It's been another crazy week, which means I missed my lunch hour ride due to too much work. Never a good sign. I did get out last week and spotted a herd of deer while waiting in the parking lot. That is something I would have never thought to see. The valley walls are laced with wildlife paths, but I'd figured they they were much, much smaller animals: legions of migratory rabbits and the like. It was shocking to see deer wander by. I said 'herd'; however, it was really only eight, but you have to remember this is in a valley in urban San Diego. That is eight more than I expected. I pointed them out to somebody in the parking lot who responded with the not-so-soothing "Oh, maybe that is what the mountain lion I heard about eats". I'm going to remember to stay in the middle of the biking pack from now on.

Seriously, there are deer in that picture. Almost dead center.

I get this email forwarded to me from one of our testers and it starts out "Got Application Performance Challenges?" which immediately made me wonder what brainless hack wrote that. I can see the job advertisement now: "Are you a grammatically challenged copy writer? Come work for (insert application vendor here)". I'm so sick and tired of the "Got XXXX?" advertising campaign. I was going to push for a bumper sticker that said "Understand Grammar?" but I don't think it would sell.

So we are back in to peer review hell again this month. I've plowed through six peer reviews so far and I've got two more plus a self review to do. Do people ever give bad self reviews? I'm stoked this time around because I managed to use the term "myopic" in a peer review. I wasn't writing a bad review but it was my fifth review that day so I was amusing myself. One of the sections they have you review your co-workers on is their ability to balance their work load. A lot of the people I work with are responsible for bits of the infrastructure that our systems rely on, so I really don't *care* how they balance their work load as long as they do my stuff first.

It was getting late and I was on my fifth review so I stated that "George (not his real name) is very efficient at managing his workload, of course I have a very myopic view of his workload since I consider my stuff to be the most important". I'm not sure if I've helped him with that kind of review. A couple years ago I wrote "George (not his real name either) has lost the joy in his job." on a review. That came back to bite me in the ass because 'George' had that quoted to him by his boss and he immediately figured I'd written it, which was very astute of him. We're still good friends, he works somewhere else now.

Kat just finished making some chocolate cherry loaf. Tasty, but now it is sitting in my stomach like a carb laden sugary black hole. I'm afraid to go in to the kitchen because I think the other food is starting to form orbits around it.

I thought it would be interesting to see where people work. I think folks should email me pictures of their office/cube and I'll collate them all. You all have cell phones that take pictures, there is no excuse not to. I'll include the full size of mine here. The photo on the wall is Kat in her bandito outfit while we were crossing the Andes. Yes, I don't personalize my office much. I just work there.

I had a whole post going earlier this week but I started to talk about expectations of personal privacy. It turns out the phones Kat and I have do a lot of 'calling home' to their maker to blab all about our habits, what we were doing and where we were(!). My writing quickly degraded in to a rant about how everyone gathers data on you and you really don't have any privacy. I had to stop writing it because I could either give up entirely and join facebook and twitter or move to a wood cabin in the wilderness, hunt my own food, and never use electronics again. I've chosen the third path, willful ignorance. As I read on a bumper sticker "If you aren't outraged, you're not paying attention.", I'm making an effort not to pay attention. I'll give a call out to Lincoln who many years ago pointed out that ignorant is the happy way to be. In his case he argued that he wanted all politicians to lie to him and tell him everything is just fine. He figured it was their job to worry about the big things. Why were they attempting to offload their jobs to him by telling him the economy sucked? He elected THEM to worry about that, get back to it and stop sharing the pain.

Speaking of twitter and such, I'm still going to the work presentations of Web 2.0 and Social Media trying desperately to understand why they keep giving talks about it. I've even managed to coin a term for my attitude, I am officially a 'Optimistic Cynic' or 'Cynical Optimist' depending on who I'm talking to. I really want the technology to be everything they say it will be, but I doubt it.
They rolled out 'Yammer' as a beta try-out at work. Yammer is work equivalent of Twitter. My boss sent me the link to sign up so I installed it along with a plug-in for my Firefox browser. Every time somebody I subscribed to sent a message on Yammer my machine would drawl "Yam" (drawled like a stoned surfer discovering tubers for the first time) and the text would pop up. I've discovered things about Yammer:
1) It's annoying to have yet another thing interrupting me.
2) The "Yam" sound should never have passed user interface design. I turned it off.
3) Some people at my work have TOO MUCH TIME on their hands. How can they keep sending 'cool links' to the Yammer channels, don't they work? I became more convinced then ever that some people in the corporate infrastructure group are just like sugar sensitive A.D.D. kids in a candy store. Ooooh, shiny technology link! OMG, OMG look at this! THIS is the future! OMG, forget the last future, that's the past, look at this future!
4) 'Yamming' from a conference isn't about sharing information, it's all about pointing out that you are at a conference paid for by work while everyone else is stuck in the office. How are you supposed to distill a conference presentation down to 180 characters? You can't, stop trying.
5) I really, really don't care that you are going to be in building B for lunch.

