Danger! Offensive comments ahead!
Archive for May, 2003
Woohoo!!!
May 30th
It’s off to Virginia for a fun weekend at a theme park. Anything I don’t want to do and all my normal responsibilities can kiss my ass!!! I’m outta here till Monday!!
Been lazy with posting lately…a few updates.
May 24th
First, my arm is much better. I have full range of motion now in the shoulder joint itself. After the doctor told me I could move it as long as I kept to a 1 lb weight limit it had a few ways that it didn’t like to move. After a couple times of reaching for something and having it pop rather painfully, it was suddenly able to move through the full range of motion and the popping quit and totally went away. I’m happy 
The only thing still wrong with my shoulder is that the pin keeps the collar bone from moving as freely as it should be able to move. Things like I can take my left hand and move it over my right shoulder and actually place it on my back. My right arm can’t do that. About the time my hand reaches my left shoulder, the pin in my collar bone starts putting pressure on the bone itself (which doesn’t feel all that good). So, shoulder joint itself moves fine, collar bone/shoulder blade junction it limited in movement by the pin. All in all, I’m happy with the recovery.
Work this week was less productive than I wanted. I had to deal with lots of email that kept interrupting my ability to get things done. On top of that, the laptop I’ve been using was OK for email and things like that, but it was too wimpy for real work. That meant I had to log into other machines to do real work, and they weren’t always available. So, today I’m trying to get some real development work done. In order to make that easier, I went to Circuit City Thursday and bought a new laptop. The one I have now isn’t one of those small, light laptops, it’s a beast! But, it kicks ass performance wise. It’s actually quite a bit more powerful than my desktop machine at work (which is a couple years old now). The laptop I got is a p4, 2.4gHz, 512MB DDR 2100 RAM, 40gb disk, dvd/cd-rw, ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 video (which Linux supports rather well, thank God) w/32MB video RAM, and the best part is the LCD panel on the laptop does a native resolution of 1400×1050 so I have *tons* of screen real estate 
Between Thursday night and last night I managed to get it installed and working the way I want so that I’m ready to actually get to work on this thing now. My one bitch about it? It’s got a full sized keyboard. Between that little Vaio I was using and the keyboard I was using on my computer prior to my accident, I’m *tired* of readjusting to different keyboard sizes and layouts. Typos suck…
One of the things I did with this laptop is to finally track down the software I need to make full use of the things I own…I can play my mp3s and dvds on this thing under linux even though rh9 doesn’t ship with software to do that. Sshhh, don’t tell anyone that I like to be able to listen to and watch the shit I’ve paid for. RIAA can kiss my ass, fair use doesn’t mean shit to them.
Finally caught up with email…
May 19th
It took forever, but I’ve finally got my email widdled down to a reasonable level. At one point in time I had over 800 emails in just one folder waiting to be read. It was a work folder too so I couldn’t just delete them all, I actually had to read them looking for information I might need or things I needed to respond to (there were several items that I had unique knowledge of and that needed my input). Anyway, now I’m all caught up on email. If you had an email in my Inbox and I didn’t respond to it, then resend your original email in case I deleted it (I deleted a lot of older emails that no longer looked relevant or important).
Warranty work is so much fun…
May 16th
Last year we had a contractor do some work on our house (ok, maybe that’s a bit of an understatement, they were here for something like a month and completely stripped all the covering off the outside of our house and our roof and put on cedar shake siding and a new roof). Part of the work was done wrong and we called them back in under warranty. So, they showed up today supossedly to do the work, but once I fully showed them what I wanted, they ended up leaving without doing anything so they could come back at a later time (when it was more dry).
Well, at least when they come back I won’t need to be here since I showed them how I wanted it fixed today.
New toys rock…
May 15th
Since I had my arm surgery, I’ve had to use a laptop to do any work because lifting my arm up to use a mouse or raise it up to the level of a keyboard on a desk was a problem. For my own use, I pulled an old, abondoned unit out of my closet. God that thing was slow, 128mb ram and only a p3/333 is really painful running rh9. So, taking pity on me, my manager sent me a not currently being used laptop he had up in Westford that is a nice Vaio with a p3/600 and 256mb ram. It is *so* much faster by comparison that it makes me want to go buy a Vaio for myself
Hunter S. Thompson…
May 6th
On Conan O’Brian. Shooting fully automatic firearms. At teddy bears and life size cut outs of baseball players. With a full bar at the shooting site. And drinking a *HUGE* glass of some sort of whiskey
I am soooo tired…
May 3rd
I went in to work on Thursday. I left kinda early so I could beat the rush hour traffic home. While I was in the office I spent most of my time catching up with people I hadn’t seen for many weeks now. Getting some face time, you know how that goes.
When I got home, I got to work. I set down with my laptop and I opened up a new email. I spent the next 7 hours writing one very long winded email to the CEO of the company. What I had to say in my email may be right or wrong, but it made a difference. I have an appt. for 3:30 Tuesday afternoon to discuss the issues I raised with Matthew (CEO of Red Hat). After that I spent a couple hours winding down and then went to bed.
Friday, Jessica had a shoot at the house. So, I had to get up and get dressed before the photographer arrived. Once I had my first latte, I set my laptop in my lap and started to work (about 10:30am). There was already a response to my email from Matthew. I set in one spot and wrote a counter response for the next 3 or 4 hours. Then I had an email from HR about my participation in the BNW project. I spent the next 3 or 4 hours writing two more emails to the HR person. In the middle of all this I got a call from my manager that there is a last minute issue with one of our kernels. I took about a 30 minute break to settle that problem. I had one other issue come up that took about another 30 minutes of my time. I had planned on going in to the office Friday. I never made it. I didn’t actually get around to eating my breakfast until about 7pm that night.
I have never been so drained from just doing email in all my life. I’m still wiped out today. Wonder what I should put on my status report that goes to the entire engineering department to account for my time on those two days?