The life and times of The Man

So it seems that I am completely and totally without work currently... this is not to say that I have lost my position but more so along the lines of gross over extension of the time it would take an individual to perform the task that was assigned to me... From what I can understand and have seen, someone (who is not me) was assigned to the same job on a different program a few years ago... and he took about 6-8 months to complete it. The program that I am working on has been around for a shorter time but all the changes that were made on the previous program have been incorporated into this one. When the time came to estimate timing... they thought it would still take six months!! So, unfortunately for me... I am already done with all my assigned tasks with nothing to do till august... (I have mentioned this to my manager, but he seems to have lost my request)... My days now are mostly spent reading C++ manuals, writing pointless applications in VB.net (and talking to Karl about them, who has also been my test engineer for them) and reading comics and such. But I never thought I would say this... even all this got boring after a while. Maybe I'll just start sleeping at work.

So, in a series of unfortunate events, my beloved tablet of 5 years died this weekend... RIP. So, I ended up buying a Mac. Oh well.

M

So this morning we had a meeting about our configuration management techniques at the company (For those unfamiliar with the terms: It applies to the version control and tracking of documents as they are changed and modified over time).
I brought up a point about the fact that the file naming convention was worthless and this was a serious problem to be addressed. The lead engineer responsible for this responded with, "It's being tracked with our Clearquest."... (Clearquest is a database that tracks defects and problems)
Funny thing about this: I had one of my co-workers to check to see if this was actually being addressed in Clearquest... and it was not. I pointed that out to the Lead.
"Well I have down on my sheet in my to-do list."
I pointed out that for something this serious, that was not enough and that it should definitely be added to the Clearquest database so it can be tracked and resolved... and then shut up (I had rattled the cage enough at this point of time).
The Lead had been backed into a corner and I didn't want to press it any further than I had.

15 minutes later an email arrives: (This a copy and paste of that email)

( The Email )

Ok....
You have just told me what I already knew... AND nothing has been done to rectify it yet. Have a cookie.

M

I went to the Vet on wednesday to get the cat checked out. I must say the experience is no different from going to a normal doctor's appointment...
My appointment was at 7:00 PM, got there right on time... and... I had to wait 15 minutes before the vet tech even decided to come get me and 5 more minutes before the Vet actually came in and looked at the cat... then 2 minutes later... all done... and I was headed home.

...
...

M

So I finally started my job with Northrop Grumman last week... and it was dull in the beginning since I had no PC and I could not get access to any of the documents since I was not security cleared at that point... but come Friday I actually knew what I would finally be working on. This in itself was a feat. My project lead looks like she is about have an aneurysm because of the "aggressive" schedule that we have to deliver the software on. But I suppose when it comes to stuff like                they have to be aggressive… at least the part that I am changing, which is                       , so it’s not very hard when you think about it. Really all it involves is changing                    to             and the making some other changes in the                  code for making sure that you are covered on all areas of              .

 …

 Yeah, I am not allowed to talk much detail about my work anyway… Good thing…

 Other than that, it’s not too bad here. Quite a pleasant area to live in. not too much traffic and not too much noise… and most all important stores are within stones throw of where I live, so very convenient in the end.

 

Pictures to come soon.

M

So it is time for me to make another post from India. This one is mostly about there always being a bigger fish.
So about 3 days ago I was visiting a friend and we decided to take the town by storm and while out and about we spotted an arcade... to which I was attracted, like a fly to honey. To top it all off they had a Soul Calibur III machine there as well (one thing that I didn't expect to see here, but hey I wasn't complaining). We got some change and putzed about on the different games they had (turns out not all Asians are good at DDR and the like). We finally decided (much cajoling from  me) to go to the Soul Calibur Machine which was now occupied by a couple of teenagers who took our approach to be the perfect time to trash talk... after having seen them play for a bit against my friend I knew they weren't that good (not good enough to warrent trash talking about it at least)... Now I don't know what it was... I could have just let it go, but maybe I like inflicting pain on others but... about 50 games later the youngsters left quite upset and leaving me the highest score on the machine. Strangely satisfying.

That was all.

M

M

Again, Gmail in its infinite wisdom has decided that I really needed to know this.
Gmail uses the subject/content of an email to suggest a advertisment link to you...
The email that I was looking at had nothing to do with thongs or any sort of female undergarments whatsoever...

And yet....

 

Well that is definitely something that I have been curious about for ages now.

*sigh* I really wish I had something else to do at work rather than lounge about with limited access to the internet...

M

Now google has this new thing where it'll try to guess what you are trying to type and show you the relevant choices for in a little drop down box...

 

Tannhauser = is nearest to swallows???

m

For anyone interested, the zoo trip pictures are located Here under the zoo trip set.

M

PS: Noelle, let me know which shots out of those you took and they shall be labeled as such. (Don't want to claim credit for you awesome shots as well).

