Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2006/03/It has been quite a while since I have made a “real” post–one not consisting of a one-liner question or a comment on road conditions.
So, going back a few weeks ago, Kim and I had dinner with Diana and Damien at a great little tapas-style gourmet restaurant on 28th. It was a little bit pricey, but the food was great! It was also good to see the two of them outside of Tuesday nights at Euphoria.
Not too much longer after that, Fi visited town for some snowboarding on Mt. Hood. Her, SpaceBass, Kim, and I had Thai food just down the street (Bangkok Kitchen on Belmont.) It was great to finally meet one of the Mind Candy bunch and good times were had by all. The food was not exactly the best Thai in town, but many of the others Thai restaurants were closed. It wasn't bad food by any means, just not as great as we have had before.
In more recent news, Kim's shop is set up and she is busy, busy, busy. The cats are getting along much better with one another. Sometimes Ebenezer can be a bit too curious and/or excited and ends up driving Charlotte crazy. The Precious is still spooked at having a new cat around and hisses at everything (including Ebenezer.) Charlotte is pretty accepting of the whole situation.
Our subscription with The Company Formerly Known as Manic Organics (now, Organics 2 You) kicked in. I'm starting to wonder if we need to also get the “Juicer Bin” because we have not really gotten enough fruit for juice every morning. Regardless, it is nice to have fresh fruit and vegetables every day, even if they are not juiceable.
On the Netflix front, we have been powering through movies (to offset the month or two that we sat, stagnant, on the three movies we never got around to watching.) Schizopolis was bizarre but good. Prozac Nation was just sort of blah. Code 46 started out interesting, but there was just no chemistry between characters, which just made the whole thing seem unbelievable. The Age of Innocence was good, although I fell asleep for about 20 minutes of it.
I got an email from my ISP that used the term “forensic accountant.” I had never even heard of such a thing before. I guess they had a little uh-oh involving an employee “borrowing” a quarter of a million dollars over about 5 years without telling anyone. It looks like Mr. Bad Employee gets to pay it all back and spend two and a half years in a small room.
At work, the digital telephones show one time. The computers show another. The clocks on the wall show yet a third. My phone shows atomic time. Nothing is in sync with anything else. I now have both a digital and analog clock that both sync with the atomic clock and am finding comfort in the second hand of the one click stepping in perfect unison with the digital readout of the other.
Also at work, one of my coworkers is now between jobs. He's a great guy, but I never worked directly with him and have heard that there may have been some “playing well with others” issues. Seriously, he's a fun guy and has helped lay down a lot of good process, but as I understand the situation, people were angry that he was not doing the job he got hired to do (write software) so much as all the “extras” that you typically do when you have a spare second. I'm sad to see him go. Today, before everything went down, we had lunch, played dueling credit cards, and I ended up paying for lunch. In retrospect, it ended up being a sendoff lunch, although neither of us knew it at the time; I would have felt bad if he had ended up being the one paying for lunch, then returned to the office for the news.
In related news, is anyone in the Portland area a senior level programmer in search of a job? We have at least two positions open. They both need some cross-platform experience (Linux/Windows) with the standard Gnu tools (gcc, Makefiles, etc.) and standard Open Source apps (MySql, etc.) One of the job openings is for server work (sockets, databases, XML, SQL.) The other is for GUI work (QT, XML.) I think we finally managed to find a firmware engineer who isn't going to be stolen by Wind River at the last second, but if he does defect to Wind River/VxWorks, we would still have a firmware job opening.
Anyway, I think those have been the major happenings in my world in the last few weeks. In a few weeks, we will be seeing Bellydance Superstars. In a few weeks after that, Cirque Du Soleil. A few after that is Sigor Ros.
