February 16, 2025 - bloghan 34
This week was busy, and because this week was busy, things just felt so draining when I got back. But there were still places to derive joy from at least... right? Here's how this week went:
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: snacks! While I'm trying to lose more weight, one cannot deny that they just taste so good. I know they're bad for you, but they are just snacks. I can't quite cut them out of my life yet. Here's my tier list, ranked by how much I like them:
Ordered tiers, unordered within tiers. The snacks at the top are the ones I will prioritize taking when they get delivered in the break room. I was not expecting to love Popcorners so much, but they are my current favourite at work. The classics are up there as well (can you tell I'm an Oreo guy), with sweets being the thing that are mostly up there. It pains me to admit that I have a sweet tooth. I've tried all of these snacks once, and to be honest, most cheesy stuff tends to flal lower because a lot of the time I'm not really looking for something cheesy when wanting a snack. Now, as for the thing in D tier... I can't stand eating them. I genuinely will always pass on them, and if I ever end up with one, I give it away as soon as I can. I'm also very justified in putting it there because my work rival loves them.
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
Monday starts off quite horribly, actually. I wake up 5 minutes before my bus is set to leave. I consider my options, half-starting on "rush out right away without doing any part of your routine," but giving up on that when I realize that I wouldn't make it anyways. Looking on my phone, there's an alternate couple of bus routes I can take that should get me to work at the same time, but I'll only have 10 minutes to execute it. It also involves a bit more walking, but that's quite alright with me if it means making it in on time. I have to cut my tea out of my morning, but I manage to just barely make the bus on time, and get to work 5 minutes early. Maybe staying up so late wasn't the best idea... This morning, I want to continue on that error cleanup from last week, but my mentor is really requestimg me to run something my predecessor made a year ago. Now that thing uses Absconder, but it was also made for a project that's a year out of date, so things aren't working very well. I decide to go ahead with figuring out this Absconder stuff. My mentor only wants me to apply the Absconder to a subset of the full functionatlity, which is quite fine by me. I try to parse through my predecessors documentation of his work, but I'm getting nowhere. When I ask him about it, he vists me and we work through it together. Honestly, this piece of Absconder work seems so flimsy and difficultly implemented, but I eventually understand it through multiple yawns. Once my predecessor leaves me to my devices, I finish up my edits and get it going. The fanatic comes in demanding to know more about my 'One Piece' progress, and while he's disappointed to hear that I didn't make more progress, he does like that I went back to re-read certain sections. We talk a little about my new observations about that arc and the world of 'One Piece,' as I finally get things going for that task from my mentor. Around this time, we all go down for lunch. I have to get lunch from the restaurant here, and after a bit of waiting and talking to some other people who work on other floors about the economy, I grab my chicken wrap and head to the lunchroom. There's some pretty limited conversation there, but I arrive just in time for my Absconder stuff to fail. Oh joy. Not many eventful things happen during this lunch, except for an employee from some random team behind me leaning over to tell the guy next to him "if you put her in a trunk I won't say anything." That is such a normal thing to say, huh? I head up after lunch is finished, and my restart of Absconder failed again. My intuitive guess is that it's a memory thing again, so once I increase the amount Absconder can access, things start working... and immediately failing again, but at least this time it's for a different reason. What a pain... I prepare the tea I brought and let my predecessor know about this error, and on the way I tell the gregarious about the hair removal thing. She's so excited about it, and surprised that I actually went through with it. There is a reason why I'll never get married, and that's because I'm already in a committed relationship to the bit. She shares eome tips on getting the area behind my legs, and I head back to my desk to wait for advice from the predecessor on his Absconder work. Very quickly it becomes apparaent that I made a single typo, causing things to break, and once I fix it, things just work. It always seems to be me, huh? I think that now is a great time to bloghan, but my go-to messages me about the newest project, asking me about progress on something I've never heard of. Upon telling her about my confusion, she tells me that my manager assigned me as the person of contact for the newest project's background environment stuff, and asked me where I was during today's meeting. Meeting? What meeting????? At this point, the situation seems dire enough that she brings me over to her cubicle to discuss. We talk about splitting the work, and it's revealed that it's the work