Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

new desk!

Friday, May 20th, 2005

Finally I got a real desk! Well, it’s a workstation desk and not a business desk, but that’s perfect for me.

http://img3.musiciansfriend.com/dbase/pics/products/54/546553.jpg

I had to remove the keyboard tray to make it comfortable, but it’s awesome! Both my monitors and both my speakers fit on the top shelf, both my computers fit in the right side rack space, and all my music rack gear fits in the bottom 1/3 of the left rack. I haven’t put anything on the middle shelves yet, but give me time.

The desk took almost 3 hours to build. Before that I spent an hour deconstructing my old setup, moving everything out of the room, and vacuuming where until today was behind the immovable kitchen table.

Once clean, I dragged the 185 pounds of new desk parts into the room, unpacked them, checked them against the parts manifest, and started assembling. I had heard that some of the quality control of these desks was a bit lacking so I was very careful to make sure everything was right before did anything that might cause damage.

Turns out everything was in order, and I got the desk assembled with a minimum of trouble. I spent the rest of the afternoon putting my computer systems on the desk and firing them up. Once they were hot I showered and had a short nap. My hands and back are exhausted and sore.

After the computers were up, I tore all my music rack gear out of the mobile rack and mounted it in the lower left rack. I’ve got a tiny 3′ power cable running from my amp to the back of the power sink, and it’s limiting where I can put the head. I should have splurged and got a longer cable. My speaker cables to the speakers are 20′ long and only need to be about 4′ and 8′ respectively. Maybe 5′ and 10′. Who cares? At least they reach!

Tomorrow’s going to be long and painful. I’d better get enough sleep tonight.

productivity

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005

It always seems to happen. Once the massive pressure is lifted off my shoulders, I enter a phase of creative productivity. I also figured out how to solve a problem that stumped me for half of last week. Nice. :)

I’m also catching up on my sleep a bit. I don’t yet have a regular routine but at least I’m sleeping a lot. Note the correlation between sleep and productivity. Also note the negative correlation between stress and sleep. I need less stress. For a while it was so much that it was debilitating.

Much better now.

finally

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

The weekend is half over. I’ve just posted a new software release. I feel much more relaxed now than I did before.

Sangeeta is stressing over her accounting though. I hope it’s not contagious. I think she wants to go to Thousand Oaks today to look at a new shopping center. That’ll be nice except for the drive. It’s a beautiful day.

pressure

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

I know it’s starting to sound like a broken record (remember those?) but I’m pretty stressed out. I’m preparing for a major business presentation of our software and it still looks ugly. I’ve got to get it looking presentable by tomorrow.

Stress!

yup, it’s dead

Saturday, April 30th, 2005

Today I tried to convert a Sun workstation to act as a DHCP client and ended up corrupting the boot sector. I remember reading the instructions for doing this on the Sun website and thinking “this doesn’t seem too difficult…”.

Heh. Yeah.

So after that Sangeeta and I went to Melrose and looked at all the alternative clothing stores. Then we went to The Grove/Farmers Market and looked around there for a while. Forgot all about computers for a few hours.

I hate computers.

Too fast!

Monday, April 25th, 2005

Today (Monday) started too fast and too furious for me! I woke up to the sound of my wife talking to my boss on the phone. It seems there’s some problem or something, I don’t know. I had to try to figure it out before I even really woke up.

Then my wife needed MS Word technical assistance so she could print an invoice. She’s going to rent some jewelry to a company that’s filming a Cingular commercial. She’s also stressed because she has a midterm tomorrow and her sister keeps coming over to check her e-mail and use up all our printer supplies. Not to mention she locked up Sangeeta’s cart yesterday using an old padlock that Sangeeta lost the key to! What a pair. Anyway, the stress is overflowing onto me at a bad time.

It’s too much for a Monday morning!

Update:

And now! NOW! Now I finally get a chance to take a shower, and as soon as I got my head all shampoo’d up the hot water turned off! Then the cold water slowed to a trickle! Gnnnnaaaarrrrgggghhhh!

Typical Monday, right?

overworked

Friday, April 22nd, 2005

I’m starting the burnout process. I’m just not interested in hurting myself in order to get work done. Guess it’s time to cash in that overtime I’ve been logging and take a day off.

Africa late

Thursday, April 21st, 2005

It’s late. It’s Africa late. Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of late.

I can’t sleep so I’m testing and debugging my code. Refining the design. Feeling really bad inside, like I’m going to fall apart. I need sleep but can’t have it.

I hate this.

Math fun

Tuesday, April 19th, 2005

It kind of sucks when your boss calls you and wakes you up in the morning.

I’m getting into conflicts with General Electric through one of their contracts. We’re subcontractors under them, working for LADWP. They let the H1B visa for their key employee expire and he had to go back to India for a couple months. Meanwhile, the guy who replaced him went ahead without knowing about our prior development agreements, and now they say it’s too late to go back and do what they agreed to do to support our work.

Progress is happening on our new arithmetic learning software too. We’ve added word problems to the mix, and it’s going pretty good. The project is finally at the stage of “alpha testing”, which means it runs but it’s easy (trivial) to find the bugs in it. Joel is helping me enumerate and document them, and I’m fixing them.

Fun fun fun.

software updated

Friday, April 15th, 2005

The code I’ve been struggling with over the last couple weeks has been tidied, bundled, and uploaded. Finally! A moment’s peace while the testers flood me with bug reports.

Come to think of it, this is all I’ve really been doing since I started hosting my own blog! Time for a change of pace, I think…