journal for 2002-10-07

kompressor sleep not enough

I’m actually writing this Tuesday morning. I was tired enough, last night, that I didn’t feel much like journalizing.

work

I checked out of the hotel in the morning and hauled my bags to work. This wasn’t a big deal; I’m borrowing one of Gloria’s awesome giant suitcases, and it rolls nicely.

Work sucked. I started working on the actual “interactive applications” in the new module in the ERP system. The form designer crashed so many times that we decided to try a different machine. We untangled the rats’ nest and hauled the first machine out and plugged the next one in. The new machine would hard reset at apparently random intervals, so that one had to be yanked, too.

At this point, Godfrey took over. He pulled out a disused little powerhouse of a workstation and connected it. He ran the software updates, removed some extraneous stuff, defragged it, reinstalled the ERP system, and so on. This took about two or three hours, and I left it defragging it overnight. This morning, I logged in, set my preferences, and started doing some form designing. BAMF! The form designer started crashing again. This may be the single worst piece of software I’ve ever used. Ever. Really.

I’m trying to relax a bit by listening to Kompressor. This guy rocks.

after work

Matt (my new host) and I left work at 1700 and headed to his parents’ house, where his dad changed his spark plugs. I sat around for a while and chatted with his mom. I think she most definitely had a bad experience with some American(s) at some point, though it’s hard to say exactly why. “That clock over there is $LARGE_NUM years old,” she said. “I bet there’s an American who’d pay a lot of money for that!” Huh.

I unpacked a little, at Matt’s, and he took a pile of pictures of his place – he’d taken some before he decorated, and wanted some “afters.” The apartment is nice, and very Ikea. I’ll have the pictures up soon, I think. I’m playing around with iGal, and I’ll probably just put up a single gallery for now. iGal is giving me a lot of ideas about image handling in Debug. I definitely want to improve on the crappy one-image-per-para concept currently in place, and I want to be able to reference single images in multiple entries. I’m thinking that Debug will end up with a loading dock for dumping raw entries, a store for storing parsed content, and a catalog for finding entries in given dates or categories.

Anyway! We did some grocery shopping (I got a nice pic of my haul) and then got dinner. Matt had never had Japanese, so we went to the “Japanese Tavern” and had miso soup, temaki, and unagi don. It was way good. Afterwords, we had a few drinks (I stuck to cider, as I wasn’t in a beer mood). Gloria called, which was good. She’s still sick, which is bad. I was also glad to hear that the burn she’d gotten on her finger was not quite as bad as I thought. Burns suck.

When Matt and I got home, we had one last drink and some doritoes. They have the weirdest flavor /everything/ here. He had “hint of lime” and “lightly salted” flavored doritoes. WTF?

That reminds me: for lunch, I had BK again. I got some curry sauce, which was actually not entirely disgusting. I took a picture of some of the weird condiments (there’re more to go, though) and started to eat. When I opened the vinegar packet, though, and poured it on my fries, it came out like maple syrup. (Godfrey said, “like snot.”) It was pretty awful, and I got new fries, with which I stuck to curry and BBQ.

Today, I may skip lunch altogether and wait for dinner. Pot noodles! (That’s cup noodles for you non-exiled Yanks.)

Written on October 7, 2002