March 2, 2025 - bloghan 36

Well, I did call that I wouldn't have much time this week for things. Sometimes it was my fault. Actually, I think it was almost always my fault. I could've done better this week, I really could've. Here's what I did this week:

Tier list of the week

This week's tier list: dark patterns in social media user interface design. A dark pattern is a user interface design choice that tries to manipulate users into doing certain actions, usually ones that benefit the social media platform and exploit the users. Here's the tier list:

Ordered tiers, unordered within tiers. This is based on how effectively I think these techniques work to do the effect of the dark pattern. I don't have too much more to say on this, since I have looked at these patterns and their descriptors for way too long already. Don't want ot think of them ever again... but at least being aware of them makes me less susceptible to them too.

Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)

Monday was kinda boring overall. I get to the office and see that the various things I ran over the weekend all failed because of misplaced files. Those ones are easily found because they say where they're meant to be placed, but when I redo them, it reports back another set of files are misplaced, but doesn't tell me where they are. Well that's just wonderful! As I puzzle it out, my mentor visits me and asks about my weekend, to which I reply "productive." This prompts him to ask if I'm not taking the weekend to rest, and I explain to him how I spent a good chunk of time decluttering everything in my apartment yesterday, so that I could feel like I could live again - ah, good, he completely understands. He asks me about the results of my predecessor's Absconder stuff, which he asked me to do last week. I saw that my predecessor sent him something last week, so I pointed my mentor to that, but we checked it again, since we had both not opened it. While openeing it, he commented on my dual monitor setup, asking if my neck hurt from looking up and down all the time. To be honest, I don't know if my neck hurts from this setup or from other things, but it's very useful for Absconder work, and I've accidentally gotten pretty used to it. He replies with something along the lines of "don't knock it if it works, I guess." He must think I'm such a strange guy. It turns out my predecessor had only done it for the new case that needed to be added to the flow, so all the data that was needed was never made. I told my mentor I would get on that right away, and so I did. I kept myself mostly focused on it, even as my predecessor visited to discuss all these errors we were both struggling to fix on the new project. He left pretty quick, and the fanatic, compatriot, and co-DM visisted too. I didn't pay much attention to what they said, since I was busy with working on what my mentor asked me to, but I didn't even realize they came to collect me for lunch. It came sooner than I thought it did, and these three were specifically requesting that I join them, since I hadn't gone down for lunch very consistently over the past few days. Well... fine, I guess I'll join. Not much really happens at lunch, just a bit of conversation on D&D and on the crossword I had prepared. I kinda wish I didn't go down, because there wasnt all that much being done, and I was working more on the laptop that I had brought down than I was talking to the others. I went back up and continued to work, managing all these message from people telling them about progress: "no, I still have to call someone to find out why there's still errors" or "no, I don't know why that other test suddenly began failing." My work rival and my predecessor started doing my crossword together at the table, getting only a few clues. I visited the crossword cubicle and they had already finished most of the across clues, only stuck on the theme clues and a really tricky charades one. They wanted to make things harder on themselves by only doing the across clues before moving on to the down clues, and also so my effort in making the puzzle wouldn't be spent in just an hour like last time. I get back to my desk and write bloghan as I let the Absconder stuff do its work, and it fails a whole bunch. On top of all this, I'm trying to manage the expectations of so many people asking about why things are failing or not, and I'm just trying to do this one task. My work rival seems pretty busy too, but once he finishes the majority of his tasks he works on the crossword, getting 25% of it on his own! My predecessor visits to ask him some stuff on his team's work, but once the question is answered he also helps to start getting more clues down. Eventually though, he calls over the crossword cubicle to assist him, and they do just that, pointing out easy clues and walking him through some of the more obscure ones. I have to explain the theme clues to the crossword cubicle people though, as well as one of the contractions that I used, but they're pretty happy with it overall. I do think it's one of my best written crosswords, both in terms of clues and fill, so I'm glad to hear it. They slowly leave as they get bored of watching my work rival struggle (he's getting better though!), and eventually it's just us again. A call from someone on his team leads me no closer to figuring out why this generation thing has made a completely new error, and looking at a forum for other employees who would be using this generation tool to complain, it seems like our specific error is an uncommon one that never gets answered. He just tells me to make my own post... well, ok. By now, it's almost the end of the day, so I head out and go home. There, I just clean and write bloghan and start another 'Jeopardy!' board for some reason. I sink too much time than I should have in a game, but I get to enjoy my stir fry noodle dinner while sitting on my couch. It's so nice to have a couch to sit on. I know I had one all this time, but now that I've fully decluttered my living space, I can use it!! It's just so nice. After a small exploration of "tarot card journaling RPGs" (I'd love to try, but I'm pressed for writing time right now), I do only a tiny bit of assignment work and go to bed. I really should've done more.