I was assigned last week by my manager! That clearing up of errors! Well, why didn't she say so?? She assigns me some stuff for me to do while she takes another section of errors, and sends me on my way. Well, with two competing priorities, I choose the one that seems more important to get done quickly: this error clearing has to finish by this Friday, so I'll do that. I end up sitting down by the gregarious, talking about the whole leg hair removal thing while working, though she seems to understand that I'd rather not talk about it when the others are around. However, people overhear me talk about the time I went to bed, asking what I was doing up that late. After giving an avoidant answer that sounded very very unintentionally dirty, I corrected quickly with "cleaning," which got the gregarious to chuckle. Poeple were in and out, talkign and chatting about various things as I worked. We talked about 'One Piece,' about the opposite of "girl talk" ("girl silence" or "boy silence" or "boy talk"????), about setting up a 'Minecraft' server for all for us to play on (the compatriot just went ahead and did it), and (when alone with the gregarious) some more on leg shaving. We started a bit of planning for the next 'Jeopardy,' deciding on better days to do it, when I jokingly suggested that we do it in 'Minecraft.' That got me thinking of the logisitcs of implementing the buzzer system with redstone circuits... first though, I'd need to make a digital circuit for it, then translate it over. I mulled over the problem for a bit, but then realized that I should probably start working since I can hear my manager's voice nearby. I end up wrapped up in this work all the way up until it's time to go, but before I do, I come up with a plan. The circuit I need to make is the following: there are four one-bit input signals that are normally low. On reset, the circuit should indentify which signal goes high first, using a two-bit bus to denote which signal it is. I could probably come up with a good solution for this on my own given time, and maybe it's somewhere out there too. But, if I present this question like it's an interview question at a prestigous tech company that I found on the Internet somwhere, my work rival woun't be able to resist the challenge and solve it himself, then and there. Then, I would be able to offload the process onto someone else, as I get to work on other things. It's genius! And it works perfectly too, completely ensnaring his attention. He's still working on it and presenting his idea to everyone else as I'm leaving. Just thinking about mit makes me giggle in evil glee. Have I said yet how much I love being evil? I get home, still giggling to myself because of just about anything that comes to mind, and I get to work once I get home: dishes, bloghan, some small quizzes for my course, dinner, and celerating Kanan Matsuura's birthday too! Then, comes the toughest thing I've faced yet today: the rest of the hair. Except... it wasn't actually all that tough! I had overestimated the amount of hair I had left to go, and I was out of there in only an hour. I think I got one small chemical blister on the backside of my right knee, but the results felt really good. My legs looked just like potato noodles. This is surprisingly enjoyable... maybe I should go full time with having no leg hair. Once again, I went to bed, really letting the crisp feeling of the sheets soothe me.
Waking up a little earlier on Tuesday was fine, I suppose, but I still had to miss my regular bus. At least this time I had enough time to prepare lunch! I get to the office and immediately get to work: this is going to be one of those work days where I probably won't be able to write as much bloghan throughout the day. It's error log fixing time, but first it's time to push those nightly runs to start at a later time. They weren't catching changes made late at night, and since the deadline to clean up the errors is Friday, we need all the reports we can get. Things were slow after that, between phone-based distractions, my great sleepiness, and my struggle to get things working correctly while integrating other team's smaller projects into our own project. Eventually, I had my first call of the day, which happened to be with that senior staff guy who I embarrassed myself in front of last week. This time though, I was prepared, having the right things already open before he even had to ask. I followed his instructions and learned quite a bit about the debug process that our team uses at its highest level, but when it came to actually making a decision, it seems I don't really yet have the overall project knowledge to do that. This senior staff guy brought in another senior staff guy to discuss, and it really ended up being them confirming with eachother that a certain thing can get set to a fixed value, wondering why it didn't get caught in previous projects, and telling me to scroll left and right. I stayed silent the whole time: two greater than me were speaking, after all. Once they agreed, the guy I originally discussed this with told me he would submit the fix, but I asked if I could see what he was doing. He obliged, and started showing me what he was doing. As he opened a file, he asked me what text editor I use. When I answered with "vim," he told me: "yes, good boy." What. WHAT????? He continued explaining something