sugardeath

9:08

Installing Service Pack 2 on the XP machine… Still gotta do XP3, all patches since, and then Office XP… I’m guessing I’ll have it sometime after noon today.

Didn’t get Center Court for lunch today, will stop at 7-11 again. Sandwiches are better at 7-11 anyway..

At least I got in on time today. And tomrrow is Friday, also the day I hand in my two weeks…

I should really work on that tonight..

I’m pretty sure that nearly all of my hair could be ponytailed. I was playing with it while brushing my teeth last night and decided to just pull it all back to see. I didn’t have any hair ties on me, but it definitely all stayed in my makeshift hand hair tie. It looks funny though.

[…]

9:32

You know what I hate? When I’m taking a poop and my boss comes in and pees in the urinal next to the stall. For some reason that just really irks me. A lot. But only with him.

9:44

Anyone else is fine. Maybe it’s the way he lingers. Maybe it’s the paranoid fear of him trying to make me feel bad for not being at my desk (but I’m pooping). I’m not sure, all I know is that I don’t like it. He brushed his teeth today while I was pooping… slight bit awkward there…

I need to shave…

9:52

There’s very little I can do at the moment. I guess I could keep half assing my script without AutoTester, but I probably already have enough to fix seeing as how I don’t know the names of the forms without AutoTester (it has a specific way of referencing them?), and so I just wrote bullshit for form names for the past three search things… Ugh. I really wish I was kind of more secluded like Mustafa, who’s way at the end. Anyone who walks by can see exactly what I’m doing, but he’s a little more mysterious down there.. What a jerk.

All three Death Note soundtracks clock in at roughly four hours. GOGOGO

OH OH OH I should listen to the Batman Begins soundtrack next! This one little bit of one Death Note song made me think about the Batman Begins score.

10:00

I don’t know why, but I just wondered if there were people still playing Tribes: Aerial Assault on the PS2..

10:07

Oh, PNN. You’re my only friend.

10:14

This may have been a bad idea.. The Death Note soundtrack is… slow, laid back, easy going.. It’s putting me to sleep.

OK, yeah, Evanescence time. Been forever since I’ve listened to Amy Lee’s beautiful voice..

10:30

Melanie finally sent the files for the two CourtBriefs work requests (only took her two days). Hopefully those get uploaded soon enough and I can test them in production.

1:52

Ugh, I’m sure work would be a lot more bearable if I weren’t falling asleep every ten minutes.

I got my machine back finally, with XP. It’s pretty cool.

The graphics driver keeps crashing.. yay…

3:24

Still working on it. Just when I was thinking we needed a good rain, we got one!

4:30

Maybe we got it? Namon was useless for this one.. Google is my friend. When it says that the Savage video card is dying, don’t install Intel video drivers.

Solution: Turn down the hardware acceleration in WinXP so as to tax the card less. Makes a ton of sense. Seems to be good now.

4:44

I got so little done today, it’s stupid. The day still went by fairly quickly. And the storm seems to have passed, it’s a lot lighter outside (though you can’t tell with these windows, eternal twilight is how one of the devs described them).

I can’t wait to get home and go on my computer and talk to people and take a nap and..

[…]

4:54

Email this to myself so I can post it when I go home, pee, and get out of here.

[…] The fifteenth is my last day at Law Bulletin. I need to put my two weeks in this Friday..

Sample Resignation Letters

11:57

[…] It’s very exciting. I’ll be out of here. While it is a GREAT place to work for, I wish I had more responsibility and less down time. It’s fucking boring. I’d rather be bored at home doing nothing than bored at work and feeling awkward because I’m getting paid to pretend to look busy. That’s not… work, that’s cheating.

Namon at least got most of Office 2000 back on here. No access for me, but that’ll just be even more reason for Jon to upgrade me. Though all signs point to him not doing so. Namon started saying.. some things about Jon. I don’t know true any of them are, but I could see them.. maybe.. Namon also told me about how he went to Alabama State for an education but came out of it with a kid. Actually.. he mentioned that most of his kids were mistakes. I never found out if he has one or more baby mamas.