I woke up a bit late on Tuesday, but that's quite alright: today's a free pizza lunch day, so I don't need to prepare my own lunch. It's more wet and icy than snowy outside which is annoying, but I get to work pretty quick anyways. As soon as I sit down at my desk I have to immediately take a call and send messages explaining the whole generation thing and why it's not fixed yet. I file my support ticket as soon as I'm free of those requirements, then as I wait for people just about everywhere to get back to me on what I should do about these infinite seeming problems with this frustrating task. I'll finish off that 'Jeopardy!' board I started in the meantime, so that when I get home I don't sink all my time into it. I'm making this one very hevaily and stupidly themed, but trying to also include some more generic knowledge so that more people can feel like they're participating. Yet again, just like yesterday, I completely lose track of time and have to be reminded of the upcoming free lunch, but just before I'm collected and brought downstairs, my go-to adds me to a group chat with the useless guy on my work rival's team, and we have to call about the error. I don't know why she brought him in, if he has never worked on this project or related projects, but he tells me to try preparing my generated files for submission, without actually submitting them. With that, I head down to lunch to eat. The free pizza is just fine, it's the same as always, and as everyone talks and eats I work more on the 'Jeopardy!' board. I'm seated next to the two girls, the gregarious and my co-DM, and we have a bit of conversation where I catch a whole ton of strays and get the gregarious to agree to take me to the mall next week (I need adult supervision and the mall is a scary place, plus I need someone to help me pick out a good dress shirt). At some point, the topic of my weight comes up again, and my co-DM stats jokingly going in and calling me fat, then accidentally kicks me under the table. The gregarious sweeps a bunch of the crumbs on her lap onto my legs too. The amount of abuse I take from girls is unreal. Those alpha male people who sell seminars on Twitter or whatever for thousands of dollars would be screeching about how I give up all my manliness or pride and that I should I be really aggresive or rough with them - bah, what a waste of breath and bits on hard drives in California! I really don't care, and it's not that deep. Sure, I'm sure there are girls out there who actually do malicious things to people for malicious reasons, but these are my friends? Why would they do that? Especially in the workplace. After I finish off my pizza and finish the 'Jeopardy!' category I'm working on, the gregarious and I play foosball: not for points, not to win, just to play around, shoot some balls around. We leave pretty soon after we finish up, and I guess this pizza event was not bad this time, not bad at all. I do a bit of work (to be real though, it's mostly 'Jeopardy!'), and some of the Absconder stuff that I just remembered I was supposed to do, while feeling just terrible about all the stuff to do with generating those files in the new project. People slowly filter in from the crossword cubicle just to make conversation, and pretty soon we literally have everyone visiting us in our corner. My work rival sees this and realizes he has the perfect audience to start another argument of some kind, and so he proposes that we have a whole slew of events that we do after work next Thursday. He wants to do 'Jeopardy!' then an escape room, then a movie, and a whole bunch of things. Everyone is against his plan of doing so many things in one night, and I myself am not sure if I can even make that day. I don't know about how my assignments will feel next week (a video and a presentation that I have to make with those 4 teammates... not feeling great about that), and people are giving their opinion on what they think they should be doing that day. Dinner is brought up, then bowling, then going to the escape rooms in a large group, but my work rival conitnues to complain about how it would split all of us up, like what happened with dinner last week. Like I'd want to spend all my social time with him... After a whole bunch of judgement and fighting over what we should do, and my work rival trying to get me to do 'Jeopardy!' next Thursday (which would require me to change up my prior plans that day too), and others telling me to just take my time, a decision is made: 'Jeopardy!' at the very least, hosted by me if I'm able or by my co-DM if not. She's going to make them do one entirely in French, isn't she... The rest of the day at work, I just feel so drained. In my busyness to finish off this 'Jeopardy!' board (so that I won't get distracted with it once I get back), I forget to sign up for my communications course starting in May, but it turns out that not many people were signed up for it yet, so I got in pretty easily. My go-to messages me about if I tried the useless guy's method, but as I expected, it did nothing. She also tells me about some alternate method having to do with something named "something something migration something something" (ok, I guess I don't really know the name), which would've been nice to know about before. As she works on that, I get a visit from my mentor asking about the Absconder stuff, since it's pertially not working. I provide what I can and contact my predecessor to get more insight, but he doesn't really help all that much. It's near the end of the day, just one hour to go, and I've finished the board and succesfully drained myself of all my energy. I have no motivation to fix the generated stuff in teh new project or the Absconder stuff that I didn't wrote. I'm really starting to resent having to do other people's work. My work rival also seems a bit drained of work effort right now too, and he sets himself on spending this last hour working on my crossword from yesterday, finishing it with a lot of handholding from the fanatic. Once he does, it's the end of the day, and I head out, unsatisfied with what I had done. My bus and walk home though is warm and not dark at least, but unlike yesterday, I fail to dodge the puddles as effectively. Still though, I feel way better wlaking into my apartment, enjoying playing games and eating snacks while on my freed up couch, and updating bloghan for the day sitting at a desk with so much room. I manage to focus in a bit more with things today too! Completed the daily bloghan catchup pretty early, and I went for a shower where I discovered that I can make high notes easier to hit if I push on one part of my neck as I do it. After the shower though, it's back to work, and I make a risky move wit hmy data visualization assignment: a pivot, from one idea to another. I was originally going to be a bit more ambitious and explanatory with my data vis, but I came up with an idea that takes just a subsection of the original idea and fleshes it out a bit more, but would take less overall "visual design work" in the end, which will save me time when making it. The research can be done in a couple of "locked-in" sessions of work, but the visiaul design is another story. Honestly, it's not that risky, but it is a pretty late change. I feel comfortable doing it because I had barely started on the old idea anyways. Once this decision was made though, I thought that it might be a good time to make dinner. The plan was a big baked potato with some fried rice, but as I cooked the two at the same time, my pot where I cooked the rice started to bubble over with... soap? Also, the water that the rice was in had turned blue... the same shade as my dish soap. Oh come on... I thought I rinsed that pot enough, but evidently enough. There wasn't enough time to cook another batch of rice and not have the baked potato go cold before applying sour cream to it, so I had to quickly transition to stir fry noodle, and eat that instead. It was still enjoyable, but having to throw out a cupful of rice because I made it with detergent water instead of plain water still felt pretty bad. After eating, I tightened up my new idea even more, coming up with a really solid frame for all my ideas and graphics... a frame which I'm sure I will fill out tomorrow, right? With that comforting and procrastinatory thought, I went to sleep.

