this microsoft support article in essence says M$ is holding hostage a hotfix that will let you see what processes on a windows 2000 computer are opening what network ports. They could have easily just included a link to the hotfix, but this article seems to me to be saying, ‘we are going to make you pay $200 for a support incident to get a copy of this tool’.
My boss decided to cancel the software development project that I’ve been working on for the past year. My guess is it would have taken me about a month and a half to fix the bugs in the user interface code – which was being written by a offshore development firm. However, he didn’t want to continue working on it.
This leaves me in the position of looking for work. My resume is at http://www.sheer.us/resume/SheerResume-html-ca.html, although I’m working on a nifty database-driven searchable resume which I hope to post sometime next week. If any of you know of a position that would be a fit for me, I’d love to hear about it.
So, my spam folder – just the spam automatically weeded out by SpamAssassin – was 1.3G this year. I’m tar/bzipping it up and then deleting it, and I’m really thinking someone needs to do something a lot more aggressive about spam.
I’ll post a followup to this with how much you can compress spam, because I’m curious. Does it compress better or worse than regular mail? 😉
Well, I have yet again blown a time estimation. I guessed a job at 80 hours that took 200 – and because I wasn’t keeping track, I didn’t really notice until my boss totalled up the bills.
I don’t know what to do – I feel awful about it. Most of the time was spent getting audio playback working in a java application on a sprint phone – sprint requires the midlet to be signed in order to have access to the audio playback API (someone, please tell me there’s a reason for those?) and it took me forever to find out how to get the midlet signed – especially since the directions on sprint’s web site were *wrong* – and to figure out how to test to see if I had developer root enabled on the phone – and then I had to fix some threading issues that came up on the phone but not on the emulator – and a hundred other little things. The rest of the overrun was a set of fixes to a windows CE application that I thought would take a few hours .. but which instead took 50.
I suck at time estimation. And I try and warn people that I suck at time estimation, and I try to never take jobs where I get paid a flat rate because I know how badly I can get screwed by those because of my lack of time estimation skills..
I don’t even know what the fallout from this latest screwup is going to be. Will they refuse to pay me? I’m already sure they’re upset about me not keeping track of my estimate – the thing is, I did tell them when things weren’t going well, but I didn’t say ‘I’ve reached the number of hours I guessed at and I’m nowhere near having things working’ because I wasn’t even keeping track of how long it was taking..
Compared with the problems of my friends.. one of whom has a friend in the hospital because he was attacked by a crackhead with a 2×4, another of which has had a good friend suicide.. a third of which has just had their grandfather die.. I have nothing at all to complain about, and I really shouldn’t feel so awful..
My geek pride requires me to mention that this is a especially difficult test – it involves a lot of random, unconnected words, and jumps after every ‘sentence’ – I took another test on the web and it came out 120, which is what I usually think of as my typing speed
Well, we will still be able to pay rent despite my boss’s forgetting to issue my paycheck – but it did literally end up with me raiding my coin jar.
I hope that I end up 2008 with more reserves than 2007.
(Actually, ironically, I just recently decided to move a bunch of my money from paypal’s money market thingie to e*trade, because paypal isn’t FDIC insured and recent events with the banking industry have me slightly chewing on my fingernails – so I would have been far more okay, except that money is ‘in transit’ and who knows when it will end up wherever it’s going. Also, I’ve long since lost my e*trade debit card.. perhaps I should write them about a new one…)
I find all of this inherently stressful.
So, I agreed to work in December for one of the software start-ups that I do work for for stock. I knew that the stock probably wouldn’t ever be worth anything, but I didn’t want the project to come to a screetching halt because one of the backers was feeling a little short.
The problem is, now I’m being approached to work for stock in January, and I don’t want to. I was hoping that in December I’d be working on the user interface, but instead I got hung up and ended up spending twice as many hours as I’d intended working on little details of the back-end. I’ve got a bunch of software development for my car that I think would be more rewarding than continuing to debug and refine the back-end, and if I’m not going to get paid, I’d rather be doing work that I enjoy.
The *real* problem is, I’m horrible at saying no. And so, tomorrow I’m supposed to discuss this situation with my boss, and he’s already talking about not paying me, and I feel like I’m likely to fold like a cheap suit if he pressures me on it, and I’m really unhappy about it.
To add to my unhappiness, apparently my first Jan invoice didn’t get processed and so my paycheck is going to be almost two weeks late. Granted, it will also contain my second invoice and therefore that part of the money will be a few weeks early, but now I have to decide if I should approach my landlady and explain about the SNAFU, or if I should raid my stocks, or borrow money from Kayti, or what.
Yet again money manages to make me utterly miserable…
As I mentioned a couple posts ago, I’ve been getting hooked (pun certainly intended) on bowling a bit lately. It’s been sort of a interesting experience for me, because historically I have loathed most sports.
As I get further into it – and, bear in mind, I’ve only been doing it for two weeks – I’m noticing more and more how often my strikes coincide with a detached, dissociative, almost completely blank mind. I suspect this is what the Zenpeople are trying to acheive with meditation, and I can really see the appeal.
I think I’m getting better at attaining this state – I still can go entire games without obtaining it, but it’s also becoming more and more common for me to have a game in which I bowl a significant portion of the game in this mindset.
There must be a name for this – I’m sure thousands of people have written about the experience – but I’m not really sure what it would be. I haven’t get put ‘bowling meditation’ or ‘bowling zen’ into google – perhaps I’ll try that and see if anything comes back.
I always thought the point of sports was to not think, but it never occured to me that not thinking could be so much fun..
95% Mike Gravel
95% Dennis Kucinich
84% Chris Dodd
82% John Edwards
82% Barack Obama
80% Joe Biden
79% Hillary Clinton
73% Bill Richardson
35% Rudy Giuliani
27% Ron Paul
21% John McCain
15% Mike Huckabee
15% Tom Tancredo
14% Mitt Romney
6% Fred Thompson
2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz
Well, I seem to have garnered a new addiction – bowling, of all things.
Most of the time, it’s a good deal cheaper than my last one – and it seems less likely to involve trips to the mental hospital. I’m not very good at it, but I do find it enormously satisfying.
Perhaps I should go back and watch the Big Lebowski again.. 😉