February 23, 2005

Only two more days until my birthday… dum dum dum…

More working on class materials today. Only two more days until Min and I are at the Castile school for the whole day.

I accidentally slept without my CPAP on last night and got like no sleep at all. But I get so tired that I don’t realize that I don’t have the machine on. I know that that is hard for people to understand but the machine become such a part of me that I really don’t even realize that it is there anymore. I actually have to use my hands to feel for it during the night because sometimes I can’t even tell if I am wearing it. So when Min got home this morning, I stayed in bed and ended up sleeping until after noon! So, I got plenty of bed time last night. Min felt pretty rested after her four hours of sleep so we got up.

I had some work I had to do right away considering how late it was so I went down to the basement to work for a little bit. Min finished assembling a new shelving / cubby hole unit that we had bought the other day to help clean up our bedroom a little bit. It has been such a mess for so long – we just have so much stuff that has to be squeezed into such a small space. There is almost no where to put everything. So we are working on that.

This afternoon, Min and I are going over to the Livingston County Chamber of Commerce’s Business After Hours event at the C.G. May Center (BOCES) in Mt. Morris. That is from 4:00 until 6:00 but we will probably go a little bit late since it is just snacks for the first little while and there isn’t a whole lot to do. My grandma is going into the doctor’s today at 3:30 to see about her hearing loss that happened yesterday. Dad and Aunt Sharon are hopeful that it is just an infection or a blockage or something. She can still hear herself talking but can’t hear anyone else, so that is a good sign.

So far today, this is about 3:30 that I am writing now, the router has remained up and running. I don’t have any good explanation for why that is, but it is a really good sign. It would be so nice not to have that unit dropping all of the time. We have a lot of customers that depend on that unit and our telephones turning off is a pretty big nuisance too. We have to worry about that all day long. And at night I have to have my cell phone by the bed every night just in case the regular phone turns off on us.

This Saturday there is a Lord of the Rings marathon planned over at Josh’s place in Farmington starting just after noon. It will be back to back to back all three LotR movies in the extended editions. Everyone always threatens to do it, he is really doing it. I don’t know yet if Min and I are going, I have to talk her into it yet. Josh is asking everyone who comes to bring a couple of dollars to help pay for the pizza. Maybe I will be able to go and work on SGL updates while we watch 9+ hours of movies.

Well, we didn’t get back from the Business After Hours until almost 7:30 but I think that we did some good networking. It was a good time and the culinary arts students from the BOCES did the catering and it was really yummy. We had a good time.

Min decided that the all day LotR marathon over at the Joshinator’s house on Saturday sounded like a plan so you will likely see us over there. Andy might go, he hasn’t decided, but probably not. It is over ten hours of movies.

Andy had a crappy day at work today. Wegmans is freaking out because they refused to discuss Andy’s work with him and wouldn’t do anything ahead of time to extend his contract or to get a new contract and his contract is up in a few weeks. Now, it turns out, they have banked on him moving into a lower position as a tech support guy and staying indefinitely. They never even bothered to ask him if he wanted to stay or if he was already contracted somewhere else or anything. They also haven’t asked him if he would be willing to have a change in contract to do a different position than what he had agreed to. He has already spoken with just about everyone involved and told them that he was not going to extend or recontract but he would be willing to stay a few extra weeks to help them out – until sometime in April. But, for some reason, Wegmans hires contractors instead of employees when the work is really awful and just hopes that they are so desperate for work that they never leave. That probably works a bit of the time, especially in Rochester, but it sure doesn’t work well when you are hiring industry leading professionals. It would never even have occurred to me to try to stay longer than the original contract at Wegmans. I would have had another contract lined up and just moved on and never even have talked to them about it. If you hire a contractor and want them to stay past the time that you have hired them for, you need to talk to them and see what terms they are willing to work with. Contractors will normally be happy to “re-up” at a location but they work day to day knowing, not guessing but actually knowing, that they have a contract end date quickly approaching and that they have to have something else lined up for when that date arrives. Without an end date, contracting is just a very inefficient way of having despairing employees. Wegmans appears to use it as a means of keeping unhappy employees from being able to vote on “America’s Best Places to Work.” It is really insulting that Wegmans treats their contractors so badly. Many of us choose to contract and have done so since the market was good and jobs were plentiful. Some of us like it and take what we do really seriously and see ourselves as a valuable and important part of the industry. When companies like Wegmans use the system to lower the quality of life for regular employees, it just makes me upset. We are professional and expect to work with other professionals who know how to behave in a professional work environment. Andy also caught two of his managers lying today. One claiming that there was no work for him to do and one admitted that there actually was plenty of work but they weren’t letting him do it because they didn’t want to take his focus away from his pending – and unannounced – move over to tech support. So all this time that he has been so upset that they didn’t have anything for him to do and were just making him stare at the walls all day (he has almost left a number of times since he was contracted to be a developer and not as a body – they actually have had plenty of work for him to do and have been actively keeping it from him.

