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Through An Artist’s Eye

Currently, one of my favorite comic strips is My Cage which is somewhat like Dilbert in that it takes place in an office. Unlike Dilbert, it focuses more on the character’s personalities, the lead being a platypus named Norman who works at an office and finds himself constantly frustrated not only by office life, but also by his co-workers.

The creators of the strip, artist Melissa DeJesus and writer Ed Powers, held two contests recently on MySpace with the prize being an appearance in the strip. There was a fanart contest, and a writing contest, which I won. The rub is that the characters are all animals, so in addition to supplying a photograph for the artist to use as a model, I had to choose an animal. Over the protests of my former coworkers, who for some strange reason wanted me to pick a koala, and my best friend, who wanted me to go with an owl (high school thing). I decided to go with a bear because I think it suits my personality and also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bear in the strip.

Melissa has posted her version of myself and the other winners, and I like the way mine came out. The pic I sent for Melissa to use can be found here and the toon version is here. He, er, me looks like a pretty laid-back guy who needs to go to the gym a little more often. The only thing missing is a Nintendo DS 🙂

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Disk Schlockeys

As much as I like to think of myself as being Mr. High-Tech Geek Dood, I am somewhat old-fashioned. I don’t trust automatic billpay, don’t carry an iPod around with me every minute of the day (or even OWN an iPod for that matter) and I still mostly listen to the radio to get my recommended daily allowance of music.

My favorite station is currently the local Jack FM station because they play a lot of the older stuff I like, but more importantly, they don’t have any DJs. After having listened to Jack FM for some time, I find DJs to be even more annoying now.

The first time I went to the laundromat I now wash my clothes at, their PA was tuned to a local “Hit Music” station. It was two hours of mind-numbing HELL; if the speaker hadn’t been concealed, I would have ripped it out of the wall. When I turn on the radio, I want to hear MUSIC. I don’t give a crap about who got voted off on American Idol last night, I don’t want to hear the lame-ass DJ’s lame-ass jokes and his lame-ass sidekicks laughing on cue like Pavlov’s dog, and I don’t want to know how to tell if my significant other is cheating or any of that other crap.

Talking is for AM, music is for FM, its that simple. The next time I went to that laundromat the PA was tuned to Jack FM, so maybe its not just me.

I have a radio/CD player in the apartment, so I can listen to music and occasionally I’ll drop in a CD. If I am at the PC, I might fire up Winamp and pick out some MP3’s. I like listening to CDs in my car, or I’ll flip around the local FM stations, and I have an MP3 player I listen to while I work out.

I was helping a friend paint yesterday, and after some time, I noticed something was missing. There was no music. I used to help one of my brothers paint our parent’s house and he would always have either a radio outside blaring or his car’s trunk open with the stereo cranked to get that extra kick while listening to KISS.

Unfortunately, I could never do it to his satisfaction, and this would inevitably end with us yelling at each other…like I said, I used to help.

I asked my friend if he could put some music on, and he said yes and exited the room. I was fully expecting him to come back with a portable radio. Instead, he goes to his computer room and fires up iTunes on his Mac. Of course, the first song that cued up was something I wasn’t crazy about, but what can you do?

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The Force is Strong in This One…

Even though I’m probably not supposed to, I like to IM the friends I made at the last company I was at, just to see how they are doing back in the ol’ salt mine. As is the case with a bunch of screw-balls like us, some funny exchanges often ensue, but my conversation with Chris (not RavynX, BTW) this afternoon took a weird twist.

It was ten minutes until quitting time and I get a message from Chris asking if I was leaving soon. I replied yes I was, assuming nobody called. He then sent: “You are going to get a call” or something to that effect, and just as I finished reading that sentence THE DAMN PHONE RANG. I was flabbergasted, to say nothing of cheesed-off at Chris for jinxing me. I cursed Chris’ name under my breath as I put on my headset and picked up the call.

Luckily for Chris, the call was for someone else, so I transferred the call and went home on time. I left a message on Chris’ voicemail telling him how much he sucked, which probably wasn’t a good idea, since apparently he is a Sith Lord in training.

Now if it happens tomorrow, I am officially freaking out.

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I’m not sayin’…I’m just sayin

If you work on the 2nd floor of a building and you are able to, TAKE THE DAMN STAIRS!

The worst example of this was when I shared the elevator with two ditzy girls who apparently took the elevator from the 2nd floor all the way to the TOP floor of the building (the office where I work is on the top floor) and all the way back down to the 1st floor…un-farking-believable.

Oh well, just half a day to go until the sweet sweet weekend is upon me!

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Talk About Good Timing!

Despite living in San Antonio since mid-2006, I had yet to register to vote here in San Antonio (I was registered at my parents’ address) Of course, with the presidential primaries and general election coming up in November, I decided to rectify that problem, so I sent in a voter registration card in late January.

Now to vote in an election, you have to have registered 30 days prior to the election day, so I wasn’t sure that I would get my new card in time for the primaries today. I thought I could bring my voter registration card from my old county and vote anyway.

Well, that is true, but you have to vote early in order to do that. Of course I find this out Saturday after early voting had ended here in Texas, so I got bummed out over not being able to participate in (what I think anyway) is a historic Democratic primary.