about what he was doing, I wasn't listening. The FIRST time in my life I unironically get called that, and it's by AN OLD MAN?!?!??!? IN THE WORKPLACE?????? We end the call, and rather shell-shocked, I just get up and stnad in the middle of the corner, hand over mouth, thinking about what just happened. I stnad there for about a minute, and my work rival's manager walks in to the corner to see just me in the middle of it, standing there. She asks where my work rival is, and I tell her about how I think he went down for lunch. She thanks me, and I start to head down, but not before sending my work rival to her, as I see him on the way. As I go down to the lunchroom with the others, they tease me a bit once I tell them about that "good boy" comment. My lunch is a chicken-flake, cilantro, mayo and cheese sandwich, and it tastes better than I thought it would! It's a little crumblier than I'd like, but it's fine. There's not much to talk about during lunch, and everyone's relatively quiet until my work rival starts to tell us about the butter garlic shrimp he made or whatever. He tries to push us into trying it, but we end up arguing about chitin instead. I head back upstairs, and I'm feeling so dead tired. I need my tea. Most of the others went out for buble tea, but I don't really like bubble tea. I make my own tea and tiredly look at endless seeming logs. For another error I need to fix, I need to bring in some smaller projects into our own project, but for one of those smaller projects, I can't find an email telling me where to find their final version. I cannot bring their stuff in unless it's that final version, so I start poking around to see if I can find it anywhere. Nothing in my inbox, but as I'm just wandering around some of our internal sites, I find what seems to be a portal where those other teams can submit info about those final versions they release to other teams. When I look up the specific team and project I'm looking for, I find that all the info for it is right there! An online copy of the email I was supposed to get is there too! I ask my go-to about this, and she propses a call. On that call, we go over what I found, and do a couple of tests to figure out if this is the final version we've been looking for. While things load, she asks me about how I got all the text on my screen to be all bright pinks and reds, and I begin to explain to here where I found it. She tells me "maybe later," since we do have a deadline on Friday after all. After we conclude our tests, we figure out it is the correct version, and she begins to wonder why we never got the email. She muses on her own aobut that, and figures out the asnwer on her own. That's great for me, since it means I don't have to be the one who tracks that issue down too. The call ends, and now I'm just kind of waiting to see if my test results of other things are working out. Before that though, the people who went out for bubble tea return, and drop a grapefruit drink on my desk. I did not ask for this, and I did not want this, but they told me that they needed to buy an extra one so that they could take advantage of a discount. The thing is though, it would've been cheaper anyways if they didn't get it. It wasn't like a two for one discount. I refuse to touch it for a while, but cave when I realize that no one else would drink it. I don't want it to get thrown out, so over the course of the work day I drink it. It's very bitter, which makes sense since it's grapefruit. The rest of the workday is focused on fixing some other errors/ That change made by the senior staff member didn't end up fixing everything, and we had another quick call to figure that out. This one didn't involve any other people or anything like that, and certainly no "good boy" comments. He guides me in making my fix, and teaches me some new things about how our project interacts with other projects, and I submit my changes. Not much else really happens at work. I'm mostly just monitoring tests, but they take a while to run. There's some conversations about miscellaneous things with that regular cast of characters here at my workplace, but I'm still rather spent. I head home later than most of them, and I just let myself relax. Only a little bit though. I decide to lounge around in my shorts today, not my regular sweats (this will be relevant later I promise), and hop onto 'Minecraft.' I want to try playing on that server my coworkers made, and after jumping through a couple of hoops, I'm in. I play for a bit, just exploring around, with the goal of finding a nice place to build a house on, and make that house look nice. After some wandering and some nights spent in two-block high holes, I happen upon a small island close to the coast of the main continent I spawned on. It was perfect. Exactly what I was looking for. It'll need some expanding, and I'll need a ton more resources, but it's going to work quite nicely. Before I can start on that though, my friends in my home city continuously message me. Apparently, we had moved our Thursday plans to Tuesday? I don't remember that one bit... Well, after getting my apologies out of the way, we launch into the tiebreaker round of our little 'Jeopardy!' series. I already realize that I messed up though, as I forgot to place the daily doubles... we had to restart to make sure they would load this time, and the scores