Generic things
My mind is heavily focused on writing right now, trying to spend some time every week writing something new, editing something I wrote a couple months ago, and getting something ready to send off to some literary fiction magazine, likely to be rejected by them six weeks later.
That's an odd process in itself. Most of these things I send off I feel so strongly they'll get rejected I'd bet money on it. It's only after I do a half dozen or maybe half a hundred submissions that something will get accepted. Yet, still have to go through those first six or fifty submissions to get the possibility of an acceptance.
And I don't know how to use commas for s***. There's ten cents for the curse jar.
Granted it's late September and there are three full months left before the end of the year, but I was looking at my 2011 writing folder last week and I've only written three stories this year, plus finished a novella from 2010 that rolled into February of 2011. Need to be doing better. Empty promises? We'll see. Would like to be writing one story and editing a different one per month in 2012 (plus for the rest of this year).
The printing of the stories is a whole other fiasco. Maybe a separate post on how I had to dredge up my old lexmark73 printer that I haven't used since high school.
Work is good right now. I am mostly doing build and deployments and writing code to automate all of that. All of the code is internal use only and very much on my own grab what I want to work on right now and do it. If I come up with any ideas or things I want to add, I can just create a task for it and start working on it, which is nice.
Right now I'm sitting in a meeting with two other guys watching the build process blow up again and again as we keep running into errors. Good times on a Wednesday.
Last week I got dragged back into PSE stuff. Dragged is a little strong of a word. I volunteered when a lvl 2 came down the aisle looking for an engineer and I asked him if I could help. He stopped to talk and I answered some questions for him. I seemed to give him some knowledge he didn't already have, and I was glad could help. Later that afternoon he IM'ed me and asked if I could come over so he could pick my brain. I stopped by and sat down to look at a partial stack trace that the customer was getting on their end but could not be reproduced by him on our end. I told him it was likely they had some code or files out of date, though he protested that he had a gotten a recent backup from them and was testing against all the same code. I said if we could get the rest of the stack trace we could isolate where it was coming from and look at the code for any changes that would account for them getting the error and not us. Took about an hour for him to retrieve the rest of that trace, but it did the trick. I could see where it was happening in the code, went and looked up that code, and found a conditional wrapped around a few lines that indicated code would only get executed if a sys param was set specifically (data issue) and he was not testing against the same data as them. Bingo. Finding that felt good.
Also noted on Friday multiple social awkward moments. People would stop by my desk to ask about something or talk and we'd talk and eventually I'd have said all I had to say and they wouldn't say anything more. I was good, but they just hung around sort of staring off into space and hmmming to themselves. I guess it's "it's Friday and I feel like taking it easy" mentality. I'm not so big on the hanging around in mutual silence with some else, makes me feel out of place.
It feels good to write in here, despite the fact that I probably procrastinate doing so more than anything else currently in my life.
That's an odd process in itself. Most of these things I send off I feel so strongly they'll get rejected I'd bet money on it. It's only after I do a half dozen or maybe half a hundred submissions that something will get accepted. Yet, still have to go through those first six or fifty submissions to get the possibility of an acceptance.
And I don't know how to use commas for s***. There's ten cents for the curse jar.
Granted it's late September and there are three full months left before the end of the year, but I was looking at my 2011 writing folder last week and I've only written three stories this year, plus finished a novella from 2010 that rolled into February of 2011. Need to be doing better. Empty promises? We'll see. Would like to be writing one story and editing a different one per month in 2012 (plus for the rest of this year).
The printing of the stories is a whole other fiasco. Maybe a separate post on how I had to dredge up my old lexmark73 printer that I haven't used since high school.
Work is good right now. I am mostly doing build and deployments and writing code to automate all of that. All of the code is internal use only and very much on my own grab what I want to work on right now and do it. If I come up with any ideas or things I want to add, I can just create a task for it and start working on it, which is nice.
Right now I'm sitting in a meeting with two other guys watching the build process blow up again and again as we keep running into errors. Good times on a Wednesday.
Last week I got dragged back into PSE stuff. Dragged is a little strong of a word. I volunteered when a lvl 2 came down the aisle looking for an engineer and I asked him if I could help. He stopped to talk and I answered some questions for him. I seemed to give him some knowledge he didn't already have, and I was glad could help. Later that afternoon he IM'ed me and asked if I could come over so he could pick my brain. I stopped by and sat down to look at a partial stack trace that the customer was getting on their end but could not be reproduced by him on our end. I told him it was likely they had some code or files out of date, though he protested that he had a gotten a recent backup from them and was testing against all the same code. I said if we could get the rest of the stack trace we could isolate where it was coming from and look at the code for any changes that would account for them getting the error and not us. Took about an hour for him to retrieve the rest of that trace, but it did the trick. I could see where it was happening in the code, went and looked up that code, and found a conditional wrapped around a few lines that indicated code would only get executed if a sys param was set specifically (data issue) and he was not testing against the same data as them. Bingo. Finding that felt good.
Also noted on Friday multiple social awkward moments. People would stop by my desk to ask about something or talk and we'd talk and eventually I'd have said all I had to say and they wouldn't say anything more. I was good, but they just hung around sort of staring off into space and hmmming to themselves. I guess it's "it's Friday and I feel like taking it easy" mentality. I'm not so big on the hanging around in mutual silence with some else, makes me feel out of place.
It feels good to write in here, despite the fact that I probably procrastinate doing so more than anything else currently in my life.