Friday, February 06, 2004

Friday Morning

The poor little boy isn't feeling well. He got up several times last night. He finally decided that at 4am he was ready to be up, and that he was ready for us to be up with him. He is weezing and really congested. I ran to the store this morning and got him a vaporizer and some medicine.(There are some of the strangest people that work and shop at walmart at 4:30am) My wonderful Wife has sent me back to bed. While she is up with him.

Thursday, February 05, 2004

Just another Manic Thursday

Well it has been a thursday...<quote who="Arthur Dent">This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.</quote>

Today was one of those days where you wake up with the greatest of intentions. You are going to put a huge dent in that big project that is due yesterday, infact you think, hey if things go well enough I can have it finished early. But somehow you still done seem to get anything done.

I got up early, grabbed the 5:50am train into LA, got the 6:50am into burbank, was in at my desk by 7:15am. Starting going at it and got four pages of content in the CMS in 45 minutes. I was rockin'. But (there is always a but isn't there) then people started coming in. So you know how it goes. You can't focus on what you are working on because every ten minutes you are putting out fires. Some of them, three at a time like this afternoon, and it's flustering. It's one of those happy problems. If you weren't any good they wouldn't bother you. But I am fairly good at what I do. So I get asked for help on everything from graphic design work to server problems. And I am happy to help, but at the end of the day, I still have to get my work done, you know...

I have been working hot and heavy on the CMS project. I've come up with a list of questions. So I called over to the vendor we got it from, and my contact wasn't in. (He is the guy that wrote the CMS) I've called a couple times before and got the same thing. Of course he is incredibly cool and gave me his cell phone number so I can call him. So I did, and I asked him today about it. He says yeah, if I am in the office I get bombairded with requests. So if I have to focus or do anything like programming logic I do it from home.

Now this is my ideal situation. This sparked in my little memory something I had talked with my boss about the other day. Working from home on Fridays. A couple of Fridays a month to start. So I went in and asked if it would be cool of I worked from home tomorrow. And he thought for a moment and said, 'Yeah, I don't see anything wrong with that.'. So I am a happy programmer. I get to work from home tomorrow. No 2 1/2 to 3 hours work of train rides. No interuptions...Except the little boy....hummm. Maybe I should think this thing through.

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

The day after a rain

There is something about the day after a rain here in So. Cal.. The skys are so beautiful, the air is freshing and cleansing. Even the trees seem to be smiling. Of course the ones without leaves are feeling a little embarrassed about being sans verge with the weather being so nice. Outside my window here at work, I see the lovely swaying of green trees with the purple mountains serving as a back drop. The Blue sky with the light whispy clouds that act like they have nothing to do but hang around and watch the day go by. It's hard not to just stare out there into space and do nothing.However that isn't going to happen.

We just got out of an interview with a new canidate for the eMarketing position here at work. The person we interviewed seemed to know what they are doing. They would probably be a good fit. But change is hard. I worked with KrissV for two years. She's my friend. So its hard to think that, there wll be this new person, who you are going to be working with for x amount of years. And of course questions pop up in your head that you can't really answer or even ask of this new person. How this affects you, your workload? Is this going to be a nice person, that is easy to get along with, or are they going to fight you on every point all of the time? It all comes down to time, I guess. Working with KrissV was easy because we had spend enough time working together that we knew where the limits were. Now there is a new person and you have to invest the time in finding out where the limits are going to be. Like I said change is hard. I didn't used to think that, but as I grow older, change grows more difficult.

Sunday, February 01, 2004

myDoom Hits it's target

Well, it seems like the myDoom virus that has been spreading like wildfire had hit it's target. Rueters has the story on their site, as do countless other news sources.

MyDoom Net Worm Scores Hit, Knocks Out SCO Site

This virus was responsible for 10% of all emails on the internet last week. Which is just an amazing number. SCOs CEO Darl McBride is offering an reward for information that leads to the arrest of the person or persons that are responsible for writing this virus. Though I don't think anyone is going to come forward. What SCO did with it's IP (Intellectual Property) lawsuit against Linux and IBM struck at the core of a very tightknit and powerful community. Some of the best programmers in the world work on and write code for Linux. I also find it interesting that SCO itself had a Linux program going and it stopped work on that after it had sold Microsoft rights to Unix. Humm, a big influx of money from Microsoft and then SCO stops their Linux program and starts going after anyone else that is working on linux.

I can't condone whoever wrote this virus, even if the intentions are good, this is causing more work to an already over worked IT staff. And in the end the people that will be affected by it have no idea about the SCO/Linux controversy. However, the person(s) that wrote this virus probably don't have all the money that a big corporation does to fight this out in the court system for years and years. I can see both sides of the story. I can't condemn them either. The DoS attack that they are launching is in essense a digital version of a protest. I know that not everyone sees it that way. But what is the differents between the Grocery Strike here in CA. where the striking employees were physically preventing the deliever trucks and customers from entering the parking lot. They are simply digitally not letting customers get to the web store front of SCOs parking lot.

At the root of this controversy is one word "Monopoly". (No not the board game) There is a good chance that if SCO wins this suit, that microsoft will have a Monopoly on the Intel based computing operating systems. Now don't get me wrong, I am not anti-Microsoft, in fact I make my leaving writing in microsoft's C#. However I do think that computing needs are too diverse for one company to be the end all be all. I want to be able to have different operating system running on my machine. I also think that there are some computing tasks that Linux is the only platform I would choose. Also did the government split of Bell because it had a Monpoly of the phone/communication systems? How is this any different then that?