Rioters rampage, protesters block French airports
We really, really need to be more like France. Where the idea that you might actually have to work a bit leads people to stop working, block traffic, and eventually smash and steal things.
Reason # 5674329 why I hate the French.
Wow. What a mess. Empty seltzer cans, pastrami sandwich wrappers, and it hasn't been dusted in AGES. It's like someone abandoned the place, and it was too low-rent even for the squatters.
I suppose I should pick up a bit around here, but...
So where the heck have I been? Facebook, mostly, but up way, way past my eyebrows in work. When we last bloggified back in March, it was Passover. Now it's almost Rosh Hashana. I'm starting to feel like a three times a year blogging Jew.
While the world has moved on to critical topics of the day like:
I took this week to lock down - no meetings, no projects other than the big, honkin', major video delivery portal I've been up to my eyeballs in. I started with a punchlist long as your arm that has since grown even as some things got removed from it. But it was nice to be able to focus on nothing but this project.
Oh, and the latest storm of the millenium that honked things up for two days. Mucho shoveling, and yes I'm sick of winter.
That said, I had my laptop and one of my portable hard drives, so I was all set to work from home. Thanks to a boss who thought it was a great idea. The children were not as compliant - more interruptions than I really wanted.
Still, progress is being made and I have a half a hope that we'll be in reasonable shape by our departmental deadline of March 1. This is going to dramatically change how we deliver online media, especially online education, and I'm hoping to make some important people fall out of their chairs when they see this thing in action.
Of course, next week I have to go back to talking to people.
PS Had to go through the haloscan switchover. Not sure how much I like the new commenting system, but I also backed up my comments in case somebody figures out how I can import them into blogger. Whaddaya think?
I'm posting this everywhere. Courtesy of Rick Brookhiser over at National Review:
The Six Stages of a Project
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. The Search for the Guilty
5. The Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Honor to Non-Participants
This describes so many, many of the projects I have been involved with. I'm thinking I should add it to the planning documents of every project I am part of.
though I couldn't swear to it, that things have taken a dramatic turn for the positive around here. I may have been moved to another department (something we've been working on for a bit) and free from the stupidity of where I've been (see Tuesday, July 2nd for more.)
Yet it's sort of hard to tell. No one's said anything directly to me about answering elsewhere (though the big boss announced it while I was in Ohio), I had a ridiculously complicated project dumped in my lap from the old department with 4 days to do it, and there's been no discussion of transition.
So, I can't entirely tell if life has changed since it doesn't really feel like it, but at least on someone's paper things are different. You'd think after nearly 9 years I'd have this place figured out, but there's always a curveball you've never seen before.
to my asinine "supervisor":
Read your goddam emails. Pay attention when I talk to you. Get off my back. I know more than you do, I do more than you do, and you're being a colossal pain in the ass.
Rant over, and apologies for the language.
Back & forth to Cleveland, OH for a wedding, which was nice. Drive home not so much, though we stopped both at an outlet location (five new pairs of work pants for about $100) and a new kosher Indian place in NJ. Neither of which made up for 12 hours in the car. And may I say I hope the leadership of the Pennsylvania DOT suffers eternal damnation of a particularly heinous, traffic-related type.
Weird doings here at work, of which I can say little. Works much in my favor, admittedly, but these doings make assumptions that may be unfulfilled by the HR powers that be.
Oh, and the work email servers done blowed up real good - it's about 10 days and they're still trying to resolve the problems. Guess the Squirrel running the generator finally got PO'd enough and walked off the job.
to the sneaking, lying, lazy sack of crap who tried to throw me under the bus this morning.
This will not land heavily on me, I assure you. You may throw it, but I assure it will bounce back high, hard, and fast very much in your own direction.
The depths of some people's insanity are not to be believed. Show it to me if you must, but sharing it with other people? Yet I will be a good boy and dot the i's and cross the t's, and merely hope for the final implosion.
Mind you I intend to watch from a safe distance if at all possible.
Day 2 of the official show. Some decent presentations today, even the one I walked out of to call in to a conference call that never happened. So I went back in & heard the rest of what they had to say (for the record, it was about using online video for distance learning.)
I have to admit I'm both excited and depressed by what I learned. Excited because there are some really smart people out there doing really cool things with online media. Depressed because not only am I not doing it, but we're in many ways just barely keeping up.
Plus all of these people have jobs and titles that I would like to have. Whatever. It was a good conference, I actually talked to a lot of people (kind of unusual for me with people I don't know), and tomorrow it's back to reality.
Which includes a major overhaul to a system that happened today and does not seem to be working properly. But that's likely to be another blogpost.
Spent the last two days at Streaming Media East, a gathering of all the geeks media professionals smart enough to get their bosses to let them goof around in Manhattan for a few days.
Had a really good day yesterday with one of our vendors who had a half-day session with a bunch of customers. They previewed some new software that looks extremely promising and will likely cure some headaches for us. Now if they can only get it released on a convenient schedule...
