MikeBrum.com

Ok, so last night I locked my keys in my car. Awesome. Had to call AAA to get them to have someone pop it. Stupid. As I was shutting the door I was just thinking “I really shouldn’t be doing this…” -shut- “FUCK!”.

After I pulled my head out of my ass, ended up having a nice dinner and relaxed. Didn’t get much accomplished, but it was a good night none-the-less.

I think I’m going out after work to a work function… should be interesting. I haven’t been on one (and they happen every other week) in my time here, so I figure I might as well do it now since I’ll never have a chance again.

That wraps that up – I feel like an idiot for last night’s adventure, but at least it was a quick fix and I can laugh at myself.

Last night was weird. I started feeling the onset of a sore throat so I downed some nighttime cough medicine around 8 last night. I passed out on my couch and woke up around midnight. I took out my contacts, dosed up again and went to bed for good. Nighttime cold medicines always fuck me up something good.

I woke up early today because I needed to get a new tire. Almost $200 gone, but the car feels a lot better and I no longer worry about dying at 80mph or faster due to the tire disintegrating or something equally spectacular and pointless. Now I just have to get my right high-beam light replaced and I’ll be all set. I don’t know why, but the way m car is designed makes the headlights insanely difficult to replace. It’s not difficult “to do” as much as it’s difficult to get to.

At least now I can speed and only have to worry about road conditions and speeding tickets instead of my car falling apart and sending me into a tree or guard rail.

I’ll preface this with the fact that I don’t hate ALL of them – just a decent amount.

If you call up to support a few times and get the exact same answer to a question (because it’s the right answer), you don’t turn around and bitch to customer care about it. It’s simply _the way that it is_ deal with it.

So customer care, being completely non-technical sets up a call with the customer and support (after I explained at length that there’s nothing we can or will do for the customer) and at the given time, when I call the customer, they can’t be bothered to be around. I leave a voice mail, try back in 15, still nothing. What the fuck?

How friggin important can this really be to justify your bitching if you can’t be around to receive the call that your bitching got you?

It makes no sense to me at all!

It’s weird – I only have four more days at my current job and then my time at Sophos will be at an end. It’s been about 2.5 years and I have the nagging feeling that I’m leaving a bunch of loose ends behind – which bothers me no end. It’s like going on a super long vacation and you just know that you’ve forgotten something behind… except I won’t be coming back.

I attribute this all to the fact that I’m leaving on good terms and I’m not unhappy at Sophos. I just happened to get a really good offer and I think it’ll be great to learn some new stuff. I fully believe that this is the right carear move for me as well – and those people I’ve talked to about this tend to agree. After all that’s said and done, it’s just hard to leave issues that I’ve poured a very large amount of personal time and energy into – beyond that which would be normally expected. The customer I visited in Kansas is probably my biggest regret not being able to see through to resolution (not that I have the power to actually resolve their issues, but I’ve been one of the sole people to keep those people that are able to motivated).

But it’s time to exhale, release and move on…

This weekend brought a new bed, which is always nice. I also worked a full day on Sunday. This pays out double-time, which is also nice. Despite finding myself with very little free time, I’m very happy right now. I’m slightly nervous (not worried, but more anxious) about starting a new job in a week, but I’m also really excited. And all of that aside, I’m not really stressing at all – go me! I like the direction things are moving in.

I’m just going to chill the rest of the night, listen to some Jack Johnson, think about Hawaii and other good times.

I’ll leave you with a smile.

Dinner last night was really good. I typically don’t eat dinner since I work until 7, don’t get home until 8 and have a late lunch… so it was a really nice change of pace.

Yesterday morning RCN came in at about 10 past 8 in the morning and worked for an hour doing the wiring and getting everything set up. Before the guy left he hooked up the TV to confirm that it was working, I hooked up the cable modem and plugged it into my router and assured that I had a connection. He did a great job and the service seems rather reliable. I used to use RCN years ago when I was living downtown and never really had any problems with their service. Despite not watching TV, I like knowing that I have access to Sci-Fi, Discovery, Animal Planet, TCL and especially Cartoon Network. I’ll probably just put the TV on as an auditory distraction while I work on my computer.

Last night as I was leaving work I totally dropped my mp3 player. It’s still working and sounds fine – most of the damage appears to be cosmetic. The thing that sucks is that it looks super beat up now. I’ve had the thing for a few years with only one minor ding. I drop it once last night and now the front looks a bit chewed up in places. Bah! I’m not really in a position to buy a new one (even though I want to) just yet – I’ll have to wait a few months and give it some consideration.

I’m in a strange situation though, the gadgets that I use are all kinda old – my camera, my mp3 player, my computer and a few other toys. I want to upgrade them all, but have a really hard time doing so while the older ones still work and “get the job done”. I need to figure something out that appeases my sense of practicality and obsession with technology at the same time. Be sure when I buy new toys that I’ll blabber about it at length.

Here’s the 3 day plan:

Friday: work then drinks and dinner in Porter Sq.
Saturday: get bed, go shopping and “whatever”
Sunday: work (horray double-time!) and play D&D

Should be fun. Hit up the cell if you want to chat, I probably won’t be online much.