were relatively close going into the second round. The second round's categories were all a 'Love Live!' reference though, and so the player who hated 'Love Live!' actually ended up losing everything. The questions weren't even about 'Love Live!' The other player was doing well, and was getting some realyl good guesses, or just knew some of the random stuff because of the sheer amount of YouTube documentaries she's watched. Near the end, she began to pity the other contestant, and tried to feed him an answer. He was already about to guess it too, but this spoiled the fun of it for him. They both decided to throw this question, and then they threw the rest of the questions too, until they both ended up in the negative right before the final round. In normal 'Jeopardy!' they both would have been disqualified, so I do believe they both lost and the tie is still active. The one who lost with a score of -5800 dollars said that only he lost, while the other player said she felt like this round shouldn't count because of how skewed it felt. I would like to do another board, one that's more fair, but our post-game conversation was very tense. I just suggested we go back to our regular plan of "watch me play 'Danganronpa' for the first time" on Thursdays. The call ends quickly after that. I want to do some chores before hopping back on 'Minecraft,' and as I do, my landlord knocks on my door. I almost answer it, before I realize that I'm wearing my short shorts and that my legs are completely hairless. While I'm sure she would not care in the slightest, I'm not ready yet to show people what I look like in shorts and what I look like with shaved legs, both in conjuction and not. I turn on my kettle so that it sounds like I'm busy, then rush around the room throwing off my shorts and putting on sweats. Meanwhile, she's still knocking and raising her voice to call on me, and I only answer "Just a moment" after her fifth knock, which I'm sure didn't help. Even with the noise from the kettle, I'm sure she heard my loud frantic footsteps as I rushed to change, but she didn't ask about what I was doing. Phew... She hands me some groceries (earlier, she told me she would be going to the grocery store and she could grab some things for me), just some lotion (my legs could really use it after what I've been putting them through), turkey strips (half off, and the chicken was sold out), and a suprise just for me: BBQ PORK BUNS!! It's been so long since I last had some. I'll pay her back tomorrow though. Once I finish all my chores, I hop back onto 'Minecraft,' but when I spawn back on my island I hear... animals? There were no animals nearby when I logged off..? Digging myself out of my hole, I discover that some people on the server already found my island, and left an entire farm on it, and a chest with resources. This was a clear and blatant disrespect of my sovereignty. I massacred all the animals (except the chickens I accidentally let them go), moved the chest to the coastline, and left a threatening warning sign to "stay off my island." After this, I began preparing to expand my island and build a house, gathering stone and dirt and wood for it. Once I had gotten my fill, I logged off, then worked on bloghan until it was late. While it was a bit upsetting to see that some of the hair on my lower leg was already starting to grow back, it still felt just as amazing against the sheets while I slept.
Wednesday was a day where I actually woke up on time (relatively), but because I wanted to sleep more, I had to miss my regular bus again. I got really lucky with my alternate route though, and somehow ended up at work 15 minutes early. Players for our D&D campaign approached me throughout the day to ask if we would cancel today's session, due to a giant snowstorm that was set to happen tonight. Now, I really don't think it would be all that bad, since people in this region seem to overestimate snow stuff. My work today was still error fixing, but I was really feeling the pressure now. The deadline actually turned out to be on Tuesday, not Friday, but I still don't think we're making that deadline. For starters, literally every single run I started before I left last evening failed. Every single one. Smooth start to the day. For the task where I have to bring in smaller projects, I was told to ask someone who would know where to begin indentifying errors, before starting to rerun other stuff to check their errors. Things i had previously fixed were showing more errors, because of course they were, so I started working on those. The fanatic visited me to discuss 'Minecraft,' as it turns out he was the one who invaded my island. He talked about how he planned to destroy my island after almost immediately finding it, but chose mercy and did not do that. Ah. OK then. He left me to my devices, and I him, as I went back to my work. That message I sent earlier had since blown up into this much bigger group chat with all these senior employees, and I was being asked really tough questions about why I was even doing this. Apparently, the project I was told to bring into our project was making changes that ran counter to some of the goals with our own project, and I had no idea how to asnwer these questions of "why" when my answer of "to make the tests pass so we can ship out our project on time" wasn't accepted. To be fair, I guess