The next day at work didn't feel so bad, mostly because I had a lot more rest in me this time. Also, no one came after me as soon as I got in the office to ask about results, so I started fixing up all the Absconder stuff first, as my go-to asked me some questions about things that were not really great questions to ask? Like, she asked me about why one of the nightly things didn't run last night, but I got an email about it this morning, so it did??? What is she talking about??? There was also a reply to my ticket, and the the reply basically just repeated the words of the error message back to me, then told me to reread the logs... the logs where I found that error in the first place. There were actually only a couple of words that could be taken as something helpful, so my go-to asked the useless guy about that. We'll see if he even responds. Back to the Absconder, I was still lost as to why part of it wasn't working, until I actually looked closer at the project files themselves. Things got renamed when I wasn't looking. Oh. Of course. Why didn't I look sooner? I would've saved so much frustration and time... I explain this to my mentor, and go ahead with multiple re-runs throughout the day to get as much of it working as I can. He even visits me to discuss it, and gives some ideas to do it automatically - yeah no, not now, please not now. As I do that work, I get some messages from my go-to's manager, asking for an update on the ticket, and I tell him about how we asked that useless guy. He immediately wants in on that group chat we've got going, probably to get the useless guy working? I hope it works. The Absconder stuff mostly works, and sometimes doesn't, so while I isolate which things do and don't work, I head down to lunch. It's the same old stuff at lunch, just some talk on courses and on big projects, and about work too. When people start playing cards, I go on my phone, reading a lot more 'One Piece,' and also helping out my co-DM with a pretty tricky New Yorker cryptic. A bit boring of a lunch, but I was perfectly ok with that. When I got back up, it was more of the same. Waiting for Absconder things to go through, and for meaningful things to be said about the generation task by literally anyone qualified, and myself filling in that time with more 'One Piece' reading and blogahn writing. My work rival tried to start up a whole "I can indentify prime numbers" thing, but me giving him 1729 and 731 as test numbers quickly defeated that attitutde. I honestly feel so busy, but just waiting for things to happen for me to act upon is the limiting factor. I did all these things with some distraction from the fanatic and my work rival throughout, up until the D&D group (minus cable guy) went down for a short session. But right before I could do that, I got some messages. This other manager, one more strict than mine, the manager of my mentor and of my go-to. The one who asked me to keep him in the loop and got mad when I forgot, the one who asked me what I had done so far in my time here. He asked for a quick group call. And he went in on me and the go-to. Well, actually, more the go-to, once I explained exactly what I had been doing with the generation thing, and explained where I was getting all my information from. He was most hung up on the fact that I used the name of a old project to generate the stuff for the new project - ah, but the useful guy on my work rival's team told me to, since the tools weren't recognizing that newest project. That wasn't good enough for him though, and he brought in my work rival's manager, especially after my go-to said she got the tool partially working for the new project. Once my work rival's manager gave a reason for why using the name of the new project didn't work back then, the grilling manager backed off and understood. I was asked to work on re-generating everything tonight, and I said I would, but man. He really went in on my go-to for a moment there, talking about how it made no sense for us to have been working on this for a week. Well, if anything that my work rival's team worked on was working in the first place, this wouldn't have happened, but I do suppose it is also my fault for not being as proactive as I should be. The call ends, I freak out a bit internally about how tense it was, and we go down for D&D. It's only a short session since most people have to leave within an hour or so, so we keep it to mostly interacting with political figures and sneaking into someone's office. We're going to have to shift some of our original plans around, because this new setting that the player's have gotten themselves into has both written us into a corner and proved to be very interesting, and the players seemed to like what's going on, although I do feel bad that we didn't give much for my Japanese coworker to do. Once we finish, we all get dropped off pretty quickly, and once I get back to my place I turn my work laptop back on to check on how things have carried on. All my generations have finished with a couple errors... strange, I don't remember those being there when I did it last time. I think to check them, but I get this itch... I need to know what happens next in the story. I can't put it down. I have to read all the way to the end of the arc, I have to see 'Dressrosa' all the way through. And so, I end up spending two hours reading 'One Piece.' TWO HOURS! And I loved every minute of it. Spoilers follow. This arc was just so... so... whatever emotion is behind the "Absolute Cinema" meme, but not the ironic version of it. No, I mean the unironic version of it. Like most 'One Piece' arcs, once you actually get into the mystery of the island, and past that initial slower movement, Oda's writing just draws you in to read at the same frantic pace as Straw Hats and allies are moving throughout the story. I really loved how we got parallels to an earlier arc with this one, that being Arabasta, but leaning more into the tragedy and cruelty aspects made me love this arc even more. The backstories were on point with this as well (Law, Rebecca, Senor Pink), the villains felt compelling, and while the power level of some of the side characters were a bit too hard for me to believe (sorry Kyros fans), some of the feats we did get to see were just amazing, and I will admit that I'm pretty excited for new characters introduced in this arc already being labelled as recurring: so excited to see where they'll be at in many more arcs' time. The sheer amount of antics that occur don't overshadow things in this arc too, genuinely feeling like they fit in perfectly as a way to drive things forward (Batrolomeo, God Usopp). And of course, the character callbacks with Sabo and Bellamy!! I want to say so much more, but I also don't think I can. The only thing left to say is my main criticism, which is that half of the crew is just not present for half of the story. Nami, Brook, Sanji, and Chopper are just off doing some other thing, and I wouldn't have minded it as much if 1. they didn't mention that they were going to go back to Dressrosa just to get distracted by something else and not brought up, and 2. if we actually got to see them ocassionally get distracted out at sea, instead of just checking in on them in the middle and at the end of the arc. Still though, it's not often that some piece of media draws me in like that, then makes me sit still for 5 minutes just reflecting and thinking about the events that I just read. Starting this series all those months ago was so worth it. With all that out of the way, and still reeling from everything which just happened, I sat there and realized: oh shoot there's still a lot to do today! First, let's cook and eat, and wash dishes while I'm at it. Sour cream fried rice is... it's fine. I let myself get a little too distracted while eating it, and it's not until an hour after I start cooking that I start working on both my assignment and the generation thing. I also get a little distracted with trying to figure out what happened to the website where I regularly got my 'One Piece' chapters, but after a long time of fruitless searching, I got some progress done on both tasks? Not much, but a lot more than yesterday, that's for sure. With that, I noted that it had become extremely late, and time to go to bed. Now. It was nearly 4 hours after midnight...

