blah

tired. So tired. Too much going on. It's going to get a little easier, but I'm still overworked and pushing hard to complete things in unrealistic timeframes. And I just got landed with yet another project to document, so I guess the beatings are continuing until morale improves.

not a stellar day

it was not a stellar day today. Didn't do much of note, but I'm done with the auditting I've been working on for 3 days. The gal I've been working with offered that "you're wasted doing this garbage"... which is true. My large stack of cisco books turned up today. CCDA studying started tonight, and then once that's out of the way, CCNP it is. Had to drag myself out of bed this morning. My energy level is waning ever so much lately, I guess the heat is getting to me.

yawn

too long a day. So I arrive at work, and make the fatal mistake of looking at my camera. Not 15 minutes later I'm on the road dialled into a conference call that ends 35 minutes and 30 miles later. Then it's into the all day meeting regarding reconfiguration of my huge project. Not an unpleasant experience, as I got to pick the brains of the senior architecture person from the vendor, but nonetheless, I could be doing other things that are more productive. I was asked what it would take to keep me on the project for the next couple of phases. I responded "An act of God". He said "I'll speak to him tomorrow". Now i'm just beat. Too much thinking, not enough doing. Later

boy, am I ever glad I came into work today!

so far, I've been chewed out by 2 different project managers, I've done 4 different build documents, totalled up the servers installed for a project, reviewed 3 documents for configuration options and had 1 cup of coffee. Ew. I shall have my revenge on one of the project managers. Heh heh heh. No Project Approval means I can put in the hardware justifications as quickly as you like pal, but it's not going anywhere until you have someone to pay for it. Heh. Heh. Heh.

and so it goes...

I'm slowly winding down for the day. A little Net, a little BCRAN. FatBrain just emailed me that my books have shipped, so with any luck, tomorrow or Tuesday I can started my CCDA/CCNP studying once I have the courses that the training dept offer downloaded. Go me! Cooked dinner (steak, real mashed potatoes, corn and green beans) about an hour ago - yum! The steak was lightly marinated in KC Masterpiece BBQ sauce, and the potatoes were nice and fluffy :-) Time to zoom - I'm going to play a little with Oracle and then move some more books downstairs. Then I'll stop and sleep and go to work tomorrow to deal with the idiots.

weekend is almost over...

it's almost the end of Sunday. Wah. That means back to work tomorrow. That's bad. On the upside, my cubemate is out for 2 weeks on vacation. This is good. Got up at 8:30 or so and went and mowed and edged the lawn. It looks really good out the front. I mowed the neighbours lawn as well as they sold the house and moved to Austin, and it'll be 30 days before the new neighbours move in. Bob asked me to mow the lawn every couple of weeks, and it's not that much more for me to do anyway, so I'm doing it when I mow. Dropped by Target to pick some stuff up, then visited Helzberg to have my lovely bride's engagement ring resized, wandered about a bit, then hit Best Buy looking at MP3 players for her. Came home, took some pictures of the house to send to my folks, then moved some stuff around in the garage. We're going to finish the laundry room and turn it into an office for me, so we've cleared that room ready for my f-i-l to come on over and help me finish the drywall and lay the carpet and get the desk moved in. Then the fun can begin - I'm looking around for some routers and switches to build a small test network to nail down my CCNP, then I also want to get my Solaris and Oracle certifications this year, so I need Sun and *Nix boxen to blow up and then build production kit once TWC and Earthlink sort their shit out regarding cable modems. SWBell doesn't do DSL out here yet, which sucks, so I'm left with RR. Ew. Anyhow, all the heavy lifting and stuff is done for the day. I survived the heat while mowing. Even at 9am it was over 85, which is a little too hot. Perchance I start doing this on Saturdays at 8. Even the god-botherers should be out of bed by then. Toodle whom.

back from being out in the sun

According to weatherbug, it's 92deg out there. We went and saw "Original Sin". I'm going to do a favor for you all out there - do not see this movie for reasons other than Antonio Banderas' butt or Angelina Jolie's breasts. You won't find the plot even if you look real hard. Ate lunch at The Big Chill, which was ok I guess. They had this weird appetiser of "Pasta Nachos" which was normal nachos with chili pepper pasta in it. It tasted ok tho. I had a 20oz steak and my lovely bride had the chicken. The triple chocolate cheesecake was pretty darn good as well. Now we're digesting lunch, and I'm reading news and ordering up some books for my CCDA and CCNP certifications. Go me.

my ears hurt

I think I have a slight ear infection. Ow. Yesterday was another fine day in my contracting life. The meeting I run to hand off build documentation turned into a shemozzle after half the people who had asked me to be put onto the agenda didn't show. There was some Stern Talking going on afterwards. Then I jumped onto a conference call to smack a project manager around the head for being stupid. I will need to talk to his director to have him 'adjusted'. I have said it for a while now, but it's interesting that the people who are charged with making the application work are more worried about the hardware, whereas the people charged with making the hardware work are more worried about how the application works. That's fucked up. Then I started on the auditing project again, and we finished it! Not one piece of equipment was ordered without paperwork, which is amazing given the volume, size, complexity and variety of stuff we ordered. So I was done with that by 5, and then zoomed on out of work home to my lovely bride. Cooked burgers for dinner, then spent a couple of hours catching up on email and news and then watched Iron Chef before falling asleep. Horribly boring. Today was wake up late, and we'll be off to the movies shortly. It's too hot to do otherwise. Oh, and a quick stop at Barnes and Noble to look for "Designing Cisco Networks" for me. Zoom.

enough already!

I spent all today from 9am to 4:30pm (breaking for 30 minutes for lunch) in an audit meeting for the grand project. And I get to go in tomorrow and do it all again from 11 until 3! Landsakes! It's too much! I exclaim too much! Bah!. !!. So, basically I'm going to be the good little soldier tonight and do everything I was supposed to do today after hours. After the staff meeting finishes at 3 tomorrow, I'm gone. Installed Oracle 8.1.7 onto my laptop. I'm pretty much going to mess with it while I'm studying for my CCDA/CCNP and then with any luck, take the Oracle DBA certs at around the same time. I think 3 certs in half a year is enough for any company. The infrastructure manager at the orkplace is shitting bricks that I may roll off at the end of the year. I know a lot about how to make his billing systems work, and I'm pretty sure he wants me to stick around. Renegotiation time should be interesting.

my net worth is..

$2,446,810.00. Word.

phew!

busy day. I feel much better today than yesterday. Yesterday was a complete blah day - not really interested in doing much at all. I have been reasonably productive - one build document down, one project rescued from death, one serving of canneloni (sp?) sent to a better home (mmm! I like Zios). Things proceed apace. I'm thinking of moving onto my CCNP via the CCDA/CCDP route, but I'm itching to finish my Oracle certifications first. I installed Oracle onto evil laptop of doom today - it installs apache by default! Time to go play DBA. 2 more meetings to go, one of which will be as funny as all hell as the project manager tries to be all butch and "drive us to resolution". Heh heh heh. I'm going to completely blow him out of the water. Hee hee hee.