He seems like a cool guy. Dad is from Southfield? Loves hockey. Loves the Wings. His sixteen year old kid lives with mother in Mobile, Alabama but visits every summer. The went to see some Blackhawks games a while back. I’ve been meaning to go to a Blackhawks game, preferably when their facing the Wings.

This is my first 7-11 run in ages, and only because I was starving and didn’t have time to hit Center Court for lunch this morning. It literally took like three minutes. I wonder if when whoever looks at my fob record they’ll wonder why I fobbed out at 12:10ish and why I fobbed right back in like three minutes later. Should I really have even bothered? I get paid a hefty sum on Friday. I get paid a heftier sum two weeks after that, which is also the second day of school. I figured I’d take the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before school off to get things in order. […]

I grabbed two string cheeses at 7-11. I am excited to eat those.

[…]

I am so cold right now, I don’t know why. I’m moving my leg a ridiculous amount.

12:28

[…]

Why am I so cold?

I really need to lift.. something. Anything. Helping the kids move in two weeks ago proved to me a) how much I need to do it and b) how easy it can be. They’re like.. a million (twelve) years young, right? Well, their suitcases or whatever were like five (one and a half, maybe) times their size, so Casey and I took them up to the third floor of South hall for the kids. Well, my arms were damn sore, but it only took like, what, ten to fifteen minutes to move all that? I need to find some sort of physical labor that would tax my upper body without me really thinking expressly about working out.

1:03

Hm.. actually got some work done on my AutoTester script.. It’s gettin’ there.. I really hope I’m not doing this for the next two and a half weeks.

Everyday around 10AM, 1PM, and 4PM I get an email. Everytime I think it’s something real, someone trying to contact me, and I feel a little less lonely and bored here at work. But then I see a new emailed in the PNN/SII folder and realize it’s just the automated PNN to SII Submission Batch Process…

Guilty pleasure admission: I like Beyonce’s Irreplaceable. Also t.A.T.u (I need more of their songs).

I hope this Bawls (in a can, ew) helps me stay awake today.

Namon was bitching about how I was on an NT machine as my main work machine, that it wouldn’t help me with my schooling (what? I’m thinking he meant like work experience for school or something? I’m not sure). He asked me how I could use this machine and not get frustrated. “It’s only a summer job.” Then we shared a terrorist fist-jab.

All of my name searches in AccessPlus are for “Rademacher” because it is not only fairly rare in the database (there’s still results, though, which is fun), but because I can type it completely with my left hand (with a swift slide to the right for the ‘m’).

Man, I really hope whoever looks at this script after I’m done and gone appreciates my comments and stuff. I should spent a whole day one of these next weeks commenting the shit out of this and put it in my DSR as “commented script to make it more understandable to others.”

1:23

1:43

Yum yum string cheese.

Ooh… you touch my tralala…
Mmmm… my ding ding dong..
(mmm..!)

I just stuck a little header on my script

#By Tony Lademan (2008)
#For Law Bulletin Publishing Company
#Quality Assurance department

It’s within my rights, yeah? I mean, not that I’d have any use for this script outside of LBPC, but still.. it’s not a bad idea to have my name attached to things I’ve written.

Speaking of things I’ve written, I need to get on integrating MSN and ICQ support into that plugin I’m modifying. I’ve already had two requests (one for each) over the weekend, so I should probably get on that tonight. It’s not too hard, just gotta figure out how to recompile the Python egg.. <_<

2:06

Ehhh… my stomach feels funny. Maybe I shouldn’t have let that cheese sit at room temperature for almost an hour and a half..

2:18

I put in this LOGGEDIN variable and check so that JUST THIS wouldn’t happen:

Sorry , Invalid Username/Password or Inactive Account!

It seems that logging in too fast/often results in the account being locked for a short period of time.

Oh look, there’s a Work Request in my name for Office Pro to be reinstalled. Namon, you’re a cool guy, really. He’s talking with Jon right now.. They’re… going to wipe the disk? Time to back up my stuff to the SQA server…

2:38

Whoo.. Running Win2000 on a Pentium 2 with 256mb of RAM… Why is the p2 mounted veritcally? Why is the heatsink so stupid looking? Namon’s gonna drop XP on my old machine (a p3). Shouldn’t take too long. Worst case I’ll have it back sometime tomorrow.