Keeping my phone far from my bed was totally a strategic move, not a forgetful one, because it forced me to get up early to turn off the alarm. I made it to the bus stop on time, but I waited quite a while for it to come, and it was over 10 minutes late. Makes sense, I suppose, since the snow had recently restarted. When I finally saw the bus peeking around the corner, I raised my arms as if to say "where were you?" I Was a little mad, since I knew I would be messaged right away as soon as I got into the office , and I didn't want to catch any sort of "lateness" flack. When I got on though, the driver was very apologetic and told me not to pay since it was her fault it was so late. I was very surprised by this and I took my seat, and I also observed that the next person to get picked up still had to pay. I think that she must've seen how I reacted to seeing and tried to appease my anger. I felt ashamed. How immature of me! She was just doing her job. It's not like I've never been late for something before. When I got off the bus, I gave her an apology for my behaviour, and she countered with her own apology. I think we're on good terms now? Not sure... we'll see next week. I had no such complications with the second bus, and got to the office pretty quick. First order of business: do the favour for my work rival that he just sent me, running something for him on his machine from mine. Second: answer the messages from the go-to and her manager aobut my progress, telling them that I regenerated the files yesterday and that my tests failed for different reasons, so I would be fixing those "different reasons" first before trying again. Third: visit my mentor's cubicle upon being asked to and help him out with the Absconder flow he was trying to do, showing him a couple cool tricks at the same time. With those out of the way, I could actually focus on fixing those "different reasons," which I realized would just be a case of generating some entire other set of files, because of course it would work like that. I had the command wrong the first couple times, but my go-to corrected me, and now it was just a waiting game to get it all working. During all this, I was chatting with my work rival about the new announcments from Gamefreak that day (online, because he chose to work from home today... of course), and also to my co-DM (in-person) about our plans for the next session. Since one player couldn't make it yesterday, their character did not enter a location with the rest of the party, so now we have to figure out how to get that character to the location in a timely manner. I sat back down at my desk and just kind of sat there watching the results of stuf I was running go by. My mentor reported that he had an issue where his Absconder stuff suddenly quit out, and it made me wonder if there was a way to skip that 10 minutes of setup if you weren't changing the project files that Absconder analyzes as part of its setup. Looking at the docs, there's a couple promising commands that might do exactly that, so I spend some time to test it out and time it too. The parsing of how to use and the basic setup aren't too long, and saving the Absconder setup and loading it later proves to be somewhat useful? My testing indicates that it takes 2-5 minutes less than just restarting the Absconder setup, so it's worth it just a little bit. Around this time is lunch, but I end up forgoing sitting with everyone downstairs to sit at my desk instead. I just want to watch the last thing I have running so that I can act as soon as it's done. I'm mostly on my phone during this time, supremely bored, but once I finish eating lunch I catch up on bloghan. The run finishes and it seems like it generated the files I need to analyze the other set of files that I generated (because of course! of course that's how it has to be), so I start up the next run, the one that actually does that analysis I just discussed. One big reason I had to do a second round of regeneration was because prior important steps were being skipped by the testing program, since it saw that those steps proceeded before without any problems, skipping them to save time. This time, I forced it to regenerate everything. Things will take longer to run, sure, but now they'll run correctly. Once I've caught up to bloghan, I try to put a little work into my data vis assignment. I'm not sure how things ended up like this, where I just do a whole bunch of other stuff at work while I wait for things to finish. Better than just doomscrolling, I guess. Before I could even start on the data vis though, the initial test finished. The results... pratial success. The sample of the new files that I generated and transferred