ironymaiden | Entries tagged with the eyrie

yesterday was the last Monday standup of my old org. in the before times most of three floors of my office would pile into a big open area and turn on the camera and mike for the (much smaller) team in New York and we would all see each other and exchange info for 15 minutes. it was always informative but with a lighthearted spirit. one of the added features when we went remote was a QA lead (who owns hundreds of masks) who would show up as a different superhero/alien/monster every week. with the merger and the increased size of the org it was determined by The New Management that rather than expand and adapt the meeting to include everyone from the other company the meeting would come to an end.

i already miss it.

a colleague who has long taken the role of MC for demos, trivia events, etc* played us out:

You’re the life of the party
But the party is finally over
I think I’m gonna lose my shit**
I’m gonna lose my composure

(the song is otherwise about other things; definitely one i would have played on my college radio show if it had existed at the time.)

Watch on YouTube

i have other things i meant to write about, but apparently this is what i'm chewing on.

* i think the only event he's run since the merger was the intern demos. this is a sadness
** we were pretty foul-mouthed, which was supported by our dearly departed EVP; i think saying fuck at work isn't really going to be a thing anymore

Current Mood: I think I want to pick a fight
Current Music: which one is your girlfriend

the access saga from a locked post resolved late this afternoon. at first the person who got it fixed sent me an email notification to tell me. you know, the email I couldn't access. (work slack has an emoji that fully expresses getting a dump of three days of unread emails and calendar invites, :joy_cry_blood:)

I did a chat bot workshop for two of the three fucking business days I had no email. All the workshop environment invites were in email. then they tried to contact me in sibling company's slack instance... which I did eventually get into.

Anyhow, the class was really great when i wasn't nearly in tears trying to get a login while the instructor went ahead mile-a-minute. the pace was just fine as long as I had access at the beginning of the segment. (the workshop was sponsored out of an office on the east coast so I've also bolted my lunch in 15 minutes for two days in a row.) really looking forward to putting it to use, but this has been a long long week.

all day planning meeting tomorrow *sigh*

In all my thinking over stuff that happened in 2021 I forgot to note log4j exploit mitigation and baby's first AWS cert - two other things that made December extremely busy.

Doing the certification exam remotely was a trip. You put some spyware on your computer (they literally tell you not to attempt testing on your work machine because their shit will get blocked) and spend a good 20 minutes waving your laptop around so that the proctor can confirm that you are alone and don't have any notes or access to search engines, etc. And show them your ears and the inside of your glasses.

i went to the office this week - Monday, Tuesday, and today. going in is completely optional, and very few people are taking advantage of it. i decided to see what it was like.

it was super clean and dust-free. it looked for all the world like i had left on Friday and not 18 months ago. the real signs that time had passed were that the two cafes in the lobby are gone without a trace remaining, and there are something like three new buildings outside. (my office is in the same neighborhood as Amazon and the growth rate is phenomenal. i was sad to note that you can no longer see the local dog park from our lounge.)

pros:

the bus is not full and traffic is light
i have at least my half of the floor to myself. no distractions!
coffee and reduced but larger-than-expected assortment of snacks and soft drinks
the fancy laptop dock
phat internet pipes
immaculately clean everything
no noise outside or C breaking my flow for dumb shit

cons:

masks required if you are not alone in a room (which is all the time since i don't have an office)
i have at least half the floor to myself. no friends.
motion-activated lights time out and turn off if i don't leave my desk
i still have a hard time passing up the basket of full-sized candy bars
only one door to the lobby is unlocked and it makes my walk like 30ft longer

i was productive, and the commute really is a difference maker: on the way in slowly starting to think about work stuff on the bus ride, walking up the hill and waking up my body; on the way out shedding work thoughts as i walk down the hill, reading and chatting with C about dinner on the ride home. when i walk through the door i'm fully home and decompressed. for two nights i left my work computer at work! (apparently just knowing that it's in reach weighs on me.)

part of being at the office is people and there aren't people since we're not able to spend time together yet. that's hard. but wow do i need to get out of the damn house, it's definitely improved my mood.

my mentor at work turned this article about using the pandemic as a chance to start over into a virtual whiteboard template in order to work through what to keep and what to remove.* so far i'm just populating my quadrants - liked before/liked during, disliked before/disliked during. it's interesting to me that my "disliked before" quadrant is the least populated. not sure if i'm looking at the past with rose-colored glasses or if i had already eliminated a lot of bullshit from my life already.

one thing i hope that i get to keep: the ability to work remotely while traveling. being able to have a long visit with my family but NOT use up my vacation time and have a limited number of hours in the day that i'm required to be socially on is pretty great. *knocks wood* i can afford the plane tickets, so getting rid of the feeling that i could either see my family or do something for myself, resenting most of the trip... it's a game changer.

