Selenay's Ramblings

I wrote a long blog post about Deployment Day Take Two and then I deleted it all because man, it was loooooong.

Almost as long as Deployment Day Take Two. Which ended up taking 30 hours (I took a five hour nap in the middle) and much of that time was spent typing frantic IMs and listening to conference calls where the team deploying the source application tried to rollback the deployment for entirely ridiculous reasons.

I'm still trying to process the concept that it's done. This is proving difficult for a variety of reasons.

This week I'm mostly bug fixing, working on the extra features requested for the end of the month, and sticking my fingers in my ears every time someone mentions rolling back the source application. Mostly because my part works, damn it, and it's being used by major clients already who will scream bloody murder if I have to pull it.

Anyway.

I'd reached the slightly hysterical stage of exhaustion on Monday, which may explain the flurry of bingo card posts (ALL THE BINGOS!) and the whole of Tumblr that day. Er, I tried to kill my beta reader with threats of what I'd write for kink_bingo. Heh ;-D

I've been trying to watch Looper as part of my Hugo voting prep and I'm starting to think I'll have to call it quits on that. So many nightmares and I'm only halfway through the two hour film. My imagination is too strong, it hits a few of my squicks, and I'm afraid to see how much worse it can get.

The idea is brilliant, the writing is strong...it's just not good for my mental health. At least I tried?

( Cut for melting server rooms take three and crazy Project Doom stuff )

In other news...

Today I am woeful for there is no showing of Much Ado anywhere in my province. The cinema listings came out for the weekend and...nothing. Not even at our little arthouse cinema. Maybe the little arthouse cinema will show it in a few weeks?

I'm not going to hold my breath on that.

Hopefully there will be a DVD release.

On the brighter side, that work of cinematic genius "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters" arrived yesterday :-D Watching it this weekend will be my reward for getting my AO3 auction fic edited and sent for beta. If the editing isn't done, I don't get to enjoy Hansel in a tree.

Dear fic,

Please be less terrible quickly.

Much love,
Sel

RIP Steve Jobs. It's hard to explain to non-geeks how much he changed things, but he made a huge impact on the computing world and it's going to be a slightly duller place without him. His core ideas - computers should be easy to use and look good - are the reason that so many iDevices do so well and keep people coming back. Thankfully those ideas have finally started to filter into other companies, but Apple still tends to do them best.

Just think what we'd be using if he hadn't inspired the things that he did, not just the lack of Apple products but also the way that our PCs, music players, phones and tablets might have been. Clunky. Ugly. Painful to set up and use. The territory of geeks and hobbyists, rather than the almost ubiquitous gadgets that our mothers and even grandmothers happily use.

***

It wasn't Steve Jobs' death that made my bad so bad, although I'll admit that it wasn't great news to wake up to.

Nope, the news is that Project Doom is going even further off the rails. We had to pull our release, it's not going to be released over my vacation either, because we found some rather large issues with the data source. The distressing part is that this is the one part of Phase I that we thought had no problems.

*sigh*

So, er, we're now waiting for confirmation on what the right data is and then I can start working out how to use it.

I am so incredibly ready for my vacation now. I just have to get through tomorrow...

It's possible that I completely overdid things with the cleaning on Saturday. There was a point, late in my sleepless Saturday night thanks to by back, when I started to worry that I'd overdone things so totally that I might not be able to pick Mum up from the airport.

Note to self: never, ever do that again.

I'd crow over my beautifully clean house if I hadn't found a dust patch and a fur bunny two minutes after getting up on Sunday. Argh! Oh, well, it's as done as it could be and Mum didn't appear horrified when she got in.

Thankfully I did get out to fetch her. Although it was a close-run thing and not due to my back. I needed to get some petrol so that my car wouldn't conk out halfway to the airport, so I stopped at the petrol station and filled the car up. All was going quite smoothly until it came time to pay.

( Cut for bank hatred )

I appear to be going through another bout of no appetite-ness. I'd just got used to having a normal appetite again! I'm going back to tracking and planning my eats every morning and then sticking to it (in the sense of making myself eat everything I planned) because otherwise I eat less than 1,000 calories a day and that's just not healthy. When I finally put some food in my mouth, I tend to get a tiny bit hungry and eager to eat (it helps if it's yummy food) so forcing myself to eat does work. It's just that I need to remind myself and plan and make myself eat because otherwise I just don't want anything. Oh, body, could you stop sucking so much?

