6am waking-up in the morning...

No, it's not Friday. It's Sunday, very early in the morning by my standards, and I'm at work.

---
The room was still covered in darkness when I awoke, the alarm from my cell phone at the lowest volume setting, yet creating what felt like a loud plea for me to wake in the relative quiet of the early morning. My hand reached out from its warm spot under my duvet and protested what it was doing when it met the cold of the morning air. My arm continued to reach however, not needing input from my sleep-addled brain as it had performed this manoeuvre many times before - locating my cellphone on the bedside table, flipping it open (I've still got one of those clamshell-type phones), and pressing the button that would silence it's pleas to rouse me from my sleep. I would have normally gone straight back to sleep after that, returning to whatever dreams I had momentarily left by the time my arm returned to its place under the warm duvet, but something in my head kept prodding me and preventing me from sleeping:

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

It was just as annoying as my cellphone alarm, but I didn't have a routine to turn this kind of buzzing off; I couldn't reach a metaphysical arm into my brain and press the button to turn off subconscious thought. So I just lay there, listening to its pleas:

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

Who else's subconscious is a penguin with crash cymbals?

Why? I wondered back. Why must I wake up? It's too early, it's a Sunday, it's the LONG WEEKEND! WHY? But my questions were useless; the subconscious never answers questions, it only makes requests.

And it almost always wins.

I opened my eyes. Then I wondered if I did that right, because all I could see was the same blackness that stared back at me through closed lids. My eyes wouldn't open any further, so I tried turning to find something I could train them on, and there, on my ceiling, was a single streak of light from a lamp on the street outside.

I came to several conclusions then: that it was cold, that it was early, and that the sun had not yet risen. I also remembered something else: I had to go to work.

So I got out of bed, faced the frigid daggers of single-digit temperatures that were waiting for me the moment I shrugged off my duvet, and started my usual morning routine at the pace of a shambling zombie. My eyes never opened fully, despite my repeated attempts, and I managed to make my way through getting changed, eating breakfast, and brushing my teeth, amongst other things. I remember looking into the mirror through the slits in my eyes and looking upon the 6am version of myself: sunken eyes, frazzled hair, no will to carry on, and only the wish to sleep. That last one however, was normally the subconscious' job, but it was still intent on getting me to work instead.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

It seems I wasn't awake enough by my subconscious' standards and it could see through the charade that I placed before it to try to get it to shut up; the zombie-Emanuel marionette on display wasn't enough to appease its simple request and high standards. I didn't think my state of mind would have met the medical definition of awake or conscious either, but it was all I could muster at such an early hour. Like Superman, I draw-upon the sun for my powers, but the sun was still a while away from shining its grace on my little corner of the world.

By the time I left my apartment to begin the walk to work, the sky was still the same shade of black as the shadows of a dark alley where unwitnessed murders would take place. There is no colour to be found in an early morning city: only the glare of artificial lights and a million shades of black. I looked down at my pants and couldn't tell what colour they were, couldn't even remember what colour I put on when I got changed this morning. Zombies apparently don't have a short-term memory. Funny, I thought, considering their insatiable appetite for brains.

I haven't had to wake up this early in a long time. The streets, normally packed with other people making their way towards their own work, were empty of humanity. I was reminded me of those old spaghetti western movies that I used to watch with my dad, and I half expected to see a tumbleweed float by - incongruous in a city setting, but not out-of-place for the current context.

A dark shape skittered across the road - a plastic bag.

Hmph, appropriate. I thought.

Urban tumbleweed

---
So yeah, I'm at work, at an unusual time and day. This weekend, the system that I've been working on for almost 2 years is being released and I'm here to help oversee the transition. Although there's actually one of the more senior and knowledgeable guys here to cover that, I'm sort of the backup, the 'throw-ideas-at-me' guy. So with nothing to really do until we get a phone call from the few people on-site to report something odd going on with the transition, I decided to do some blogging.

The light at the end of the tunnel that I've been chasing after for so long is finally here, and it feels like all the weight and stress of the previous months is finally leaving me. I should really be more stressed, considering that now I'll be moving-on to doing live support and production fixes, but it just feels so much better to see the end of something that's acted like a vacuum to my spare time and social life - sucking it all away from me until I only had work and the next working-day left to look forward to.

So fingers crossed that nothing catastrophic happens; catastrophic to the system we're deploying, not catastrophic to the planet. Hell, I'm more worried right now of our phones ringing than I am of a meteor striking the Earth. That saying about how silence is golden? For me, at this very moment: totally true.

So about a week-and-a-half ago I said that I had finally reduced my workload! I was telling any friends I met, I posted it on my last blog, I had time to go out at night, and I even had time to practice some more guitar! (something I haven't really done since I was dumped* by my guitar buddy) Just when I was starting to enjoy my new 'freedom', the forces at work must have noticed my higher-than-normal levels of happiness and excitement because today, my workload crept back up on me, knocked me out, and when I awoke I was bruised all over and missing my left shoe.

It seems I jinxed myself when I started telling others that I'm no longer as busy as I used to be. I don't know how it happened but since yesterday I've been given additional work and by the end of the day I was adding overtime to my timesheet...

Overtime! I hadn't done overtime for maybe more than 3 weeks now. I mean, I did when work started dangling the do-overtime-get-paid carrot in-front of me some months ago, but I quickly learned that I'm not made for doing too much because the OOS monster that lies dormant in my wrists most of the time started to make a fuss.