AARGGHH!!!

Okay, enough complaining about crappy businesses. Min cooked BLT’s for dinner tonight. Andy actually hadn’t eaten by the time we had gotten home so we all had dinner together – which almost never happens. I love vegetarian BLT’s. Veggie bacon is SO good and you can have as much of it as you want because it is really healthy.

The router is still up, it has been up for just about 21 hours. I have no idea what is different today than yesterday but it is looking encouraging. Although I do worry that it might work for a few days and then go right back to the way that it was. It is always scary when you have a mission critical system like that doing something that you don’t competely understand. Even though the phone has been staying up and running, though, it still is almost impossible to use because the phone calls keep breaking up. We are guessing that the router is dropping packets on a regular basis but there isn’t an easy way to tell if that is really what is happening or not.

Mr. Humphries got up and came down to his cage door at 8:00 looking for some love and affection. He gets into his “attention” moods from time to time. He played for a while and then decided that he wanted to get into his ball and roll around the house.

Min fell asleep on the futon in the living room around 9:00. She only got four hours of sleep last night. I can’t wait until we are able to have schedules that, at least, part way mesh. It would be nice to have our free times be around the same time as each other – once in a while.

I had to do another SUSE 9.2 install this evening so I came down to the office after Min was fast asleep and watched the end of Lover Come Back that I hadn’t gotten the chance to wrap up a few days ago. I was a bit surprised at just how inappropriate parts of the movie are. It was pretty good though.

I went upstairs around 10:30 and found the whole house asleep. Andy had passed out face down on his bed. Min was sleeping soundly on the futon. Mr. Humphries was even snoring away. Okay, actually I can’t hear the hamster snoring but if I was little, I am sure that I could. I decided to come back down to the basement and keep my Rock Hudson / Doris Day marathon running. So I put in their final movie – Send Me No Flowers. It is a strange premise for a movie: a man who thinks that he is dying tries to set up his wife with her college sweetheart but she ends up thinking that he is having an affair which he then confesses to because she won’t believe that he thought that he was dying. Where do people come up with these things?

The installation that I was working on was still only a small portion completed so I decided that I needed to babysit it a bit longer so I popped in Down with Love starring Ewan McGregor and Renee Zelweger. I really dislike Zellweger but I am hopeful that Ewan McGregor can pull her along like he did with Kidman in Moulin Rouge. Min has already seen it and told me that it was supposed to be just like one of the Rock Hudson / Doris Day movies so I wanted to watch those first before watching this one. Even in the credits you will notice that they took a bunch of stylings straight out of Lover Came Back. The movie is even set in 1962. David Hyde Pierce does an amazing job of playing the part of Tony Randall. I can’t believe how close he gets to the real thing. Definitely do not attempt to watch Down with Love until you have at least seen Lover Come Back. Tony Randall even makes an appearance.

I didn’t finish the film, it was getting late. So I wrapped up the dailies and headed off to bed. Or, I guess I will do so in a minute. Goodnight everyone.

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