Distorted Cerebration

So many moons has passed since I last blogged to this site.  What’s changed?  Jobs have changed, and…. that’s about it.  Still a workaholic, still playing W.O.W.  Though not as much as before.  And still perplexed by the question: “So how’s your love life?”.  Love life?  What’s that?

First it was a country song a few weeks ago (Bad Things, from True Blood).  Now it’s me using a windows application for blogging.  What is the world coming to?!

I do have to say, so far Windows Live Writer is pretty damn good.  Shit ton better than any other blogging client I’ve tried for Windows.

(Yes, I have to use Windows since my netbook is running Win7 ).

For some reason I’ve been watching a lot of stand-up comedy specials via ITunes as of late. Most were good, the rest were meh. However last night I watched something that was just plain odd. Frank Caliendo’s “All over the place”.

The guy is pretty funny. His impressions are dead on, and I loved how he would integrate all of the personalities into each part of the act. However somewhere within the last 30 mins of the show he was so unfocused it felt like he was out of material and was just filling time until he could walk off stage.

I went from laughing my ass off to confused as hell. He literally lies down on stage for a min and does nothing. At first it seemed like a setup for a new bit, but it went no where fast.

It made me a little sad. I have always seen his commercials for his show and never got to see it. So when I remembered that he existed (yeah bad memory for that kind of stuff) I was all over renting it. He’s pretty damn funny, but that last part makes me question whether I should even bother searching out his show on ITunes.

Shortly after watching that small debacle, I rented another show that had Frank as one of the performers from a few years before. Guess what? (chicken butt). It was the exact same routine word for word. OK I take it back. Apparently it was before dubya became president because there weren’t anything related to him in this other routine. However everything else was the same. Same order, same everything.

Yeah I get that comics reuse material, and I don’t have a good established time line of when that second show was recorded. However based on the film quality and his appearance (like pre-have-your-own-show-that-pays-well) I would say that the recording I saw was at least 4 years prior. And you would hope that within that time he could come up with some new material.

Add in the appearance that he ran out of material with at least 10mins to go on stage and it just seems like he hasn’t anything new for a very long time.

Oh well, he was funny while it lasted.

At some point tenacity is no longer an admirable skill.  At some point it becomes insanity. Working hard day in and day out knowing that things won’t improve.

Now the thing is is to determine what’s beyond insanity. Then we’ll know where I am.

Battlestar Galactica is a great show.  Everything about it is top notch.  With that I have to say to everyone that has had some part in bringing BSG to life…..

FRAK YOU!

This show has pulled me in and won’t let me go.  And now after watching Daybreak pt 1. I realize that there is only one more night of this great show, and from where I’m sitting it looks like no one will survive beyond it.  No one.  WTF?!

Roslyn is dying. She can barely stand on her own, and yet I want a miracle to happen.  The Old Man can’t die. He mustn’t die.  But you’re putting a gun to his head that he won’t be able to stare down the opponent out of.  Hera has had a total of about 20m of screen time total throughout the entire series and I want the Galactica to swoop in and carry her home to Athena and Helo.  Helo,  your pleas to the Admiral for a raptor made me want to suit up and go find your daughter.  Athena, please please please have faith.   Kara, I want to know as much as you do, what you truly are. What the secret is behind your life.  Boomer, you had a chance at redemption and you failed me.  You shot the Old Man and I still want to forgive you, but you keep frakking it up.  Dee, my lovely, beautiful, and totally hot Dee. I hope you finally found peace.  Gaeta, how did you go from being the most loyal to the most treacherous?  I don’t know if I can ever forgive you, despite your intentions.  Baltar, you were interesting in the beginning, but you’re just full of shit and I have no problem skipping through your scenes.  Sorry, but your road of redemption via religion makes me want to shoot you just so I don’t have to hear you babble anymore.

Bear McCreary(?) and everyone involved with bringing that “All along the watchtower” version to life, and using it through the series.  You frakking rock!   I had read the synopsis to the episode where Kara plays it on piano.  I knew it was going to happen.  And yet I still jumped up and cheered when it was played full force.  (Tigh’s reaction was absolutely priceless.  That man deserves an award based on that scene alone).

Right now I feel like Dee felt.   Holding on to hope for so long, only for it to come to and end and not knowing where to go to from here.  There’s one more showing.  One last chance for all of these desperate situations, all of this fighting to survive, to pay off.

And that ladies and gentlemen is the sign of a great show.  It’s not watched, it’s not heard. It’s felt.

With our current economic state and uplifting stories such as the Madof case I thought it best to share some great ways to decrease morale in the work place.  Although this is written from the perspective of an IT shop that’s part of a larger organization, it will sure to find some use in any workplace.