my answer was kind of weak, but I was really feeling the stress. I reached out to my go-to, asking her if my initial draft of answers were all correct, but she just told me to add her and her manager to the group chat. Once I do that, I decide to let the adults do the talking. My results come in for another set of tests, which brings me into a whole other kind of panic, and the people who visit me to bring me down to lunch see that stress and decide to let me work through that on my own up here. I eat at my desk, carefully watching the group chats and the running tests, watching to see what reacts first so I can get a jumpstart on either. I write some bloghan as I do, but it's quite hard to focus on it. It's just so stressful making sure all these things work, and watching that group chat grow and grow, and watching emails get sent out to teams I've never heard of about this simple thing I was asked to do. My coworkers tell me about how they are planning on leaving early to make sure they beat bad road conditions, and I thought that maybe I should do that too. Catch an early bus or whatever. I decide that after one more call with that senior to finally fix this one error that just keeps coming back, I would leave for the bus about 2.5 hours before I normally would. Once I do that call (he took control of my computer, which I didn't know was a thing he could do! then we solved it by making a waiver for it, so that it's allowed to exist in an unfixed state... the power of deadlines at work!), I re-run a bunch of tests, but my go-to points out that the -1 error on some other test came back, so I have to spend some time fixing that, and then I have to re-run MROE tests and it's this nonstop set of things breaking and needing fixes and things breaking - honestly though, if the stress of the deadline and all these senior staff members asking me questions wasn't there, this would be a pretty fun process. I finish everything, and set myself on writing bloghan as I waited for results. 20 minutes before I was going to leave, my manager sends out an email, scheduling a meeting in another 50 minutes... which is when teh snowstorm starts. If I leave at my planned time, I will make it back to my place before teh snowstorm starts, but I will not be present for the beginning of the meeting - surely, a bad choice. However, there's a bus I might make in the next 5 minutes. If I do, then I can end up back at my place 10 minutes before the meeting starts. If I don't make it though, then I'll be stranded for half-an-hour in between work and my place... I take the risk, because we always clutch those bus schedules line-ups. Rushing out, speedwalking to the station, I make it just in time. THe second bus is on time too! I always win those, and there has absolutely never been a case where I haven't. Don't fact check me on that. It turns out that I would have actually been just fine to miss the beginning of the meeting, since we didn't end up discussing the project we were working on until the tail end of the meeting. I didn't even have to stress out about answering the tough questions, since my go-to was fielding all of them for me. I only had to answer for what I was working on. That whole time, I was doomtexting my work rival about how over it was for me, but things seemed to work out. After this meeting, I let myself relax a little. I had promised in this meeting that I would submit changes tonight, so I set up all the tests I needed to, and got on my regular laptop to write bloghan and do other things. I would check in periodically to see if the tests were finished or not, but until I did, it was time for some other work. THe snow seemed to barely be falling, so I made some hot chocolate, drinking it as I finalized my submission, and closed my work laptop for the day. Then was some time spent on our 'Minecraft' server (finished the base of my house, next I'll work on decorative elements), then researching razors (for use once I run out of cream), dinner, moisturizer for my legs, and sleep, hours earlier them I've been going to bed before this entire week...
...which helped only a little. I think I need to re-check if my alarms are actually working, because I still woke up really late, even if I feel fully rested. I did rush to get ready, but I managed to get everything on my morning checklist done this time. I opened my blinds and saw the sheer amount of snow on the ground. Oh. They were not overreacting, were they? This is about as abd as it gets back where I grew up. How I missed it. I run out of my place (I do leave a little later than I would like, so making my regular bus would be up to a run). As I ran out of the garage though, I realized that my initial glance at the snow was an underestimation of the snow. There was so much of it that they cancelled school! That would never happen back where I'm from... Entire families were shovelling their sidewalks, and they seemed to be struggling hard. I elected to not increase their burden, and walked along the road, which had been flattened out for the most part. As I rode on my regular bus, I saw people in the neighbourhood at large were pulling out whole snow blowers (not the handheld blowers I'm used to, but the ones that suck it in and dispense it out up and to the side), and when I got off that first bus, I had a lot of fun trudging through some of the deeper snow, and