MikeBrum.com

Ok, so the weather here in the Boston area has been nothing short of insane the past 12 hours. The roads near work are shrouded in tree parts, hydroplaning is everywhere, Rt 1 was closed in both directions earlier (I’m assuming it’s open now) due to downed power lines, 1/2 of the city of Newton was without power… insanity!

It got a bit nicer for a little while, but I think the rain has picked up again. Blech.

I have the pleasure of someone making me dinner tonight in Somerville. That should be nice. It’s been a while since my meals weren’t take-out, pulled out of a freezer or picked up at a drive-through window.

Tomorrow is my “early day”, so I should try to keep tonight from being a late night. I hate being exhausted when I have a bunch of stuff to do.

I don’t think I have a lot more to report… maybe in the next few days… we’ll see.

I’m really tired today. I got in yesterday around noon with very little sleep, made some calls and headed down for a 3 hour nap… a 3 hour nap.

It wasn’t much, but it helped some. Then Pat & Kevin came over and we played for a while. Despite how much a geek it makes me, I enjoy playing D&D. And no, we don’t get dressed up in wizard outfits or anything like that.

Today I’m starting off really tired. I don’t like starting out the week exhausted. Granted it’s easy to remedy – just get more sleep – but somewhere that gets difficult and I never seem to do it. We’ll see what happens tonight, though. I just have a lot of cleaning up to do and I’m terrified of going outside right now.

I hate the winter – I should move to Hawaii.

Last night I stopped off on my way home and dropped off the PC I was selling and I’m not $200 richer. Nice.

I visited my mom shortly this morning since I was in Delaware and Philly last weekend. I picked up a DVD (the Aeon Flux complete series) along with a book that was late to arrive for xmas. She brought me back some weird looking, but cool mask made from different stones all stuck together… hard to describe and I’m too lazy to get the camera… so that’s what you got to work with :)

I stopped by the shop to drop off some stuff for Marria but she wasn’t around so I hung out for a bit then headed home. I got some food in the oven then it’s shower time.

Tonight looks like pizza and DVDs with a friend – no clue what I’ll be watching. Tomorrow – cleaning & D&D – a decent mix.

And that’ll bring us up to Monday… workworkwork.

I called Verizon last night because my connection speed sucks. So I talk to this guy that probably knows little to nothing about computers (which I can largely confirm) and he reads a bunch of crap from the prompt which makes little sense (like deleting my cookies to check bandwidth issues?!?!?) and I just told him “I simply refuse to do that”. At that point he put me on hold (that was the story, anyhow) and I got transferred to the phone queue auto-attendant (the “please enter your phone number…” automated system).

Ok… so I was pissed. Called back in and immediately asked for a manager who did nothing but give me bullshit half-apologies.

I called up this morning, canceled my phone service then xferred to DSL customer support and canceled that. The reason I gave was that “the technical support and customer service was nothing short of horrible” – which the sales rep person didn’t really have much to say about. She kept looking over my incident, trying to get my to do all sorts of things but I just told her that I’ve already canceled my phone line, and ordered another service… which got her to stop trying to “fix things” and actually move ahead with canceling my service.

So around the 21st, I’ll have the most basic cable you can get and cable internet again. After I pay off my last bit from Verizon, I’ll still save more money each and have more bandwidth. I should have done this months ago. Plus – I really don’t need a land line. I have a cell that I pay enough for that people call me on when they need me.

Hopefully the transition is easy… but I know it won’t be.

Yesterday I was exhausted, it was horrible. I went out with Benjii after work to Bukowski’s and had a couple of drinks and some food. We were both completely worn out, but it was still fun.

I got home, bummed around a bit, but was still feeling spent and ended up crashing early. I was asleep by 12 – which isn’t common at all for me. Today’s my “early day” (in at 10 vs 11) and I woke up at 8 feeling awesome. I even did more pushups this morning than I usually do. Go me!

We’ll see what today holds – I just hope I can keep up the momentum and ride this all day long. Wheee…

I use the word “fuck” a lot – not at work (ok, not “often” at work) and certainly not when talking customers (despite when it’d be very appropriate) – but a lot none-the-less. Swearing adds a lot to interaction that simple language doesn’t. There’s all sorts of inflection and emotion that dropping well-timed swears adds to any conversation.

