St. Sean the Amused

Funny. Probably a lot more funny than the creators intended. Not quite Lost Skeleton of Cadavra funny, but close.

Take everything bad about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Dracula 2000, Queen of the Damned, Dungeons and Dragons (the Movie), and Gremlins 2. Mash them into one movie.

It's a good movie to see with friends that enjoy MST3K, perhaps after a few drinks.

Spoilers available in comments, upon request.

So, I can invite two people into the Google Mail beta. Who wants one?

My liquifeid brain is seeping out my eyeballs. I hate you, Windows. And some days I start hating Palm, for jumping into bed with you like a cheap whore without even providing a condom, so that now anybody that writes a Palm Conduit has to deal with your diseaesed ideas of what programming "should" be.

Palm recommends that Palm application code should usually be written in C, using their APIs. For network-based Palm conduits, they recommend using Java, and provide a fairly usable "JSync API". This makes sense, because C++ Windows Network Programming is a very special circle of Hell (somewhere between the Walled City of Dis and the Forest of the Suicides). Unfortunately, to INSTALL a Java-based conduit, you have to write a Win32 C++ program that calls specific methods in a DLL they provide. I'd rather be working in C# - at least the .NET envirenments don't have 20 years of backward compatability with bad ideas built into every single API call.

I feel dirty.

Well, at least it's better than working with JoyDesk code. I should probably look up my old NDA, to see if I'm officially allowed to say that, yet. Not that they have any right to feel violated, after some of the crap I saw them pull.

I turned on the radio this morning, and they were playing something other than Nirvana. This made me absurdly happy.

I've never understood celebrity cults, and I don't think I ever will.

The good news: It looks like I'll get the opportunity to add "Data warehousing, OLAP, and MDX" to my resume.
The bad news: I'll have some heavy reading for my vacation.

We're talking about catching a 9:10 showing this Friday at the Meridian 16. Since most of us park at the Rich People's Mall anyway, we're thinking about meeting at the Barnes and Noble there 8:30-*;40 and walking over from there.

Who's interested?

My license tabs expired in February. Good thing I'm already going with Kyna to get hers renewed on Saturday...

...there are no active bugs assigned to me!

Of course, we are a little behind schedule on the Major Project that is due to go live 4 days before I leave for my vacation...

We seem to have reached a rather absurd level of smitten. This is confusing both of us. Be thankful we refuse to gush on LJ.

There are some nasty scratchmarks on my whiteboard from the time when I, in a fit of hectic genius (or something), used Eeyore's butt as an impromptu eraser. Me being me, I insist that Eyeore should ALWAYS have a button-on tail.

I'm just barely goth enough to have a standard for what consitutes "goth" - a standard that I don't think I ever meet.

I figured out how to send and receive SMS messages from my laptop over bluetooth, without using an email gateway server. Like most bluetooth things I have seen, this fits under the category of "nifty toy" technology.

Watch hockey for the fights, watch speed skating for the falls.

I like my job, a lot. At one point, it was my dream job. It pays well (very well). Still, I can't stagnate. Being an algorithms/abstract problem solving geek, I eventually want to move into more of a "Software Architect" role. Been my new "dream job" ever since I met Neale Pickett. A little over 4 years now.

Implementing online data analysis is hard. Hard enough to be interesting. With a good data structure, the problem can be simplified to operations on N-dimensional hypercubes. With our data structure, it's much more complicated.

Already have two takers for crashspace at con. Unsurprisingly, my roommates got top priority. Assume trilliumgrl is going to be spending time there as well, so I doubt I'll have crashspace for anybody else. People asking me at con will likely be SOL.

I just heard from my mom that my little sister is "expecting" again. The baby is due in November. It sounds like she's very happy about this.

One more neice or nephew to cherish from a distance, one more reason I don't have to spawn.

So, my grandmother is moving from Bellevue down to Vancouver - she decided it's time to do the retirement home thing. She found one she likes down there, and I have an aunt and uncle in the area that will be helping her settle in.

