Monday, May 16, 2005

And I wanted to do this?

Alright... Well I don't know if I have announced it here, but I have been progressing on that great big thing called a corporate ladder. I was made manager about three weeks ago. Now the perks to this little promotion have not outweighed the disadvantages to this point.

I have been working crazy hours lately. It's the first time my review is impacted by the performance of others. I'm really starting to realize why it's so critical to have people who go the extra mile to get things done.

When I got the promotion I was told I could pick a title. I really wanted a title like "Evil Overlord" or "Benevolent Despot," but I don't think they would work too well on the business cards. And I didn't want to be a Project Manager b/c my experience with Project Managers have not been the more positive interactions. Instead I'm a "Systems Manager." Not that it means anything to anyone, but I have "manager" in my title now. So far all it means is I work twice as hard for the same pay. But I'm working to fix the latter part of the equation.

This last weekend we moved offices. Again. And things could not have been more messed up. Over the weekend I ranted to anyone who would listen for at least 30 minutes about everything that had gone wrong and was continuing to go wrong. I could go into it all again, but there's not much point. Long and short of it is none of the vendors did what they were supposed to do. We had no internet until today when it should have been delivered last week. The furniture will be there Thursday when it should have been delivered last week. The cubes have not been assembled... yada yada yada. Long hours and lots of yelling at stupid people accomplished nothing. Isn't management fun?

The highlight of the weekend was a visit from Kevin and Sesalee. I hadn't seen them since last summer, but they came up to visit Jeff and Lisa and their new baby Jakob. I joined them at Jeff and Lisa's house where we watched Starwars: Clone Wars on Cartoon Network and played Monopoly. I tried to warn them before we started monopoly that I got competitive about the game. I don't think they quite realized how competitive. We quit when I controlled 2/3 of the board and was working hard to get more.

9:16 PM Posted by Big Dave | 1 Thoughts

Monday, May 02, 2005

Proof of Concept

I have no idea why I feel like I have to further demonstrate my geekiness. But I'm about to.

I have had a number of problems with one of my computers basically since I bought it. It works fine for menial tasks but when I try to play videos or do anything too complicated it would hang or reboot. On Thursday night it did this three times in a row so I shut it down and opened up the case to look at the CPU's heatsink. It had a lot of crud inside the heatsink itself. Thinking it had never been completely adequate I decided I would fix the problem once and for all.

Dezi and I went to CompUSA on Saturday. Not my ideal store, but I can usually find what I'm looking for even if it's not as cheap as I would like. I bought a CPU cooler and some Artic Silver and rushed home to play with my new purchases. After taking forever to install the stupid thing I fired it up and voila! It's been rock solid ever since. The cooler I bought had a switch to kick the fan RPMs from 2800 to 3700 to 5400 RPMs. I enjoyed abusing my computer and seeing what the temperature would go to. It was averaging 60 C before the new parts. Afterwards it got as high as 42 C when I was really abusing it, but usually stayed around 38 C.

Now I may to the same thing to my other computer. I bought the cooler that came from Intel with a P4. That computer has the same symptoms so I'm hoping if I add the cooler I'll be back to having a gaming machine again. Muhaha!

2:41 PM Posted by Big Dave | 0 Thoughts

Sunday, May 01, 2005

On the move

I've been awfully busy this last week. On Tuesday I was made project lead. This is a good thing and a bad thing. I'm taking over from someone who is senior to me who is now reporting to me until he moves off the project. Tuesday was nuts trying to figure out what everyone was working on and what had fallen through the cracks. For a couple of nights I didn't sleep well with everything running through my mind. The rest of the week improved greatly. By the time I left on Friday, I was still stressed out, but I think everything will be fine. It's a new experience having my performance based on the performance of other people. For now I'm following a principle that Ronald Reagan put forth. "Trust first. Verify later."

Friday night we participated in the Relay for Life at the Frisco High School. It was an all night walk-a-thon. The youth were responsible for walking from 2:00 AM to 5:00 AM. We planned to stay all night, but the temperature just kept dropping. I finally convinced Dezi to go to my apartment about 10:00 that night. We guessed that at the coldest point it was 45 degrees. I know the wind chill put it into the 30's. The youth and I were quite a sight trying to stay warm. I brought a tent, but the wind finally put an end to the tent. I'd had it for about 12 years and it just wasn't going to cut it any more. I have funny stories to tell about that tent. Maybe I'll include them later.

Since Friday I've been doing my best to recuperate from the weekend. Saturday and Sunday I've spent most of the time in bed. It's been nice since I'm not going to be able to do that much over the next few months.

9:33 PM Posted by Big Dave | 0 Thoughts