standing on top of large mountains of the stuff too. I had a lot of fun watching people struggle to drive in the snow, and I'm pretty sure people were really concerned seeing me in the bus hold just smiling and giggling to myself. Once I got off my second bus and headed towards the company building, the sidewalks were just not as shoveled. Rather than walk along the sides which were imprinted with footprints already, I opted to just run a bit through the heavy snow. I hadn't gotten a chance to do true deep snow running for a very long time, and it was just so enjoyable! Reminded me of where I'm from... As I walked into the building, someone made a comment asking if I had any spare socks. I looked down. Up to my knees, I was coated in snow. I brushed most of it off, said that I didn't have socks, but that this kind of thing happens all the time back home. With this, I headed up to a mostly empty office. It's only now that I realize that maybe I'm not giving the best impression, walking into work with the lower half of my jeans covered in snow. Before I start any actual work, one of the managers (same guy who runs those pizza events) visits our corner, commenting on the snow and the sun. He comes by my desk at one point and sees the picture on it, asking if it's my mother. It's not, and I tell him that without his influence, I wouldn't be where I am today. He looked at me a bit oddly, then put his hand on my shoulder, saying that it's quite rare for people to have pictures of academic people on their desks. He leaves after that, and I'm barely able to hold in the laughter. Once I'm over it, I start to work. My first tasks of the morning involve justifying my changes yesterday to some other senior staff member, and investigating why everything suddenly decided to break. It turns out to be some random part of the project being missing... but wait, I remember this part a little bit... weren't they talking about this in yesterday's surprise meeting? I bring it up to my go-to, and she says yeah! She'll go ahead and fix that. I ask for something else to do, and she gives me a couple of easy errors to fix, so I work on those throughout the day. It's pretty frustrating to be honest, since everytime I try to test my changes, it always returns an error. And it's not necessarily because my fixes are wrong, but because the tests I am testing refuse to run if I'm running them for my own purpose of checking them. They'll only run if they are part of that more formal nightly run. Of course... thanks a lot. My coworkers aren't too chatty today, and only my co-DM, the compatriot, my Japanese coworker, the cable guy, and my equivalent are in today. They only really come to talk to me in the morning to bring me down for lunch, where we note how quiet it is today. I'm asked to do an impression of my work rival, since he's always trying to stir up conversation by saying controversial things that he genuienly believes. I'm immediately nailed as a drama kid for how well I was able to do it (I feel like I wasn't all that good..?), and I end up sharing about my history with plays back in high school. I'd like to end up on the stage one day, but at this point it's probably too late to get into it. After some more discussion of where someone could find a video of one of my performances (it's probably unlisted...) and some discussion of some theatres nearby which I might check out, we start up a game of 'President.' I win it handily by biding my time with a well-placed four-of-a-kind kings (right after making sure I win a hand with a 2), and saving high single cards for the last round, with pairs played in between. I just watch the next round, since at the same time I am monitoring things on my laptop. We go back upstairs, and I'm struggling a little bit to find out where to get the information to fix certain things I was asked to. After caving and asking my go-to, she tells me where exactly I need to do things, which makes me wonder: if it was so easy, why did she get me to do it?? At this point, I'm letting myself get distracted with time on bloghan and other time on my phone. Now that my big fixes are done, and these small fixes are just kind of easy, it feels like there's not much for me to do right now. Near the end of the work day, I submit my changes (strangely, only one of two things I changed are being reported as submitted... I'm sure that will be fine!), and end up trying to get an online simulator for 'Love Live! School idol festival' working. It turns out that all I had to do was switch my mobile browser from Chrome to Firefox, and it just worked! Me and the compatriot were both huge fans of this game, and now trying it again, playing through various difficulties of 'Snow halation' and even seeing that the gacha simulator still has all the old animations really leaves us close to teary-eyed. It's at this point that I head out, and I end up not really doing all that much once I get back. All the snow has been shoveled for me already, and the night was ripe for me to do a whole lot of things. Naturally, I squandered all the time I had, spending it just watching videos and playing games, and chatting to a friend from my home city about whale tails, university students, and gluten snacks. Very little work was done for bloghan or my course, or just about anything that wasn't chores or cooking, and I even went to bed early.