Lo and behold, what do I find in my mailbox today, but my new voter registration card!

Go Obama!

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Down With The Sickness

As a kid, sick days were pretty cool, you get to miss school and lie around in bed all day. If you were lucky, your mom would dote over you making sure you were comfortable, bringing you soup, making sure you took your medicine and all of that good stuff.

As an adult, sick days suck. Its fun to sit around and play games, or goof around on the computer all day, but when you have to drag your rear out of bed to go to the doctor or to buy groceries or get prescriptions filled it freakin’ SUCKS.

Reading the side effects on the prescriptions is always fun, though; drowsiness, dizzyness, lightheadedness, blurred vision, possible ADDICTION?! Fark, I think I would have been better off with a bottle of Jack Daniels…it would have been cheaper, too.

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Taking Exception to Idiots

I want to start out by apologizing to all the non-programmers reading this. I try to avoid talking shop in a public place, but fark it…at least this gives me something else to say today besides “Valentine’s Day Sucks.”

A client has been busting my balls for the last week talking about “I have a random error” and he keeps sending me the same damn error message “Invalid data found in column XYZ” over and over again. At first I’m like, “Dude, you have invalid data!” which he denies, instead he blames it on the latest version of our software. He has no way to reliably recreate the error, but without that, I really have nothing to work with. “It’s random” he parrots to me.

Sorry, buster, but unless you’re having a hardware problem or failure: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A RANDOM ERROR!!

This eventually escalates to The Boss, who will no longer be my The Boss after tomorrow; he is transferring to another department. Mr. Random Error sends his code and some example data to The Boss who bounces it back to me because, hey, he’s moving out of our department, and he’s got other things to do. Okay, fine, I’m cool with that, but he didn’t have to be a dick about it, hopefully new The Boss will be cooler.

Randomizer’s dumb luck means I get passed the buck 90 minutes before my scheduled time to leave, and I have tomorrow off, too. Fark.

Those minutes quickly melt away setting up the test environment and getting the crappy code to freaking compile because the Brainiacs who wrote it are using a bunch of old crap that I don’t have referenced because I don’t use old crap. By the time I get all that sorted out, its way past time for me to go and I’m barely getting to the “let’s find out what happened” part, but I decide to stay despite a sweet, sweet, 3-day weekend staring me in the face.

I stay partially because its my job, partially because soon-to-be-former The Boss insisted this be done ASAP, partially out of curiosity as to what is causing the problem, and partially to prove to that jerk Mr. Random Error that he’s full of crap.

It doesn’t take long.

The program starts up as he said it would, data is loaded and everything looks okay…but I notice there are four exceptions in the Output window, and the program is still running?? For the 99% of you that aren’t code monkeys it means the program should have crashed…HARD

I fart around for a bit and get the “Invalid data found” error that started it all. Before the program dies, though, exceptions keep stacking up in the Output window like pancakes at Denny’s on a Sunday morning. It’s not quite Miller Time yet, though, something screwy is going on here. I look for Try-Catch statements in the code (these are used to catch errors) and find the following:

Try
blah
blah
suck
blah
Catch ex Exception

End Try

There is NOTHING in the Catch block!? Those of you who are programmers are probably laughing by now, for those that aren’t, that means when something Really Really Bad happens, the program just goes along its merry way as if nothing had happened. Normally, you would DO something about the error and keep the program from crashing.

In this case, something bad DID happen, but nothing is done about it. The errors just keep stacking up and stacking up until the whole thing blows up, which explains why it is (exaggerated finger quotes in mid-air) “RAN-DOM.” I breathe a sigh of relief because this is something we can work with, and I can tell Mr. Random Error that his code sucks and he needs to add some error handling to it. I enjoyed typing every single letter of that fucking email.

I was done at 830; I didn’t send out the email to Mr. Random Error, though, I sent it to The Boss and The Boss’s The Boss to let them know what was going on and to verify my theory is correct. Considering my state of mind when I typed it, some proofreading is probably a good idea, too.

So now I can begin my 3-day weekend, and I think I’ll start it by going out for some buffalo wings…mmm, wing-y!

By the way; Valentine’s Day sucks!

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You can’t fix stupid…but you have to support it

I do tech support for a living right now, and have worked in call centers in the past. There is an unfortunate truth that never occurred to me until last Saturday.

When I took this job, I had assumed that it would be easier then my previous crappy customer service experience. I based this assumption on the fact that I would be working with a ‘smarter’ group of people consisting of fellow programmers and assorted geeks. This would be easier than dealing the general public because those programmers and assorted geeks would be better at computers.

Of course, it didn’t take long to discover how wrong I was, but it took until last Saturday to figure out why:

The majority of those programmers and assorted geeks who call for help aren’t the Brainiacs that know what they’re doing. They’re the C and D students sitting near the bottom of the bell curve that need their hands held while they deal with Visual Studio, and in extreme cases, Windows.

I believe this holds true for ANY kind of support, regardless of whom the group of people you support are. Whether they’re programmers, teachers, lawyers or scientists, most of the ones who come calling for help are going to be the dumbest of the lot, no matter how smart they appear on paper.

While coming to that conclusion certainly doesn’t make my job any easier, it definitely explains a lot.

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