Friday, February 27, 2009

I am not that stupid...

So, I've been fighting with our internal applications department for the past two weeks because they put something in production that wasn't tested.

In fact, one of the comments was "We knew that BU was an exception. I guess we never had any test data for it."

WTF?

When I was in internal applications, I would have been chewed up and spit out by every person in my department if that ever happened. In fact, I sent that portion of the conversation to a colleague of mine at The Suffix and my colleague was in total agreement.

So, let's see -- I solved one phantom error message, gave them a way to solve another problem another area is having, and they can't even get things right? What's wrong with this picture.

So, I was fighting for two weeks with them and they FINALLY "got it fixed" and told me I can run the process. So I did. And it hung up. SERIOUSLY. They spent another day fixing it. This morning, I got a voicemail that said, and I quote, "Killing a process will effectively end it" (ok, it's probably a paraphrase, but still).

SERIOUSLY? If you kill a process, that effectively ends it? REALLY now?

From the person who said they were glad to hear I came from an IT background so they can speak geek to me and I get THAT comment? What have I gotten myself into?

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Kids these days... I swear...

Growing up, we keep telling ourselves we'll never be like our parents. In some cases, we strive for it. We want to be better than them. But, there are some things we cannot avoid.

Growing up, when we did laundry, if there was an unmatched sock, we put it in a pile on top of the dryer. Eventually, we would go through that pile and pair up any matches, and every now and then we'd throw away the unmatched socks. (Made me wonder if there really WAS something in the washing machine or dryer that ate them).

A few years back, I was doing laundry, and there was an unmatched sock. Subconsciously, I threw said sock on the dryer and said to myself, "The other half will show up."

I stopped myself right there, went and hunted down the match, and put both in my dirty clothes basket. It was one less thing I wanted to be like my parents with.

I don't know why that side-story is in this post. It really is supposed to be about video games. In fact, I don't even know how I started on that. Anyways, let's let my ADHD go aside and hit the topic at hand. What was it? Oh yeah, video games.

Kids these days complain about how hard video games are. With all their cheat codes and gabillion lives, and let's not mention how many times your character is allowed to be shot, stepped on, trampled on, or whatever before you actually lose a life, what can you complain about? Then, when you regenerate your life, you're halfway through the level.

Back in my day, you got hit once, your character died. And when you regenerated, you were back at the beginning of the level. Oh, and we had a frog that couldn't freaking swim! What the flip is up with that, Konami?

And, let's not forget the imagination you had to have! If you look at Donkey Kong, he seemed terrifying to me as a child. I plugged in my Atari recently with Donkey Kong, and... well... laughed at him. What kind of crazy fool climbs some whatever that is supposed to be, and just stands there throwing barrels? (and I don't think he really did it... they just magically appear out of nowhere, it seems.) And, when you get closer, he doesn't do anything until you get next to dude's girlfriend? (And, seriously... an ape and a human... I don't get it...)

And who here doesn't know the swirling staticy noise that's at the beginning of a level of Defender? Seriously now!

Now, we had games that made absolutely no sense (Yars' Revenge, anyone?), but we still loved them. Except for maybe E.T. the Extra Terrestrial -- I think I was the only person who liked that one. But, no matter what, we had imagination to make it seem more awesome than the 8-bit graphics allowed.

Then video games progressed and we had games (like Super Mario Bros) that had never-ending pits. Not particularly realistic, but neither was The Mushroom Kingdom. In this unrealistic game, there were never-ending pits. You fall in one of them, and heaven knows where your character went. You never see the splat. But it was still hard because there were these mushroom people that killed you if you touched them any way but jumping on them. But there was this star that went "dat-dat-ble-dat..."

Nowadays, video games have to be extremely lifelike. But, they've gotten away from the things that make them truly lifelike. If your character gets shot, the chances of it being able to continue on and save the world are slim to none. Seriously. And we wonder why kids are getting in trouble "due to video games."

I liked them better when they were more cartooney. No way in our mind's eye that it could be real. We had to use our imagination to understand what was going on. If we forced our kids to go back to level of imagination, who knows where we'd be. Kids would probably do better in school because they're flexing their brain. Creativity would go up since they're flexing their imagination. The would could become a better place if we weren't focused on making video games "look real"

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Weekends are crazy

Well, we started to figure out exactly what I needed to get my house network wired and such.

Except, my awesomely hot boyfriend started planning around other things and the scope creep came into play.

You see, here's my goals:
  1. Network my house (Satellite boxes and other things are now wanting network connection for this that and the other. Buying wireless adapters all over the place is crazy, so let's run ethernet around).
  2. Get an electric tankless hot water heater -- that will save money since I'm not heating water in the event I want to use it and provide more room in the utility closet for my mini network rack.
  3. #2 causes a problem because I've only got 150 service into the house and I need like 200 (or was it 250? I couldn't remember -- I just needed bigger wiring to meet #2's requirement)
  4. I also, at some point, need to replace my HVAC system since it's about 2/3 of my age. I was pondering around the same time as #2 so I could get rid of Georgia Natural Gas. But, that requires #3 to have been done.
With all this scope creep, the budget has been blown out of the water. I need to seriously sit down and figure out which order I want parts 1 and 3 done in. Partly due to cost, but mostly because I have a wonderful man helping me and I don't want him to feel burned out or have him think I'm using him for his skills. They're great projects to do, but I also want to spend quality time where we're not sweating because of the extensive work we're doing.

...So, if anyone wants to donate to the projects fund, you can donate via PayPal at... :)