January 29
Gotta pay it forward... (and I don't mean the happy sappy movie of the same name. I don't really like sappy movies. Give me a good kung fu flick... but I digress)
I am referring to the nice people who stopped to help me when I was trying to get my car out of the snowbank that I had half parked in when I needed to go to the ISR Building to do some work on the PSC Intranet and had parallel parked on Thompson street. I got stuck on a patch of ice and frozen snow (couldn't go forward, couldn't go in reverse) and these complete strangers pulled over and helped push me off of it. (Thank you kind strangers!!!!) There are still plenty of nice people in the world.
So now I owe a good deed or a favor to some random stranger. That's the way it works. Or that's the way it should work.
January 28
It has been snowing a lot lately. I must be a little bit crazy, because I love this weather. There is something really grand about a nice, heavy snowfall.
The irony of this sentiment being that I am always cold. Currently I am wearing a silk undershirt, a merino wool shirt, and a heavy cotton-wool blend sweater and the heat is up around 68-70 degrees. And I am just about comfortable.
Yet I love winter. Yesterday was great, weather wise. I took off for work early so that I would miss the idiots who don't know how to drive in heavy, wet snow - so there was almost no one on the streets besides myself. I grabbed my camera on the way out or my apartment, so after I got to the office, I was able to wander around outside for a while and get some shots (I need to see if any of them came out alright) Because of the day-long snowfall, the office and all of downtown Ann Arbor were pretty dead.
Ann Arbor is very pretty in the winter.
But.
Ann Arbor doesn't plow the streets worth &^$%. As long as it is still snowing, they don't send the plows out. A full day after the heavy snowfall we got on Monday and Tuesday, and I am still not sure if Plymouth road near my apartment was ever plowed. It sure doesn't look like it. And I don't think that they salted either (or if they did, it wasn't enough to make a difference) Going out to Ypsilanti to Katy and Eric's house (this was on Friday evening, after another day of heavy snow) was interesting. There was almost a line of demarcation between Ypsi and Ann Arbor. The streets in Ypsi were just fine. Kinda wet, but no snow or ice. But as soon as you crossed into Ann Arbor, the streets were *@$&Q@ again.
John's theory is that Ypsi doesn't care if they kill the (mostly non-existant) greenery at the side of the roads or not, so they dump as many chemicals and salt on the roads as is necessary. Ann Arbor, however, is too "green" to do that... so all they do is sort of plow.
I don't mind the road conditions in Ann Arbor. I am used to snowy winter weather. and I think that Ann Arbor actually gets less snow during the winter then Ithaca or Cleveland do. But in Ithaca and Cleveland, they do a good job of keeping the roads clear.
January 22
Well. The week is looking up. Mostly because it is almost over.
My wireless network at home is up and running. I am sitting on my couch with my laptop and my cat keeping my feet warm as I update this. The faulty DLink router was exchanged for a SMC router that was actually plug-and-play rather then plug-and-fiddle-and-curse-and-give up. Yay. Thanks, John!
And my car is fine. Surprisingly enough. I love my Honda. It can take a rear-end collision and not even sustain a scratch!
And the design for the PSC intranet site is coming along well. I have a template up and "running" (so to speak) and am touching up some tweaks in the code before I start to drop in content. Mainly I have two bits I am working on. The first bit is the dynamic navigation...I am writing this in php as an include file. This way any modifications to the navigation only has to be done once, and in one place. (Is it laziness or efficiency? heh) The other thing - and this will probably take longer - is the fluid main content box. I designed it to have some very pretty rounded corners (I got the idea from an article I read on A List Apart). It looks great. Until you start to resize it a lot. Then the images kind of fall apart. I think that the problem is that I only have five anchor points for the border graphics. Top/side left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, and right side. I think that to have a really robust resizable content window I need eight anchor points - the four corners and the four sides. Of course, there are only so many elements in the content window that the border images can be anchored to. I will have to think about this one....
January 20
For those of you who may read my journal and who remember my "fun" (read, bad luck) with trying to port my wire-line SBC home number to a CIngular wireless account, also will remember that I cancelled the request when I was finally told that there was really no ETA for SBC to begin supporting ports, and that I ought to try asking again sometime in February. So imagine my surprise when I got home yesterday evening, tried to call tech support for a DLink wireless router (which turned out in the end to be faulty) in an attempt to figure out why, despite reporting a "strong wireless signal", my laptop was not able to connect to the internet through my Orinocco wireless card ... and found that I had no dial tone on my home phone.
