Month: November 2007

This is why were killing the planet

I work on computers all day.  So do my coworkers.  This morning, I came into work and found someone had left some papers on my chair, which seems to be universal for “You should look at these”.  I, naturally, assumed it was something reasonably important.  Perhaps some security form I needed to fill out.

It turns out it was a printout of a sixteen page SQL stored procedure which my coworker printed just so he could highlight the 8th and 9th lines of the first page and write a little note informing me of something I did not ask to know, need to know, or want to know.

He had a bunch of options here.  The first one, and my preference, would have been to just not tell me at all.  The world would have continued to turn.

Second, he could have emailed me the stored procedure with a note in the email.  That would have been fine.  He could have come by my desk this morning and said, “Hey, open up that stored procedure.  See this line?  I changed it.  It works better now.”  I would have even been sort of okay if he’d printed out the first page only and made his notes there.  An unnecessary use of paper, but not egregious.

Anyway, now I have to recycle this stack of papers.  All so he could notify me of something I never needed to know.

Nano Update – Day 8

438 on the ride in this morning.  I had a seat the whole time.  I don’t know if that helped my word count or not.

Unfortunately, with the idiotic waste of time meeting I had to go to before I left work and then the aforementioned trivia, I only got about 1,100 words yesterday.  So this morning’s word count is just getting me back to about on track.

It’s okay, though.  The wife is going out of town for a day or two, and I can spend the entire time writing.  Wives can be really distracting.  I mean, they’re great and all, and mine is particularly great.  But they tend to not like it if you ignore them all the time and don’t help with cooking or cleaning or anything.

Which reminds me, I won a little bet with the wife last night at trivia.  Had I lost, I would have had to cook dinner three nights in a row.  Unfortunately, I never thought of what she would have to do if I won.  It was one of the trivia questions.  It said that Columbia Heights, our wonderful transitional neighborhood, was named for Columbia College.  Columbia College has a new name.  What is it?

Well, the wife was sure it was Howard, because Howard is more or less in Columbia Heights (Or Shaw, whatever, they’re right next door).  While that is certainly a reasonable guess, I was pretty sure it was GW.  Turns out I was right.

OMG TomKat!

Flickr has let me down – apparently no one who was outside the Uptown Theater last night taking pictures of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes has posted their stuff yet.  But here is a little gallery that I won’t hotlink, although maybe I could.

Anyway, I post this not because I’m obsessed with two crazy, rich Hollywood people, but because I totally saw them.  We went to trivia night at a bar just down the street from the Uptown, and as I was walking down Connecticut Avenue from the bus stop, there was a huge crowd in front of the theater.  I looked in the center of the crowd, and there was a short man with a really bad haircut (Come on, Tom, now that you’re married, you’re letting yourself go?) and his wife towering over him. 

It was kind of cool.  I didn’t get a picture, because pulling out my camera phone would have just pissed me off because it takes such awful pictures.  I had thought they had the baby with them, because I couldn’t see either of them (especially Tom) below the shoulders.  Tom’s body language suggested he was holding a baby.  Or maybe that was my imagination.  Anyway, the kid doesn’t seem to be in the pictures that I’ve seen of the event, so I guess I was wrong.

Nano Update – Day 6 (Or, the worst paragraph Ive ever written)

I wrote 353 words this morning.  That’s good for the wordcount, but today’s opening paragraph is one of the worst I’ve written since I started doing Nano.

Kathy woke up feeling cold.  Her leg hurt, and she was cold.  As she regained her bearings, she realized that it was very noisy.  People screaming and running everywhere.

WTF was that?  I looked at it as I was counting words after I got to work, and I cringed.  I’m going to claim that I was still asleep when I wrote that, because that’s the only reasonable excuse.  I know Nano is supposed to create more quantity than quality, but there IS a bottom, below which one should take up another hobby.  That paragraph was below the bottom.  But the section picked up as it went on, and I have high hopes for this afternoon’s ride home.

I think I’m going to use that paragraph as my excerpt at the Nano site.

I cant show you what we did this weekend

Stupid Comcast. They fixed part of our cable and internet problems. They’re claiming we have a weak signal. But our HD channels are coming in just fine. But we don’t get Comedy Central and the stations that rerun Law and Order: SVU all day, which makes the wife a little salty. And our internet doesn’t work at all. Which means I can’t post the pictures of our progress this weekend to Flickr. So, let me just say that our hallway/art gallery is looking fantastic. And it only took four drill bits and countless trips to Home Depot. We melted a titanium drill bit. I don’t know the chemical properties physical properties (Thanks, non-blogging-scientist-brother-in-law) of titanium, but you get the impression that it’s pretty tough, right? And you figure that melting it would be hard? Turns out it’s not as hard as you might think.

But it’s all finished now. The wife was putting a final coat of paint on this morning, and we’ll hang pictures tonight. Comcast is due back between 5-8PM to give it one more shot, so maybe I’ll even be able to upload pictures. If I do, you’ll get a sneak preview of the color we’re going to paint our bedroom next time we get a weekend with a little free time. I really like the color.

Nano Update – Day 5

Four hundred and sixty words on the Metro this morning.  Did you see how I wrote out “four hundred and sixty”, instead of simply writing “460”?  That is what is called “maximizing your word count for National Novel Writing Month“.  There, I did it again.  I could have abbreviated National Novel Writing Month.  Or used apostrophes.  But I did not.

Anyway, that brings my total up to 7,190.  That’s a pretty good total for four days plus a commute to work.  And I’m just hitting the first big event in the story.  I don’t know the literary term for it.  It’s the big event early in the story that enables the rest of the story to happen.  I think it’s going well.

Joo-dish-oo-what?

Is this a DC thing?  Every time I hear someone on a Metro loudspeaker mention the Judiciary Square Metro stop, they pronounce it “joo-DISH-oo-wary”.

I don’t often take the Red Line out that way, so I don’t hear it very often.  But today something was going on there, and they made an announcement at Pentagon City while I was waiting for my train.

I’m home early, by the way, because Satan’s Cable Company, Comcast, is supposed to come out again to fix our tv and internet.  I was told the other day that they had to do some work outside, and no one needed to be home.  Apparently that was a lie.

I really hate Comcast.  The service is bad.  I hear they’re much better in Maryland, but in DC the service is not good.  The guy who came to look at our connections the other day was very pleasant, but he couldn’t fix the problem.

Anyway, if there was any real competition in the cable and internet market here, I would switch.  But there currently isn’t.  A neighbor is trying out the DirecTV and Verizon DSL route.  I’m going to have to see how he likes it.  I’ve had bad experiences with satellite tv, and I’m sure Verizon is going to complain if I ask for DSL without a Verizon phone line (Although I think they have to provide it).

So, I’m at home, using my wireless internet card from work.  It’s AT&T, and it works occasionally.  Actually, the card says Cingular on it, but Cingular doesn’t exist anymore.

And now I’m just rambling, which usually means I should just stop and hit “Publish”.  So I think I’ll do that.

Nano update – Day 2

1817 words yesterday.  428 on the Metro this morning.  If I can knock out nearly half my daily word goal during my commute, that would be awesome.

The story is going well so far.  I love how characters kind of pop up out of nowhere.  I mean, sometimes I have a character in my head before I start, and I’m more or less waiting for the right moment for him or her to make an appearance.  But sometimes I’m writing, and someone pops up, and turns out to be important.  The campaign manager hoping her guy gets elected so she can get a better book deal is one of those.  The surly, hungover police officer might be another.  I’m not sure if he’s going to end up with a big role in the story.

Anyway, I’m happy so far.