journal for 2002-06-06
work sucks
Work actually started out well, today. I’m preparing for a big meeting with some of our engineers to write a spec for a piece of software we’ve been using for years. Sound brain damaged? Well, it is. I’m hoping that once there are rules about what goes where, I can convince people to abide by them. Enforcing unwritten rules is pretty tough work.
Anyway, at some point during the day, someone wandered into my office and said, “What do you know about the layoffs?” Since I’m one of the “The IT Guys,” it’s probably assumed that I know everything that’s going to happen before it does. This is actually not the case. Often, I don’t know about things that’ve happened for months. Since that was the case, as usual, I said, “Huh?”
Well, it turns out that despite assurances, last week, that no layoffs were planned, just under 5% of our staff was laid off today. I wasn’t among them, but I am still miffed. What’s the point of lying about something like that? I mean, isn’t it painfully obvious that you will soon be revealed as a liar? So, I took the rest of the day off to fume and relax. Time will tell if these two things go well together.
the simulacra
OK, so I didn’t wait before starting my next new PKD book. The Simulacra is clearly a reworking of elements of another book or short story. (I think it must be a short story, because, really, would they publish the same book twice? Well, yes.) It’s really distracting, so I’m putting the book on hold until I find its source.
I’m hoping, though, that reading some nice almost-light almost-modern fiction will inspire me to work more on my own recent-but-now-decaying attempts at writing. Here’s hoping!
programming
RSS is pretty cool. I’ve spent some time since yesterday looking into sites that use RSS and online aggregators. I’m going to write a really light aggregator for use as my home page. I’ll work on that a little later. Now, I’m off for my daily dose of SSX.