caveatman

I know it's not a story about a Japanese girl and her pet dog, but this one actually brought me to tears. Rugged, manly tears. Yeah.

A few weeks ago I had a song in my head at work. Normally, my solution is to just play the song through and get on with my life. However, this song was on a CD at home and I just didn't have a way to play it. A few hours later, it occurred to me to look it up on You Tube and a few seconds later I was happy bopping around in my chair to She's a Beauty by The Tubes.

With the wife away tonight, I decided to run through several videos from my childhood. What started as, "She Drives me Crazy was a cool video" has now gone on for almost an hour and has run through FYC, New Order, Talking Heads, Richard Thompson, and Was (not Was). This is way more fun than falling into the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

The past two weeks at work have been just a tad insane. I'm:

• Responsible for the successful delivery (dev/doc/qa) of one feature.
  
• Writing the documentation for that feature.
  
• Training product management on the feature for our big user conference next month.
  
• Learning about the feature I'm taking over in May.
  
• Writing installation and upgrade guides for the release.
  
• Writing data documentation for the release.
  
• Writing release notes for the release.
  

Everyone above and below me acknowledges that this is an unreasonable workload, but we're all out of ideas for ways around it. My goal was to see how much I could get done without falling into the same dark hole that I did five years ago at Big O.

So, we churned, man did we churn, for the past two weeks. My various teams all pulled together and we got it done. No excessively late nights&emdash;several nights staying to 6pm and one night staying to 6:30&emdash;just a lot of hard, efficient, and effective work. The cost was just mentally draining. It got worse when we realized that a misunderstanding was pushing our deadline up from mid-May to this past Wednesday.

Still, we got it done. Got it all done. We cut a few corners, which bought us an extra day, but it's done. Especially now... now it's done and I can just relax. Relax is good. This was a good win. Feels good. Damn good.

My cousin's wireless network was hacked over the weekend. He gave me a call asking what to do. Basically, he had left his network open and knew his neighbours were using his internet connection, but didn't really worry about it. Then, someone took the liberty of securing his network for him. We were both pretty outraged by this... I mean using his connection is one thing, but locking him out of his own service?

He called me up asking for help reclaiming the router and then securing it for himself. It had been a rough week for him with someone hacking into his Facebook account earlier, and I think he had had enough. We reset the router and enabled security. When he tried to log into the network, he kept running into problems. I tried helping as best as I could, but there's only so much troubleshooting I can do over the phone. We decided that I'd just visit one night after work and try to get things running.

Tonight I did that and we had everything running pretty quickly. It turned out that his network ID was still the default and when I changed that to something unique we found at least one other network with the default name. After I explained this to him, he asked, "do you think they were just trying to secure their network and accidentally locked me out of mine? Even if it's a slight chance, I'd still like to think the best of my neighbours."

It was a great point and something I hadn't thought of. Why couldn't this be an accident? I talk about trusting other people, but my first instinct is never to open up to anyone. In the middle of a rough patch, my cousin is able to give the benefit of the doubt. I want to do that too.

A few of us were asked to bake cookies for work tomorrow and bring them in. We have a small snack time every other Wednesday and the organizer thought it would be nice to make the theme milk and cookies.

I just finished my batch. Back at DS, I used to bake all the time and it was incredibly convenient to just be able to bake whatever I wanted and then take it into work the next day. No leftovers for me and everyone at work seemed happy too.

I'm thinking I need to get back into that habit. It'll be a bit different now that I don't live on my own though. I guess folks at work can't complain too much about only getting half of a cake, right?

Tonight was my second consecutive trip to the gym without any climb-mates. I could have teamed up with someone at the gym, but on both nights, I decided to try something a little different and just bouldered for a couple of hours.

Normally, the focus at the gym is going up. With bouldering, your goal is more to go around things. The advantage of going up is that you can put all of your weight on your feet and hold yourself up with your hands... gravity helps with that. Bouldering fixates on twisting yourself around a corner and pulling yourself into the wall with the big toe on your left foot.

I was only there for an hour and a half, but I think this was one of the best workouts I've had since I started climbing &emdash; just exhausting. Not much else to report, so I guess I'll just leave it at that.

A few of us at work have been asked to bake cookies for a thing next week. Today, we got the list of what was coming in. Here we go:

• Peanut butter chocolate chip.
  
• Chocolate chip and butterscotch chip.
  
• Snickerdoodles.
  
• Gluten free chocolate chip.
  

I can forgive the gluten free cookies, because those are some pretty crazy constraints. But variety peeps! C'mon! Oh, guess which ones I'm signed up for. :)

I saw this set of Firefox Pranks last night and thought I'd install them as an April Fool's prank for the wife. After installing the extension, I tested it by going to YouTube and confirming that Rick Astley was coming up for a bunch of the links.

About ten minutes later, I felt guilty and uninstalled the extension. I tried YouTube again, but Astley kept coming back. I tried the Extension Manager, the properties file, everything! No luck. I ended up fifteen minutes late for work, nearly missing my first meeting, and expecting to completely uninstall and reinstall her browser when I got home tonight.

Then I found out that YouTube itself had replaced most of their front page videos with Rick Astley clips. The browser was fine, it was the internet that was conspiring against me. Stupid jerks.

Okay, new rule. After brushing your teeth, beige foods (breads, cheeses, cereals) and green foods (lettuce) are okay. Anything else is off limits. This includes the well known orange and the recently discovered strawberry. Bad, bad, bad combination. Ick.

I got a nice compliment from our Lead Developer today. We were comparing notes about folks on the team and he said that what makes me different from other people on the team is that I'll actually try to do things myself instead of just taking a developer's word for it. What makes my documentation solid is that I try to understand what I'm talking about before I write it down.

I asked him something that's always tickled in the back of my mind, "do you mind that it takes that much longer for me to write some stuff as a result? Do you mind answering all of the questions that I ask?" He answered that he didn't mind because the time they spend with me visibly goes into the product.

I've always maintained that the install guides that I'm currently working on are team guides since so many people on the team contribute to it. I just cut out a lot of the junk and put things into a logical order. It's really gratifying to know that it's noticed and appreciated though.

Go team!