I can’t install AutoTester on this machine because the cdrom isn’t hooked up and the IDE cable in there doesn’t have a second connection on it.

FUN STUFF

2:51

Oops I didn’t have to move the machines, he’s going to do it right here, oh well. WinXP here I come.

3:00

My old machine has a 10GB harddrive. That’s special.

Namon commented on how fast I type earlier today.

Is it really already three? This day is flying.

Been listening to a a lot of.. hard? music lately at work. Time to give the Final Fantasy Piano Collections another go. IV’s is the best. I need to play it on the DS.. Got somewhat far on the PlayStation, but I refuse to play it again on the SNES (on my Wii) due to the shitty translation job. Though the SNES version has dialogue during the flashack in the intro, neither the PlayStation or the DS versions have that.. Kind of odd, I thought.

Casey suggested we go see Dark Knight at the IMAX again with Phil this weekend. I am excited. I wonder if we will be playing D&D? Alex is gonna be at home for the weekend I’m pretty sure and I don’t know what Jeremy is doing.

3:13

Seventeen minutes until my boss leaves for the day.

Typing this script up in Notepad with no way to test it is really lame. I don’t have the drive to work on it at the moment..

I just got really tired, too… Ugh.. stupid guarana crashes… asldkfsl;fj

Manjot has taken to emailing a friend or a family member or something during work hours. I can’t tell who the recipient is, it’s all in Indian.

I am thinking of buying Mario Kart Wii sometime soon. I miss racing online and just racing in general. Plus the time trials, that’s where it’s really at in that game.

3:42

AND HE’S OUTTA HERE

The name you chose for this PC earlier in the setup
TESTPC7
is already in use by a machine on this network.

Please choose another:
TESTPC007

I’m sure Namon won’t mind.

Jon told me to ask Namon for another IDE cable to hook up the cdrom in the 2000 machine I’m using at the moment. I don’t think I’ll do that..

4:02

Both Manjot and Mustafa are out of here. Another hour fifteen for me. I’m falling asleep. This can’t end well… Time IS flying, though, so maybe I can just make the most of it somehow.

Goddamnit! Got another PNN/SII email.. I was hoping someone finally moved the CourtBriefs fixes to production so I could do one last final test and send out the last approval email… BUT NO

Hm, I wonder how traffic jammed people would take to me blasting classical or piano music? That’s be pretty awesome. I used to go to/from work last summer blasting the local classical station, got some weird looks. I was a cool guy. Not that my car speakers can really blast, per se.

Speaking of my car, I really need to see why I have a ticket on it. I was told that, despite my being in the wrong lot, I would be fine because my car is currently disabled. I should also reenable it. Sometime this week or next week, for sure.. Ugh.. So much to do…

Tatyana’s out. It’s just me and Namon whenever he gets back and decides to finish the XP install. I can install XP for personal use and all, but I imagine there’s some network settings he has to give it so that it behaves properly on the LBPC network. Perhaps.

Conor didn’t come in today and we didn’t get an email from Jon saying “Conor will be out today.” Hm.. Namon said that Conor doesn’t know what he wants to do. He’s been here two years, he’s been a chef, and he is/has researching/ed theology. Hm.

I wonder how old both Mustafa and Conor are. They have little bits of gray hair and Conor has some thinning going on at the top of his head. Conor’s wife (maybe? he has a ring) had a baby two months ago. I.. really don’t want to be like either of them.. They’re both fairly.. nondescript and just.. here to work. The devs seem to be pretty cool, though. Joking around with each other, always talking to each other, ALWAYS HAVING STUFF TO DO. INTERESTING STUFF, TOO. Shortly after I got hired there was an opening for a Java dev. I’m pretty sure the employee handbook stated that I have to be in my current position some arbitrary amount (longer than I would be employed for anyway) of time before I can move around. And besides, the Java they’re doing here is probably far advanced compared to what I know (though I imagine I’d have a much better chance of understanding it if I had actually done any work for CS441 this summer…).

Nevermind, I think Namon’s outta here too. He just came over, did some stuff with the install then turned off the monitor and left. His shirt was untucked where previously I think it had been tucked in? Perhaps.