Work isn't the only thing to turn on me the moment I thought it was all working: this website also decided to go belly-up sometime during the day, just when I was starting to feel confident that my last fix had solved all my problems.

*sigh*

Such is life.

---
* OK so I wasn't really dumped, but I got an e-mail from her saying she wanted to take a break from our guitar practices.

Do you remember those old black-and-white movies with scenes like where the male lead is waiting at the station for his love before the train departs; he's waiting desperately for a sign of her so they can go away together, but instead he hears the train guard/conductor calling out his name; he tells the conductor that he's the person he's looking for, and the conductor hands him a letter; the guy opens the letter and as he reads it, the voice of his love reads aloudthe words written on the letter and the expression on his face turns to dismay as he reads/hears the reasons or excuses for why she can't come?

Her e-mail read like one of those letters, and when I reached the end of it my initial reaction was, "Dammit, I've been dumped!" OK, maybe I have too active an imagination. That, or I shouldn't have seen Casablanca so soon before.

After all this time, I still don't really know what it is that makes me decide to blog about something. It's been a month since the last post and in that time I just started thinking that I was too busy to write here. While others I know are doing the whole 30 Days of Me thing (for which they have my sympathy and understanding if it becomes difficult because, as I learned with Blog Every Day April last year, blogging every day for 30 days is hard), I've been sitting back and lapping-up the content that they and the rest of the internet has been putting up there.

Today however, I was hit with a few 'I should write about this' feelings, the kind that makes me want to find the nearest computer, hit-up my site, and start throwing my thoughts into the electronic ether (now going by the buzzword, 'the cloud'. Did you imagine someone doing air quotes just then? Yeah, same here). At that moment, the nearest computer was in my hands (carrying work laptop to work), so I quickly finished the rest of my morning walk to work, plugged the thing in, waited the obligatory long-enough-to-make-a-cup-of-tea start-up time, and before I could start up my browser somebody came up to me and asked me a work question - the first of many which made me soon forget about blogging entirely.

During my lunch break, I was once again hit with that blogging feeling, and remembered what it was in the morning I was wanting to write about. Sentences started forming in my mind and I was editing drafts in my thoughts as I made my way back to work at the end of my lunch break to sit down at my desk and not blog some more.

So what happened that first time that made me want to punch some keys for God's sake? Well, I pretty much admitted that I am a big fat pushover.

I ran into a friend (read: walked passed and didn't realize it was someone I knew until I was 2 metres away, at which point I turned around and back-tracked) on my way to work this morning with my heavy work laptop in it's bag in one hand and a 30 Seconds To Mars track playing in my ears. She was standing with workmates and a bunch of equipment, all of them waiting for a taxi that may or may not have forgotten about them so they can carry all this stuff to where it needs to be through the schizophrenic Wellington weather. When I stopped to talk with her the usual conversation ensued (How are you? Haven't seen you in ages! Why are you standing out here with a box full of LCD screens?) and somehow got to me telling her that I'm sort of dreading going to work today. The reason: the almost-daily project meeting that involves our testing crew.

Now it's not really the testers I'm afraid of - they're a great bunch and do a much needed job that adds tremendous value to the project - but when they're in the meeting, all the current problems with the system we're working on get highlighted and when it comes to letting everyone know about the issues in the area I'm working on, my overriding conscience starts to kick in and suddenly I feel like I'm not doing a good enough job. It doesn't help either when sometimes I'm involved in e-mail exchanges about problems with the system that are directed at me while CC'ing all the other testers and none of the other developers which then makes me feel like I have to defend myself against a 21st century electronic workspace flogging.

I summarised the above for my friend, and her response was pretty much to send some angry e-mails straight back.

I thought about it some, and quickly realized that telling people who annoy me to go suck donkey dick wasn't really in my repertoire. I mean, it would be funny if it happened, but it would only happen in my head, whereas in real-life I'd metaphorically turn to some strange angle and hope that whatever projectile was aimed at bruising my ego would glance off my titanium skull or just miss because I presented a smaller target. And so after making a lot of doubtful thinking noises, I admitted to my friend, "Hmm, that's not really me; I'm a bit of a pushover actually."

A bit? Well, yes, for very large values of the word 'bit'.

Why my brain told me to go blog about that, I have no idea why.

Guess which one I am in that picture. If you answered 'all of the above' you win a prize

The next incident at lunch time was when I was finishing-up my shopping to take advantage of a one-day store sale. The sales guy just ran my card so I could pay for my purchase, and as the Eftpos system was connecting to my bank account to rob me of my money, to kill some of the silence he asked me "Had a good day so far?"

I thought about it, and thought about it some more. I thought I was taking a very long time to think but obviously I wasn't because I managed to give him my answer before the Eftpos machine could confirm my payment. "Actually, no" I told him, "I've been having a pretty crappy day."

I don't know whether it was the honesty or because I didn't just say "good", but he was obviously taken aback by my reply. This isn't the first time I've been asked that sort of question, gave that sort of answer, and saw that sort of reaction. The last person was my neighbour (is that the right word to use when technically they live 4 floors above you?) and, I dunno, it made that conversation - and even the very short one with the sales guy - just that much more engaging.

I mean, when you have those 'How was your day? / Good.' exchanges, you can really tell that the other party isn't dedicating much of their brain to the conversation: their eyes are staring at some point in the distance instead of you, their body is still facing in the direction that they really want to go before they ran into you, and you can see them thinking about other things like what to eat once they get home instead wondering about how to reply to you. But when you mess-up the norm, then you've got their attention: they have to actually think of responses, and now they've got you on their mind instead of what it is they're going to make for dinner.

