Selenay's Ramblings

Less than two working days until my week off! Woo hoo!

I definitely need it. Today I barely restrained myself from writing a sarcastic response to a request for something that doesn't exist yet (apparently people think I'm psychic) so it's needed. I managed to write a polite response, but honestly. This person knows the thing doesn't exist yet, knows it's something there's no algorithm I can write to predict the thing, and therefore I don't know why he was asking for the thing.

I'm a wee bit grumpy right now.

First shift as an ops rover for virtual Worldcon went well, I think. We seem to be getting the hang of how to manage it and a lot of the early glitches are getting ironed out. Hopefully everyone is enjoying their con time. I spent a couple of hours being a stand-in for the Hugo ceremony rehearsal, so hopefully there will be no glitches with that!

Being staff on a convention is always an interesting experience. You end up seeing a lot of the bits of a convention that aren't working well, so it can be hard to tell whether the majority are having a good time. In terms of being staff on a convention where I can't get to any of the programming due to timezones and day job, it's doubly difficult. Normally I'd get to experience some of the con outside the staff role, but this time I'm not so all I'm seeing are the bits where something has gone wrong. OTOH, I am impressed that with all the moving parts and tech and people who don't know how to use the tech, we're not getting as many issues as I expected and everyone is working hard to get issues ironed out fast.

I suspect that a lot of conventions are going to be virtual or blended virtual/offline for a couple of years, so what we're learning at events like ConZealand and this year's vidukon_cardiff are going to be the model for conventions for a while. It's a good thing for us to work at getting issues worked through and figuring out all the necessary tech so that we can keep events like this going through these weird times.

In other thoughts...

Guardian is a lovely, lovely fandom and everyone was right about there being some great fic. Apparently my time in superhero fandom prepared me well for a fandom where secret identities and fix-its would be major themes :D

I got home from the big trip on Monday. It was a BIG trip, so I will need to write up some notes from Worldcon etc. because it was amazing and I don't want to forget it.

Brief summary: wedding was amazing, Worldcon was fantastic, really liked Helsinki, the days with dad post-Helsinki were busy but lovely.

Pretty sure Helsinki/Worldcon wouldn't have been half so fun without roommate extraordinaire bookmonster :-D

Being back has been...interesting. The office managed not to collapse without me, despite the boss's worries and dire predictions. They didn't contact me while I was away (I suspect my coworkers sat on the boss whenever he suggested it) and nothing came in that couldn't wait for my return. Phew! I've been doing all the paperwork and prep for the release on Sunday of the project I've been working on since January. It's the first phase--lots of new code to replace all the COBOL we were running--and the second phase will happen in a month--deleting all the obsolete COBOL--if nothing falls down. I decided to leave the old COBOL in place for a few weeks in case we have to roll back, but if we get through a full month end batch cycle, it will go.

It's a bigger deal than I realised. So far, the director of my department has sent out an email to the whole of IT about it and I've had the manager of another department come over and congratulate me, and explain why freeing up some COBOL licences has huge benefits to his team. I'm a little gob-smacked that my little project is getting so much attention. There's talk of getting me to help some other teams do similar and of getting me to work on some projects to port stuff out of other old code-bases into something newer and better supported. Wow.

On the home front...

I love my mother. I really do. Remind me of this regularly, guys? It's only been four days and she's driving me up the wall. We'd been doing so well over the last two or three summers! But she came out later this year, so I had more time to get used to being on my own and doing my own thing and it's hard to adjust. It's probably all petty little things, but I'm not dealing well with her this year. Plus, there was an incident with my car and if it turns out she's wrong and the parking barrier didn't malfunction (the car park operator is trying to dig up CCTV), I'm going to need to have a talk with her about why she needs to pay for the damage she did and not me. I mean, I don't ask her to pay for any other maintenance or insurance, even though she uses it a lot when she's here! If she damages it through carelessness, I see no reason why I need to foot the bill. I'm waiting to see how her claim against the car park goes before we discuss that, though. We're getting the damage assessed this afternoon for the adjuster.

I'm ready for another holiday.

It is Sunday. It's midday. I've been logged on waiting to start monitoring jobs and reports during a big processing job for four hours.

The upstream processes are all hideously delayed. There was a power cut due to a storm last night. Even though power and processing were restored within a couple of hours, the morning team couldn't access their floor because all the card readers are out. So it took them a long time to find some PCs they could physically access to log in.

