Hidden Pugmarks

We have moved around at work; making room for the other studio full of people that will be moving in soon.

My view is still spectacular, but my desk is much smaller. We have all been reduced to 6′ x 8′ “cubes”. I use quotes, since we really only have two walls. Heck, I only have one, because the second one is the window. (6′ x 8′ is not a lot of space for someone from the prairie)

My nearest cube-mate and I can’t both push our chairs back at the same time without threat of bumping into each other.

This is quite a big shift from what we had just a few days ago. Those few days ago we had probably the largest “cubes” in the studio.

None of that really matters. The job is still the same. The good and the bad.

Performance reviews are over. I’m still waiting for the final word in which we will work out what I need to do for career advancement. The craziness of how advancement is measured may actually require me to spend at least one year doing something that is outside of my field of expertise. This seems like an odd path for advancement. It seems to me it will hurt the company more than it will hurt me for that time. Wouldn’t you always want your experts working in the area they are experts in?

I’m sure that someday when I end up being driven insane by the politics of daily business life I will end up trying to start my own company. Just what kind of company that might be still remains to be seen.

I have a lot of crazy ideas, driven by a lot of different desires. I enjoy way too many things. From high level design to low level bit twiddling optimization. I like making games and software. I even enjoy web programming to a certain extent. Ultimately I just enjoy making things that appeal to me. Things that I consider to be fun, useful or interesting.

In other news the lady that lives directly beneath us is the bane of our existence. She complains about how loudly we walk around on our floor in our sock feet, and she complains about the noise the cats make when they chase eachother around.

Then again, she is also the reason that our building gets frequent notices posted requesting that people walk more quietly down the stairwells. I think the Strata should chip in and get her a pair of really good ear plugs.

Now it appears that our bathroom might be leaking (we don’t know where or how or if she is just as I mentioned crazy) down into her unit. We actually went down and looked at the tiny spot on the ceiling above her shower and we were like (Wow, how the hell would anyone ever even notice that?) So yay… more money needs to be spent that we don’t have.

I’m not sure that there is ever enough money, which is too bad. Hopefully my side project will take off and generate a little bit of extra money. I’m not expecting anything from it, but I do like to hope.

I want to go home for a visit sometime. I want to take a vacation. I want a new computer. I want a new TV.

I’ve been tracking down a bug at work for over a week now. A crazy bug driven by an amazing intersection of systems and intermittent events within them. The end result is what is commonly referred to as an off by one error.

The trick here is that it is only an off by one error, some times. When crunching raw numbers it should happen 50% of the time. Due to the actual way in which events occur it happens more like 10% of the time in practice.

I think I have now figured out how to detect when all of the events that need to take place actually take place and compensate for it, but seriously, it is just crazy.

This is all a result of taking what is a fuzzy system designed to be the source data for doing a lot of approximations; and then asking it to provide incredibly precise and accurate results.

I can’t wait until this is sorted out and I can get back to some real work. The work I enjoy.

I’m tired. So tired. So very tired.

I don’t want to be sick anymore. It just isn’t fun. Over the weekend I transitioned from “recovering from seasonal allergies” to “full blown cold and bright red eyes”.

Work on my side project, from this point on referred to as Tiqr, is continuing. Slowly I might add. The scope of it has drastically increased and the more time I have spent with it, as cool as I think it already is, the more I thought it needed a couple of more things to really make it useful.

In my head I’m aiming for an early September release. Hopefully I’ll be opening it up to some beta testing in early August.

It is definitely something I will use, and I hope that others might find a use for it as well.

I do need to rework my plan a little bit. Just to help order the remaining tasks and build up a timeline.

I have also been thinking about keeping sort of a development diary for the whole project, and making all of the posts public when I finally finish it. In fact I will do that. I’ll have to add that to my list of things to do.

Sometimes work is flat out unbelievable. I miss my old manager(s) who didn’t throw infinite amounts of work at me. I am tasked at probably 150% capacity right now, with rumours that even more work is going to come my way. Enough to put me at 180% or worse. Needless to say, it won’t all get done. It just can’t. I can do 110%, maybe even up to 120%, but not this much.

I don’t want to live at the office.