Ski bumming it sounds pretty good right now… We are in that phase of a project where occasionally someone will come along and try to add a feature, or put a feature we deferred for a later milestone back into the current milestone’s work. More often than not the requester loses this attempt, but it still annoys me when I am distracted trying to explain to this person (who occasionally is my boss changing his mind about a prior deferral) that it simply isn’t going to happen.
May I remind you that there are a total of 14 people working for my company. Small enough where everyone should know what the fuck is going on. I wish I had a place I could go and hide with a laptop or a workstation or whatever, loud music, and no distractions for the next 3 days… I would probably finish in 2 and just spend the last day listening to loud music. :)
As expected, the frantic pace of work this week is taking its toll on me… I really hope everything gelatinizes before the end of the day on Friday so I don’t have to work this weekend… I could really use a few days of staring at the ceiling in bed and playing mindless video games…
We are going to have a party at the new apartment on the 30th of this month… Celebrating the new place, the passing of our milestone at work, among other things….
My boss checked in his rsp protocol layer today (which gives us client authentication as well as encryption) and it all worked first shot (well, after a small configuration hiccup). He delivered a week later than his prediction, which is both cool and shitty… Shitty in the sense that our feature freeze is this Friday and I am just testing under the real protocol stack. Cool in the sense that we all have a get out of jail free card should we ever need to slip a bit.. :P Anyway, it is good to see that he implemented all the protocol features “right enough” so I can get to work finishing all my code.
Adam has begun to integrate the gui design into our current project here at work and it is finally starting to feel “right”. I am even starting to feel okay about our deadline on Friday… Things are good, I guess.. :)
In other Rovia news, my favorite sales guy, Matt, has left the company…. I think it was a bit of a mutual decision, as Matt was more geared towards selling to professors and publishers, and we really need someone with experience selling enterprise software, but I am still sad to see him go… The new guy, Chuck, is some friend of our new CEO, and I guess some nepotism has to be expected when you bring a new boss on board… Hopefully he doesn’t go ISC on us…
Last night I spent about 20 minutes fishing with a coat hanger, but I finally found the data Cat5 in the wall of my bedroom. I punched down the keystone jack and patched it in the network closet (that end was already punched down into the patch panel) and it worked like a champ. I then spent about an hour fixing the phone connections down there… The electrician simply took the telephone feed from the street and twisted it together with all of the wires going to all of the rooms in the house, then wrapped the four 7-wire twists in electrical tape…. This is perfectly valid, but also a mess, so I bought a terminal block and did it all “right”. I also removed my “hacked apart phone cord” DSL connection and replaced it with a proper modular wall jack box thingie (and wired the other end of that properly into the terminal block). It is all much better now, and phone service has been restored to all the rooms…
Adam and I went to Active Electronics today to get some RJ-11 keystone jacks for telephone service in the bedrooms… We bought 2 hole keystone plates when we added the ethernet jacks in the rooms, but they were out of telephone jacks, so right now there is a big gaping hole in each wallplate… They still didn’t have RJ-11 jacks, but we just got 6-wire jacks and will just not connect the extra 2 wires… Shouldn’t be a problem at all…
Chuck and I had lots of fun this weekend, mostly just chillin’ out and relaxing…. The high point was going out last night… First we went to Boston Billiards to shoot some pool and get a bite to eat… According to Chuck, the waitress was totally hitting on me, and I guess I could agree with him.. We both agreed that she seemed to be going above and beyond the “trying to get a good tip” realm (esp. since she was totally ignoring Chuck.. :P) That’s fine with me, because she surely was a cutie… :) Perhaps I will go back next weekend and see if she is still around… :)
Afterwards Chuck and I met , Melanie, and Mike (Mel’s friend) for a few drinks at Jake Ivory’s.. It was great to see Mz. Luis again, since I haven’t seen her since Rochester, and her friends were way-cool as well. The bar was okay, but being I am not in to the bar scene that much, standing around listening to bad musicians kinda got old after awhile… Chuck got tired of it as well and we hit the road after a little while since we had an early morning today (chuck’s return trip). Perhaps next time she is in town I will pick where we go… :P
Today I think I am going to wire the phone service using a terminal block (the electrician just twisted the wire up and used electrical tape, which isn’t a big deal until you want to add something to the mess.. :P) and clean up the network closet. When I talked to the electrician the other day he said that there is definately a data line up in this room, so I will have to grab a coat hanger and try to fish it out of the wall… Then I can return phone service to this room… :)