IT’S JUST ME GUYS. ME AND KELLY, BUT I DON’T TALK TO HIM ‘CAUSE HE’S ACROSS THE ROOM. SILLY DEVELOPERS.

4:15

4:26

The Final Fantasy IV Celtic Moon disc is actually pretty good too, a neat take on the game’s music.

I really need to reboot into Windows and get some more podcasts for these next two weeks.. I’m sure there’s at least two more shows of This Week in Tech to pick up as well as a few Paranormal Cafes. Should keep me entertained for all of… three days, maybe?

I hope you guys like long posts. Really, how many of you read ALL of the last one, and are reading ALL of this one? That’s a lot of time that you could be doing something more productive with your life. You should feel bad.

4:46

Some of these Chrono Trigger remixes sound slightly different on my Zune.. I wonder if it’s just because I haven’t listened to them in some time?

4:52

I need to grab more remixes from ocremix.org. I’m going through my Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger ones right now and I forgot how GOOD some of them are. Damn. Not to mention the compilation projects.

I am really tempted to take one of these AutoTester One discs home and make a copy of it. The program is damn neat and I really wanna play with it more.

Things on my “to order” list:

• A Wii VGA Cable (~$50)
• A new keyboard (~$50)
• A mini RCA audio/video cable for my laptop (~$??)

5:09

Time to put this up and get out of here! Or email it to myself so that I can proof read it when I get home. Why are journal entries the only thing I proofread? Well, journal entries and messages to people, but I don’t proofread school papers or anything of that sort. Oh well, time to get movin’.

Today was pretty fun. A little before noon my boss brought Namon (I think?) over to upgrade both my and Manjot’s installs of Office 2000 to Office XP/2007/whatever. Works fine on her machine, she’s running XP. Seems to work fine on my NT machine, but.. I reboot like the installer wants me to and go to open the Access Database we use and… error city. OK, close Access, try to open the database again… wait, why are you searching for msaccess.exe? Why do the shortcuts to Access no longer work? Why is msaccess.exe GONE? What? Oh, great. How did this happen? Alright, reinstall Office… Nope, Access doesn’t even isntall this time. …OK, let’s put the old Office on… er.. installer exited prematurely due to an unexpected error? Cool! Not only can I now not access the database, I don’t have Outlook anymore either! Basically, I can’t really do anything at the moment. The dude said he was gonna go find the CD ’cause that might help (he was doing a network install before), but he never came back. …

Because this whole fiasco took about three hours or so, I wasn’t able to get lunch… So here I am starving with forty minutes left on the clock… I am going straight to Chipotle after work and getting another big-as-my-head burrito. It will be delicious and filling.

I definitely have a lot more money in my bank account than I thought, so I can totally justify buying this burrito. I might also be able to justify a new keyboard.. After using the laptop for the weekend, I realized how shit my five year old keyboard is. The space bar only works in the middle, a lot of keys either don’t hit or hit multiple times.. It’s annoying. I found a neat keyboard on newegg that’s about $50, same exact key layout as my current one (which is great, I love this layout), glows just the same, but looks to be of higher quality than mine. Thing is, a wired Apple keyboard is also $50, and that thing is sexy. I have heard of some issues with the Apple keyboard and Linux, but I’d have to do more research.

Half an hour..

I’ve been spending my free time doing a lot of… nothing. Well, nothing social or interesting, just playing around with my computers.. I got Skype working on the laptop, full webcam and front mic support too! Tested it with David last night, works pretty well. Someone Skype me at sugar_death sometime :(((

A while back Nicole linked me to a Youtube of some dude who took a picture of himself once per day for like.. a couple of years? I’m thinking about doing something like that. It’d be pretty neat. I look like shit in one of the test pictures I took Sunday morning after I installed Cheese.

I can totally camwhore now that I’ve got the mic working too.. <_<

I really hope my boss gets me a new machine… an XP machine. How many of our clients are really using NT still, anyway? How many of our apps are web based? The majority of them, right? That’s OS independent there. Give me an XP machine already!

