Not much to say...

List of books I want to read by Ixtapa-time

Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle

Quicksilver
Confusion
The System Of The World


Jared Diamond's Collapse
Vij's Elegant And Inspired Indian Food


MtG Tarot card of the day: Straatadon

Yet again, I have a feeling I cancelled my days off for naught as the super-mega-hyper urgent I was supposed to work on was delayed. It's not as if I had nothing to do besides that but nothing that could have waited a couple of days.

Oh well, on the strength of this, they will hard pressed to deny I can take 24 hours off and the corp will stiil be standing by the time I get back on Friday. I have yet decided what I'll do tommorow.

In the mean time, here's another thorough interrogation sent to my the Red Devil.

"No good deeds go unpunished" this is now the unoffical motto for our department at BigMediaCo.

I have an implementation scheduled for next week, and have yet to begin testing because it's not working yet. But, lo and behold, the 2-drinks crew have not found any problems. Even though, you can't access the webpages. They probably have a higher tolerance towards malfunctions than I do. Sigh!

In other news, I was browsing the past few days looking at websites, and found a whole bunch of new sites related to the Assassins LARP (aka Killers).
While I remember playing a couple of games back in my college days, I never fully understood the appeal for it (nor for LARP in general), I find surprising that out of the blue, 6 new sites are added about the subject.

Story-wise, it's hard to justify having a group play-acting murders, I could find many uses for a guild of assassins who has access to easily-disguisable weapons. Since my character is kind of an assassin himself (albeit from a different background), it could be a way to set up some opposition.

It seems my card muse is in tune with my feelings, as I've drawn DUSKWORKER.

Meh, another day off!!! 

I shouldn't have been allowed to take some days off from work but then again, I shouldn't be the only to care. One of the project I'm working one (which is due for Wednesday) has hit a few snags when I started to work on it Tuesday. The developer assigned to it was supposed to deliver a patch to resolve the showstopper issues on Tuesday aftertoon, especially since he would not be at the office yesterday.

Unfortunately, he probably didn't test it because it looked worse than before. At least, I have confirmation that none of our current systems at work will survive the 10K bug.

Spent my last hour at work in a "wonderful" meeting for the new VoD client with the usual suspects (2-drinks crew, non-genie-ring) with the senior colleague on this assignment. It's funny how quickly people seem to forget how the department they used to work for when it suits their needs.

In all honesty, I can say that I never reneged on my previous works (as for cow-orkers, that's another thing) and I think it's one of my strengths. It's too bad that not everyone has the same attitude.

Speaking of which, the card I've drawn is STRAW GOLEM. 'nuff said.

Well, the last few days have been a nice reminder of what Winter used to feel like in the good old days with roaring winds, blinding snow, and the cold bonding with the bones. Fortunately for me, the only negative event stemming from all this was the loss of my garbage can. If you see a Rubbermaid blue plastic garbage can (with a missing handle), leave me a note.

Even giving the freakish weather, I had an off-site meeting at BigMediaCo in the afternoon, which was in a brewery. Hopefully, this is not a prelude to a merger (or worse a joint marketing campaign). Hey Kids! You can't drink and drive, but you sure can drink and watch TV, use the phone or the internet, or even call on a cell phone... *shudder*

Have not learned anything new, as this was more geared towards people in other department, but it capped a nice little week in which I was celebrated (or rather my 10-year tenure in the various incarnations of BigMediaCo) were celebrated. And to think I ALMOST didn't see it coming.

Oh yeah, a weird thing happened a couple of days back while basking in the wisdom of my fellow colleague and LJer verdylak. A homeless guy (clearly intoxicated) had managed to jump the gate at the building's entrance and was on its way to head to the second floor. It fell upon verdylak, some other guy, and me to a) bring the guy outside and b) strongly discourage any attempt for him to try again. It wasn't anything heroic, I just tried to interpose myself between the door and the guy and hoping this would not escalate. 

Did I mention there was a (rather cute) security guard of the female persuasion at the desk right next to the gate and also a couple of guy a few feets back in a camera room. AND...  THEY... DIDN'T... LIFT... ONE... SMEGGING... FINGER...!!!

Here's the kicker, the day after, a woman working in the same department as I do told me that they didn't even want to call the police while this was going on and had to be shouted out of complacency to react. Now, they are very effective at hindering our daily going-ons and seem to relish in using what little authority they think they have over us, poor working stiff, but they should consider the responsabilities linked with it.