were indeed working and causing the test to pass. I couldn't believe it. It had been done! Finally!!! All I have to do is move evrything else over and this will all be over! I announce this success to the various managers and all that, and get up to walk around. After a quick conversation with my equivalent about his Absconder task that he's doing for his team, I go to the washroom and qucikly take care of some things. As I head for the sink, the VP walks in and we nod heads at eachother - that feels a little awkeward... as I wash my hands my predecessor walks out of a stall and joins me at the sinks, starting up conversation, which is even more awkward. I try not to talk much because now the VP is behind us waiting to use the sink, so I quickly finish off drying and the conversation and get out of there. Why did that situation have to happen to me? I go back to my desk and setup the last few things I need to before I can begin copying, and I'll be honest. I decided to just wait for it to finish instead of doing something else in the meantime. I probably could have gotten some useful work in, but I was just kinda sitting there, staring at things, waiting for them to do something. The tiredness of staying up so late last night was finally getting to me, and I think I did actually rest my head on my arms for a little bit, falling asleep. I pushed through a bit to catch up on more bloghan, but this final step was taking a lot longer than I thought it should have. I visited the crossword cubicle where we talked about our upcoming mall trip, and I got asked if I really meant "a dress and a shirt" when I said I was planning on buying "a dress shirt." That conversation also involved some conversation about blazers (why does google refer me to the WOMEN'S BLAZERS FIRST??????), then other people working here who had birthdays yesterday, a bit of a roast session about my weight (all tongue in cheek, so it's alright), and eventually I headed back to my desk to check on things. The last thing was STILL running, and now that manager was asking about the other half of the generated stuff. How much had I done? Well, there's no harm in starting to move over some of the stuff as the other stuff generaates, and it's not actually moving them, just copying them! The copy process this time is a lot smoother because now I know what to do, and now I have my shortcuts from last time available for me to use right away. My predecessor comes to visit me a couple times during this process, just to talk to me about one of the new tasks he's been given, but I don't really talk to him that mcuh about it. Sure, I pay a little close attention at some parts, but this feels more important right now. Before I leave work, I manage to get about half of the files copied over of the ones that I need to, and I decide that I might as well start running the test again, to see if the partially copied files would work just fine. I doubt it, but there is a pretty good chance I'd say! After I get home, it's time for a snack and a shower, then another period of wasted time on my laptop. I see that I get a phone call from my landlord on my phone, but I don't really feel like answering it, so I just message her instead. It's nothing serious, she's just at the grocery store and wants to know if I want anything. Oh. Then why call??? I ask for eggs, so that I don't have to get it myself on Sunday, then join a voice call with my friends from my home city for our weekly online meetup. One person really wants to show us these skits of the world's fastest readers and writers, and they're pretty funny, thought the other guy very clearly just wants to get on with the 'Jeopardy' boards. After collecting my eggs, we play the two boards that I made, and they love/hate the theming. The first board is pretty well-received, and I think we all lived and learned quite a bit from it. The funniest part of the night is seeing how the one who hates 'Love Live!' gets the most amount of the 'Love Live!' clues correct, and subsequently wins the 'Love Live!' themed board - you love to see it. Afterwards, I take all the feedback, and this time there's quite a lot of it. I guess I didn't pay too much attention to difficulty in these boards, huh? After some pesto pasta and a long drawn out conversation with a different freind about my apparent association with femininity in the eyes of girls everywhere, I did a bit of writing and planning for my assignment. But I came to wonder, at one point do I just stop hitting walls with all this planning and actually make the thing? This is a question which I ask myself all the time. My answer to it is the same as all the other times I ask and answer it: I go to bed, very very late.