On top of that, I find it odd that all swearing is considered “vulgar” by some people. Like the word “ass” – one of the tamer swear words – is rarely “vulgar” in most cases. Calling someone an ass or saying that “you fell on your ass” isn’t really a big deal.

Eh… I do live in a blue state… but I just don’t understand why people get so bent out of such unimportant bullshit.

My desk started to disappear under mounds of junk. Oops. Got me some hard drives, mail, magazines, more CDs than I can count, DVDs, a spindle of DVD-Rs, markers, pens, chainmaille, random computer peripherals, a tire pump… all sorts of crazy shit. Got that largely cleaned off and then took care of a bunch of bills. I’ll be seeing one entire bill disappear in 2 months. Then I see the next one disappear for good in about 4 or 5 I think. That’s pretty damn exciting!

Looks like my week’s filling up, which is cool. I also may have some news around Friday which I’m holding my tongue on until I hear something. Also looks like I’ve found someone to buy a spare PC I had laying around and some people interested in buying some spare hard drives I have.

I’ve simply thrown some hard drives away – I actually had a 212MB hard drive. What the fuck can I do with that – and why didn’t I throw that out years ago? I guess the answers are “nothing” and “because I’m a pack rat” respectively… but that’s still semi-amusing for geek types.

Anyway – I think I have about 30 minutes left then it’s teeth brushing, push ups and bed time.

Today’s taking a lot out of me. Started off just getting settled and talking to my manager about last week’s visit. Then I had a conference call with someone in development and product management about some fixes they’re working on for a particular customer that I visited when I was in Kansas. I guess I’m the “resident expert” on them and I’m being consulted on these decisions… which is cool.

Then I set to writing up a full summary of my customer visit last week to be delivered to the customer. I think that came out well. I’m wordy (if you didn’t notice) and it took a little while to get everything sorted. Then I moved on to helping someone with a few issues and grabbed some food.

Now, I find myself 5 minutes away from making a conference call with a customer and his ISP because he’s completely unable to manage his firewall and can’t get one of our products to work.

So through all of this, I have a moment to reflect and ask myself “how did my job get from where it was two years ago to where it is now?” I’m not complaining, this is fun and I enjoy the travel, but it’s just not what I was expecting. As I was ramping up a lot of the responsibilities that I have were being transitioned out of support… but here I am doing some of them. Weird how things work out, eh?

Onward and upwards and all that jazz.

About a week ago my friend Pat said that I “thrive on conflict”. It was in context of the conversation we were having, so it wasn’t some weird attack or anything. Anyway, so I initially took minor offense to that but after thinking about it a bit, I think he’s right. It’s been bugging me and naturally been on my mind since.

After a lot of thought, I’d have to say that I fully agree with him; although I think the word “conflict” as an umbrella term is somewhat insufficient.

There’s a lot of aspects of this that I can’t deny. I know that I “work best under pressure”. Only when faced with really tough challenges (in all aspects of my life, really) do I dig into the potential that I have. I’ve been gliding through life for the majority of my self-aware existence and much of that is somewhat bland. The same can be said for work – I tend to do really well in semi-unfamiliar situations or when I’m pushing myself to learn new things. When I’m just putting in enough effort to get the usual job done, I’m more prone to slip than when I have to bust my ass to achieve a goal. It’s weird, but there it is.

On top of that, there’s the whole relationship thing. I know my shortcomings and I don’t feel the need to air them all here, but I can be prone to neglect when there’s not a lot changing. Once there’s a clearly defined status quo, interests starts to wane. Now, this isn’t conscious, but with a decent amount of reflection I think this is what goes on. I don’t like that it does, but I can’t deny what I think I’ve been prone to do in the past.

I can dig through a lot of aspects of my life, but those are some really obvious and clear examples. The question that remains is… what to do about it?

I guess there’s two answers:

1. Change what appears to be a fundamentally core aspect of my personality
2. Live my life in a way that compliments who I am and constantly pushes me to be a better person

While neither of them seem like they’ll be immediately “easy”, I think I’m going to go for option #2 for now. I’m sure there’s other options, but those are the two that stick out in my mind as the only really viable solutions.

Anyhow… this is more rambling than anything. An attempt to add some coherence to the whispering that I’ve been doing in my brain the past week. And since it’s always most difficult to reflect upon yourself…