In My Experience: Personal

Too soon.

2004-02-12T15:11:43-05:00

C|Net news has this story about Lycos today...

Lycos laid off about 90 people in the United States, according to a company representative. Sources inside the company said many members of its U.S. ad sales team were laid off Monday, along with the engineering and Webmonkey staff in San Francisco; employees of financial services site Quote.com and others in the Mountain View offices; and most of the staff in the New York office. Employees at Wired News were not affected by the layoffs.

And this advertisement runs underneath it...

On holiday.

2003-12-17T15:26:15-05:00

Lots of work, lots of family and being on-call will keep me from posting anything until the new year. In the meantime, I hope everyone has a great holiday. Cya soon.

It didn't happen on TV.

2003-09-11T08:46:00-05:00

Two years ago, I could see the smoke rising from my office window.

I miss couches.

2003-09-09T14:36:40-05:00

Back at my last job, we had a large room that had numerous couches, over stuffed chairs, small tables a and big ass HDTV with a Playstation attached to it. Mostly, the room was used as a place to have lunch and relax (and unfortunately, to announce layoffs). I mostly used it as a place to go sit down with a manual, O'Reilly book or printed source code.

Where I am now, there's no real comfortable place with a table, chair, and no one there to bother me. I have an office with a door, but a task chair is good for sitting at a computer, not hunkering down with the 1400+ page DHTML book. There's always someone coming by with a question, or a problem or another odd task that needs to be dealt with a.s.a.p.

What a tease.

2003-07-30T10:11:48-05:00

At the iTunes Music store (the only music service I have ever considered 'acceptable' in terms of technology and fair use) there are several records from New Order. If you are a techie gen-x'er like myself, you likely wore out a cassette or two containing the music from New Order. Imagine my nostalgic disappointment when the iTunes Store has only seven of the ten tracks from Technique.

Which brings up an important point. I want it ALL. Not one track (such as blue Monday) but the entire record. It's a body of work, and almost all of it was good (I recall not liking one track) and should be bought as a full grouping of music. That's what quality does, it makes you collect.

If I was a pop music, KISS listening, ultra low rise wearing, teeny bopper, I would very likely want to buy the one offs for 99 cents. Instead, I'm a 30 something, t-shirt wearing, dark blue 'back-to-school' jeans wearing father with a penchant for 80's music. When it comes to my records, I want it all, but I don't want to go down to Tower to get it.

Oh, isn't this delicious...

2003-07-18T09:18:59-05:00

For most of my adult life I have been drooling over the idea of having a fast internet connection at my home. The lust is really on the order of that zoot suit wolf in the Warner Brothers cartoons who hits himself over the head when a hot chick walks by. When I see rumors of broadband in my area and I start to drool.

Recently I became aware of a wireless possibility after years of being lied to by Adelphia. They used to say "2 to 3 months" every time I called them, for the past three years. I've bitched about the situation before, but now there's a new twist. I signed a one year contract for the wireless connection, and now, 4 days later, Adelphia says they are going to rollout the cable modem in my area next month.

Really, what's most psychotic about the whole situation is that the wirless connection is pricey, and Adelphia's proposed price is definitely lower. However, even if they do rollout, will it be fast enough or reliable enough? Will the wireless connection live up to its promise of being 1meg down and 128up? Who knows... I'll probably just be stuck with the expensive zoot suit.

Good dads play Gameboy.

2003-06-16T11:56:55-05:00

I had my first Father's Day over the weekend, and my wife was kind enough to get me a couple of gists and a card. I got her nothing for Mother's Day, mostly due to the fact that she was in the Hospital recovering from the C-Section. So basically, she got a baby and a full day's worth of my time for her first Mother's Day.

So, she got me this pencil holder thing with a picture in it of my and the baby. Also, there was a Gameboy Advance SP in the gift bag as well. I had been railing on for months about the Gameboy SP and had planned on buying one as soon as my ultra slow savings plan had accrued $100 (ie, I throw loose change into a box at home).

Now, I get to finish Advance Wars in full backlit glory, and will probably finish Yoshi's Island as well. That will be a satisfying event to be sure, but the most satisfying part of the weekend was the card that accompanied the gifts. My wife had written in the card that I was already proving to be a good father. I can't describe how satisfying that is.

This is why there have been no posts recently.

2003-05-12T17:56:53-05:00

The look on her face says it all. ;^) Regular postings should resume sometime soon.

Wipe Out.

2003-04-15T10:22:42-05:00

Over the weekend I passed out while with my wife at a group function. We had been there for just a little while, and I began to feel kind of funky, the next thing I knew I was being led out of the room by my wife. I had been unconscious for a little while and was twitching, with my eyes rolled back, while on the floor.

I remember the feeling right before I lost consciousness and the absolutely horrible feeling of coming out of it. In both cases, I had no clue at all about where I was or what was going on or if I was awake or dreaming. The extreme confusion, dizziness and a weird mentholated feeling in my head were extremely disturbing. I though this would be an isolated incident due to being exposed to something I hadn't expected (and sort of made the squeamish part of me come out).

In a twist of somewhat comical reoccurrence, I almost went down again in a staff meeting yesterday. It's not actually funny, but it kind of is at the same time. Nothing disturbing was going on, but again, I was in a room full of people and felt the terror of my mind slipping away.

I know my Dad reads my blog from time to time, and may be learning about this for the first time right here. The whole situation is extremely embarrassing, and disturbing, and caused me to go see my doctor, who is sending me to another doctor (in a process that I would call 'an escalation' if this was a project at work).

It's been difficult to talk about, but writing has always been a cathartic process for me. I can't say if I will be doing much in the way of blogging in the coming weeks, but I will be trying to crank out the quality prose if time allows. The changes in my life are becoming increasingly significant.