A photoblog and other things

Ok, so I must be suffering from some stress symptoms or something. I went to work around 3pm today and just got back 1/2 hour ago. It’s a freaking Saturday. A lot of stuff wasn’t working again, and it’s really pi$$ing me off. Or maybe my liver really is stuffed. No! My liver has to be stronger than that. It can’t be that wussy.

I rang about 20 piano stores within a 15 mile radius of home looking for my Kawai ES3 digital piano. You know what? None of the buggers stock it. The only place that does is ‘certified’ to and they charge US $1600 for it (pre tax). Blood sucking bastards. Considering I can get it for just over AUD $1800 back in Australia… well that’s just dodgy. I’m going to walk in there on Monday with a printout showing the Aussie price and let the guy know that I know he owns the only place that sells such pianos in South Florida (as far as I know know know know). He has two choices – either sell me the piano at the equivalent Australian price or lose a sale. I’ll bring in cold hard caaaaaaash too to put a bit more pressure on him. And you know what else? I didn’t talk to one nice person out of all of those people I spoke to today. At least in Oz people would sound nicer over the phone. Bastards. The Yanks aren’t getting tipped so they can justify treating you like crap over the phone. Wankerchops.

I’m glad I’m finally getting over this cold sore thing so now I can go out. But now my left eyelid is throbbing and is causing me a bit of pain. But you know what? I’m going to say “No! F$%k that!” I’m going the hell out and I’m going to have fun because for the last week and a half I’ve been having everything but. I’m surprised how good my mood is at the moment actually. I’m feeling on top of the world right now despite a whole heap of problems that are knocking at my door and everything just not going right. Do you wanna know why I’m feeling so good people? Ya wanna know what has helped me to cast all my problems aside just for tonight? Listening to Billy Ocean. That’s right, BILLY OCEAN.

I couldn’t believe how bad today was. It was just absolutely, undoubtedly, the worst work day I’ve had over here in Florida. I swear to God I was nearly in tears when people were going through pointing out mistakes I had made in resolving merge conflicts, and why the program could not be built. Err, merge conflicts. Basically you have many people working on fixes/improvements to a program. Each person has their own separate work environment and eventually all the work done has to be brought together. That’s where I stuffed up. We were hoping to release the version that had everyone’s changes today, and I stuffed up. Yeah, good work K. My tech lead trusted that I could do the work in his absence, I thought I could do the work, but it was shown that I couldn’t. I guess I’m being pretty hard on myself since I’ve never done this before – and it’s not straightforward text source code files that I was merging either. For those who know, I was trying to resolve conflicts in Rational Rose Realtime code models. A nightmare. Incredibly complex, but hell, I thought I could do better. Oh the humanity!

I’ve just arrived back from work. Let’s see… nearly a 14 hour day. Not bad, not bad. It’d be a lot better though if I actually felt like I’d achieved something today. I wish I could just laugh at things when they get like this but I just don’t have the energy to at the moment. I swear I was going flat out the whole day and then spent most of the night fixing problems arising from the day’s work. I discovered a lot of the problems weren’t mine – which is sort of a relief, but then it’s also a pain in the ass because I’m the one who worked the overtime. Ahh well. At least I’m back in time to watch the Daily Show.

I’m also a bit depressed because I had psyched myself up over the past two days to make a very expensive but also very important purchase today. I had saved up enough money and today I was going to spend it all in one shot. That wasn’t to be because of how busy I got. I can’t do it tomorrow because I’ll be busy again but I guess I’ll get it done on Saturday. Because I thought I was going to make the purchase I was extremely happy this morning. Not so now, but hey I’ll get over it.

Things are starting to warm up temperature wise over here in Florida. Maybe I’ll see more people out and about? It’s apparently too cold for the locals to go out at night over here. Wusses! Anyway, it like hasn’t rained for the last 2 months. My car has been showing it too. I don’t wash rental cars, but even so I was starting to get a bit embarrassed driving around in it. So I washed it last night. And today it rained. I can’t believe it! Anyway, looks like we’ve got a stack of thunderstorms coming around which is all good coz I love thunderstorms.

There is talk that it may be another big hurricane season this year. The high pressure system that was sitting over the Atlantic and steering the hurricanes towards Florida hasn’t moved, so they expect more of the same. Should be an interesting year!

Well, gotta go now. I’ve gotten sick of sitting in front of a computer today. Cheerio.

– Put the icecream in the fridge.
– Put the margarine in the freezer.
– Failed to declare $VOB_ROOT in my rational rose realtime environment, thus causing me an amazing amount of pain over the last 2 days. It never told me it wasn’t declared!!!
– I had one beer. C’mon, it was only one and it was happy hour! Wanna know what I ate? No? Well don’t read on. I ate the same damn thing I eat every damn time I go to Wednesday night happy hour at the Davie ale house. Zinger Caesar Salad, medium hotness.

P.S. I’m still waiting to see if Vanilla Ice turns up at the ale house. I’ve been told he lives in the area.