More signs that you’re a workaholic at heart, love your job, or both

Today’s the last day for one of our more skilled hackers, so the powers that be decided to cart Engineering out to lunch for the send off. While I’m happy enough to accept the invite, I’m also, well, I just eat a quick lunch and go back to work lol. Asked one of my peers whether he thought it would be rude if I brought the netbook along to get some work done and he thought nothing of it. The guy that’s leaving the company, I’m surprised we could pry him off work long enough for the gathering. Yup.

So of course I’m working remotely off alice by the time the like ~20 of us are filtering out of this Mexican restaurant up the road. What brought a smile to my face however, was when Steve remarked something like, “You just couldn’t leave work?” and then realized we had wifi access the whole time xD.

My closest friends know that I’m kind of a workaholic at heart…. and that I am also insane lol

I reckon going by historical critique, my opinions would differ but I think I may have finally figured out how to give my mother a smile towards Mother’s day.

Last night ma went kind of on red alert when she noticed someone climbing up a ladder outside her window; me of course, why would I worry? If they’re smart enough to use a ladder they’re not stupid and if they break the window, well, you shout at them to be more careful next time… heh. It was far past time for sleeping that short of seeing a TV lowering out the window, little to worry about in my books.

In my shift from tired mode to quick-computate mode, things obviously suggested thief, or someone sneaking in without the parents knowledge. Seeing a young arm hanging out a window, holding a pink ribbon tied to the ladder and trying to ‘remotely’ hide it on the other hand, would suggest the latter to me. So of course, ma had me look up the non emergency number for the local police, which conveniently has an outpost like 2 minutes up the road from here. Sure enough, 17-year old whose probably going to have upset parents.

Nothing like being out in the cold with like four cops poking around to get you wide awake again. *Groans*

The best part about being a penny pinching S.O.B. is when you make a budget that’s designed around being bled like a stuffed pig, unless the car halts and catches fire, the fact is that the reality can’t be toooo terrible when the graph is so good.

How? Driving ~30km per day at a rate of approximately 450km to every 45 litres, seriously beats the ****ing hell out of driving near ~225km per day and using around 38 litres for the same general distance covered.

And my budget for the next month or so is built around the assumption that petrol will cost me around $4.15 a gal, or roughly $1.09 a litre. That’s about a $0.25 higher per hal then it is now.

Haven’t had much tie to update my journal lately, kinda had more important things on my mind when I’m off work. At work, well, most of my time of late has been spent working on a project that’s shared between the two principal developent groups. Work related stuff, usually filters through to private notes or the companies internal stuff. That’s my policy at least.

If we could move the table out and bring in a cot and my PC, I’d probably never leave work, except to use the shower lol.

Aside from being grumpy that the company I work for, takes Good Friday as a company holiday :'(, I’ve been somewhat busy today. My mother wanted to visit a Catholic church some miles down the highway, so I took her up there, she didn’t like it of course, but trying to please my mother isn’t quite trivial for anything, let along the Roman Catholics.

After that, it was essentially off to the nearest Publix supermarket to appease her shopping list a bit. Even though I’m not at work, I couldn’t help but notice a type error when walking down the isles. Ma wanted to grab a box of matzah, bottle of soy sauce, etc. So they’ve got the “Mexican” food, they’ve “Asian”, which is vaguely ethnic but convenient, “West Indies” which is more geographic then ethnical, but what really made my brain reach up and say “Compiler error: type association invalid”, is when I saw at the end of the isle, the sign marked “Kosher”. To top it off, the directory labels the isle as ethnic foods and the sign marks it as Hispanic foods. Yeah, I’m a pain in the ass.

The word Kosher, essentially refers to a discipline: if we go by one of my favourite resources from Princeton University, semantically it means food that obeys the jewish food law. It’s not an ethnic group. I.e. you may have a Mexican that eats kosher food in the west indies but you are unlikely to meat a someone of the Mexican-Kosher ethnicity from the west indies ^_^. O.K. so sue me, I’m stuck driving my mother around instead of being at work, the marbles ain’t going to shift out of programmer mode that easily. Besides, that kind of branch of math is very relevant to my work.

What I really would like to know however, is in what kind of type model that also makes sense, does fish != a meat. But eh, I’ve been wondering about that one for most of my life.

Yesterday, Alice proved her utility. When I went to work Friday, I decided to go “Live fire”, leaving dixie home and bringing alice. Where as the day before  I had brought both. Except for a few cases, I rarely use my laptop at work, except to version control my notes and stream 94.9 The Bull.

A fellow programmer is implementing the backend that makes the code I’ve written on one of our projects, work. So we were sitting in front of his work station trying to get a couple things sorted. Very conveniently I just brought alice and set her up to remote access the development server the way my workstation does. What proved so useful, the battery life was being reported as over 12-hours: allowing me to focus on the work at hand, and not keeping track of when I would need to go get my charger.

Of course, alice still needs a workable OS but hey, no girl^H^H^H^Hcomputer is perfect. I could arguably live with Windows 7 Starter on it, but I rather like XMonad. Considering how slow Cygwin has been on more powerful systems, I really don’t want to try it on alice. So far,  I’ve yet to solve my booting issue with OpenBSD, and tests using X11 forwarding between dixie and alice, by way of xming/putty; does not make me think it’s gonna work. So I think alice will end up with Ubuntu Netbook or some other Linux distro, for the sake of ease of access to Google Chrome—Mozilla firefox can go suck rotten eggs.

The sad thing, since alice seems to be >= dixie on resources, it will probably work perfectly in a ‘normal’ laptop capacity :-/.

It may sound rather odd, but after a work week, I feel like I’ll go batty if I don’t touch code before Monday :-/.

Hmm, what of use to me, could be whipped up in a weekend…

Welcome dear little Alice

Today at work, an idea caught my fancy: since I don’t need an uber-expensive laptop if I go with separate laptop/desktop setup. I thought, well gee, maybe a netbook would work in place of a laptop. So far, seems to be awesomeness.

I found an ASUS Eee PC 1015PE model at a really good price. Originally I was thinking that all it would be useful for is a glorified terminal: SSH into vectra at home and the server at work (when needed), to run Screen, then use X11 forwarding for the rest. Sadly this little netbook seems to be more snappy than my laptop, although it’s likely just as useless for compiling stuff. Which is REALLY sad IMHO because my laptop is only about 5 years old, and this netbook beats it on every performane spec save the CPU: an Atom N450 instead of a Sempron 3300+. I think I like the Atom more…

Windows 7 is quite nice and I do like it, much as I expected, but I would prefer a BSD or Linux based system. My only real complaint so far, is the keyboard places the FN key where my fingers naturally expect to land on Control. My fingers are deffo having a hard time adjusting though, since the auxiliary keys (like home/end) are even more cramped than what my laptop uses, and I am extremely used to my laptops keyboard, hey, it’s been 5 years with Dixie.

The main problem is resizing the partition to make room for a suitable OS, as there are no optical or floppy drives built in, and I’mt o cheap to buy one. So I’ve made a thread over on DF seeking some advice.

As much as Google seems to be trying to improve their already excellent search, I can’t help but wonder–what are they really doing with our location data?

Or is it just a fumble that I’m standing in Duluth, Georgia as the GPS symbol flashes in my notification area, and the #1 search result for ‘duluth library’, is still for Duluth, Minnesota!

You might think it might even include a map link to the library like 5km away lol.