Once the Eftpos machine finally confirmed that it had left my bank account a little worse for wear, the sales guy wished me a really good rest-of-the-day and, you know what, it felt like he meant it.

Why my brain told me to go blog about that, I have no idea why.

(apologies if I don't seem my usual self through my prose or writing style or whatever it is that manages to reach through my blog posts and into your heads - I'm a bit tipsy right now. I need to stop letting people leave unfinished bottles of wine at my apartment for me to finish by myself)

Something I've written about before, although only in story e-mails, are the security keypads at my work. Using these keypads, there's a sensor in it somewhere that used to detect the presence of these company-issued security tags to let only authorized personnel enter a work area. What I loved about these things is that, when combined with the tag that I wore at waist height, I could feign all sorts of silly acts in my attempts to unlock the keypad. Acts like: pretending to rub my ass right up to the keypad when I wore the tag on a belt buckle closer to my back, or pretending to thrust my crotch at the keypad when I wore the tag on a belt buckle closer to my front - the possibilities were endless!

I only ever did these in-front of one workmate (who has since left) just because it was the sort of thing he'd do too.

Now, those last paragraphs were all in past tense because, as of last week, they changed the security system.

(no, the keypad at work didn't look anything like this, but I couldn't find any 'wagging ass at keypad' pictures)

The system is much like before: something you carry with you that, when put into proximity with these new sensors, will let you into areas of the building you are authorized to enter. The problem with the new sensors is that they are installed significantly above waist height. No, they're not way up at shoulder level or anything as high as that, but they're just high enough that I can't really get any rude part of me up to meet it without jumping. I only need to jump a little bit, but even a 1 centimetre rise above the ground is more effort than I'm willing to make for a small joke, thus my fun is ruined.

I know I said in my last post that I'd try not to let work get to me down/stressed as quickly as it used to, but when they start taking away the 'perks' of my job, it gets kinda hard to maintain my positive attitude.

I'm pretty much consumed with work at the moment: stories that I can bring to a social situation have dropped significantly - as evidenced by my plummeting blogging rate from roughly 1-post-per-week to some number that's lower than the morale of a Foxconn factory worker - and, barring that one dream in my last blog post where a wonderful Scottish accent turned into harsh pirate yarn, my most recent dreams have actually all been about work.

You know what's terrible about work dreams? The same thing that's terrible about those homework dreams you sometimes get during the high school and university years: you wake-up and, some time during the day, realize that your dream about completing the most awesome assignment that any teacher in the history of teachers is ever going to see - such that they will give you medals, prize money, and (for the guys, when your teacher happens to be hot, young, and female) offers to have your babies - never happened.

It's a terrible feeling of disappointment, and I felt that just 2 weeks ago when I had a dream I completed all my tasks in the most mind-blowing manner, then when I got to work and sat-down at my desk for the first time that morning, realized that none of it ever happened.

I sighed audibly, and nobody even looked my way.

The work I'm doing at the moment is the first big new-development project I have ever been on since joining this company straight out of university almost 5 years ago. Being the rookie when I came into work, I was always given the not-so-glamorous job of bug-fixing existing systems and attempting to undo messes made by the developers who came before me a long time ago. The worst cases were when the code was developed by a contractor or by somebody who obviously didn't care which college-grad-n00bie would be looking at their code in the future and submitting the detritus that they encountered to websites like TheDailyWTF.

It wasn't terrible work: I learned a lot, and the years since then have given me enough experience and grounding in my own programming habits to realize that I wouldn't have trusted that younger version of me to work on anything so important as what I am working on now. But it was very cushy work: never stressful, I always had spare time for my own projects and thoughts, and work never pervaded the life I lead after hours.

Now that's all changed.

One of the things I'm struggling with right now is JSF. (Here's where this post starts to get a bit techy)

For the uninitiated, JSF is one of many many frameworks out there whose objectives are, amongst other things, to make life easier for developers (like myself), particularly in creating very large Java web-based systems. That's the objective of pretty much any framework: to make software development easier by giving you a foundation to start with.

Somewhere along the way though, the creators of JSF omitted the 'make things easier' part from their objectives and instead created something that's more difficult to work with than Facebook's privacy settings. Not only that, but JSF creates completely new and unique problems that weren't there before. It's like I was told to dig a trench... and they gave me chopsticks. I would've preferred a spoon but JSF is supposed to be a better spoon, so not only am I now digging a trench with the wrong tool, but it's also giving me hand cramps.

Note to the people behind JSF: you can't program like this

The thing it's worst at, and my main issue with JSF, is creating web pages. You'd think for a technology that's supposed to be used for web development, it'd make the serving of web pages to a person's browser one of the things it'd be best at, but no! Instead, they created some ridiculous abstraction over (X)HTML components and ask you to use their own components which will generate HTML for you.

As an aside: one of the things I had been getting into during my spare time was web design and development best practices: clean HTML pages, proper uses of HTML markup, all the tricks of CSS, SEO, and using the powers of JavaScript only for good. I do my best to apply all these things to my own website, and while I'm no expert at web design, I can spot questionable practices when I see them.

I remember the first time I saw the HTML that came out of one of the JSF pages at work: the web designer in me died a little, and a threw-up a bit in my mouth.

To use a line from another JSF-bashing blog post, it generated HTML like it was 1999: tables, more tables, nested tables, and 1px images to space content.

