sweatervest got his renewed visa and is back. He is not used to the cold anymore, and it is below freezing in his part of China.

The Randomizer is packing his office. I had a thumb drive, which he has loaded for my manager. He came by again, shook my hand, and told me that I have been consistently awesome these nearly three years. I successfully didn't let my eyes fully overflow. (Another friend advised that their department regards me as the Wonder Admin, because I know many things about getting things done, plus doing battle with the evil tech of the week.)

My list of helpdesk tickets is very long. Today I hunted for some of the ones which never got touched to illustrate the point of the Stage Manager. Exhausting and brain-numbing.

The quiet room in the old building is still a quiet and dim cavern for prayer and napping. I took refuge. Purple envies my ability to nap. I came back refreshed.

Purple called it early on account of brain. He likes red velvet cupcakes because it's chocolate but doesn't get chocolate frosting, so it's not being troutslapped with chocolate.

My knee went out again on the walk through the parking lot. I clenched my fists and made it to my car, then leaned against it after putting down my backpack. (This was the day I parked right next to him.) Purple made a little sympathetic noise and gently hugged me.

"Fucking bodies," I said.

That started a really weird digression ( of dick jokes )

There was an opportunity to knock on wood. I knocked on my head. Purple tried knocking on his, but it was hollow. I leaned over to allow him to knock on mine.

I used to hate writing by hand as viciously as I hate the helldesk software now. That faded after I started a journal. I used to write more, when I was more scared of memory loss and wanted to be able to recover from backup. Purple suggested that my sister could have exploited my fear of memory loss and the journal by inserting fake sections I would have had no memory of. Evil! :D

Refueled Vash. Brought home tasty chicken, and fried up more potato wedges with sauerkraut and homemade pickles. Nom.