On the bright side, the Air Canada people went back to work on Friday so Mum's flight went smoothly with no hassle. Woo!

On the down side, Canada Post is still on strike so my father did not get his birthday card or Father's Day card. It seemed silly to put them into a mail box by the ocean and have them sitting there (getting soggy) for possibly a number of days. Apparently the NDP is going to slow the debate in Parliament on back to work legislation so it could be many days yet before our mail resumes. Argh.

So glad that all my bills are available (and payable) online. I'm willing to bet most companies will not be accepting the postal strike as a reason why people can't pay their bills, even companies who only issue paper bills and only accept cheques.

In work stuff, it appears that the business analyst on my project is a complete idiot. Also, she has no understanding of basic maths, SQL or when it is appropriate in a project life cycle to gather requirements. Hint: it is considerably before systest and definitely before acceptance testing. I'm sure even my non-programmer f-listies can see why requirements gathering (from the business, rather than the BA's imagination) is supposed to happen before we have built the system. Setting up meetings to gather requirements from the business after my colleague has completed the design documentation (to the BA's requirements, which turn out not to have been discussed with the business) and when I have built and begun systesting of a large chunk of the project is really, really not going to help us to meet our deadlines.

Also, this is the week of many meetings and many work lunches. On the one hand, this may ensure that there is one meal a day that I eat. On the other hand, I'm going to be a wrung out, useless wreck crippled by back pain every evening from the looks of my schedule. Yay?

ETA: All my monies are exactly where they should be! Note to banks: doing system updates on a Sunday afternoon does not guarantee that nobody will need card facilities!

Last night Mum and I decided that we needed to watch Dirty Dancing. I still love that movie so much. The dancing is amazing. The story is great and moving, the music is just right, but it's the dancing that really captures me. Swayze was fantastic :-( The only gripe I have is that the filming of the final big dance number, while beautiful, doesn't let me see feet as much as I'd like.

Yes, I do hate going to a dance performance if I can't see the feet.

In dance, it's the feet that really do the magic work. The bodies tell the story and get you pulled in, that's where you see the chemistry between characters, but it's the feet where the real work and technicality are and that's what I always end up watching.

In other stuff, I read the re-cap of S5 Grey's Anatomy. I suspect strongly that I'll be putting S6 on the DVR. Damn. It's always been my guilty pleasure series, because it's so silly and frivolous and basically daft and yet...

Also, by big horrible Zombie Project has taken a nasty turn. Last night we thought that we'd finally cracked it and were loading good, correct data. Today we've found that there was a serious issue with the data load that nobody had noticed, wasn't on our list of issues and is going to take a huge amount of work to fix. Urf.

So glad that I'm going out for evil dinner tonight so that I can drown my sorrows in yummy food.

Mum goes home tomorrow, which I am both not enjoying (I'm going to miss her!) and looking forward to (my house will be my own again!). It's a weird feeling. The visit has been much better than I'd hoped, I'm confident that we won't kill each other when she's here next year, but I'm also quite looking forward to being on my own as well. Except that I enjoy doing things with her. Although it will be nice to do things at my own pace again :-) So, it's a conflicted thing but at least I know that I can survive winter and stuff on my own.

Oh, also, I'm coming to England for Christmas. Bought the tickets last night. Yay!

The good news is that my aunt is moved, almost all her belongings are in her new apartment and nothing got broken in transit. When I left, most of her stuff was piled in approximately the rooms it will stay in and most of the furniture was in peices, but she had a bed, a chair and a kitchen table with chairs so she's sorted. Plus her telephone, TV and Internet were all hooked up without problems on Saturday so communications are a go.

It's going to take her a while to get everything sorted out, unpacked, constructed and set up. She's got a fair bit of sorting through and chucking out still to do because her ex-housemate ensured that she didn't have time to do any packing last week. This is also the reason why some of her stuff is still at the house. Sadly, that means the ex-housemate will be getting her to do 'little jobs' (hmm) for her every time my aunt goes over to pick things up. Damn.

Still, considering how hard the ex-housemate was working to ensure that the move didn't happen and how determined she was that most of our time would be spent rearranging her stuff in the space my aunt has vacated, it wasn't too bad.