Just the feeling that I've been put into a time machine and sent back to when web development was, to be honest, pretty shit, does not give me confidence in JSF at all.

Coding like it's 1999...

So in short, I'm getting a bit stressed about work, deadlines are looming while the amount I've been tasked with just keeps growing, and it's totally not helping when the technology we're using to create this system is giving me persistent headaches. (I actually went to the pharmacy last Thursday and bought a pack of 100 tablets of paracetamol. They normally only sell them in packs of 20. I went for the bulk deal. Thanks a lot JSF.)

It's a bright sunny day in my little corner of New Zealand. I'm looking out the window on this lovely Saturday morning and up above are blue skies and white fluffy clouds, the Metservice says it's 22.9 degrees Celsius, and my watch is telling me that now is a good time to go fishing (yeah, something to do with setting my longitudinal position and the phases of the moon, don't ask me to go into detail).

The only problem with this picture is that the window I am looking out of is not any of the ones at my apartment, but rather the ones at my work building. Yep, I'm at work today :(

While I'd rather be anywhere but here, I don't hate coming to work on a weekend. On the rare occasion that I do find myself walking to work, it's usually morning when the streets are pretty empty, and when I arrive at the building it's nice and quiet and there's usually nobody else around. I find that the quiet of the weekend and the feeling that this city's population has magically been cut in half help me sort-out my thoughts for a much more productive couple of hours than the busy office environment usually does.

The office may be empty, but today, and for the last couple of days, the streets are anything but.

There are a bunch of big events going on: 2 AC/DC concerts, a Them Crooked Vultures concert, Wellington Cup Day (horse racing, although the focus of such events is never on the horse racing), next week we play host to the Rugby Sevens, and to top it all off, docked at the harbour are some very VERY large cruise ships with LOTS of tourists.

So the streets are packed, it's hella busy outside, and when I walked around during my lunch break the other day my ears honed-in on several foreign accents, mainly American. Accents weren't the only odd thing that day; a massive line coming-out of the Wellington Cable Car was the other:

I don't think anybody in this line is from around here...

Long lines aren't a very common sight around here. When they do appear, they're usually leading towards an upper-middle-class retail/department store with some sort of epic store-wide sale going on. We don't often get 60 metre lines streaming-out from what is effectively a 7-minute tram ride between the CBD and this city's gardens.

But maybe I'm just being too cynical. Tourists aren't a bad thing - I even enjoyed being one the last time, despite being mistaken for a local and asked which way to the immigration offices - and my lack of enthusiasm towards The Cable Car is probably because for years I used it as one of my methods of transport to/from university, thus relegating one of this city's best attractions to the background of public transport vehicles that help this city function.

Maybe I've just lived here too long.

So a funny little something happened to me at work just a while ago: somebody sent an e-mail to a mailing list that I shouldn't belong to. Thinking nothing of it, I decided not to do anything.

Somebody else however, decided to do something and asked to be removed from the mailing list. But they didn't reply to the original sender, instead they replied to the mailing list, giving a whole bunch of people the idea that it is a Good Idea to do the exact same thing. And by exact same thing, that means repeating the mistake of the first responder of replying to the mailing list (must be some automatic reflex to click 'reply-to-all') instead of putting their request to the original sender.

This continued for the rest of the afternoon. My 'new e-mail' alert pop-up was going spastic, eventually stopping to give me the details of the incoming messages and instead just telling me that I had "...new items in your inbox." At first I was hoping that people notice the incoming flood and correct their responses, then I kept facepalming at every new message alert, and then I LOL'd.

Did I mention I work for a large corporation with offices all around the world? I was getting e-mails from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, the US, Mexico, Brazil... Here's a timeline of events:

• 1:22pm - initial e-mail sent to a mailing list
• 2:12pm - first reply to be removed from the mailing list
• 2:15pm - more replies to be removed from the mailing list start coming
• 2:20pm - first replies to say 'please don't e-mail everybody', and first angry reply to ask people to stop, saying they 'have enough e-mail to read'
• 2:23pm - first 'stop e-mailing!' message to be sent in capital letters
• 2:26pm - somebody changes the e-mail subject to try get peoples' attention
• 2:52pm - original sender tries to recall initial e-mail
• 2:54pm - first sarcastic reply, saying they love getting to know all these new people
• 2:57pm - comment comparing this incident to 'please forward to X people' chain e-mails
• 3:02pm - I reply to everybody and the chain e-mail guy, saying we've reached 73 messages, mine is the 74th, and that 6 more have come in during me writing my response
• 3:05pm - the network goes down

(At this point I start worrying that the Mailing List Saga has brought down the network, particularly my message since it was the last thing to be sent before it all hit the fan. I'm probably being a bit egotistical there, thinking that I would have such influence on our company's network infrastructure, but it's not the first time I've been jokingly blamed by my workmates for network failures before.)

• 3:34pm - network restored for a moment, I receive 35 more messages (1 of which is an ACTUAL e-mail from a friend), someone decided to add exclamation marks to the e-mail subject, network goes down again
• 3:54pm - network restored, receive the last of the e-mails, including the one where somebody has talked to somebody with mailing list power to get the list fixed
• 4:10pm - straggler requests to be removed from the list

At this point in the Mailing List Saga (which is the moment before I shut this computer off to go home), I counted 121 e-mails - more e-mails than I receive in a normal week. This includes all the replies, several out-of-office messages, one 'inbox too full' message, and the one I sent myself.

