On one hand, it’s only 11pm here because work is pegged to EDT and I’m in HST. The bad thing is that I’m also pretty tied to EDT and wake up at 5am or earlier. If I were still on the East Coast, it’d be 5am and I’d have been up from the night prior, with work starting at 11:30pm. But given that I’m still waking up really early, the fact that it’s only 11pm is somewhat immaterial — especially when you consider how long I’ve been working today. The raw hours are a bit scary.

From my last trip to Oahu, I had a leftover “5 Hour Energy” drink that I never ended up needing. It was the first time I had bought one, but figured since I’d be up really late, it was probably worth having it just in case. Well, ‘in case’ never came so it traveled back with me to sit in my medicine cabinet. Around 8pm, I could tell that I was starting to get a tad slower. I was far from “tired”, but I knew I was going to be feeling it in a few hours despite the copious amounts of Coke that I’ve been consuming all day long. With that realization, I went to the medicine cabinet and cracked open the tiny bottle.

While bringing it to my mouth to drink, I paused and read the “instructions”. Basically, they said “drink half of the bottle if you want 1/2 the energy in the bottle, but drink the whole thing if you want super energy”. I knew I had at least 5-6 hours of work ahead of me, so I figured it was both safe and prudent to go all in.

Here’s where disappointment sets in — it’s only 3 hours later (I’m still working) and I feel exactly like I would have had I not taken that drink. I have to do a lot of out-of-hours work and get woken up in the middle of the night with phone calls, so I’ve got a pretty good bead on how I react to sleep and sleep deprivation.

My loose assumption is that my body is pretty well tuned to break down stimulants given my diet that consists of a large amount of sugar and caffeine sources. I’m one of those people that can drink soda right up to going to bed and my eyes still shut when I hit the pillow. Maybe this should have flavored my expectation of efficacy, but given the explicit goal of the drink, I was hoping for more.

Next time, I’ll just take an afternoon nap.

Today was a double-whammy in that I had to bring my car in for service early. So I got to bed last night after 1am when I finished work and then was up at 6am to get the car to the dealership. No fun.

Tomorrow is the Scars of Mirrodin pre-release. For anyone not in the know, this is a Magic: the Gathering thing. It’ll be one of the last “fun things” that I do before I go on-call on Wednesday. The thought of a week on-call is a bit defeating, but I can only hope that it’s not horrible and just put my head down.

At some point, I need to stop being surprised at how quickly I come back into rotation and how much it kicks my ass each and every time.

I’ve been working at ITA since October 2007 and it’s an amazingly fascinating job. No matter how insane you believe the airline industry is from the perspective of an airline traveler, it’s probably more than 10x that insane from the point of view of someone with a bit more insight into how things work. And that said, my window into the airline world is much smaller than many — so I’m sure it gets even crazier then more you learn.

Needless to say, the chance to work for Google (pending the usual regulatory approval that’s associated with these sorts of deals) is an exciting one. ITA has won countless awards for being a great place to work. Google is known to be a great place to work as well. In this regard, the companies are a really good fit. Add to that the push for innovation, creativity and producing the best products in their class, and you have even more synergies.

These are definitely interesting times.

The week of 12/8 I was nighttime upgrader and I was scheduled to work the weekend of 12/13. That got bumped, but completely ate my Friday night. Then from 12/18-12/25, I’ve been on-call, which means 24-7 support coverage by phone. I also did that weekend work that got rescheduled this past weekend. It’s all very exhausting and totally screws up my sleep schedule.

So on the 25th I’ll be “free” for a few days before I go into two solid weeks of traveling. Just being away from work will be nice… but traveling has its own exhaustion associated with it. I just wish I was going somewhere warm and tropical. I need to get somewhere to dive soon else I’m going to go stir crazy.

Sun: 2100-0200
Mon: 2359-0700
Tue: 1900-0700
Wed: 1900-0200
Thu: 1900-0200

Every night until Friday is overnight work.

It’s just the luck of the draw, and this one is gonna suck.

Click for larger.

The video doesn’t really show the rain (though you can see it hitting a bit on the rail), but you can hear the thunder and see some lightning flashes. I still don’t really know much about the video setting on my camera — or about properly converting higher-res video to lower res at a decent file size and quality — but this is what you get.