I feel so disconnected without email. It’s pretty awesome. I can’t see if I’m supposed to test these three work requests in production that I’ve been working on. I can’t… see anything. I can’t send my boss a Daily Status Report.. Haha, that’ll be fun to explain tomorrow. “Yeah, he said he was coming back, but he didn’t.”

I should have quite a bit more money come this Friday, too. And then two weeks after that… and two weeks from that… I won’t be broke-ass for some time! It’ll be.. exciting. What will I do with that money? Buy food.

Ah! I forgot to grab my Costco card while at home… :/

I wonder if I should be saving these to my desktop as I type them? I haven’t deleted any yet, I’ve got two for yesterday and one for today. I can really delete them after I post them.. Laziness will fuck me over, watch.

Twenty minutes.. Go me for getting into work fifteen minutes late, thus leaving fifteen minutes late.

My timesheet has three hours unallocated to any Work Request. That’s a fair amount of time that I was watching Mr. Dude play around on my computer.

The AutoTester script that I was working on screws up massively when I make it start searching… It’s a pain in the ass. Actually, no, what it is is that the developers set the address for a ‘Terms of Use’ link on this ONE page to $CURRENT_ADDRESS + “#” instead of linux-ts/test/apweb/terms.cfm. Ugh. I should email Melanie about it so she could fix it quickly..

OH WAIT

Gay.

Fifteen minutes.

When leaning forward, my bangs (can they really be called bangs at this length? I part my hair and they’re mostly off to the side) fall forward and hit me on the mustache area. I can almost get them in my mouth if I try (well that sounded dirty).

Twelve.

I like how I can write and write while bored at work but I can’t arse myself to even open WordPress to begin writing while bored at home.

I really should have left Dude Man at my computer and gone to get lunch anyway. The hunger pains were pretty bad for a while there… but they’re gone now for some reason. I don’t understand it.

Man I love the YTMND soundtracks. Number eight has The Lonely Man Theme, which some of you may recognize as the end credits music for the old Incredible Hulk TV show.

ALSO AXEL F. I think I may have mentioned this before?

Four.

Lights off in the server room.

Lots of TV themes.. Cheers, Flintstones, Bill Nye, MacGuyver, The Price is Right, and a few others?

Out of here. Big ass burrito time!

Saw a custom license plate on the way back yesterday that said ‘Schema.’ I thought that this would make a neat computer name. Too bad Feldspar is already named =P

We hit a traffic jam somewhere in Indiana. Just like last, we opened the windows and blasted music. Unlike last time, Casey played Move, Bitch, which is what I am assuming everyone was thinking. If I had a car with a good sound system (let alone one that turned on) and I got stuck in a traffic jam, I’d play something upbeat. Something positive. Maybe some Frank Sinatra or something. People are surely upset about the traffic jam, but angry drivers do not equal good drivers and so I would blast nice, calm music to soothe everyone. This is what I want to do.

I wish I could bring my laptop to work so I could fool around on it during down time. I am falling asleep so hard here (really gotta have these late night chats earlier).. I wouldn’t even need internet access. I’d just play around with learning more Python, it’d be a good use of time.

I think.. I think I am going to skip dinner and go straight to bed when I get home.. I am so tired.. I slept like three hours.. maybe. Two and a half? I slept maybe an hour and a half in the car yesterday, and from about 10am to 2pm Sunday morning after Jacki’s party. I am so tired..

I am dying here.

These next three weeks are gonna blow.. Working full time… Ugh. I’ll make roughly $1.5k pretax, though (which comes out to $19.5k yearly, pretax, if I just kept working this job year-round).

I’ve got my music at a volume of 11, I normally keep it at 7 when walking through the city or on the train, in an attempt to stay awake.. It’s not working very well..

I forsee Notepad becoming my good friend these next few weeks (yay for website monitoring)..

One more hour left and I’m spending the first five minutes or so of it putting giraffes in the air.

I really need to get on top of a few things in the next few days. All school related… Ugh. How did the semester end so soon? It felt so far away just nine weeks ago.. I can’t believe I’m already a junior. This is crazy. Two more years and then I’ll be outta here.. And I still need to fit in two IPROs (moar liek IBLOWS amirite :|)..