I must say, it made my day :D Here are some of my favourite responses:

I have no idea what is it about.
Please do me a favor and take me out of the list i have enough email to read.

OK, enough with the reply all responses.

STOP THE REPLY TO ALL PLEASE......

Lovely teams, I'm glad to know everyone's name but can we stop this?

Its becoming like those "Send this to everyone you know and XXX will donate 1cent to ..."

Please include me in all future emails. My inbox feels loved

jejeje Hope I get all the 1cent soon :0)

And now we've got all these new in-box friends. :)

Update: Just came in to work this morning, and the hours between yesterday afternoon and now have given THE ENTIRE CONTINENT OF EUROPE a chance to respond. We're now up to 201 e-mails, and I got some new favourite replies:

aLL,
PLEASE STOP REPLYING TO DE GROUP MAILBOX.
i AM NOW OVERLOADED WITH "UNSUBSCRIBES".
stop, stop, stop

Does anybody know how's the best way to cook a turkey for next Christmas?

Aaa... it's simply. You need to take a turkey, cut the head, add some salt and pepper... and cook it until everybody send the reply with "remove me too"...

Hopefully this Turkey is almost cooked

Hope that this is the last email sending out . Pray hard.

Then next one pressing "send to all" qualifies him/herself for the next round of [Workforce Reductions].
Reason: having no understanding of IT technology..

Interesting, but It's difficult to find some of this spices here... Sounds tasty, though.

STOP REPLY AND EVERYTHING WILL BE STOP!! PLEASE

Every great super hero has their super power. And for any super villain to stand a chance against their opposite, said super hero or power must be able to be neutralized in some way: a weakness, an Achilles' Heel, their kryptonite, whatever you want to call it.

Now, I'm as far away from being a great super hero as you can possibly be, so I have only the mediocre power of being able to call more than 1 lift at a time. And because my super power is so lame, anything with the strength of a dung beetle might be able to thwart me. But you know what I discovered my kryptonite is?

Braille.

Yes, the alphabet of the blind has the ability to screw with my elevator super powers. It doesn't neutralize it, but rather make the use of said powers very painful.

Every time I manage to call more than 1 lift, a smirk spreads across my face and I my inner dialogue starts saying things like: Yeah, that's right, all elevators bow before me... When I'm in this I'm-the-king-of-the-elevators sort of mood, I press the elevator buttons a bit more forcefully than I need to. I don't usually use the end of my finger to press the buttons. Instead, it's more like a knocking-on-the-door action where I put my knuckles into it.

So how does Braille hurt me? Well take a look at the buttons being used in the lifts in my work building:

See the Braille sticking-out of the buttons? Now, imagine smashing your knuckles into those. Each tiny dot becomes the equivalent of a small spike when I throw my knuckles into them at the speed; fighting back with the bite of a rose thorn and killing my inner dialogue in the same way every time: with capital letters and exclamation points (eg: ...OWWWWW!!!!) while simultaneously wounding my pride.

Like martial arts, Braille has harnessed the power of science and learned to turn my own strength against me.

When I put it like that, I think I'd prefer it if my weakness were dung beetles - Braille can go anywhere, whereas dung beetles can't survive the New Zealand climate.

I've been with my new HP laptop for work for a while now, and thanks to it's huge increase in processing power, memory, and hard drive platters' rotation rate over my old Dell laptop which is not only slow by today's standards, but has also accumulated 3-years-worth of software detritus and e-barnacles, the turnaround time between finding an error, fixing it, and then testing the fix, is significantly faster. In fact, it's made the excuse of 'compiling' a (unfortunate) thing of the past:

This was possible when 'compiling' was a 10 minute wait

One thing I used to do between compiles (besides jousting and sword play on office chairs) was to browse websites like any other non-programmer would. No I wouldn't go to Facebook - I don't have enough active FB friends to create a long list of activity on the Live News Feed so I like to let it build-up over the work day so I have something to go through when I get home - but rather joke sites (eg: Cracked, Digg - yes Digg is just one big joke), comic sites (eg: XKCD, Cyanide and Happiness), or blogs (waaay too many to list). One blog which I've been directed to recently thanks to a referral from my brother, is the site Stuff White People Like - http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

You don't have to be non-white to appreciate the humour that went into the site - although, like myself, being some sort of ethnic minority in a white-dominated society really helps (lol, who would've thought that could ever be an advantage) - but just going through the list, I've found so much that is funny, because it is all true.

With almost every link I could find at least 1 person I knew who would fit the stereotype presented in each blog post, and I would proceed to post the link on their Facebook wall.

I'm only half-way through the list right now (no thanks to the faster work laptop for reducing the amount of time I have to slack off... damn double-edged sword of having a faster work computer!), and I must've posted way too many links because my friends (read: white friends, the 'white' is assumed as I'm often the token ethnic for their group) have noticed my pattern and are starting to retaliate.

The comments on each post are sometimes lol-worthy, but most of the time it's either someone admitting how white they are (regardless of the colour of their skin) or someone saying just how racist the site is. Odd that last one, because each post is written by a twenty-something white male who admits that he's selling-out his race and writing all of those posts in jest. I guess those 'OMG-this-is-racist' people are just pissed that they're now being subject to stereotypes, and to those people I advise they develop a sense of humour and get over it, but only after I point and laugh at them while rhetorically asking how it feels to be on the receiving end for once.

