digitalMoto.net

What have I been doing?

What HAVE I been doing?

I passed a cop on the I-84. He was in the slow lane. I was slicing through traffic teetering between under and over a buck in a 60 mph zone. Left, right, left, accelerate. Was that a cop in that last pack? Check rear view. No lights. Well, if I was to get a ticket doing over 100 mph, Oregon law requires a $1000 fine and a suspended license for 30 days. I think it is time to evacuate before someone changes their mind about pursuit. Exit onto I-5 North, take the first exit onto Sandy, and the first right onto a side street. Take 102nd home…

Sounds like self-destructive behavior to me.

“ I’ve stopped all of that now.”
“You were outside of my place this morning.”
(Name that movie.)

Counseling is helping me mellow out a bit. New meds help as well. Do I need a higher dose?

It is paradox. I know that I’m generally insane. Staying ‘here’ is a constant struggle. I get distracted. I forget so much of everything that I do and say. I day dream and lose track of time. My mind just slips away and I’m not here any longer. It is hard to describe. It is harder to live. But this is my life, such as it is. I get this one chance. The next cycle seems so unreal and distant. I just want to sleep, just want to get off this merry-go-round so that I can reset myself and move forward with hope and a degree of grace and confidence. I lost all of that with my last mental break. My confidence is shot.

I would just as soon kill my co-workers as to debate with them. I have lost respect for all of them in varying degrees. The tech-lead is the biggest problem. He’s an asshole with serious personality defects. I guess the point of this diatribe is I hate my job.

What’s new?

The work is fine. I am just not having a good time. The team is fractured and the environment is fairly hostile most of the time. There is only so much bullshit I can take. Incest jokes, rude comments about someone’s appearance, overt efforts to destroy someone’s every action, on and on… It gets old. And things haven’t changed in the 9+ months I have been there. Has it been that long? Fuck.

I’m working as a real DBA these days. When I started, there was a push to use my programming skills and do a lot of Visual Studio programming. I was agreeable but there wasn’t a clear line when things got really busy. If I am under the gun to solve a SQL problem, the last thing I want to do it go write some VB code. I don’t even like VB. C# is fine. Having a C/C++/Java background, I get it. VB makes very little sense to me. Yes, I know it works but it’s lame and I’m a bit of an elitist. I can admit that.

Today, I got fed up with everyone’s complacency and started writing a simple bug tracker. I can hide this under the guise of DBA work as I construct the data structures and refine my tables, view, stored procedures, etc. I can even hide the CLR code because that too falls under my legal realm. But the actual web site is clearly outside of my allowed activities. I don’t really care.

Last night/this morning, I was reading in Dreaming in Code again. The section covered management of IT professionals and programmers in particular. (Some of these are paraphrased. Some are direct quotes. I too lazy to look’em up.)

• “It’s like herding cats.”
• “… 70% consider themselves as thinkers… the remainder are feelers… The ‘normal’ ratio in our society is 50/50”
• “Programmers like to build tools to solve their problems, not actually writing the code to solve the actual problem at hand.”

I woke up at 04 this morning. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I read. I tossed and turned. I thought about the people I care about. I thought about the code I want to write. I thought about the problems I would love to solve through my ability to write and design software solutions. Sure, I have so much more to learn, but doing consulting is pretty good training at learning under the gun.

Now, I’m sitting in bed. My Toshiba laptop is on the TV tray, pulls back at a 20 degree angle because of my forearms. An Aimee Mann concert video is playing. Nice mellow music. The visual and sonic qualities are first rate. This isn’t one of those crappy sounding presentations with grainy images and washed out stage shots. Tasteful lighting. Rich musical textures. I like it. I think I have G3 as well + a Jim Carry film Spotless Mind or something like that.

Lunch was free pizza – birthday party for the other DBA. Dinner was a raisin bagel and 500 ml of apple juice. I have water on the shelf. My toes are cold. The forecast is for more snow in the mountains, possibly 10” in the Coastal Range tonight. That is the last thing I want. I want SUN! I want warm temps, hot tarmac, sand-free turns at triple the posted limit. I want to live for a change. I feel so caged this winter. I know part of it is just having a normal job, going to work every day, day-in day-out.

A slave to the grind.

Money is tight right now. I paid a bunch of stuff up last month and under cut my ability to pay my truck payment early. It’s due within a week of rent. I can cover both in one check, but it is tight. Plus, I have to come up with $500 for deductible on my truck.

I didn’t tell you? I slid through an intersection during the last snow fall. I couldn’t stop and made a bad choice on how to deal with it. The end result was I got T-boned. The car that hit me was totaled and my truck is getting something like $5000 in repairs. Oops. Now, that’s an understatement. There goes my 10 year accident free discount and I may get a 5% surcharge. That means my insurance is going to go up over $400 a year. Bummer.
I think I’m typed out for tonight. Hopefully, I’d be back in some reasonable date in the near future. Maybe I’ll put on High Fidelity.