- Vision is evil. Don’t be evil.
Ignore Emperor Palpatine.  There is no price to pay for a lack of vision.  In fact, if the Emperor supports it it must be evil.  Don’t be evil.   Keeping your employees in the dark about they should be doing, or what they should be striving for is sure to keep them feeling confused about their role, decreasing morale.  It also creates more opportunities for you to swing your Iron Fist.

- Be consistently inconsistent.
If you are going to be consistent about something, why not let it be your inconsistency in decision making?  For example, be sure to insist on getting full access to all systems for ‘emergency purposes’, and then refuse to accept access to the documentation for those systems.  Who needs documentation anyways?

- Play the telephone game with all of your decisions.
Tell one of your employees that you’ve decided to do something one way, and then tell others something different.  It’s a great little game to play that will help to decrease morale once everyone has wasted their time going in the wrong direction.  The in-fighting that will soon ensue is sure to help decrease morale as well.

- Take responsibilities away from the employees that want it, then give it to those that don’t.
Sure to drop morale severely, don’t allow that pesky go getter to advance.   S/He’ll just get in your way to decreasing morale.  Instead give all of those job tasks to the person who doesn’t want it.  Bonus points if that person is already overworked.  Want the gold star?  Combine this with the telephone game.  Tell the go getter that it’s too much work for them to handle, then tell the overworked employee that it’s no work at all and s/he won’t even notice the extra tasks.

- Never support your employees.
Never, ever, ever support your employees.  That just increases morale.  Instead make sure to always side with the opposing side.  Especially if that opposing side is external to your company.  What better way to decrease morale than yell at your employees for trying to get the vendor to honor the contract.

- Think inside the box.
Don’t let yourself be flexible. Think inside the box.  The box is safe.  Who cares if that employee typically works 60hr weeks unprompted, is always available when you need and never complains about it?  They came in 10mins late.  That’s against the rules. Make sure to write them up for that.

- Remind your employees constantly that you are the boss.
You sign their time sheet, you have the power to fire them.  Make sure they never forget who’s the King/Queen.  Bonus points if you can work into the conversation “Your job is to say yes sir/maam and then do what I tell you. Nothing more”

- Use movie military philosophy to manage your employees.
Recite this simple phrase if one of your employees ever asks a question about your decision “It’s above your pay grade”.  And honestly if one of your employees is brave enough to even question your greatness then you need to employ more of the suggestions in this list.  They are apparently not broken enough.

- Never communicate.
Never communicate with your employees.  It’s OK to tell them what you did last night or about your latest gadget, but don’t tell them about the upcoming project or about the difficulties that their coworkers are facing. It’s above their pay grade to know that stuff anyway.  Big points on the board if you can get it to the point where everyone that works for you has not even the foggiest about what others do.

- Make empty promises.
I’m sure you’re already practicing this one, but just in case you aren’t, start now.

- Relate all gossip to your employees.
Make sure to let your employee know about all those that hate them and everything they said.  Then deny saying anything like that when questioned later.   If you have no gossip, make it up.  Once you tell enough people, it’ll eventually be true.

Following the suggestions in this list is sure to decrease morale in your workplace.  To see a major drop in morale try to combine a few of these into the same action.  You’ll know you’re doing it right when you start writing people up for insubordination or see a large increase in your employee turn-over rate.

Dear Microsoft,

You almost had me. You lost me long ago and almost had me back, well at least in a “I won’t bad mouth you at every chance I get” kind of way.

You see I was installing a new product at $WORK.  It was a piece of software designed to run off of your Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) product.  By all intents and purposes this install should of taken 15 minutes.  However after running into one of your idiosyncrasies, I have to wait to do this install at a later time, because it’s now going to take at least an hour or more to install this software.

What’s the problem?  Well you’ve built MSSQL to allow for different sorting options. You know, the infamous “collation” setting during install time.  I’ve been bitten by “collation” issues in the past.  If not set right during setup you face the risk of doing a complete reinstall just so that one can change that option.  When I installed MSSQL 2005 I did some quick checking to avoid being bit again.  And much to my delight I found that at least in MSSQL 2005 you can change the collation option per database despite the default setting set during installation.

So I did what (just about) any other *NIX guy would do.  I set the default collation to case-sensitive.

Why, you ask?  Well a few things.

Like mentioned I am a *NIX guy, Linux to be exact.  And in the *NIX world, things are case-sensitive.  Most of my environment runs *NIX and since we need to have a certain level of interoperability I set the default option that should work best in my environment.

Also I started in the computing world as a programmer.  To me HELLO.WORLD and hello.word are two different things.  It’s how I think, it’s how most of my environment thinks, so I set the option that should work best in my environment.

