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5-15-03 // 10.17 am if you can carry it out you can take it away NP: Marillion -"Marillion.com" If you ever read reviews of any sort of media whatever, you may notice one theme that's common to the overwhelming majority, which is that the Midwest (i.e. anyplace between the New York - DC megalopolis and the West coast) is populated by unwashed mental rejects incapable of any feat of intellect. I'm sick of it. I'm tired of "Midwest" being used as a synonym for "uncultured". I mean, I'm so sorry I don't have the good sense to realize the error of my ways and live in the only bastions of free thought in the entire country (that's NYC and Los Angeles, apparently). Hrm. I know I shouldn't get so riled up about this, but generalizations like that totally get my goat. Spend some time in a Midwestern city (yes, we have those here) and then see how you like it. The pacing might be different, but there is life in our blood and thought in our brains. I dunno, I'd take a laid back, friendly Midwestern lifestyle any day over a harried, constantly pissed off Eastern one. Seriously, I loved my time in New England and the DC area, but the one thing I couldn't get over was how rude and pissed at the world the entire population seemed. Now I'm not condemning entire groups of people here -- I know and am friends with perfectly excellent people from all areas of this country. But certain regions just give off these weird vibes that I'm not used to. There's the aformentioned rush and surliness of the Northeast, the sort of humid, "you've traveled 50 years back in time" feel of the South, and the blissed-out, kind of alien feel of Southern California. Whomever it is that runs the break room here at my work have finally capitulated to my transmitted-via-ESP demands that they replace those tiny, maddening 6 ounce cans of tomato juice with proper, soda sized cans. I'm a big fan of vegetable juice, really. Is that weird? It seems weird, I mean you never see people drinking it. But hey, I like it, it's very energizing. "Matrix 2" tonight, I have to run out on my lunch hour and grab tickets for Erin, myself and John. Surprisingly, our showing isn't sold out yet, which is nice. Oh, I forgot to share my Xerox horror story from the other day. It was midafternoon Tuesday, and I had to make four or so copies of my ~130 page test plan and results document. So at first I just put the entire pile into the in queue stack of the copier -- it's a huge, industrial grade one, it can handle it, right? Nope. It kept copying about five pages just fine before it would try to suck like three sheets of paper in at once, which would halt the whole process. When this happened, the electronic display would inform me that I needed to lift certain hatches to remove papers. Though even after I did this, the copier refused to remove its warning message and get back to copying. So I try a few more times, each time with successively smaller stacks. No dice. Finally, after about a half dozen trial and error experiments, I discovered that about 30 pages at a time was acceptable to the beast. So I had to feed the document in piece-by-piece, it took forever. People walking by the copier/supplies room must've thought I was a total idiot. In any case, my copying was finally finished, and I triumphantly walked out of the copy room with arms full of huge stacks of paper. I've been jonesing for some Thai food for weeks and weeks now. I could totally go for a green curry with eggplant. Some pad noodles, too. Korean also sounds excellent, as well. A gigantic plate of kimchee, bulgogi, and noodles, washed down with a bottle of beer would rock. I haven't had a proper Italian meal for ages, either, which is silly considering I live like five minutes from the Hill. But yeah, I could totally go for some fettucine alfredo with chicken and a salad. I also wouldn't say no to a plate of carbonara and some garlic bread. Thankfully my desire for Chinese food was satiated at that buffet last weekend. The longer I live with the iBook, the more I find myself turning into one of those creepy "Mac people". I've finally made my peace with the one button mouse, and just last night I was complaining to John about how Windows has to be so difficult with its system preferences. Mac OS X has everything right there in one menu, and you don't even have to restart the machine after you change a setting. It's so nice. Could I ever not own a PC, though? At the current time, I'd have to say not totally, as there are still two PC-specific tasks Mac doesn't cover adequately enough for me -- file sharing , (Limewire blows, honestly) and gaming. Now I'm by no means a gamer, but I can't play FIFA 2001 on a Mac (can I? fill me in if I'm wrong on this), and I don't think they yet make Mac versions of most old-school emu programs. I need some way to play ROMS of Tetris and every version of Mega Man made during the Reagan and Bush administrations. But yeah, despite all that, I still want a standalone Mac to put in the study. I'd keep the PC there, too, maybe have a monitor switch set up so I could still use both. But for day to day computer use, I'm becoming sold on Macs. And don't even get me started on my almost embarassing gushing about iTunes and the iPod... Wow, I've gone on quite a bit here this morning. Alright, time to get my test server nonsense sorted out. Bleargh. [update] I am fucking furious! So just a few minutes ago I get an email from one of the chief engineers in which he has all sort of comments/questions about the design/coding I've done over the past couple of months. For one thing, there's a load of comments like "are you *sure* this is what you should be doing? ask so-and-so about it", when that is *exactly* what I did. Also, there are many places where he's contradicting himself. Months ago I went to him with a conundrum and said "this is my approach, am I on the right track", and he either said yes or not quite here's how it could be better. Now he's all "this is wrong!" even though it's what he suggested I change it to. Also, I'm getting all of these comments now, like weeks and weeks after the actual peer review of this code. I realize it's better to get these comments at this stage than later down the line, but where was he weeks ago when I *specfically* asked for his inputs and comments? And it's not even like he had to come to my meeting, I said to email me comments if you can't be there. But he didn't. I realize he's a very busy man, but grrrrrr! Oh, I'm not a happy camper right now. But it's time to calm down and put all that aside, I have work to do. Sometimes people just piss me off.
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