I wrote a summary of the technology at my bosses request pointing out that everything Yammer does we already have existing tools to do, and those tools are using mature technology that we don't have to invest more money in. Ah hell, I know people at work who can barely manage to create an email filter and they want them to pick up yet another invasive technology? The last internal presentation I went to the presenter talked about how the uptake of Yammer is on the rise at work.

Sometimes technology sucks.

World of Warcraft has advertised their latest expansion pack that sounds very interesting. They are making goblins playable race for the Horde. If they make them as cool as the goblins in Warhammer it may be tempting to take the game up again. The first time I saw a goblin in Warhammer do the /special command I laughed so hard I leaked a tear or two. So inappropriate, but that is the race that allows the fighters an ability called "right in the jibblies". How can you not like that?

Last Monday night, I managed to pop out my knee playing soccer. We were short our normal goalie and I'm backup goalie on account of I don't have a filter between "Should I jump in front of this guy?" and jumping. This normally leaves me in mid-air, or being trampled under foot wondering just how I got there. I've been told it looks good, and I think I'll put it on my tombstone "At least it looked good". I went out again tonight to play, but had a mad attack of common sense and just watched the game instead. It's very, very frustrating to be constrained by common sense. I'm not a fan.

As I mentioned in my last post, it was a very busy weekend (two weekends ago). The murder mystery had me worried, I'm not much of a people person if I don't already know them and it was a 'ask other people for information and role play' kind of evening. Kathleen swept out in to the crowd like she'd known them for ever and I was sitting at the table with a 'scientist' and two members of the 'gazelle liberation army' (GLA). Happily the 'scientist' was in reality a sound engineer and foley artist, which was pretty cool. The fact that I had to do a character assassination of my wife within five minutes of the start managed to break the ice. Some people were tagged as 'Dancers' and were forced to go up on stage later in the evening and do an interpretive dance bit on wounded gazelle. I took some photos with the new phone, but looking at them now ... everyone gathered around the 'wounded animal' while badly imitating gazelles looks downright creepy.


We ended going out that evening with members of the GLA to a pub near our place. Kat was stoked and having a great time. The scientist at our table wasn't drinking and gave me her drink tickets. It turns out that I was the driver that night so Kat enjoyed the large portions of wine being served. I'd been up since 5:30 in the morning to get in the ocean and by 12:30 AM I was just tired and wanted to go home.

The Testes toss tournament was a success, Kat and I burned out in the third round, which was good. We were there from 11:00 am until 3pm when we left (it continued on until 8pm). I never knew how much effort they put in to the tournament, but there were over 80 people (40 teams), four lanes to 'toss', bullhorns, kegs of beer, kegs of mixed drinks (when did this happen?) and of course the two police cars that showed up.

There was lots of what I would consider 'surfer flesh' hanging around: young, buff and tanned boys. Two of them had the, I'm assuming it's stylish, ass-crack showing in their low slung shorts. Kat and I met up with folks from the soccer team, the shorts boys came up in conversation and we learned that they are there every year, they are referred to as the "McCrackins" and most people can't stand them. Paula's shining moment this year was beating their teams out of the tournament.

Four hours in the sun, then home to shower, change and off to a wedding party for one of my co-workers who got married in Lebanon last month. I lasted until 9PM and then I was just tired from being in the sun all day and wanted to go home. I'm pretty sure it was the sun that made me tired, it could have been the Lebanese line dancing and ululations that were making me a little uncomfortable, but that would make me look bad. Four hours in the sun, exhausting.

I seem to have missed a week in my normal posting schedule. I'll fully admit that the busy weekend threw me off, but I've also been playing Oblivion again. It is an older game (a couple years or so) and an open ended RPG. It took me a while to start but I'm finally starting to enjoy it. The game has been around long enough that there is wiki site out there dedicated to it and that site has *everything*. Every quest in the game is indexed, detailed and searchable. I enjoy the game, but some of the effort people have put in to this site is disturbing.

Kat has continued to find that getting a job is very difficult to do in a depression. She had an audition on Saturday that she thinks went well, but sadly the male lead they chose was younger, so she thinks they'll be casting somebody younger to match. I told her to work the Mrs. Robinson angle, of course me telling her that after the audition probably didn't help. If I'd been there I would have said the same thing, in a stage whisper. Yep, that bad joke is in there intentionally.

Kathleen is still recovering from Saturday night. We went out to support a friend of ours in her karaoke habit. It was a quiet night with not many people so Kathleen volunteered to go do a tune. I'll say right now that I've heard Kat sing and she sounds good, not trained, but good. The karaoke machine hated her. It was a little painful and her ego was still suffering on Sunday.

I've been thinking about teaching the dog a new trick. I'm just in the planning stages. He's been giving me his undivided attention, but i don't think it's sinking in. I tell him to get me a beer and he just looks confused. I realize that opening the fridge is probably something I shouldn't be teaching him, since he'd sniff everything and leave nose marks in the butter, so I'm upping the ante. I figure if I ask him enough times and project maybe I'll teach him to run to the corner store with a $10 bill attached to him and open *their* fridge and get the beer.

I think the tough part is going to be teaching him the difference that opening our fridge is bad, but opening their fridge is good. My hopes aren't high.