I called SBC to see what the problem with my line was. And was told that Cingular had "ordered the disconnect". ETA on my temper spiking from zero to nuclear meltdown - 30 seconds. I was leapfrogger through several levels of managers, all of whom essentially told me that there was nothing they could do to retrieve my home number, that I could order a reconnect, but that I would be charged a reconnect fee and would be assigned a different number. The last person I talked to had the gall to ask me to rate my opinion of the SBC phone support.
Following this unproductive conversation I went to the Cingular store where my earlier cellphone drama had played out... the hapless customer service rep. who had to deal with me had little idea of what to do. And I think I scared her a little bit. She ended up calling the Cingular "main offices" (where ever those are) and having my number "released back to Cingular" - what ever that means and however they never got the message that I had CANCELLED the SBC port almost a month ago (SBC said they had recieved the order to disconnect on January 9, and had completed the order on January 14). Since there was nothing more I could accomplish there at almost 7pm, I left.
Fast forward to this morning, at about 7:00am.
I got into work extra early so I would have time to call SBC as soon as their offices opened at 7:00am. The nice person I talked to (thank you whatever deities who watch over this sort of thing that I did not have to deal with a repeat of the idiots who had no interest in service the customer last night) put in an order to reconnect my phone, with my correct home number, and said that they would waive the charges to reconnect (and if reconnect charges do show up on my next bill, I have the name, extension, and employee ID of the lovely woman who made exravagant promises this morning to a wronged customer). I told her the tale that Cingular had told me, and she said that she would take care of everything.
At a bit after 11:00, SBC called me at work to say that they had never recieved an authorization (or whatever) from Cingular to release my home number back to them. So I took an early lunch and when back to the Cingular store. Fortunatly, the sales person who knew me from my earlier cell-phone saga was in and able to deal with me. He called SBC. They talked routing numbers and databases, and legalese for a few minutes. Then he said that I would have my home phone back on with the correct number by the end of the work day. And apologized for whatever error had caused the problem.
*Whew* That is all I wanted, and I was kind of disappointed that this was so difficult to accomplish. I guess that this whole day was a testemonial to the efficacy of the be-low-grade-angry-semi-annoying-and-very-persistent until customer service people give you what you want just to make you go away and stop bothering them method of dealing with customer cervice people.I did not even have to threation to call the Better Business Bureau to complain.
So now my home phone is working again. As it should be.
And on the way home from work I was rear-ended at a stoplight.
January 14
It is snowing heavily outside. But I am inside sitting in front of a roaring (well, sort of - I don't have a very large fireplace) fire. And I am working (finally!) on my site and working on my site and basking in front of the fire are the only things that I am going to do tonight.
I will not dwell on the condition of the roads in Ann Arbor. Or the &#$^&@# idiotic drivers. Or the fact that it took me *$&^!#^&#!&* forever to get home from work... the DBD offices are just downtown, but a mile and a half (as the UM student walks) from my apartment and it took me nearly two hours to traverse that distance. But I will not dwell on that, because I just get needlessly pissed off.
Tea will help me not dwell on it. So will art. And coding. So I will drink tea and work on editing some photos for the site and enjoy my very soothing and cozy fire.
Check out the cute card the Erica sent me...
January 13
It is over. I can now emerge from the little isolation bubble that I have been in for the past couple of weeks. I wrapped up my work at FALCON and started work at DBD. And that was a lot of it. Leaving one job and starting up at another is always time consuming. But in addition to that I was finishing up my application to the PhD program at SI.
The official drop-deadline for turning it in is Jan.15, Thursday, so I was kind of pushing the deadline here. But I was pretty obsessed with perfecting my essay, which was the main reason I was lingering so long over turning it in. That, and the fact that I could just walk over to the offices to turn it in and not have to worry about the Post Office. Heh. An advantage to being a townie. Anyway, I was obsessed over the essay and making it as perfect as possible so I just kept working at it and working at it and then realized that I was coming dangerously close to overworking it. (A great big thank you to John, the 1337 pr00fr34d3r, for his patience and tolerance) So - time to turn it in. During lunch I walked the Rackham packet over to the Rackham offices and then the rest of it over to SI. I like SI and UM and the nice people I net on my hike just reaffirmed that. The two students who had set themselves and their operation up near Hatcher Library in the bitter cold and who were shouting out that they had "Free hot chocolate with marshmallows!" just made my day.