She made me promise that I would come visit sometime. I'm feeling vaugely guilty about that - I've been working in Bellevue, less than half a mile from her place for YEARS now, and I've hardly ever made myself go over to see her.

I do have an unfortunate habit of ignoring my family when I'm not immediately around them - it's not a snub, it's just an "out of sight, out of mind" thing. These are people that I don't particularly enjoy spending time with, even though I love them, so I tend not to even THINK about interacting with them. While there is definitely some genuine caring, the dominant things I associate with "family time" are terminal boredom and forced smiles.

I know I've hurt people's feelings by acting like this. I'm not trying to reject them, keep them out of my life. I just ... feel no real desire to bring them further in.

Am I making any sense here?

For myself, I believe that worrying can and often does make the situation worse. This is a religious conviction, backed up by my personal experience and my limited understanding of psychology and magic.

So, it definitely smacks of divine humor that the woman I love is a natural worrier. This difference probably creates the most friction between us, as we get into silly little spirals.

She's worth it. I just hope Someone is having a good laugh over this.

Opened yesterday: The Passion. Lukewarm reviews. Accusations of antisemitism. Grim fascination with the mythology in which I was raised ... not that I don't share the same fascination with others (which is part of why I'm going to see "King Arthur" and "Troy".
May 7: Van Helsing. Cheese.
May 21: Shrek 2. Could have a "recycled" feel, could be enjoyable like the first.
May: Troy. Fallout from the Original Snub.
"Spring": Maybe I'll watch Kill Bill. I know it's just eye candy, but .... I kind of like eye candy.
June 4: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
June: Chronicles of Riddick. I know it's going to suck. Maybe as bad as Underworld. I have to see it.
July 2: Spider-man 2. Mostly for Doc Oc.
"Summer": King Arther. Of course, it's not historically accurate. Might not even be close to the legends. But It looks worth watching.
November 5: The Incredibles. I can't say "no" to Pixar.
November: The Polar Express. It's the "winter storybook movie" for the year.

CEO: "No, I haven't forgotten that we owe you. I just need to get in touch with Charles and find out exactly what he thinks was promised to you..."
Me: "Well, I have the original document right here. I can give you a copy."

This is EXACTLY why I keep this paperwork.

"You're my manager, which means YOU work for ME now. It's your job to do everything that is necessarry to make MY job easier."

"If you put EVERY bug into the tracker as top priority, drop-everything-and-do-it-now, I'm just going to start ignoring EVERY bug from you. That's why the bugs she puts in at low priority get fixed faster than the bugs you put in at TOP priority."

Handled post-drama fallout at work today. Somehow the VP of Sales (and his Dad, the CEO) got the impression that he was going to be taking over the development side of things. Disabusing them of this notion, and making it clear that they are NOT welcome at our weekly technical meeting, took some work.

Major technical problem smacked me upside the head and became PRIORITY NUMBER ONE right as I was having an ugly conversation with a close friend, that just kept spiraling uglier (It started going bad with the phrase "do you think I'm self-absorbed"? Not that I think there IS a right answer, but I'm pretty sure I answered wrong). GREAT timing. Fixed the tech problem, hope it wasn't at the cost of the friendship. Now the servers are happy and quiet, friend decided to take a nap.

Making up specs for my next few weeks of project. If somebody just regurgitates my project notes back to me, does that count as "project management"? I guess I'll just have to train her how to write something useful for me.

I've only been here a little over six hours. Haven't killed anybody yet, but I feel like I'm DONE. Can I go home now?

Just got an email from C_____ which contains the phrase "I have decided to step away from HealthProLink for an undetermined time."

Stupid stupid stupid drama. This is DEFINITELY going to interfere with my work.

I just found an oll-office email from a coworker's husband (I deleted the names, of course):
"As all of you may now know, my wife (S_____ K_____) is currently having an affair with C______ W_________ and has been since they hit if off in New Orleans. She tells me she ended the affair but that is not the case. They have been having sex in various rooms around the office and I have pasted a conversation that they had on Saturday January 24th for your information as this may interest you."

The message degenerates from there. I've been told that we are keeping the front door locked "for the time being".

Who's going to Rustycon?