OneFreeVoice

I really enjoyed today’s tennis lesson. I think I accomplished a lot. I’m able to focus better, have a bit better form, and most importantly I can hit the ball over the net and into the other side of the court. Of course, I still have a long-long way to go…

I didn’t go the gym last night… started to get a headache. But I did buckle down and resume work on the LUG/IP ISO. I actually got the thing under 700MB and onto a CD. I meant to test it at work today, but I didn’t have time.

Speaking of work. For the third year in a row, upper management is asking me if I really want to be a manager. I really enjoy working with the people under me, and giving direction and guidance and making sure everything and everyone is working smoothly to get the job done. But I hate dealing with Red Tape stuff. I guess what I really would like to do is be a team lead, where I still get to command projects and resources, but I don’t have to do the paperwork shuffle. I think I’m going to tell my boss that all I want to do is “create novel solutions for highly complex problems” and leave it at that. Really, I just want to code. I want to learn C, get better at PL/SQL, and sit in my office (or even downgrade to a cube) and just write code.

Well, this morning was hell enough… it took me almost 2 hours to get to work. But things were looking good by the time I left work. I left right at 5:00, which usually means I’m going to be snarled up in traffic, but somehow I managed to get home just inside of an hour. That was just great. And I can’t believe I’ve already eaten dinner and it’s only 7:00 PM. I almost don’t know what to do with myself. Maybe I’ll go to the gym tonight. I’m still pretty sore from all the snow shoveling, but I want to get a good stretch and get my blood running because I have a tennis lesson tomorrow.

It’s been a very long day, indeed.

I got up at 4:00 to take my wife to the airport. We left the house at 5:15. Although the roads weren’t perfect, they weren’t that bad and I made good time. I guess it’s a plus that Eagles stadium is on the way to the airport. You know they had to get all the cleaned up for yesterdays game (go Eagles!). I didn’t want to get on the Slow-kill expressay, so I took the Blue Route up and I got to work by 7:15. I was thinking, this is great, I can get out of here early and beat traffic. Then I realized that I had a 4-5 meeting. The meeting went over by about 30 minutes, during which we got about another inch of snow. So traffic was all snarled up and a complete mess, and it took me forever to get home. Luckily, I was in my wife’s car, which is all wheel drive and has excellent tires. So I left at 5:15 AM and got home at 8:15 PM. Poor Cosmo really had to go to the bathroom when I got home.

Work was actually kind of lite. It was nice. I have a ton of deadlines, but I’m waiting for other deliverables to get finished before I can begin working. So I did some cleanup, some filing, etc. I really needed to clean out my inbox, which I hadn’t done in about 4 months. I had over 1500 email to sort through. I let the filters in GroupWise do the sorting for me, and just moved them all off into folders. During that whole process, I followed up on a couple of minor things that kind of fell through the cracks. Then I set about actually planning to do something with my office. I’ve been there more than 2 years, and I still have no decorations, no paintings, no plants, etc. So I played around with the lights a bit, discovered that I like it better a little darker than the flourescent office glow. I have a small flourescent light over part of the desk (one of those under cabinet type lights), so I turned that on and turned my main lights off. It was a nice affect, but just a little bit too dark. Still, I put my headphones on and did some filing and felt a lot calmer. I think tomorrow I’m going to swing by Target and get a cheap floor lamp.

I like using Quanta for web development. It’s a good app. But apparently, it’s no longer available on it’s own. Now, in order to get Quanta, you have to install the KDEWebDev package, which gives you Quanta, plus a whole bunch of other stuff that you may or may not want. Quanta used to have a single dependency, kdelibs. That I can understand, since it’s a kde app. But the dependencies for kdewebdev are kdebase, kdesdk, and kdepim. kdepim?!? Those are personal information management tools. What the hell do I need those for simple editing of html and php pages? I just want Quanta.

It seems to me that KDE is straying far from some core Unix development principles. Apps need to be simple. They should do one thing and do it well. End users should be able to install only what they want and need with a minimal amount of dependencies. There is no reason to roll all this stuff up into a single package. The applications should work fine together or fine by themselves. This is beginning to look like a code cludge… and I just put an extra 50MB of crap on my HDD that I’m never going to use. WHY? Why did you do this?

Well, right now we’re getting pounded. We’ve already gotten a huge amount of snow, and we’re supposed to get more and then it’s supposed to get windy.

But that didn’t stop us from having a busy day. We started with the tennis clinic at 8:00. But we didn’t stay the whole time. We left after the first hour because Sumie pulled a muscle in her leg. But I got a huge workout anyway. I didn’t realize how intense tennis can be.

We got fortunate, because some people cancelled their hair appointments, so we were able to get in a bit early. We were originally scheduled for 3:00, but we got bumped up to 1:00. It was a good thing too, because when we left at 12:30, there was already an inch and a half of snow on the car. When we got out at 3:00, I had to brush about 3 more inches off. The drive home was gonna be a huge problem, but after a white-knuckled drive through Yardley, we got right behind a plow on 95 and it was smooth sailing into Jersey. But then South on 31 some idiot in a Hyundai was tailgating me. I’m like… we’re in 6 inches of unpload snow, going down hill toward a stop light, where I need to make a right-hand turn, and you’re tailgating me… what an idiot. So it turned out that the hardest part of getting home was getting all the way into the driveway, because my front air damn was dragging in the snow.

Had fun playing with the dog out back, until we lost his ball and had to go digging for it. He’s really tired… I guess when you’re only 55 lbs and low to the ground, it can be a lot ro push all that snow around.