Today was typical conference stuff - keynote speakers and product shills masquerading as educational sessions. I have to say Microsoft really has a tin ear sometimes. They're offering a new approach to multimedia delivery and it's awfully complicated and probably unnecessary. The poor guy sent to tout this thing took kind of a beating from some people looking at a very time consuming and costly effort to convert a ton of pre-existing content into this new method. I have to say Microsoft seems to be stumbling into a lot of new ideas without thinking them through terribly carefully. I got my own question answered - we can keep doing what we're doing now and they can go fiddle around with whatever stupidity they want.
More of the same tomorrow - it's a day out of the office and that's almost always a good thing.
from our Passover break, wherein again we traveled to the Southern Stronghold of the Washington, DC suburbs.
What to talk about? Matzah, potatoes, eggs, onions. It's Taco Bell for Jews (take the same 5 ingredients and mix in different ways.) Our hostess got sick at the beginning, I got sick (and pulled my back out) at the end, and a grand time was had by all.
Oh, and all heck broke loose at work, or it seemed that way if you were an ignorant troglodyte who never figured how to ask the right questions of the right people. IMPORTANT people need things, and nobody bothered asking exactly what they wanted. My last attempts (or frankly responsibility) for this ended last July, and in the end I have no idea what's happening.
C'est la guerre.
severely underslept. Hockey last night, followed by 45 mins of KP with the Mrs. to deal with stuff we didn't get to before, followed by a night in bed in the guest room with Junior so Mrs. could get some sleep. Needless to say, not the most restful nighttime I've ever had.
Happily it's Friday, the day after Christmas, and I'm at work when nobody else is. So there's a very, very good chance I can nod off at the keyboard without anyone bothering me.
Some might say it'll actually improve my work performance.
where were we? No place in particular, so this post should pick up the theme nicely.
I spent the day at Microsoft today, in a brainstorming session. I find these things kind of fun, if you're with a good group of people. Today's group was pretty positive - aware of the challenges involved in some of the ideas we had, but openly discussing them with an eye towards trying to make things happen. Now, if I had any authority, I'd be able to see some of this through. As it stands, it's more likely that this kind of thing will get lost in the shuffle.
There are other things going on that I will not jinx by discussing, but life is moving forward. I'm feeling more at peace with the direction things are going than I was a month or two back, and a number of scenarios are possible. We'll just have to see where things go.
By the way, it's good to be the king. Microsoft may be the great satan, but they do have some really cool toys to play with.
in a major, major webcast presentation and the testing is not going well. Fortunately in the comments to my last post Valerie (who has a very nice blog, by the by) provided an important reality check.
Seems a classmate of hers from years back unfortunately passed away at a very young age. As it turns out, her classmate's brother was a gentleman named Michael McHugh. A random thing, except it happens to be that Michael was murdered on September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center. And of all things, the 2,996 Project assigned Michael to me as a subject to blog about more than two years ago.
I had, of course, completely forgotten I had even done it.
I went back and reread my tribute to Michael Edward McHugh, Jr. As it turns out, not that long ago several people who actually knew Mr. McHugh had commented on the post. They seemed to appreciate my attempt at honoring a man I'd never heard of.
The internets is a funny place where random events connect total strangers. Occasionally something pops up to remind you that the daily grind of our lives can be pretty trivial when compared to other people's reality. So take a moment on a random November day to remember Mike McHugh, his recently passed brother John McHugh, and wish the family some consolation. It helps to put things in their proper perspective.
A perfect opportunity slips away, again. It was all but in the bag. "Hiring Freeze" is the excuse this time, and frankly, I've had it. I'm pissed off at God, the economy, the Wall Street jackasses who caused it, the elected schmucks who encouraged the behavior that caused the collapse, and at the current organization for putting me in this position.
I'll accept that God is trying to get a message across to me, but damned if I know what it is.
moving in a positive direction. I don't wish to say any more at this point, but I am quite hopeful for the first time in a long, long while.
Updates will come if they are necessary - these things are a long way from being in the bag, and I'm horribly paranoid about jinxing them.
the intranet redesign project is live. It's taken more than two years of effort, meetings, more meetings, even more meetings, but we've finally launched the site. I've been so incommunicado over the last month because of all the work that was necessary, but in the end we have essentially the site we intended. Not perfect, naturally, but awfully good considering the amount of work involved.
But. But.
A superior that need not be named deserves to be hit by a bus. I'm not pleased at myself for wishing harm on another human, but they deserve it. Not a thank you. Not a "we couldn't have done it without you." Certainly not a bonus or other formal recognition for me doing their job for them. Just insulting emails asking where everything else she wants is. Never mind that go-live is just the beginning for what has to happen, what with all we pushed off until now.
So the inevitable, I hope, will happen. I will offer my services elsewhere, and hope that even if the praise is as hard to come by, I will be making enough additional money to compensate a little. There's no reason to treat your employees like servants, unless you don't care whether or not they remain your employees.
Got a couple days this week to poke around the big city at a conference. Nice mostly just to get out of the office a little. Things have not improved appreciably, so any excuse not to be there is welcome. Not a ton of consequence at the show, but it's helpful to find out what people doing real work in the area are busy with. And I had a nice burger with pastrami on it for lunch with some colleagues who went to the conference.
Another day of it tomorrow, plus some other business I have to take care of. And maybe a nice juicy steak to top it all off.