I have work to do tomorrow starting at 7:00am. That’ll last a couple of hours and I should be free for the day. Then Sunday early (sometime between 3:00-5:00am), I should get a call to do another piece of the work that needs to wait on a bunch of other things to happen. The hours kinda suck, but it shouldn’t be too bad… I hope.

Today’s Wednesday, so I picked up some comics on the way home. It was a good day for some titles that I’m a fan of – Deadpool, Farscape, Hellboy and Army of Darkness. I’m going to need to get a new box to hold comics and another set of dividers soon. Space is getting tight and things are starting to get disorganized – which irks me to no end. Some aspects of my life can be blissfully disorganized, while I get super ADD if others are not. I don’t claim to understand it, I just deal with it.

The past week or so has been Lego-centric. I’ve made a few small purchases for specific pieces that I need for a project that I’m visualizing. I think I’m going to be building a set tomorrow or Friday night (that’s exactly how cool I am) and then start putting specing out what I need for the other work in progress. I think I need a second container for parts. My current one is almost at capacity and I have more things that need to be sorted. Meh.

I ordered some candy through Amazon and I’m waiting on its arrival. It was supposed to show up on Tuesday but didn’t due to the snow we got. Then it was supposed to show up today but apparently requires a signature- even though another package was delivered without one. Luckily I can work from home tomorrow morning and wait for it to show up. It’s just a pain in the ass. At least I’ll have a bunch of candy!

The only other bit of news is that I’ve signed up for a course at NESOP. It’s a creative lighting course, which I’m excited about. Most of the things that I enjoy shooting require external lighting to do well – so anything that helps me in that area is beneficial! There’s also an “advanced” lighting course (meant to be taken after the one I signed up for) which is definitely an option pending how this one goes and what the specific course material will be. Bridges to cross though.

Since I’m working tomorrow evening, I’m forcing myself to stay up a bit later tonight so I can get up a bit later and thus be prepared for the later end time tomorrow. My sleep schedule has been pretty messed up since vacation and I can’t afford to be a zombie while working on production systems in the evenings. Gotta get my sleep scheduled shifted back to where it should be. Hopefully something can get sorted out in the next week or two. This is getting old real fast.

That’s more or less it. Like I said, nothing big. Staying busy, but still not doing a whole lot. Strange how that works out.

Today was an early day waking up at 6 so I could get up and “beat the rush”. I was also up early yesterday, though for no real reason. I didn’t sleep well and when Corinne’s alarm went off, I was already partially awake and there wasn’t any way I was going to get back up – so I just woke up and started working from home. Given that I was up early for our entire vacation, it looks like I’m going to have to break myself back to a later schedule.

I’m obviously online now and logged into work. I’ve already done a few small tasks and will be working until my car’s done and then head home and finish off the day. Better than having to take a weekend or personal time.

On Monday night I gave all of my underwater photo equipment a once-over. I did some repacking of the hardcase that it all lives in and made sure everything has a home. I also consolidated all of the paperwork I have for it and got that all stored. I probably won’t be touching it again for another few months, so I’m glad it’s in a good state while it’s stored.

That’s really been what the last few days have been like – just taking care of the mundane and getting back into the routine.

Not horrible, but not amazingly fun either.

Packing was a bit of a bitch. I have all my photo stuff plus the underwater photo stuff. On top of that is dive gear for the two of us. On top of that is the normal everyday stuff that people need – such as clothes and toiletries. Ugh. Say hello to extra baggage fees. I’m totally going to invest in some bigger/more appropriate luggage once we’re back.

My on-call rotation ended this morning at 10:30am. Our rotations last for a week from 10:30am Wednesday to the following. I’m so glad that’s behind me. People on my team have been commenting on how bad my on-call week has been … since last Friday. All you can do is keep your head down and plow through. Still, it’s not as bad as the week where I spent 27+ hours over the weekend rebuilding data for a particularly large and influential customer. That was all sorts of shitty.

But that’s looking behind me – I want to look forwards… sunshine, scuba diving, sharks, tropical fish and generally doing little else.

Can you dig it?