The VPN was up before people found accessible PCs (which is why I've been online for so long).

Hence, delays. And this was the month when we expected everything to run late due to the size of the job, so everything is compounding everything else.

This is so much fun.

At least I get to bank some time in lieu for this. I might be sitting at my PC with a book open in front of me, but my company acknowledges the inconvenience of having to be chained to my PC for hours on end even when I'm unable to actually do anything work-related. Yay company.

At this point, we're all just hoping it doesn't end up being a late night, because we all have to work tomorrow no matter what happens :-(

Today I am having the fun of arguing about the existence or otherwise of a table with the DBAs.

Hint: it exists.

Hint 2: half my code would be broken if it didn't exist.

Conclusion: clearly someone here has gone blind and it ain't me.

The argument is because I need them to change some columns and apparently if they declare it non-existent, they won't do the change. Except, uh, it's there. I'm looking right at the data I just selected from it.

*headdesk*

And people say my job doesn't require deep and meaningful thoughts on the wider issues at hand. I'm debating the nature of existence, guys! Totes deep and meaningful :-D

( Cut for witterings about fanfic and writing in general )

( Cut for long ramble about A-levels )

Due to my new working hours, today is my Friday :-D I love having alternate Fridays offf. I've got the house to myself tomorrow morning so there will be veging and bad telly and all the stuff mother disapproves of :-D And then I'll take Kate to the vet in the afternoon and buy groceries. I know, my plans are so exciting.

Last night we watched the first episode of the new Great British Bakeoff series. Now I want upside down cake. Nom.

We've got so much Holby to watch. I think that will be the plan tonight. I need my trashy medical soap!

There is a good chance that sometime next week I'll be posting new fic. I've got one part left to write on the fic that I wasn't going to write that is now 8k words damn it. Then there is resting it and editing it and flailing about it. So probably very late next week.

The Marvel Big Bang fic is progressing slowly but still progressing. Chapter six is nearly done and then there are only two rather-action packed chapters. This monster is definitely more than double the minimum word count.

Let's not discuss the other two fics that I have on the go. There is way too much in my head right now. At least it means that if I get stuck on one thing, I can write another thing? Um?

So last week there was a terribly boring meeting that we all had to attend. It's the six-monthly update from the director of our section of IT where he tells us about resourcing, budgets, audit compliance, department vision (for the day) and other stuff that's going on.

Most of us zoned out. I stayed with it through audit compliance and then spent forty-five minutes plotting fic in my head so that I'd at least have my eyes open and look kind of attentive.

I do remember hearing something about porting and portals and portlets. The porting stuff is irrelevant for at least a year and the portals/portlets was, we thought, completely irrelevant for all time because the web team never lets us play with that kind of cool stuff.

Except the business just decided that Project Doom needs a portal. As in, decided yesterday. And it's going to be M and I implementing it.

Guess I should have paid attention to that meeting after all...

My Annie-cat was, apparently, horribly lonely and unhappy last night. She told Mum and I about it all night, alternating which bedroom door she wailed outside of, and thus today is a Drink All The Coffee! kind of day.

Lazy weekend plans were mostly successful, although yet again the curse of my brain meant that my nine hours of sleep on Saturday night caused a lovely headache on Sunday.

My body is ridiculous sometimes.

Today my body is not doing the headache thing. It's doing the nausea and dizziness thing instead. I'm vaguely offended by this because it's rather inconvenient. Thankfully Mum needed to borrow the car today so she drove me to work and thus I don't have to 'fess up that I'm feeling like crap.

I don't even have anyone to yell at today. Nobody is willing to telling me why my stuff on the dev box is broken ("We're still looking!") and apparently I have to yell at the right people not just yell at everyone even though that guarantees that the guilty party will get included somewhere.

Um.

Yeah, this is why I'm not a people manager :-D

In lieu of yelling at people, I'm making Power Point presentations. Sadly, they're deeply boring and I'm not allowed to insert anything fun into them, nope not even a cute cat gif.

One thing that I did manage over the weekend (in addition to finishing two books, two volumes of Fables and setting up a Blu Ray player, go me) was reorganising a few things on AO3. My addiction to the "Mark for later" button was getting out of hand so I went through the many pages and got all the stuff that I've read and loved bookmarked instead. It tamed the history pages a wee bit and made my bookmarks look that bit more Avengers obssessed. Oops.