The bad news is that I spent a lot of the weeekend working remotely when I wasn't moving my aunt. This is because our big month end jobs ran over the weekend, I was the contact for it and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. My boss told me that it went pretty smoothly, she thought. Um, hello?

The biggest frustration of the weekend happened around 6am Sunday morning. I was totally shattered when I finally crawled home Saturday night (9.30pm) but still had to sit up doing some work stuff for an hour. After that, I made some cocoa to relax myself a bit before trying to sleep and took some painkillers.

Apparently I got too relaxed. I vaguely remember something painful happening to my knee, but at 6am I woke up with a cat crying outside the door and a dead foot. My knee dislocated while I was sleeping. Thankfully I was still so dopey and relaxed that it went back easily and I drifted off to sleep again, ignoring the cat. She was probably wondering why I was still asleep, OMG, it's 6am! I managed to sleep until my alarm went off at 8am and did some more work from my bed before going off for the final round of moving stuff. And then I did another hour of work when I got home. Bleh. My knee actually feels pretty OK now, just stiff if I sit too long, but the disturbed night and the necessity to get up and work when I'd planned to sleep in a bit did not make me happy particularly as it was due to someone else's mistake.

Now I'm at work in my office, feeling exceedingly tired with a monster headache. Unfortunately I have some work-ish stuff to do when I get home, but I plan on getting that out of the way and then having an early night.

I'm very pissed off that right now I've had three dislocations and one sprain and it's only the beginning of May. Last year, I managed one dislocation and no sprains all year. WTF?

First off, I got my invite this morning and signed up for my Dreamwidth account over breakfast. I'm selenay over there because, for once, the name hadn't been taken yet. Hooray! At the moment I'm mostly thinking that it will be a back-up should LJ go totally kaplooey at some stage (or the whole of fandom does an en mass exit) and a reading pane for those LJ-ers who have done a complete migration. If anyone wants to comment with their DW name...

I'm sure that I'll find everyone eventually. The ironic bit? I can access LJ without problems at work, but DW is blocked. Watch me laugh. I've got it set to cross-post here automatically, so I won't be leaving LJ even if I do migrate to posting there. Right now, LJ is still more convenient :-)

Last night at knit night I finally reached the neck on my tunic. That means I just need to do the shaping and bind off - yay! Then I do the front, which is the same as the back. But I'm halfway there, anyway. I've got a hairdresser's appointment with some dying involved tonight, so I figure that I can get that much done at least. This week I'd intended to make progress on my shawl during my lunch hours, as my lunch companion is on holiday, but for various reasons that's just not happened. Damn. I got a bit done on Tuesday, but Wednesday I had to have a quick lunch due to a staff meeting and I worked through yesterday's. As I have to go to the pharmacy at lunch today, I suspect that no shawl will be done again. Possibly if the hairdresser's isn't too crazy I could get a row or two done. Maybe.

Work has been a long, stressful week. I suspect that a lot of this is that I'm finally starting to care about the impact my work has on the systems and the company, not just about how good my work is. If that makes any sense. So I'm putting a ton of pressure on myself and there was a lot that needed to be done this week and that always results in stress. I've still got a lot to do today but at least I have a time limit on how late I can stay tonight. Plus, it's Friday. Thank goodness.

This weekend is my aunt's big move to the apartment. I suspect that I'm not going to be doing much other than move boxes all weekend. In the rain. Yay.

Today wasn't wonderful, but it didn't totally suck. Yesterday wasn't great and wasn't terrible. I've lost the fiery, hateful urge that I had on Friday after sitting in traffic for two and a half hours.

I suspect that it's due to half-term.

Just when I need to be thoroughly loathing the commute, the roads are clear and I'm doing the journey home in a little over an hour. The journey there isn't taking much longer.

I may be leaning towards chickening out of the whole quitting on Friday thing. Unless something goes horridly wrong in the next two days, I might be putting off the resignation until next week at least.

I have got that undated resignation letter in my backpack, though, ready to whip out if I'm thoroughly disgusted. I can't believe that I felt so fed-up on Friday after a week of absolute crap and hellish commutes, but now I'm back to feeling neutral again and slightly guilty for thinking about walking out on my colleagues. Darn my sense of fair play :-(

And no Doctor Who content yet. It will appear, I promise, because that was a darned good episode and needs babbling about.