Questionable Content is doing a guest week sort of thing and it upsets me. Some of them are good, yeah, but get back to the regular comics

I finally have a use for Opera’s “My Opera Synchronization” feature that was introduced in 9.5: Syncing bookmarks and what have you between my two computers. I had Opera up on both and was managing bookmarks on Andy when I noticed that it took about five to ten seconds for Feldspar to get the updated bookmarks from Opera’s servers, which is not bad at all. I might get around to fixing my Windows install of Opera too, as it currently just points to the Linux install’s profile and that causes problems here or there. It could just use the sync feature instead.

See that link up there, “Things I’ve Made”? There’s a new page under it for the modifications I made to the Pidgin Mumbles plugin that I talked about a while back. I just started getting emails about it so I figured it was a good idea to set up a dedicated page for it. Besides, it wouldn’t really be in the whole open source spirit if I didn’t release the modifications I made =P

The wireless network is so stupid fast when it comes to torrents and stuff. I don’t understand it. Andy can upload like no one’s business on the wired network, but Feldspar can download like no one’s business on the wireless. It’s.. weird.

Apparently the air conditioning system in the server room is… twenty-five years old? That seems a bit old for a server room that’s probably been around for ten years at most (I’m pretty sure LBPC was late to the whole online game).

Thirty-four minutes. Almost theeerre…

This place is surprisingly.. laid back. Like, this is my department’s down time and I have NOTHING to do. Even when we were “busy” I still had a lot of personal down time. Everyone’s always sitting at their desks with earbuds in or headphones on. While we were on the fifth floor due to AC failure on the third, I had a clear view of my boss’ screen and he.. was often on outside sites just doing his own thing. I wonder how long a connection to an outside site must be before it’s considered in violation of the internet access rules?

PuTTY is on the network share, I wonder if an encrypted SSH connection to my own machine would be a bad idea?

I wonder what Conor is doing down there, looks like he also has nothing to do and is just sitting, staring. Oh the last half hour of the day..

At least I’m not falling asleep anymore. I wonder what fixed that?

Taco Bell after Jacki’s party was pretty damn fun.

Hm. I need to figure out what I am going to do with my hair. Keep letting it grow out? Let it go all super pony-tail down to the ass like Casey used to have? Or just keep it at a certain length? What length? Blah.

Oh, there goes Conor at fifteen before five.

I need to figure out an easy way to sync Thunderbird.. Probably just symlink Feldspar’s Thunderbird profile to Andy’s. If I do that, though, I would only be able to check my email while Andy is on and there is a solid network connection between the two computers.. Hmm..

Not much else needs to be synced.. That I can think of.. yet…

SPEEDY SPEED BOY GASOLINE’S BURNING
SPEEDY SPEED BOY asdkfljasl;df
SPEEDY SPEED BOY EVERY NIGHT AND DAY WIND IS ON MY FACE

I have three extra USB ports now, and a Sony MemoryStick reader that’s NOT on my printer (assuming I can figure out how to get it working under Ubuntu).

So I did a search for ‘webcam’ in the Ubuntu repos and a fair number of programs came up. The very bottom of the list was this program called “cheese.” Well, with a name like that, I GOTTA install it. It worked perfectly with my webcam on the first try. It reminds me of the PhotoBooth on OSX with it’s layout and filters and stuff. I like it.

Alright, six minutes left. Shutting down the computer, packing up, and peeing should get me outta here past six.

Woot. Got Feldspar and Andy playing nicely via Synergy (a network based KVM). It’s like having two monitors, but it also gives me an extra 60GB harddrive, 2GB RAM (MORE THAN ANDY), and the ability to run programs on feldy instead of andy (like, say, my music client which will just connect to mpd on andy.. speaking of, i need to get pythoning). I am actually looking forward to controlling my music feldspar. It’ll be fun. I get great download speeds on him too, stupid wired network slowing down andy..

I need a new keyboard for Andy… and I have a lot more money in my bank than I thought… I might go for the new mac keyboard? I need to read up on how it behaves under Linux..

So, um, this weekend was… interesting. Yeah, that’s the word. Some bad… a good amount of.. good. I think we’ll leave it at that for now..?