* he's an extrovert, i've seen his board and it's interesting to see him working through some toxic social and body image stuff, where i'm sad about my filthy house and social video calls.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Mom's house
Current Music: mom playing Disney songbook on the piano

I had to work today in order to do a thing when it would impact the fewest people. It went pretty well.

via GIPHY

SIFF is over. i need to catch up here on the movies i've seen.

work thing is gonna eat my life until sometime next week, including a support window for folks in Europe where i'll start working at 11pm my time.

first vaccine shot is done as of yesterday, feeling fine so far. #housepfizer

I started work at 8am today and I just logged off.

Current Mood: accomplished

team: build this thing!

me: this thing will not work the way you wish it would. this is why, this is what I would change to get what you desire.

team: the thing! the thing!

me: okay, I will build it to your specifications with some stale production data in staging so that you can see it.

team: oh! you did exactly what we asked for, and it's terrible.

me: yes, it is.

Current Mood: bitchy
Current Location: at least they were gracious in the end
Current Music: they were all men, you knew they were

really pleased with a thing I did for work today (I made a Java thing work via stubbornness and googling).

also it looks like the paladin will survive the night.

solved a tedious work problem by using a utility module i wrote months ago.

thanks, past me.

i have to deliver a presentation themed on "a day in the life" tomorrow. (or maybe Friday, there's a whole thing where they never did send out the schedule.) it's not done, because thinking about my current routine makes me either angry or sad and i don't actually have the spoons for those feelings nor do i want to put a lot of energy into bitching. (i don't feel like it benefits me OR you, dear reader.)

or maybe i'm just horrified about having a five hour video meeting two days in a row.

the slides i do have done feature cartoons from the Oatmeal, so that should be okay.

1) How is your year going so far?
If my year started on the 20th (i feel like it did) then it's been mostly good, very busy at work, shadowed by having my dog get hurt this week. But she's on the mend and it's nice to have insurance for her and just say "yes" to the vet.

2) Have you gotten vaccinated yet? If not, when do you think it's likely to happen?
No. I'm at the bottom of the list: hoping for June/July if Washington keeps up the target pace, but if we're looking at national pace then, well, I guess maybe for Christmas.

3) Are you bored or are you busy these days?
Busy. Work has really picked up and even though I'm done with school I am soon to be in four RPGs so I'm likely to end up with five regular social things a week, which in the before times would be unacceptable. We'll see how this goes.

4) Is this pandemic good or bad for your finances?
Good? I still have my job. We order takeout regularly ~~because we're sad~~to support the locals, I have fits of online shopping, but the truth is that there's no small item impulse shopping or lunches out or transportation or live entertainment or movies or conventions or travel. My yoga teacher got a desk job and the pool is closed. For example, there were so few in-person soccer games in 2020 that almost our entire season ticket buy rolled over to this year (and of course we weren't buying concessions).* Our rent went down when we renewed the lease. We've given more to charity than ever and our savings are growing.

5) What are you missing most these days?
Thanos saying 'Everything'

it changes from day to day. today, it was being in my office - there's a Slack channel called #slobs-at-the-eyrie where we used to post pictures of messes found in the office. it has, of course, been dead for more than nine months and today someone posted about how neat and responsible we've become. it was funny and horrible at the same time. we're getting ready for our annual team "offsite" and fuck it's just going to be a two-day video call.

* I would lay money that we'll have a similar situation this year, with no in-person games until near the playoffs

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Command Station
Current Music: gamers on Discord

Slack is down.

my workflow depends on it, so this is an interesting way to start my first work week of 2021.

