Category: Work

Little bit of everything

My explosive happiness of the last couple of days has simmered down somewhat.  I have all new shiny tunes on my music player, and I set foot out the door yesterday to the strains of Dion’s “The Wanderer” and next up was Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” which, inshallah, will be played at my funeral. Work was work and Trevor got up at lunch so I could sit down, so that was nice.  Then on the way home I turned around and walked backwards for a while so I could listen to Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” and watch the sunset at the same time.  Today I’m going to lunch with my boss and someone from one of the furrin offices.  Monday I had the second best workmeeting of all time (the best one was with two of the US office guys and a pitcher of beer); the convenor, who has been with the company less than a year but has always impressed me as a very clever man, ran things in a very collaborative and fun way, and the other person was my colleague from day one at the company whom I reverence greatly (he ALWAYS sends me fraternal greetings on International Women’s Day, which is beyond words sweet) and we actually accomplished what the meeting set out to do which is how meetings go when you have the right people in the room and the wrong people aren’t invited.  And minutes were provided within a day.  Yeah.  That’s how things should be, gorramit.

I light a brace of candles for my gran, who essentially hasn’t been sick since she was recovering from gall bladder surgery, which I think was back when tv had been invented but the colour hadn’t, and who is finding her current trials painful and frankly undignified (but not life threatening).  Given that she is the sweetest woman who ever trod this ball of mud, I wish her speedy relief so she can get back to more interesting activities.

mOm is dejunking…. she is dejunking an immense piece of guilt inducing junk onto somebody who’s doing handsprings of gleeee at the prospect of receiving it, and the person who gave her the guilt inducing junk is the one who suggested it.  That’s what I call win win.  I mean, when the person who’s getting the junk is paying to have it crated and shipped…. this is success!  And no, it’s not junk.  But one of the definitions of junk is ‘useful stuff in the wrong place’ and this terrible blockage will be cleared, with satisfying results, shortly.

I am working on the Valentine’s cards for work.  One must be careful.  But one must live up to one’s reputation as well…. not always an easy balance to strike.

Katie had her first day of work at her new job yesterday and pronounced it tolerable, except that it is JUST BARELY on the other side of the line in terms of zones for bus passes.  Personally I think she should walk it but you know kids these days.

I am SO looking forward to purchasing a bicycle.  And actually living someplace I can use it!  I never did get rid of my bike helmet (or my motorcycle helmet, as I secretly believe that one day I will again have a sweetie who rides) because I didn’t want to give up that last bit of hope I’d use it.

This weekend I’m off to the Island to help my bro pack.  I am looking forward to that as well.  Hope he’s got lots of good things for me to cook in the fridge.  Hint hint.

I have much curtailed my beer consumption, which is good. Quoth the Luddite, “You don’t have to stop on my account,” after suggesting we go pick up beer to take back to is place and I’m thinking, “But I don’t need to drink beer when you’re around.”  Ah, I’m just being socially malleable.  If my friends all drank and smoked, I probably would too… no spine, that’s me.  I am going to bed at a reasonable hour and not spending hours on the computer.  All good so far…. can it last? Probably not; the cheerfulness is probably just an artifact of having the sun on my face when I went home last night, after months of darkness.

Oh, snap.  My printer is out of ink.  Think fast about this!!!! what shall I do?  Oh, yeah, there’s a reprographic place in this building, it’s not like I just ran out of airspeed, altitude and options all at the same time.

Cats.  There will be cats back in my life!  Eddie and Gizmo are wonderful, staunch, middle aged cats. Nothing too spectacular, except Gizmo took a dog out once, and both of them are mighty hunters.

Organizational anti-patterns

This is stolen, holus bolus, from a wikipedia article on Anti Patterns.

How many of these classic screwups characterize your organization?

  • Accidental ownership: Employee is given a system that was tangentially related to their system and left to poorly maintain it without proper training, growth or focus (common among phone->network administrators in the late 90’s)
  • Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
  • Captain in the engine room: The leader spends his time and attention on technical details, and nobody’s running the ship
  • Cash cow: A profitable legacy product that often leads to complacency about new products
  • Continuous obsolescence: Devoting disproportionate effort to porting a system to new environments
  • Cost migration: Transfer of project expenses to a vulnerable department or business partner
  • Crisis mode (a.k.a firefighting mode): Dealing with things only when they become a crisis, with the result that everything becomes a crisis
  • Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
  • Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
  • Hero-mode: A policy of continuously relying on the heroic efforts of staff in order to meet impossible deadlines, whilst ignoring the long term cost of failing to build in software quality from the outset.
  • I told you so: When the ignored warning of an expert proves justified, and this becomes the focus of attention
  • Management by hope: Assuming that silence means everything is going well
  • Management by neglect: Too much delegation
  • Management by numbers: Paying excessive attention to quantitative management criteria, when these are non-essential or cost too much to acquire
  • Management by perkele: Authoritarian style of management with no tolerance for dissent
  • Management by wondering: Expecting a team to define their own objectives, and then wondering what they’re doing
  • Moral hazard: Insulating a decision-maker from the consequences of his or her decision.
  • Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and misinformed (kept in the dark and fed manure)
  • Not invented here (a.k.a. N.I.H.): Ignoring an idea or implementation originated outside the organization
  • Polishing the polish: Giving a subordinate or team a finished project to work on, prohibiting them from doing anything else, and then complaining about their productivity
  • Scope creep (along with the closely related terms complexity trap and featuritis): Allowing the scope of a project to grow without proper control
  • Stovepipe: A structure that supports mostly up-down flow of data but inhibits cross organizational communication
  • Vendor lock-in: Making a system excessively dependent on an externally supplied component
  • Violin string organization: A highly tuned and trimmed organization with no flexibility