Friday was a work from home day, which is a life saver. I need some time to do my assignment, and surely I won't be too busy with work, right? Anyways, here's basically everything that happened at work that day:

Dealt with the messages that have to do with the generation task, telling them I'm still working on it
Saw that it was successfully working for both the project-specific and generic generated files
Copied over the last few files that I needed to, then re-ran all the tests
Set up a meeting with another coworker to talk about some of my Absconder work
Remade that spreadsheet my manager looked through line by line that one time, in addition to an identical spreasheet with an extra two columns with additional info
Got asked about some error's in my predecessor's Absconder work by my mentor: I told him I hadn't gotten a chance to work on it, so he set up a meeting with me and the predecessor to figure it out
Ate lunch (those beef steam buns were fine I suppose, BBQ pork still clears), worked on assignment (first few diagrams and intro slides), and saw that one set of tests failed
Asked the various managers monitoring my generation task about what I should do about those failures: they would not respond to me for the rest of the day
Had that meeting with my mentor and my predecessor, where the former just told me what I needed to change since it looked like I had done barely any work on the thing, as my predecessor remained silent
Stayed on the line with my predecessor for a long time, even after the mentor left, where we just caught up about the tasks the other was doing, talked concert tickets and 'Jeopardy!' too
Decided to just rerun the failing tests, even though nothing had changed, based on the advice of my predecessor
Tried to get back into working on my assignment but got surprised by a call from my mentor, without any warning messages
Join in the middle of a group voice call with my mentor and some guy I've never seen before, where they are talking about the results of that one Absconder task I got from the director; my mentor needs my help in proving that one of the errors that it found was not something that my team did, but is instead in the design of this other guy's team, which I do by pulling out my notebook and giving the location down to the line number... the guy I've never met before, upon seeing the error for the first time, noticeably drops the aggresive tones he was using and is suddenly very attentive to what we have to say
After that call, I ask my mentor about what just happened, and my mentor thanks me for supporting him in proving where the fault lied... feels good, man
Work rival tells me that he "saved the day" according to one other manager, just like how I did for my mentor!! Wow!!
Test run completes: it passed!??!?! Well, nothing to do now but to submit it all, and call it a day