Current Mood: lonely

i meant to write every day, but i didn't know how very boring life would be.

i bought a desk and made a space for it in the bedroom. we had to reshuffle some bookcases, but otherwise it wasn't too bad to come up with the space.

now i can put work out of sight, have a whiteboard on the wall, and we have a table again. plus i don't have to have an ethernet cable running across the living room. i am at the table with my not-work computer and it feels great.

desk is a 40in wide standing desk i found on amazon. it took two people to put together (i suppose it could have been one with the aid of something to prop pieces in place) but was otherwise easy and is very sturdy/wobble-free.

our release at work went out with no major technical issues. we're all catching our breath.

today i refactored a script i wrote for work into a little module that we can all use, and coworker P already has plans for it.

Current Mood: pleased

at the beginning of this year i was trying to write an entry every day. i still try, but life is pretty boring. i write Dad a card several times a week and i'm getting to the point where it's today's weather, how busy i am at work, and how my homework is going.

i struggled with my programming homework last week. there are several lessons that i need to internalize: 1) it is safe to ask for help 2) asking for help is expected (it's why i chose the program, after all) 3) i can turn in imperfect work and make changes based on feedback. i think i've mostly learned these things now, but i had to lose a bunch of sleep and cry first.

probably due to the above, i got a stye and that sucked. i am reminded again that taking care of my eyes and hands has to be a priority, they're too important to everything i love to do.

that said, i took something i learned in class on Tuesday and was able to turn around and automate something at work that was important (and tedious and exacting). really pleased.

this week's homework went better, and the second assignment was genuinely fun. it was based on Tom Swift Under the Milkwood - essentially it's a generator for the kind of almost-plausible text you get in spam sometimes. i used A Princess of Mars as my input. if i get in trouble for the run-on sentences, well, that's Burroughs for you.

i've completed 3+ hexes on the blanket. i say 3+ because i'm using a striping gradient yarn instead of doing all the color changes, and the one hex chart is very clearly supposed to be a flower with a leafy stem at the center. so when i was ready to start a new ball of striped yarn and its first color was green, i started the flower chart, knit up to the end of the stem, and put it on a holder. i need two of the flower ones, so i'm working a different chart until i hit a long run of green again, then i'll switch and do the center of the second flower.

this was a very busy week.

Tuesday was the first class of my certificate course. i'm enjoying it and the other students so far - the level of interest and commitment is much more my speed.

so many meetings at work, lots of balls in the air and things changing. mostly good, i think. it looks like our product launch is going to happen from home. i've suggested that we should all get branded pajama pants.

my student status gets me access to the pro version of zoom, and it's turned out to be the best solution for the knitting group on Thursdays. this week i ironed and cut fabric. previous weeks i've been spinning but i expect to be knitting more soon...at work we've been talking on and off about doing quarantine shopping. mine was buying yarn to knit a blanket.

Friday night RPG is on Discord, and that's working well except that C can't seem to get a headset mic to work with his computer to save his life. it's maddening to have to sit in another room. (we've tried multiple headsets, both wired and bluetooth. even running from his phone. i don't know, shit just breaks when he touches it.)

i've finally got the mask measurements dialed in so that i can work assembly line style instead of doing one at a time and fitting. tomorrow i should be able to crank them out.

we got takeout brunch from Hattie's this morning. what a simple pleasure.

i should have been in the bath by now, but Clone Wars is on the tv a lot in our house right now - Voyage of Temptation is on and i have to watch the whole thing every time. i ship Obitine as hard as Anakin does.

It's official, we're all working remotely for the rest of the month.

there are seven of us on a double-long bus at rush hour. normally it's a coin flip as to wether there will be a seat for me when i get on.

my conference (that i'm not allowed to go to anyway) has cancelled itself. ECCC is still on - i believe the speculation i saw that their insurance will not kick unless the county shuts them down, and without the insurance ReedPop could be wiped out. i'm guessing that's similar for any vendor who does have insurance, not like most of them do. currently i'm still planning to attend and spend with any little guys who catch my eye (and self-quarantine after).

Current Mood: okay
Current Location: the 40
Current Music: there might be 20 of us now, at the point where there's normally a crush load

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ironymaiden

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Page generated Jul. 4th, 2025 11:09 pm

the girly who shall end all girls

please scream inside your heart

Entries tagged with the eyrie

You don’t gotta say you love Pulp Fiction / I already know

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we were on a fork of version 1, so...

back to school

things to think about

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not an update but an update

how is it going?

Ivanovna is God

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a day in the life

Friday Five

welcome back

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small but mighty

i did not know what i was getting into

and believe me i am still alive

But it kind of is 61/366

i swear this is not a plague diary 60/366

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November 2024

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