It wasn't too long ago that I tweeted about the time 3 lifts answered my call in the form of a My Life Is Average blurb:

Today, I pressed the 'call lift' button, and 3 of our building's 4 elevators answered my call. I want a better superpower. MLIA.

I've not been able to repeat this feat, but ever since then I've been getting 2 lifts answer my call on a more-than-usual basis. Before, something like 2-lifts-at-a-time happened about once every couple of months. Now, it happens once every 3 or 4 days. Most recently, I got into the lift (the first that answered my call, the second one was 1 second too slow), went to press the button that would take me to the basement exit of my work building, but was suddenly surprised at the brightness of our new lift buttons.

Here's a little backstory on my work's lifts:

When I started-out here, the lifts had a (dirty) white tile-like floor and buttons with black numbers that were fading with time and use. If a button had been pressed, a red light would glow above the number in the button. The floor was getting worn, especially with all the reshuffling of people (building rennovations, corporate takeover, etc) that were going-on over the years, causing extreme wear and tear on the floors.

Once the shuffling had settled-down, they set to fix-up the lift tiles and ended-up replacing them with a nice new black floor. This introduced a new problem though: the black was reflected in the metal surfaces of the lift, including the buttons, thus making the buttons almost illegible: black on black FTW! I survived this time in the lifts' history because my floor's button was in an easy-to-memorize position amongst that grid of buttons, but many poor men and women became victims of spending countless seconds peering closer to the writing on the buttons just to try find their floor.

To combat this problem, they've been installing bright blue backlit floor buttons. Now you can read the numbers much more easily. Heck, they even come with braille for those who could never see the numbers in the first place! But, as usual, there is 1 flaw in the execution: the difference between a pressed button and an unpressed button is a matter of brightness; if it hasn't been pressed, it's bright; if it has been pressed, it's slightly brighter. The difference can be observed, but it isn't glaringly obvious like it was before.

This work to move to the bright blue buttons is still underway, and the lift being worked-on is of course shut down for the lift guy to work on it. So of our building's 4 elevators, only 3 are on at any given time. So this week, when I had 2 lifts answer my call, I was actually taking 66% of this building's lifts with me.

66% is more than half, but I still want a better superpower. At least my superpower isn't in-flight flight, or having SPF50 sunscreen squirt from my eyes.

I was doing a Google search at work last week - looking-up "AGM", making sure that it meant Annual General Meaning, which it does, before I used it in a sentence in an e-mail - and in doing so I came across a blog entry from a local blogger where they described attending their apartment's AGM and how it felt like such a grown-up thing to do at the time. I say 'at the time' because it was written in 2004.

Browsing through to the blog's homepage, I saw that it is still actively updated. OMG! I thought, another blogger from NZ who writes about their day-to-day life, who started the site off years ago, AND IS STILL AROUND! OK, so 5 years isn't forever, but my own website only has entries dating all the way back to 2005, despite having had this site up since 2001, and that was before I even called these updates 'blog posts' or that the word 'blog' was common in the English language.

I was excited! Ecstatic! Glad to find someone out there who perseveres with a personal website for years, even with the knowledge that their readership consists mainly of friends and family, with the odd stranger/passer-by. I became even more excited/ecstatic/glad when, after reading through a few of their posts, I could identify them as somebody who might be a workmate of amazing baking girl. (2-degrees of separation FTW! (NZ joke))

OK, so my excitement probably makes no sense to anybody else. Here's some background for where I'm coming from with all this:

The day before I ran into OrangeBlog (yep, that's their blog's name), I was reading another blog entry from one of the authors I read and follow, John Scalzi, who had just written about how his website has been around for 11 years. That's one helluva milestone, I thought.

Not many personal sites on the internet stay around for 11 years. My own friends' attempts at websites or blogs are a testament to that: one guy hasn't added anything substantial to his site in several years, of 2 overseas/travelling blogs, 1 stopped theirs just a few months in while the other hasn't been updated in over a year, and the 1 guy who went so far as to buy a domain name and host his own Content Management System (think website management program), when he stopped updating it it got bombarded by comment spam bots, before getting domain jacked.

And when the New York Times has a slow news day and decides to take a pot shot at bloggers for lacking discipline and staying power, I find myself alone in the fight back, using whatever skills I have on hand (writing, 'your mom' jokes) and whatever weapons I can find on my desk (unsharpened pencils and dead batteries... wait, that can't be turned into some sort of analogy for my life can it?).

I guess it takes certain kinds to continue something that has no real rewards, no tangible benefits; to throw thoughts, words, ideas, out into the digital ether and not worry about them coming back any better than they were when they left the gap between your brain and the keyboard. I haven't received so much as a cookie for what I'm doing with this website, but it's not an entirely selfless thing; every time I hear somebody I know say "Hey, I read your blog" or allude to something I've written, it becomes a real boost to the ego.

So yeah, I knew I wasn't alone in the whole 'maintain and keep updating a personal website' endeavour - the world's way too big for that - but I feel a lot less alone than I did before.

It's not called OrangeBlog for nothing

And hopeful too that there are more like me out there when it comes to keeping to things for the long term. Hope, for now it seems, is the colour orange.

2 blog posts in one day?!?! Is that a pig I see flying past my window?

Well, this one is a bit of a plea for help. You see, at work we often pass-around and fill-out cards for others whenever something eventful happens. eg: lady I was working with gives birth to baby boy, we all fill-out a card to send to her, wishing her well on her new job - motherhood.