I'm hoping to have Thing 2 of the 5+1 Things fic that I'm writing nearly finished today. All the Things have been outlined (in so far as I have vaguely descriptive titles for them) and so this fic wins the award for mostly completely outlined thing that I have ever written in my life. Go fic!

Today is my father's birthday. There will be Skyping with him later so that Mum and I can observe him opening his presents in an completely non-creepy way. I'm almost entirely certain that I can remember what I gave him. Possibly. It was weeks ago. It could be a fun surprise for all of us.

In less that twelve hours, I will be on a plane to England. Squee!

I'm sort of packed. There's stuff in my case and I've got some odds and ends to add to it (toiletries, medication, that kind od thing) but I'm sure that I'll find I've forgotten something. Definitely not socks, though. I've got lots of socks.

My hand luggage is a small stack of stuff on top of the case that I will sort out when I get home. I'm slightly concerned because, despite having an iPod, iPad and Kindle, my collection of chargers seems smaller than normal.

I'm working today, which is good because it prevents me unpacking and repacking my case a billion times.

( Cut for small rant on anti-gay marriage crap )

( Cut for discussions of work stuff and the hilarious idea that I'm a morning person )

Plan for tonight is to get home and hit the exercise bike for 45 minutes then have a quick shower and finish packing everything. I've got some stuff out for supper that just needs popping in the oven and some veggies nuking so hopefully that will all be done and cleared away well before my ride to the airport arrives.

Due to panic and craziness, I'm getting to the airport nearly three hours before my flight even though I will have checked in online the moment I get home. Hopefully that means I'll be there before the bar closes so that I can get a glass of wine. I'm currently experiencing a phase that I call Total Insomniac Who Only Sleeps Four Hours A Night so I doubt that I'll sleep on the plane, but I'm sort of hoping that the wine might help me doze a wee bit.

Oh god, this day is so long.

Ways to tell the Avengers thing is getting out of control: despite the trashing it got in the comic reviews, you have the first two issues of the Black Widow prequel on your iPad (thank you Comixology) and got overly excited at the prospect of a Hawkeye comic starting in August.

Thing the 1st
You know, when an office computer upgrade changes the entire damn process for logging into the work VPN the helpful thing is to send a memo about it.

From the tone of the IT helpdesk guy's voice, he agrees with me.

Please note: I do read my memos. OK, sometimes I get bored halfway through sentences and just skip bits, but I do at least skim them. There was no memo.

Thing the 2nd
UPS has, for once, decided not to fake my signature on a parcel so I'm working from home and hoping they turn up with my package at some stage today. They're going to get here at 4.30pm, aren't they?

Thing the 3rd
Today's Leveson inquiry day is providing a mental disconnect of epic proportions. It's *Andy* Coulson on the stand. Not Agent Coulson. Yeesh.

Thing the 4th
I'd like it noted that today, for possibly the last time, Project Doom hit a deadline on time. Two days early, in fact. This is unlikely to happen again. We're savouring the moment.

There is an iPad in my house! Eeeee!

:-D

I've been very restrained and merely stroked the boxes a bit before handing them over to Mum for safe-keeping until my birthday. So. Damn. Excited!

Also, I have booked two days of unpaid vacation over Christmas. Work is encouraging us to take a day or two of unpaid time in December if we can afford it to help them meet the financial targets. Apparently it's not that we're losing money, it's that we're not making as much as the board set as our target.

Whatever.

I'm taking two unpaid days and getting ten days off thanks to the joy of statutory holiday. Woooooo! I really need that break :-)

Project Doom has been re-estimated. If we get two additional programmers and everyone sticks to their milestones (Doom is dependent on other teams finishing their bits), we project to finish in July 2013. As we're not going to get the programmers and it's unlikely that the other teams will hit their milestones, it's probably more likely to be sometime in 2014. Yay guaranteed employment for three years?

Also, there is memeage thanks to netgirl_y2k! I got a wee bit wordy...

Comment to this post, and I will list five things I associate with you. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your LJ (or just add a reply back to me). Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself

1. ( Being Quite Technologically Proficient )

2. ( An Inexplicable Fondness for the England Rugby Team )

3. ( Smashing Taste in Books )

4. ( Unfortunate Weather )

5. ( Doctor Who )