Ladies and gentlemen, you are looking at the future

This came out of the fabricator at work. I found the file on the internet, sent the link to me colleague, and we were getting rid of that toner anyway because it had been recycled too much, and here you go.  It is sitting on a dvd so you get some idea of the scale.  Robof9 made one for himself, too.  I had a long talk with the manager who ‘owns’ the fabber, and he allayed my fears as to my robbing the company – it was a trivial amount of toner and no big deal in terms of wear and tear on the machine.  The machine itself has saved the company a couple of hundred thousand dollars since we purchased it.dodecahedron.jpg
Me very very happy.

Nine hours sleep AGAIN

Either I’m clinically depressed or I’m actually getting enough sleep.  Since I wake up in the morning feeling calm, relaxed and rested, which is usually the opposite of either depressed or sickening sleep (you know, the sleep you get when you’re trying to fend off the latest round of germs) I think it’s the latter, and that’s just fine by me.

On the list today:

Get my thank you letter off to my Granny; put all my laundry away, which laundry has transmogrified from Dirty Pile to Clean Pile without significantly reducing the wreckage that is my apartment; Cook Things (I have chicken and beef to cook up for premade meals); send out invites for the Friday night beeriness (which will also encourage me to tidy in the public areas at least although the bathroom’s already clean); assemble my outfit for contradancing on Friday (it’s literally one short bus ride from here); get into work early because me covering for somebody’s lawful absence for the last week and a half has put a cinder in the eye of all of my other customers, who are sending baleful emails.  I should also get stuff ready for Conflikt but I imagine I’ll get into a frenzy of printing stuff out later.. it was odd having somebody who knows me IRL emailing me and asking if she could print out the Tapioca Song for the song book – it’s on this site and under a Creative Commons license.  Unless you are planning on turning it into an international hit children’s song (as…bloody…if…) anybody can do what they want with it, and it’s already been parodied, so nu?  Oh, and I should cancel & rebook next Friday evening’s medical appointment downtown because I’m going to be in Seattle….

Before I die I want ONE of my songs to have a goofy flash animation.  I may have to go back to school to learn how.  I’m thinking “Catnip on my Shoes” because it’s only a minute long, and cats are definitely popular with geeks.  Why?  because they are Just Barely Social Enough.  Dog owners can be easily as crazy as cat owners, but at least they have to leave the house.

eat drink man woman

SO I went to Maria’s restaurant on Denman last night with two coworkers and did NOTHING except talk about work.  The food was fabulous, the service was a little…. I dunno. She kinda flung stuff on the table in a remarkably inelegant fashion.

Now it’s time to go to work and talk about…. the restaurant?  Life is so recursive, and passing odd.  Thanks for the link Lady Miss B ’cause it was very funny.

Snow and fog

There’s another FOUR INCHES on the ground up here.  You can barely see across the street. Tanya from work just called me on my cell to tell me it’s slippery as hell so I gotta burn ass out of here to work – she says nobody is even answering on switchboard, which sucks at 7:30 am.

Cooking

Here I am cooking lunch for I don’t know how many people.  I don’t know how many because the cafeteria is closed today but there will still be people at work.  I told all my lunch buddies that I’m cooking today, but I bet they all packed lunches because, well, they’re engineering staff and they’re like that.
Anyway it’s parsnips pan fried in butter, basmati rice, an abbreviated sort of salad, and crockpot chicken thighs with basil, pepper, kashmiri red pepper, celery salt, two cloves of garlic, a bay leaf, and about a quarter teaspoon of cardamom.  The smell in here is enough to turn your salivary glands into Niagara Falls.

Now I have to figure out how to get it down the freaking hill without breaking anything.  I am not stupid, I’ll come up with something.

pinned

I got entirely pinned by a co-worker today.  He’s known me for 10 years.  We’ve had our ups and downs, but I have a lot of respect for him.

I said to the cafeteria gal (as I owed about $80 and it’s their year end) “It’s time for me to pay my debt to society,” which was overheard by colleague.  His immediate response, “Allegra, is that possible in a single transaction?”

 

OW OW OW

Merry ho ho

There is now enough chocolate at the office to paper my wall with.  Mmm… edible walls.

I am so looking forward to five days off I can’t tell you.  Except that I’m getting all scratchy and coughy and thinking I’m about to get sick.

Goldman Sachs shorted their bad mortgage loan paper.  I love how that works.  Let’s take a debt instrument that nobody understands and make book on how far it can fall? The whole house of cards is about to come riffling down at high speed… just like I’ve been warning about for years; it’s just that it’s closer than it was in 2004.

I can’t talk about work.  I’ll talk about underwear instead….. my daughter gave me really cute underwear for Christmas.  Or if I talk about work, how about peripherally?

Dave DeR gave me the Onion Atlas for Xmas.  It’s very funny.  Yes, I opened it early! I open every Christmas present I get when I get it.  This crap about waiting just means that the garbage gets loaded into one week, I prefer to spread the Christmas debris over a couple of garbage cycles.

Bitter?  Not at all.  I’ve just gone back to my normal state, which is grumpy.