Often I've been able to get away with writing whatever the hell first came to mind. In the case of the new mother, I think I wrote something to do with sleepless nights and baby vomit. In the case of a recent card given for 30 years of service with the company, I made some remark about how they've been working longer than I've been drawing breath.

Breathing - it works bitches!

But the card I was given today is about a death in a co-workers family for which they're travelling to attend the funeral, and I don't know if my usual wit is really appropriate for the situation.

The first thing that came to mind was "Well, that sucks." Somehow, that doesn't seem like a good start.

So, umm, help? What sort of things would you - Facebook readers in particular, since you're the only ones who can actually comment on my posts on my wall - write in this situation?

(and yes I really need to get around to allowing comments on this site)

Tomorrow, I catch a bus to a city some 4-and-a-half hours away to stay with friends for the night, before all of us head for the ski fields to enjoy a week-long snowy vacation :)

It's been a long time since I last went skiing, or played-about in the snow. Last time I ever did both was... *thinks about it* ...1999. Damn, 10 years! I've been looking forward to this for a while, and have used it as an excuse to make several sweet purchases in the past couple of weeks: new jacket, beanie, socks, and sunglasses.

However, I'm wondering if my workmates will actually notice my absence.

No, I'm not being emo about things. Rather, I was noticing how embedded and automatic some responses or phrases are in some of my workmates that they either forgot that I'll be away next week, or forgot that we don't work weekends in this country:

Workmate farewell #1: "Enjoy your weekend."
Workmate farewell #2: "See you next week."
Workmate farewell #3: "See you tomorrow." (it's Friday today...)

I guess I'm just reminded of those images of Socially Awkward Penguin when it says something along the lines of: Taxi driver drops you off at the airport. He says, "Enjoy your trip!" You say, "You too!"

I love you internets...

If, come Monday morning, my empty chair doesn't remind them, then I hope my out-of-office reply will remind them where I am. Here's what mine's set up to say:

If you're reading this, then I'm out enjoying the snowy slopes of my ski trip... or faceplanting into the snow. Given the winter we've been having, you think it'd be smarter for me to go somewhere sunny eh?

I'll be back in the office Monday 27th July, hopefully in 1 piece, without too many bruises or leg/arm/neck braces.

Very professional, I know.

What I don't know though, is if I'll get internets up there, but I'll try remember to Tweet / update Facebook status daily from my phone with my injury statistics.

So... see y'all in a week-and-a-bit :)

The other day I was talking with somebody who had very recently joined Facebook (yes, seems some people don't have Facebook, I'm shocked too). Not having been a big user of social networking websites until that moment, she talked about feeling very exposed: having photos of yourself up there for the world to see, and how the social aspect of your life is now visible to work colleagues or potential employers (as many people do like to keep those sides of their lives separate).

This isn't the first time I've heard these topics brought up when it comes to the social web - one friend in particular mentions these points as arguments for not joining Facebook, which kinda sucks because that person lives in Australia, so the keeping-in-touch stuff is all done through e-mail. Maybe it's time I gave these subjects a bit of thought, I said to myself.

Time to put one on. Actually, time to find a brain to make this thing of any use.

Personally, I haven't had too much fear of putting myself out there on the big bad internet. I run a personal website with my name plastered all over it so that Google can index me, and my e-mail address is just 1 click away from potential spambot loving.

My Facebook profile isn't any better either; everyone on my friends list sees the same thing: photos of me being stupid at parties of weekends past, my sometimes-personal Twitter-sized status updates, and work mates can just as easily read my posts about my latest work-related gripes.

Maybe it is time I started taking the face I show to the internet - which is the face I wear in real-life - a bit more seriously by putting some leash or restraint on it, because throughout my online life (some 14 or 15 years now) it's probably only dumb luck that has protected me from the consequences of being this open. Or maybe, I'm just not a good target: I'm not a big company, I'm not a famous person, I don't have lots of money, I don't wield any power, nor am I any combination of the above.

And I'm definitely not an Attractive Young Female.

OK, let's be realistic: I'm not even 1 of those 3 key words in the paragraph above, but because of what I'm not, I reduce the size of the pool of potential people I could be afraid of on the internet. Creepy old men don't want me, I'm too old for paedophiles and cradle-snatchers, and straight-guy stalkers ain't coming here for their fix.

As for my current employers or anybody in my future to whom I look to for work? Well, lets just hope that they not only want to add some programmer / web designer to their teams, but also want to inject some personality and honesty into their company (because with my ugly mug, those 2 traits are all I've got going for me now).

And as work ended for the day, my holiday officially started :D

As per the suggestions of upper management, I (and several of my workmates) will be taking the this Thursday, and next Tuesday and Wednesday off. Couple that with the Monday and Friday already being public holidays thanks to the Easter weekend, and we're each gonna have a week-long break!

Now I can guess as to why the big wigs were encouraging all of us to take our leave as a cost-cutting measure during the recession - something about how leave not used is costing the company money - but despite their agenda, if they're encouraging me to spend extended periods of time away from my desk, I'm not going to say no. So as the office quietened down and people started leaving for their long long weekends, I got my own stuff in order, including the automated out-of-office reply.

I never came across the out-of-office reply until I started full-time work. I believe Gmail has an equivalent feature with their On Vacation automated reply e-mails, but it's a very handy thing that lets anybody who e-mails you know that you're away. Some people often say whether they're on leave or sick, when they're returning, and sometimes a secondary contact is mentioned who is available to help should they want to seek somebody else who kinda knows your job. Many out-of-office replies I've encountered are very professional: quick, concise, and straight to the point. Others however, like mine when I first started work, tend to beat around the bush.