I’ve been involved with the interview process at work for some time now. My role is basically the guy that asks all the job-related questions (in this case, 6 pages of job-related questions). Today we interviewed a guy that had a really good looking resume (at first – I had some last minute concerns) but turned out to have pretty much none of the skills we were looking for. After a couple of minutes and a couple of questions it was really obvious. He felt uncomfortable, I felt uncomfortable and we just agreed that it wasn’t the right position for him.

I hate “bad interviews”. Not at all because I think it’s “a waste of time” or anything like that. Simply because I know what it’s like to be terrified of interviewing. It wasn’t until I started interviewing other people did I get better at being an interviewee… so I’m very aware of being on the receiving end. I just feel really bad for those people that know that “things went really bad” and that there’s nothing they can immediately do about it. I guess it’s just heightened sympathy since it mirrors some fears I have.

Anyhow… the rest of the day sailed by. Tonight’s been productive – doing some cleaning because RCN is coming in the AM to activate my cable. Not that I care at all about the cable itself – I’m concerned with the internet connection. I’ve been fortunate the past couple of days in that my connection to my neighbor (whoever you are, thank you!) has been really steady. But this could go at any time. (an endless ping session to the router has probably helped a bit)

Tomorrow night I get a nice home-cooked meal… which is always awesome. I’m quite excited and I’ll post about it likely on Friday.

Pat, Kevin and I play D&D on Sundays. It’s good fun and we all end up having a great time. This Sunday I’m going to be running the game and I have a lot of preparation to do. If you’ve never played before, you’d be surprised how much time goes into preparing an adventure for people if you want to have it be a positive experience for them. In many senses it’s like writing an interactive chapter of a novel for each game.

So in addition to doing that on Sunday night, I’m working Sunday day and on Saturday I’m picking up a bed. I’ve been told that my bedroom is “very sad” (I think the context is that my bedroom itself is saddened, not that it’s pathetic, but I could be wrong). Beyond that, I’m not sure what else is going on on Saturday. We shall see.

I think on Thursday night I’m going out for some drinks… I’ll just need to make sure that it’s not a lot of drinks since I’ll be driving home :)

Oddly enough, I seemed to work backwards there, so that’ll pretty much bring us up to now, where I’m going to be interviewing someone in about 20 minutes while I digest my lunch. Mmmm… pizza.

This weekend was nice. I met up with Sophy (the cute Australian girl I mentioned a couple posts back), Michele and Pam and we all saw Underworld Evolution on Saturday (which I enjoyed) and got some Indian in Davis afterwards. It was fun hanging around and just relaxing.

On Sunday, Sophy, her sister, her brother-in-law and myself all went ice skating on the commons. I was worried I’d be really bad, but luckily there were a lot of similarities to roller blading and despite not skating for about 3 years, I did well. All said and done, I had a great time.

Yesterday was a bit nutty – I didn’t come directly into the office. Instead, I visited a customer in downtown Boston for half the day, fixed some problems, then came into the office. The few remaining hours stayed packed with work and I didn’t get to eat anything until after I went home.

Today my boss sent out the email letting the company know that I’ll be leaving as of the 10th. I’ve gotten largely positive and congratulatory messages from people, which is always great. I had one guy (naturally jokingly) offer me his girlfriend if I stayed – he said he’d sleep on the couch downstairs :)

It’s taken me about an hour and a half to write this between calls and meetings, so I’m going to wrap this up now and just send it off. More later.

The more I hear about Vista, the more I’m confident that I’m going to stick to XP and likely end up switching to a non-Windows OS as my primary machine.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1914971,00.asp

It turns out that Vista will not let you install any unsigned drivers – at all. Currently, we get those little “do you want to proceed anyway” with unsigned drives when installing on XP or 2003. Vista is planning on making that impossible. While the reasoning that MS is giving for these changes is initially sound, it means that things like

1) installing 3rd party video drivers for game enhancements, since these are all unsigned
2) digging through old drivers (a la driversguide.com) to get odd or old hardware working

simply won’t work.

It also means that smaller companies will have harder time making hardware since all the software will need to get these drivers verified by MS and that process isn’t cheap (although there hasn’t been any numbers posted for Vista verification that I’ve seen yet).

So in addition to severely limiting what you do with the software and hardware that you purchase, Microsoft is also making it more difficult for vendors to innovate and integrate with their OS. Restricting the usability of an OS and limiting third party vendors from creating software and hardware for your OS is a “really bad idea^TM“.

Let’s think back to a company that did this some 20 years ago… what was their name… Oh yeah… Apple. That didn’t work all that well for them, did it?

I happen to have a decent connection tonight, so I’m trying not to squander it. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

I’ve been spending a bunch of time with a cute Australian girl, which has been pretty awesome. This weekend I think we’re going to hit up a movie and get some dinner with Michele and Pam and also try to go ice skating with her sister and brother-in-law. I can’t remember the last time I went ice skating, but I’m hoping it’s something like roller blading and I won’t be that bad at it and bust my ass. :)

Work has been going well. I got a lot done today, and that felt good. Tomorrow is probably going to be really busy with a few meetings and a bunch of issues to work through. Only time will tell how it goes, but I hope it’s not too bad.

Paul and Beth gave me a really cool gift today – an old school Gameboy and three games. How cool is that? It seems so gigantic compared to all the newer hand-helds that are on the market… but it’s pretty awesome none-the-less.

Oh – and hopefully a week from tomorrow RCN will have my cable internet up and running and I won’t have to be a bum and steal it anymore… I hate being a leach.