Oh yeah! Kicker #2 (in importance not in sequence), someone from the union came to me and verdylak after the miscreant left and told us we SHOULD not have done anything as it was the Security's responsability and yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, guess what? They weren't doing much to stop the guy and I don't think I acted as a union employee but rather as a human being concerned about the potential threat this person could represent.

I've drawn COMPLEX AUTOMATON for my MtG draw. Not sure, what it means yet but things are happening at a break-neck pace here and there, I only hope I keep all my pieces until my departure.

The title says it all. I had never experienced something as bad as yesterday's in all my years at BigMediaCo. Even now, I failed to comprehend how this project was allowed to go "gold" as it was almost doomed from the start.

Let's just begin by stating that the events of the day had been ordained as I crossed the path of a black cat that had been standing watch near the office's entrance. First of all, the systems were almost 2 hours coming up (for reasons which were totally unrelated to my project). So, instead of beginning to check on things at 5AM, I had to wait intil 6:15, leaving with only 30 minutes before the systems would be online for the rest of the company. To make matters worse, when I finally started to verify, I noticed errors cropping up right and left, most of which had been corrected in earlier revisions.

To make a long (and painful) story short, the systems were finally online by 10:30 but the application itself was not available. Not only that, but as hours were passing by, we were to learned that several key features that were supposed to available had been postponed to a later release without our department being informed of the fact. Score one for the bad guys at the 2-drinks-minimum crew, the Un-geneers and the developers.

In a word, the implementation crashed. Big time. And I'll have to go and pick up the pieces for the next few days, trying to make sense of the mess. It's a good thing I'm out of here Friday as I would propably lose another weekend worrying about it.

But the really scary part is that this project was only the first of 4 or 5 that I will be implicated in for the rest of the year and are similar in outlook (Big implementations with limited resources and time available on the testing side of things, spearheaded mostly by myself).

Of course, the fates mock me my making me draw the GEMINI ENGINE. After all, it means that things could get much worse...

Feeling a little better today.This is mitigated by the fact that it's probably gonna be the last weekend I'll be able to fully enjoy for a long while. I shouldn't complain as I did not venture much on the RPG side of things during that time but between the possiblity of using places like Comics Rive-Sud and browsing through Harry Potter sites, I would rather choose the former.

At least the sun is finally out and I'm "almost" at peak levels. Probably go for a little biking this afternoon and soak up on the Sun while I can. Besides, I just realize that, by next week, I'll be starting on my writing so that's another constraint I have to live with. I'll probably have to visit the Bibliothèque Nationale pretty soon because my mum needs some sociology books. Since I didn't had the opportunity of visiting the place since it opened, this would be the perfect opportunity and while I wasn't able to find any potential RPG sources I could borrow (not only that the only RPGs available are those by Montreal-based Dream Pod 9 like "Tribe 8", "Gear Krieg", or their various alternate "Cyberpunk" settings, but they are available only for on-place consultation, weird...), who knows? I might get lucky and forego for the time being going to the same well.

Haven't been able to see "Batman Begins" just yet. Was supposed to go on Friday but had a last-minute change in my plans. If nothing else, I'll probably go next Thursday as I'll be on vacation...

The Fates are messing with my head. After drawing Oblivion for Mother's Day, my Father's Day draw is HOLLOW WARRIOR. Since the last two times I've seen my father, he tried to attack me in broad daylight blaming me for the fact that I had withdrawn my mother's part in the joint bank account and afterwards, he tried to defraud me of an inheritance a great-uncle of mine had left me. You will probably understand me if I'm not reminiscing warm and fuzzy memories on this day.

 

Another early morning at BigMediaCo for me. Good thing, I have a 4-day weekend coming up as I feel like a mindless drone.

Still have not decided what I'll do on this "vacation" but if the weather is still blah! (we were spoiled by too much sun early on, Stupid Sun!!!), I'll probably stay at home and catch up on "24", which I've taped but haven't watch since my return from Ixtapa.

As part of my "freaking the mundanes' 05" campaign, my first randomly selected comp time day off falls on Friday, May 13. Bad luck omens notwhitstanding, this will probably mean, I'll foil any attempts to have my birthday celebrated, such a shame... Of course, If I were not that ob-comp, I could decide to take the friday after that, for no particular reason... Of course, I'll could use my membership in the "Call in sick" club on that day, not that I have ever done that...

Tarot-wise, I have drawn ENERGIZER since there are no Jolt! Cola card (yet), I'll take this as the pick-up I need today