So. The application is all turned in. Every bit of it. And now I can stop worrying. Though it is not like I won't be biting my nails for the next couple of months until I get a response.
So. now I have free time again I can give some meaningful snapshots of my life the past couple of weeks.
Snapshot
Starting back at DBD felt good. And the fact that I was here before and know all of these crazy people is definitely making the transition easier. (and the fact that I now have a five minute drive to work instead of an hour commute is very good) But I really have just been thrown into the deep end to sink or swim as far as the workload goes. I am doing major IA and UID work on one site that has a very tight schedule, project manager on another project that has an even tighter schedule, managing the banking websites that DBD maintaines/updates/hosts (thankfully, not a very time consuming job), and taking on/learning sysadmin duties when I have "free time" to do so. Arrrghghhhh! But I love it. It is in Ann Arbor, so I can go have lunch at Cafe Zola if I want. Schedules are very relaxed, so as long as the work gets done and the meetings are attended, everything is very laisze-faire. And I even love the amount of work. Why? Maybe because I am a crazy Type A workaholic.
Snapshot
Ingrid had a goodbye party for Wayne and I (my last day was Tunesday, Jan. 6, and Wayne's was Thursday, Jan. 8) at her house after work on Monday. It was a great gathering... Ingrid and her sister Wally, Wayne and his family, Mark and his family, Ann, Sandy, Denise, Chandrika... all of the people we actually wanted to say good bye to before we left. (It was an invitation only party) Ingrid gace me a beautiful piece of art my a contemporary of Erte. I gave them all pysanky that I made as a goodbye gift. I felt like that was so much more that I could have done... should have done....
I will miss the FALCON team. I know that given the whole political situation at GDL and all of the uncertainty surrounding the future of FALCON that it was tbhe "right" decision to leave. But that doesn't make me feel any better about it, especially when I consider all of the people that are being left behind to try and pick up the pieces and carry them along.
Here is a picture of all of us... I must stay in touch......
Shapshot
Working at FALCON the last bit was really hectic. I was trying to finish all of my work on the Research Central website before I left (which I did), as well as document all of my regular and irregular tasks so that Mark doesn't go too crazy trying to figure everything out after I leave (which I also did - but only time will tell if I was able to write good documentation). And in the middle of all of this the Library Guardian softward needed to be updated on all of the Gates Foundation computers in Lapeer, or it would stop working. And Ann, who would usually do this sort of thing wasn't able to because of bad political stuff. So it was Mark and me.
Picture us driving down rural Michigan roads, some paved, some not paved going to teeny tiny little rural libraries. Smoking cigars in his car and discussing how to "fix" the problem of the FALCON governance, the question of a system migration, the politics at GDL, anf library consortiums in general. It was good. Definitely a memory that I will always carry with me.
Snapshot
These are the pysanky that I made (it was a long and painful process) for Ingrid, Mark, Wayne, and Anne as goodbye presents. The designs are all my own, and since it is winter, I based them all on snowflakes.
January 1
Happy New Year!
Did the New Years party at Chuck and Elaine's last night. They throw a good party. Much Catan and Muchkins and other odd railroad game was played. Good food. Good drink. Cumarra around to mix a few last drinks before he moves to Colorado in a couple of days. (He is moving out there to pursue his dream of being a professional photographer. I am a little jealous. I would like to be able to do something like this. Someday. Maybe. Ah, who am I kidding? I am a dedicated amateur but I don't think I have what it takes to go professional. Still... it would be nice to see my work in a national publication someday. Goals to shoot for.) Good people. Great company. Watch the ball drop at midnight. Chreers. Toasts. Great party.
I have today off from work and a whole list of stuff that I want to get done (a list that I am currently avoiding by updating my blog. Heh.) Anyway. My list. Some light cleaning and laundry around my apartment. Work on my application essay. Which means get it into a shape that I can farm out to friends for proofreading. Work on pysanky a bit. Work on some new photos to put up here. Well, start to work on them anyway... they probably won't actually show up for several days... Do some work on the PSC intranet IA design (it is mostly at the penciled list on paper stage right now) And... oh yeah! It is my day off! Rest and relax and take it easy. In between all of the chores, that is. Heh heh.
Well, time to get busy I guess... having a day off is hard work.