journal for 2002-08-22
work
No one has been laid off for a day, now, at our UK branch, but I get the feeling that more layoffs are coming. We were promised fifty, and there don’t seem to have been that many, yet. Among those gone, though, is my boss’s counterpart. This is neither a great surprise nor a great tragedy, in my eyes. He seemed like a decent fellow, from my meetings and discussions with him, but he was unbelievably difficult; I don’t think I ever heard him agree wholeheartedly with anything. Ever.
The annoyance of this is that I also never saw him convince anyone else of his opinions. I’m pretty sure this was because he was always wrong. There comes a point when working with the Always Wrong and Arguing guy becomes simply impossible. Now that he’s gone, we’ll see how things progress.
I’ve been doing a lot of documenting, lately, which is good and bad. There comes a point when I’d much rather just be coding—but it’s good to keep up the documentation of specs and implementations, if only to show people how it’s done. It’s frustrating to be told, “We’re going to go with the other solution; you know, the one with undocumented code, an anomalous database structure, and no spec? Yeah, that one.”
Meh!
play
With our video games returned, we were free to watch the first of our rented movies, last night: Resident Evil. It really wasn’t the awful, awful thing so many people made it out ot me. Now, I’m prejudced: I like zombie movies. But, even so, it was alright. It was a generic B horror movie. It really wasn’t even very gory, which I thought was really odd. Romero’s (excellent) Living Dead flicks were full of intestines, dismemberment, and other choice material. This movie was made decades later, but wasn’t even as graphic—it just had some scary monster effects. I want intestines, dammit! (For a great example of what’s missing from modern American cinema, watch the final few scenes of Day of the Dead. “Choke on it! Choke on it!”)
In other fun news, I finished The Shining, which was a darn good book. I think I preferred the Stand, sucker that I am for the eschaton, but this book didn’t suffer from Steven King Ending Syndrome. The ending wasn’t great, but it didn’t make me fling the book across the room in disgust as The Hand of the Great Space Turtle-God Destroyed All. Or whatever.
I’m getting really antsy about Mario and Monkey Ball. I fixed the countdown to match the time at which I can pick them up from EBX, which just pushes them 56 hours further away. The annoying thing is that I’m not a huge Mario fan—I just want a good game that can kill a lot of time. It’s not like I don’t have anything else to do, but… I guess I’m just longing for some good mindless entertainment. Maybe I should get a cup and ball. You never know which way that crazy thing is gonna go!