How did I get so busy on the one day where I need to work from home and not be busy???????? Whatever, man. Now, I can focus on more important things... like that knock on my door form my landlord. She tells me there's a mother and daughter who want to view the space I'm living in, with a move-in date of September. They're coming in 1.5 hours, and she's wondering if I'll be available at that time. Thinking on it for just a bit, I decide that it's fine. I have nowhere else to be on a Friday night. She leaves and I realize that it woudl reflect very well on me if things got cleaned up in here. I stand in the middle of my apartment and stretch, do that pianist finger thing, all that runner warm-up stuff. I've made tighter deadlines for harder things. The next hour is some frantic doing of laundry, sweeping, cleaning, taking down the picture of Shadow the Hedgehog in my washroom, dishwashing, bed-making, organization, and dusting I've ever done, to the beat of some very fast paced rock. When all is said and done, I have 30 minutes leftover, which I use for assignment work. I hear my landlord behind me spraying air freshner all over my washroom (geez, I don't think it's that bad, right?), sweeping the laundry room (I forgot to do it... that's alright though because it's kind of my responsibility and kind of not too!), and asks me to unlock the extra storage room so that it can be shown. She also specifically requests that I do not use the dryer until after they leave... well, alright then. More work on my assignment ensues, until I see a face in my window. It scares me a bit, but I figure out it's the guests. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to open the door for them, but the door behind me receives a knock, and down walks my landlord from upstairs, letting them in for me. Ah, well that settles that. She gives them these slippers, and they leave me alone as they tour around my living space, which I've made pretty presentable in my humble opinion. The whole time they talk in another language, sometimes even whispering about me, and I do hear her mention the name of my occupation in English, so at some point they talked about me, but honestly, having these people here forced me to not get distracted with playing random videos and just do work. They leave pretty quick, and my landlord thanks me for the cooperation. Honestly, I do have to seriously think about how I use my time nowadays, since I won't get to live here forever, great as it is to do so now. Well, now is a great time to start drying some of my clothes! I throw them in and... oh, yeah, that's why she asked me to wait until after the potential future tenants left. This thing squeaks as loud as 500 mice squeaking out that one chorus from Handel's 'Messiah' in unison, and it seems to have developed the ability to growl too. Scary stuff! After cooking up a quick dinner, and checking to see how my submission at work went (it broke the project. I'm going to break something else when I walk into work on Monday), I think about how long I want to stay up to work on this assignment. While I could see myself staying up for three or more hours past midnight to do this, I feel like it's reasonable to assume I can finish off one more slide of it now, and do the rest tomorrow. Something something "I've made stricter deadlines for hard things" something something. With that comforting thought, I head to bed.

Saturday was busy but boring. Just like on February 1st, I dedicated pretty much all of this day to finishing off the assignment. Same course, but this time it was for a data visualization. I made it look a lot like an Instagram post, and even copied some of the UI elements on the top and bottom of the post. I hope I get full points for creativity this time... My data visualization was about shady UI designs used in social media, so making it look like one of those social justice social media posts seemed like a great idea. I think my data visualizations (two concept maps, an org chart, a fusions between a bar chart and an org chart, and a pie chart) were solid too (even if they took a bit of time to make yesterday and today), but I am very glad I didn't do my original idea. This idea was more focused and less work for sure, and it still took me from morning to night to finish it all. Though, I did let things wait until the last minute again... maybe the other idea would've worked better if I left myself more time. Only five things of note happened on Saturday while writing my assignment: In the morning I saw that the Landorus-Therian plushie was re-stocked (probably because of Pokémon Day), way later in the afternoon I shaved (my face) for the first time in a week (feels so much better!!!!), I left the washroom after shaving and saw that the washing machine had been pulled forward and at an angle (I guess my landlord's trying a new layout), and a bit before I finished the assignment my landlord knocked and asked me to help her put the washing machine back (she loaded it unevenly, so it moved on its own??? with use of legs to push against the machine we moved it back). Once I finished, I decided to reward myself by buying that plush of the King of OU (a rather intimidating purchase I must say, but I've finally been bought out by Big Pikachu so it's alright!), then walked around a bit. Now that this was done, what to do? Well, cook and clean is a good first step. My meal tonight is pesto pasta with spinach and garlic sausage, but I leave the door between my place and the laundry room open, since I see that my landlord left the dryer door open with a bunch of towels in it. I need to talk to her about receving a package (the one which probably has a bunch of sharp floating rocks in it and a base attack stat of 145), and sure enough, just as I scoop the pasta, sausage, and spinach into a bowl, she comes down and says something smells good. She asks if it's my lunch for tomorrow - HA! At this point it's only an hour or so after midnight; this is dinner! She laughs a bit, since she stays up pretty late too (yeah... I know), and tells me that I should use the fan when I cook this late at night to prevent smells from going upstairs. Oh. I'm supposed to be doing that at night? I've been avoinding doing it because I was afraid the noise would be too much, but she tells me the smell is more important. Whoops. Well, she says it's all good, just something to do for the future, and that's that. Before she leaves, I ask about the package questions, and she says she'll pass it to me when she receives it. Since it's not being bought from Amazon I can't send it to a locker, and the Pokémon company doesn't ship to PO boxes, so I do have to rely on my landlord on getting it. That doesn't stop me from makiong an elaborate lie to cover for why I'm buying a plush of a Pokémon at my age: it's totally a gift for my friend who's leaving this city in April! Yeah... I eat and think about doing some bloghan, but I think I've worked enough today. Let's go to bed, and wake up early tomorrow to finish bloghan.