 

( Picture ) 

M

M


 

Celebrating the Holiday Lunch...


I wonder when the Holiday lunch is...

M

So there was an upgrade recently at our department to a new Development environment.

They thought this would be something funny to put in...


and the result:


yeah not very funny...

M

 So there is a new game coming out the Wii called the "Wii Zapper with Link's Crossbow Training"  at Amazon... I checked the game release status today to see when it was being shipped. I present to you the odd thing that I saw:

The Pre-order info that I have listed under my account lists the pre-order price as: $19.99

When I click on the link to go to the game page: I get this...
The Price listing there is 24.99 and the fact that it is listed that it ships from Target (instead of Amazon which was the case when I made the pre order last week)...


Interesting F* up I must say... I do hope that I randomly end up getting the game for the lower price...

M

So some things of note since yesterday:
1)  Ford Expedition is a huge car... more so when it is an extended cab model.
2) Driving a Ford Expedition is a harmful endavour for anyone who is not used to driving anything bigger than say a normal car.
3) The Michigan left on southbound Squirrel Rd, right after Featherstone road can keep to standing still upwards of about 15-20 mins during rush hour, especially when driving the afore mentioned car.
4) If you are not used the a soft suspension car it can very easily make you queasy.
5) A Pussy(read coward) with a lightsabre is still a pussy with a lightsabre no matter what she might tell you otherwise.
6) A wookie taking down a Jedi twice is level is EXTREMELY lucky.
7) Severing the force from a Dark Jedi and then draining the power cell from his lightsabre is equivalent to casterating him.
8) Clusters are rather boring...


 
No, Karl, I still disagree... Clusters are still rather boring.

M

The pronounciation of Lieutenant:
No one knows why it's pronounced Leftenant... But there is a an article on it in some site that may have some answers.
Damn them Brits... :p
The pronounciation of Colonel:
This one is much simpler
Damn them linguists...

M

So apprently Australia has been having a pest problem with cane toads. Fascinating! I know....

Thier solution: Have the males drown the females... 

Well hey, sometimes you just have to drown a bitch.

M

I don't get it...
So I made a post about alignment restirctions on the roleplayers forum wondering what other people used as rules for such things...
As you all know I restrict all alignments in my campaigns except the good ones. But that's not really the subject of this post so I will not go into it... 
But again... as with my last post on similar subject... I got reply from the same guy again and I quote: 
"(This is, as you said, DnD specific, as few main-line RPGs at this point use alignments. You might have better luck, and this is much more appropriate for, one of those communities. I usually use </a></font></b></a>dnd3e, but there are a number of others.)"
Now to be fair to this fellow, again, he did provide me with his opinion... but, as some of my more educated friends have said, "SRSLY!" and as I would say, "What is the issue?"
Now I think I had quite a lot of luck considering I received about 30 replies to my post, and how is this post not appropriate? This is a direct question into roleplaying and not even remotely a rules question! On top of that:
(Entirely ignorable grammar comment: The ellipsis (...) isn't the construct what you want it to be -- it takes the place of words or phrases that have been removed, it isn't an open ended way of ending a senence. Additionally, if you end a sentence with an ellipses, you still need an additional sentence terminating mark, such as a period, question mark or exclamation point. It took me years to stop using it the same way you are; I've been there.)

After reading that I went and checked my post... there was only one instance of what he is talking about: "if the players could explain it I have allowed them to run alignment restricted classes (like assassin) with my alignment scheme."

Apprently this usage of the brackets is not correct, which may be true, but what? In all fairness he did say it was ignorable...

But that leads me to wonder... did I inadvertently do something to piss this fellow off? Or does he just have some sort of personal vendetta against all things momerat?
It makes you wonder...

M

So I have been posting on a roleplayers forum where people discuss different aspects of roleplaying along with questions about rules and such on them too. Useful I say, seeing as a lot of these people are a lot more "experienced" in the game system than I am, so I have been posting on it every now and then about rules questions and what not too...
It wasn't until today that I saw someone tell me off (in a manner of speaking) about me asking such a question on a roleplaying forum:

My question was about the Artificer class and the ability to make jawbreakers using the prestidigitation spell and other raw materials required for this... one of the reponses that I got, quoted below:

"There are dozens of good d20 and DnD forums. This belongs in one of them. This has nothing to do with RPGs or RPing in general. (and I belong to a number of them.) "

 In all fairness he did provide me with a solution to my problem... but as one would remark, WTF? I have posted on this forum several time with questions that were more mechanics related than this one (My current Cleric character was out of here and the WOTC optimisation forums, and Chris (credit where credit is due))and as have others who belong to this community. This is more so a flavour question... and I am still baffled by the whole statement... I thought DND was an RPG... unless I have been mistaken for some time now...

I am confused.

M