journal for 2002-04-25
work sucks
I get up at 0600 so that I can wake up, shower, and get dressed before going to work. Traditionally, waking up takes the longest. I consider myself woken up when I can actually make out the squiggles on my monitor as I try to read the BBC news.
This morning, like a lot of recent mornings, I woke up too quickly. Unfortunately, I’m not usually woken up enough to read a clock, so I ended up at work almost a half hour early. This ended up being balanced out by the fact that I was able to get almost absolutely nothing accomplished today. Mostly, I wrote documentation and discussed how the system I was documenting needed to be thrown out the window. I also wrote the most detailed bug report of my career.
The only mildly productive part of my day was helping our UK office to start using the ticket tracking system I wrote. It’s actually pretty cool to have people other than my direct co-workers using software that I wrote. I almost feel like a real programmer.
smartmedia stupidity
My dad got a new digital camera a while ago and gave me his old Minolta Dimage V, a bizarre little camera made in 1997. It takes amazing 640x480 pictures onto 5V SmartMedia cards.
The picture quality is mediocre, but that’s fine—the camera was free, and I’m not really interested (yet) in taking high-quality shots. The problem, though, is that no one seems to have a cheap, simple SmartMedia reader that will read old 5V cards and work under Linux with usb-storage. I returned one to Staples today and borrowed my dad’s. Neither worked. I don’t want to spend $60 to make this thing useable. Maybe I’ll focus on getting my crappy QuickCam to work instead, or maybe I’ll actually buy my hardware next time. It’s enough to make me want to own a Mac!