journal for 2002-10-24

late shift

I worked the late shift today, 1100 to 2000. It was OK, and did the thing I don’t like: the day crawled until the last two hours, when I started getting things done, and then it flew by. Of course, when eight rolled around, I did not stick around any longer. I checked in my CVS work and Gloria gave me a ride home. Now that it’s late in the year, it gets too dark to cycle sooner.

This morning, I played some AX and worked on my decor. I am just no good at organizing my house. I wish I could hire the HRA to do it for me.

I got to work on time and found a decent sized pile of work and messages waiting. Fortunately, most of these resolved themselves pretty quickly, but not so quickly that I could enjoy the early-part-of-the-shift ease-in. Instead, once I was done with that work, I had to get cracking on other work.

I did a lot of crummy ERP-related stuff, especially early in the day, and then did a lot of housekeeping. I need to find a good uniform way to organize my files and emails into directory structures. I’m slowly getting to a standard that I like, but I wish it was easier to defined keywords and views instead of simple trees. When will we have a good RDB filesystem? Reiserfs 4, I await you!

Toward the end of my work day, I got back to work on Kotter, our training system. I solved a few minor (but pesky) problems and did a little more logical design. I hadn’t been looking forward to it, but once I got working, it was nice to be back in the groove of actually programming. All that ERP nonsense had been shrivelling up my brain. Once I get more work done on tuning up our coding standards and procedures, I may get back into the swing of things.

After work, I had a light and tasty dinner of some eggs and toast, and I played a few hours of Star Fox. It’s a strange game. It’s really a whole lot like Zelda 64, but I just don’t enjoy it anywhere near as much. It feels more repetetive and game-like than engaging and story-like. Also, it’s so full of RPG cliches! “I’m Fox McLoud, the leader of Team Star Fox. The Queen EarthWalker sent me here to see the GateKeeper and retrieve the SpiritStones so that they can be placed in the Palace of the Spirits and defeat the SharpClaws, who plan to destroy the Snowhorns!” Gah! Why can’t I just save the princess?

Updating my menus in WindowMaker has made me really want to put my config stuff in CVS. Once I start doing that with all my important data (except for mail), I can do regular backups only for CVS, and then backups will be easy.

Written on October 24, 2002