Friday was going to be a day where that laziness would change, with me mostly catching up on bloghan as I also investigated why certain things were STILL NOT WORKING in the nightly run. For the former, I got distracted by very little, managing to fully catch up for the former and trace to some sort of solution in the latter, which I presented to my go-to around lunch time. Well... ok, so it didn't actually solve anything, but just pointed out where the errors were coming from. After lunch, she referred me to someone else (a guy on my work rival's team) who was supposed to be the person in charge of that, and I messaged him with my findings and where I got stuck. We ended up on a call where we discussed the intricacies of how that thing worked, and I realized that the fix was going to take a lot longer than I thought. I would have to regenerate a lot of models of something, and this thing is due on Tuesday. Not great, not great. He sends me these commands which look a lot more like paragraphs to be honest, and this whole time in the call, I'm thinking to myself about how much I do not want to do this. I report back to my go-to, telling her about how much more complex the situation has become, and I was very surprised to hear her almost immediately say that she was writing an email to the guy I just talked with all our managers cc'd on the email. Her plan was to get that guy to do it. I shared with my go-to that I was told he had never done it on this new project, but she retorted that we were already doing quite a lot of work for his team, that we were already being good team players, so this was justfied. I rolled with it, and there was quite a fast-moving email chain of various people trying to pass the buck of this task. I was quite happy to watch them go ahead with that, and eventually I learned that my predecessor would be getting that task in the future, but not for this one time. Huh. What goes around comes back around again, I suppose. Well, now that I was out of things for me to do specifically, I thought I could relax a bit, but the not-manager decided to remind me that he existed once again, and asked me for steps in running that one Absconder flow I last touched in 2024. Providing them to him, he comes back to me in minutes asking about an error he's encountering in the first step. Usually, refreshing your project file download is the best way to deal with that, but this is after he did that. Strange... When I do it, things work just fine. Once I tell him that, he gets me in a call, where I show him that mine is working. He looks at the outputs, the various logs, and we try some things that might make mine fail, but it just works. He eventually comes to the conclusion that I simply just have more company permissions than he does, which is wild to me. It actually makes me laugh quite a lot, but I don't let it escape my mouth until after the call is done. The rest of the call is spent with him telling me to run it instead, and what to do with the output after. It's a low priority thing though, so I won't be doing that until Tuesday. I end the call ad get up and just laugh. Man, I love this team. It's just so jank, but that's what makes it so enjoyable. Nothing is smooth, and that's frustrating, but it's also just hilarious. I'm relaly glad I'm not on my equivalent's team, with their fully functional, smooth operations that just work and very rarely have wrenches thrown into them. This team I'm on just feels so much more real, so much more comedic! Maybe I wouldn't mind coming back so much after all... My work rival messages me about if I had a lot to do today, and I unload on him for abit before shutting down my work laptop, making some turkey strips (eh, they taste just the same as chicken strips but a bit more wet?), more tea, and some bloghan done in bed, wasting away in my little apartment. It's a particular day today, and I'm trying to not bother people who I know are busy on this day, but I don't feel much more lonely than I already was. I've moved on. Kiwi slices, peanut butter bread, Splattershot Pro despair video, and a lost round of Solitarot later, and I was back to having not much to do. I took that as my cue to go ahead and cook dinner, using up the last of my canned chicken for stir fried noodle (its too salty of a meat... or maybe I used too much soy sauce). At the same time, I noticed that another set of videos and quizzes had come out for my course, so rather than work on the assignment that would be due soon, I did most of those quizzes before going to bed.
I woke up pretty late on Saturday, but there was some work to still be done. After breakfast, I played my mobile game's dailies first, then finished off those quizzes. I decided to also start up another 15x15 cryptic crossword. I had a lot of fun with the theme of this one, but after that it was back to the trenches of lunch and working on the next assignment: a data visualization. I thought that some of the sources they would provide us would include actual data to visualize, but it looks like it didn't at all... wonderful. Honestly, reading through this assignment, it feels a whole lot like they want us to make another infographic, but this time with data vis stuff inside it. Just great, really. After coming up with a short outline in the shower, and starting to plan out that outline, I hopped onto 'Minecraft,' building out my house in the day, and writing bloghan or doing assignment research in the night. Not much work on that assignment ended up happening though, even after I was done with 'Minecraft' for the day (made my house longer, mined underwater for quite a while, started prepping for the roof stuff). There was some research, some distracted video watching and phone scrolling sessions, a lot of restructuring how my assignment was going to look, but not a whole lot of actual work. At one point I even delayed by doing chores. You know the