Then I go to install the software.   It failed.  Lots o fail.   I tried running the SQL script that is part of the $SOFTWARE_PKG install process.  It failed with a bunch of “Must declare the scalar variable..” messages.  So immediately I set out to blame the vendor of $SOFTWARE_PKG.  How could they write something that out of the box doesn’t work? I thought.  And here I was enjoying my little adventure with MSSQL 2005 so far.  Everything was just working until I tried to run this vendor’s script.

So I head of to google to find out how to fix this shitty company’s script.  And much to my dismay I found out how to fix my problem. “Reinstall MSSQL and set the default collation to case-insensitive”.   Reason?  Because although the database is set to case-insensitive, none of the default system databases are.  And the MSSQL optimizer runs with the default collation setting, not the one of the database it’s currently running in.

Now, granted, this is not totally your fault Microsoft.  Part of the blame is on the vendor.  But then again, it’s not really.

Why?  Because your defaults are so loose, it allows for bad coding style.  And when ones adds any type of restrictions, good or bad, applications coded against your defaults can and will fail.  Did I ever tell you the story of how I solved a huge performance issues with a web application? Did it by disabling your IE scripting practices (READ: installed firefox and fixed the resulting code errors).

Let’s not even mention that it’s a horrid horrid thing that you give people the option to change the default collation, but if they change it then you pretty much can’t run a large portion of third party software out there (see part about your default options).

You almost had me back.  Up until I realized that changing a setting requires me to reinstall MSSQL 2005 I was holding you in a better light.  The interface with MSSQL was better than it was in the past and I was looking forward to seeing what other things you put into it that I could play with.  Now, I realize it was a fools dream to think that you’ve changed.

- Funk

Let’s see,

In 7th-8th grade I was president of the Youth Usher Board,

By surprise I awarded some Salvation Army good will award (along with some other students) at graduation from 8th grade.

In High School I was awarded “Sportsmanship” award, and I was never an athlete,

In College, sophomore year I was president of the Black Student Union. Like years previous although we were only required to host 2 events a semester, we hosted at least 2 events per month, with week long events in April.

During that time I was the lead programmer for the Student Aide Org, which managed the labs… I helped hire future programmers.

I also went from the random student programmer to the only guy in the office which knew NT4 which was just being released. The Admins of the box deferred to me…

When my Manager left who was a Full Time employee, and I was still a student the only person who could handle the technical stuff when he left was me. The student.

I led many projects, helped many a people, and advanced not because I demanded it, but because people felt I deserved it.

I became a manager, and although it was only a two person department I still managed staff and projects.

I was a Guild Leader, a Class Leader, a Council Member and a Raid Leader in WoW in the past few years…

And after all of this and many more things that I have no time to write about….

I don’t have enough ‘supervisory’ experience, to do a job that I know I would do well in, a job that many people I work with feel I would do well in, people I’ve worked in the past, if we got along or not, feel I would do well in.

It’s really a fucking kick in the teeth.

At least that’s how it feels.

It must be said.  It’s good to have friends that care.

Not that you asked….

I am very, very disappointed.  I finally grew a set. After all these years finally grew a set and asked a woman out.  Out to lunch. Had a time and date set and everything. And what happens?  Snow.  Not just “Oh it’s snowing”. No I mean “And the skies opened up and there was a great flurry. The earth trembled under the weight of the heavens as it let loose it’s frozen wrath” snow.

So lunch was cancelled.

And with that everything disappeared.  Oh I asked her for a rain check “maybe dinner instead” (in email as that was the only real available correspondence medium at the time).  Ninja Vanish.

I say to you “WTF?!”

Why is it that having a friendly conversation is no big deal, but me showing any kind of interest beyond ‘hey you’re someone to talk to at this moment” warrants ninjutsu style disappearing acts.

If I got a Will Smith style “aw, hell no” type response I could deal with that better than “*poof*”.

Granted, it’s quite possible that she didn’t see the email.  It’s quite possible that she hasn’t gotten around to responding yet.  But considering this is the N’th time something like this has happened to me I’m betting on the ninjutsu.

Maybe, somehow, someway she didn’t realize my “intentions” about lunch until she saw the dinner invitation.  I’ve seen it happen before. To me no less.  But how can that be possible?  Someone you barely see, although you work at the same place ask you out to lunch.  Odds are that they are interested in seeing you outside of work.

I am Jack’s rotting soul.

I’m at a complete and utter fucking loss here.  There has to be something wrong with me, but I just don’t know what it is.  It’s not like I can go back and ask the ninja to tell me why they took to shadows. (Well cause I can’t find them ).

And some of you, may say that posts like these are a reason why….. maybe.  But not posting, not thinking like this doesn’t get me closer to changing for the better now does it?

fucking sigh.