I woke up pretty early on Sunday, 30 minutes before I wanted to, so I went back to sleep, setting an alarm for 30 minutes. I wake up 2 hours later and realize that I've erred. Well, shoot. I decide to rot for a bit, just lying there, looking at my phone. How could I let this happen? Eventually I get up and get to work. Breakfast, then bloghan, then games when I realize that I don't actually want to write bloghan. The grocery store is up next, and I only have a few items to buy. I haven't actually gone in person for a month or so, and it's on my way back that I remember why. It's so convenient to spend that hour doing something else, while another person gets the stuff you need. The reason I went this time is for that $14 tray of chicken thighs. I didn't trust a delivery person to get the right one, and overcharge me for bone-in thighs instead. When I got back, it was time for chores, then a whole bunch of squandered time trying to avoid writing bloghan. I do like it, I really do, but I'm still feeling so tired from the events of the week. I try writing it from bed, with a blanket over my legs and the space heater, on my couch with my headphones: I just gotta push through. I work for a good hour, catching up on quite a lot, when my laptop decides that it's actually done connecting to the internet for the day. Oh. OK. I'll just turn the Wi-Fi on and off again. When that doesn't work, surely a restart does, right? Nope... OK, I'll just shut it down and play games on my phone (which is receiving connection perfectly fine) for around 10 minutes, then get back to my laptop. This also solves nothing. I'm also starting to get hungry. Fine. I'll unplug the router and plug it back in, then start cooking pesto pasta, this time with peppery chicken. As I wait for my pasta to cook, I get impatient with my laptop, and learn of USB tethering, allowing me to use the Wi-Fi connection of my phone to let my laptop reaccess the internet. Looks like this bloghan won't be getting delayed!!! My dinner is actually smaller than I thought I made it (needed to add more pesto too...), so I finish off the night with some hot water and the last of this bloghan. So ends a week of nonstop grinding... Onitsuka would be proud.

Future plans

I pretty much called it last week, I really didn't have much time to do things. However, since I planned to do very little, I ended up with nearly 100% completion!! It's too bad that the one thing that affects my future the most is the thing that got put to the wayside though...:

Assignment: finished it, mostly on Fridya and Saturday
Door: no progress
'One Piece': finished the 'Dressrosa' arc! See my review above
Online PCB trainings: if the Internet hadn't gone out on Sunday, maybe I could've done it? But yeah, no, I didn't do it

This week, I don't really know what I'll do. I guess I can prepare for the next group assignment... Oh, but I do want to visit the store so I can set up some sort of suction cup plus document sleeve thing in my shower so I can do some work in the shower too. I guess 'Homestuck' would be pretty good too, and actually doing those online PCB trainings would be good too. All this being said, I still don't have a good idea of what the week will look like, outside of things that have already been planned by my coworkers.

Song of the week

'The Logical Song' (https://youtu.be/low6Coqrw9Y) by Supertramp is the song of the week. I don't think this one needs much explanation, since this week was basically defined by work and school and school and work. By communication of a professional nature, critical thought in an academic environment, not all that much time left to just have fun, live free. For all the value I have in knowing how to think and live logically, I still face those questions at night about what I'm doing, and why. Then, it follows: what am I, and why? ...I'm probably reading into it too much.

Until next time

Well, I was right! This week DID suck! But at the very least, it didn't suck emotionally, jsut physically and in other mental aspects. Surely next week won't be like that? I mean, I have things like D&D and another 'Jeopardy!' night, and I should be getting a day off this Friday too! See you next week, which better be better! Please!!!

- bubbler

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