procrastination is bad if you have to resort to doing chores when avoiding some other task. There was even a time where I stepped outside for a bit, considering taking a very late night walk. It had been snowing all day, and it showed no sign of stopping, but it showed no signs of getting heavier either. But no. I need to start work on this. My idea is ambitious, but I don't have as much time as I feel like I do. Although... I am getting a bit hungry. Maybe it would be better to eat first. Since my grocery delivery wouldn't be coming in until Monday, today was going to be pierogies and turkey strips. Fine enough though. It tasted good, and it was quick to make too. I decided to read only a little bit of 'Homestuck' as I ate, and ended up reading for an hour longer than I wanted to, going all the way up to the end of Act 2. Wow. The story has really enraptured me now, and some of these fantasy elements and all these plot hooks and mystery - it feels like 'One Piece' to me, in a way. Ah, but... my assignment. I should do that. But.... I could just go to bed. Yeah, I'll just go to bed. Im pretty tired, my eyes are a bit sore... yeah, bed. When I wake up from bed on Sunday, it's at the same time as yesterday. The snow is still falling, and it probably never even stopped during the night. That's the Way I Like It ...For Metal Harbour. The foot-deep snow won't stop me though, because I'm not planning on leaving my place today too! After breakfast and games, and videos and piracy and chats, I finally decided to do some work: finalizing bloghan. You thought I would work on my assignment? I did too... Instead, I ended up doing only a little bit of planning, getting wrapped up in a game of 'Balatro,' some cooking and other chores, then hopping into a call with a friend from my home city. We both had some assignments to do, so surely we would both work on them right? Well, no, we almost got immediately got distracted with music (as I tried to imitate a bird while singing "If I Didn't Have You," my landlord interrupted me... oops) and her recent art, then got even more distracted by my new bit of "Shadow the Hedgehog and Ruby Kurosawa would be friendly with each other." Somehow, me just improvising with myself balooned into us making a short little script involving more characters and more voice impressions and an actual touching ending?? My landlord interrupted me again to tell me about the snow outside. Once we finished with that, she told me she'd be back, so I got a little more work in on my assignment befroe we all joined up again to teach her 'Balatro.' It was her first time playing, and the first run died pretty quick, but her second run got pretty far! More awareness of her jokers and better utilization of the discard, and she definitely would've won, but still really good for a first time! With more game experience, she'll get there. By the time all this was done, it had gotten extremely late, and the amount of work I had done on my assignment was... almost none compared to what I wanted. Well, there's always tomorrow, but I think I can stretch a little more out of tonight. Tomorrow's a holiday for me, after all!
Future plans
So many things I haven't done. So many things I have to continue to do. Here's how last week's goals went:
- PCB stuff: no progress on the one-bit adder project, no progress on the keyboard
- Door: no progress
- 'Homestuck': read all the way up to the end of Act 2! So exciting!!
- That one assignment: Started it, barely.
- Cryptic crossword: started a 15x15, didn't finish it though
- 'Yohane the Parhelion: NUMAZU in the MIRAGE': no progress made
- D&D prep: oh shoot I need to plan this too
This week, I'll start reading the 'Dressrosa' arc of 'One Piece,' finish up this data visualization assignment, finish that 15x15 crossword, and if I have spare time, I'll look into maybe doing some online PCB trainings. If I can't find time to do actual PCB work, maybe this will help in the meantime. Oh, and I think I'll try to pick up that photo recolouring project again too!
Song of the week
'Margaritaville' (https://youtu.be/ohDqjRGqpIU) by Jimmy Buffet is the song of the week. This week has been one where I'm just really feeling the wasted passage of time. I could be doing so many more things, but I'm... just not. And for once I'm not just talking about different things I'm working on, or reading, or watching. No, I'm talking about life things. I feel like I've just missed out on so many first experiences that I'm not really ever going to... well, experience. On top of that, there's a lot of interpersonal relationship things and non-working experiences that I don't really consider myself "eligible" for. In the past, I'd blame the people around me or (more gnerally) the world for that, but now I really see it for what it is. It's kinda just my fault. My first problem is that I'm me, and my second problem is that I like virtually everything about me. But that's alright. I say that a lot, or "but that's ok," but I really do mean it. In the past, I would not have been ok with it at all. But now, I see that things were meant to turn out this way. I spent all of Friday looping this song, because in the past, I would've blamed my loneliness on the generic concept of women, but now? I see that it's really been me the whole time. Honestly, I don't know why I didn't reach that conclusion earlier. I am the common denominator in all my interactions with others after all. The other aspect of that song though, that whole "lazing about, wondering why you're lazing about?" That's just kind of me now. And it seems as though things will stay that way for quite a while.
Until next time
So looks like this week will be just as tough as last week, though hopefully with circumstances reversed: things not so busy on the work front, and things pretty busy on the home front. I really need this next week to go well... See you when I see you then!
- bubbler