I was looking for pictures about "getting to the point" (ie: not beating around the bush), and this is what Google gave me...

I often liked to include a little backstory. If the leave was around a major public holiday, then I ended-up personifying the holiday and saying how it coerced me to get out of the office. If the leave was some kind of personal vacation, then I liked to write about the sorts of things I'd be doing.

It was all great fun coming up with these mini stories, but over time I did get told that they were a tad inappropriate, and not at all informative. With the assignment to my current project in which the client is a rather serious government department, I've had to compromise.

So no, I never got to talk about how the Easter bunny had swept me away (in a non-paedophile manner) towards my leave, nor did I get to say how it left me a trail of chocolate egss to lead me out of the building and into a dungeon of my own making in which I'll be stuck for a whole week. Instead, the first line reads:

The Easter Bunny has kicked me out of the office, and so I begin my Epic Easter Leave.

It's pretty tame, but I don't imagine anybody else mentioning what the Easter bunny did to them, let alone mention the Easter bunny at all. And for that, I can still claim the prize for originality amongst my peers.

While I'm no longer an avid viewer of 24 (I haven't seen seasons 6 or 7, but was glued to the TV when 24: Redemption just happened to be on) I have taken several things away from that show which, on occasion, cause me to be disappointed in real life. One of these things is the speed at which the crew of CTU, or whatever rag-tag bunch of techies Jack Bauer has to help him now, seemed to operate.

Whenever Jack Bauer needs the details about a certain suspect, all he has to do is give maybe the first couple of characters of said suspect's plate number, and within minutes (REAL-TIME minutes) he will have all the info he asked for. Things like aliases, addresses, phone numbers, political views, the place their credit card was used last, the neglect they received from their parents, the lasting psychological effects of that neglect leading to the number of Chris Brown's they've pulled with current and past partners... No information is out of reach of CTU.

I even remember one episode where they get their hands on a laptop with encrypted contents. The level and method of encryption is pretty reasonable such that trying to crack it would take much longer than 24 hours, yet they did, somehow, because CTU is that awesome. (although XKCD has already shown that encryption is virtually useless against a determined opponent)

Unfortunately, real-life (or at the very least, my work) doesn't operate like this at all. Here's how a quest for information went down at work today:

• request for information was made to our client
• client then e-mailed my project manager with the request for information
• e-mail is then forwarded to me 2 HOURS after the first bullet point
• I start work on the request by running several queries on the database, some of which take up to 5 minutes to complete
• all members of our team attend a scheduled team meeting which took about an hour
• we return and I run more queries to double-check my results
• I send a reply e-mail with my findings to our client

At the end of all this, it's 6pm, it's getting dark outside, I'm pretty much the only person left on our floor, and the person I sent the e-mail to will have probably gone home already meaning they won't get to forward the results to the original requestor until tomorrow morning. How's that for information turn-around time?

The story of my life

OK, so if speed was needed, I probably wasn't the best person for the job; I'm still becoming familiar with the system I've been assigned to, and I'm far from any kind of programming genius. But by the end of it, I just wanted to get back home as quickly as possible, and I was both disappointed in 24 for setting unrealistic expectations on programmers (just like how CSI has set unrealistic expectations of clear-cut forensic evidence in court cases) and maybe a little envious of people like those in CTU who could've done my job in mere minutes (REAL-TIME minutes). Provided such people existed.

If they did, then I totally understand why 24's Chloe looks pissed-off all the time.

The wind changed, and it stayed that way

Ego surfing; it's something we've all done before. Whether or not the results work in your favour, well, that's a different story.

A combined first and last name isn't as rare as it used to be. You'll likely meet someone during your school years with your first name. (I don't know what assumed statistic to throw at you for meeting something outside your family with your last name.) And as for finding someone with both? That's where the Internet can help fill-in the gaps; it's only a matter of time before Google spiders find your name-based doppelganger and make the results available to all.

So with a little spare time at work and a lot of curiousity, I started throwing, not only my name, but the names of several others into Google, and taking a look at what it gave me in return. Old friends, new friends, Facebook friends... everybody was fair game.

I'm still the only Emanuel Rabina on the Internet with Google giving me up to 2 pages of results on myself before going awry. Only a few others were just as unique, providing up to a page of accurate results before going on first-name/last-name tangents. As for the rest though, that's when the lols started.

Those with 2 first names gave the greatest variety of results, but a few honestly surprised me. For example, I found-out I have friends who share names with: a hand-crafted furniture maker, a canoeist, a doctor of medicine, a wrestler, a dentist, an illustrator, an actress, a singer/songwriter, a professional trainer, a scientologist, and a porn star.

Last week one of my workmates sent me a message, telling me to visit my own site. Strange request, but I did, and when I did, it wasn't what I expected. Instead of the usual splash page, I got this.

Barring the intentionally smudged-out parts (none of those things were accessible from the Internet, so I guess they won't be too happy with me sharing it), what you see is the big fat company site blocker in action, telling me I can't visit my own site. Luckily for me I can get around this particular case, but damn if this isn't annoying! And what's worse, the small print listed my site as Adult Content. Sure I might use a swear word here or there, but when one sees Adult Content, they think pr0n! Which my site doesn't have!

So when I get the time, I'm gonna see if I can't get my site unblocked. Failing that, maybe I should aim for a re-classification, like Drugs and Alcohol, or Cults (yes, they have a cults classification).