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Monday, November 28, 2011

Viva Las Vegas

Only a few more days till I leave for Vegas. I'm really looking forward to running in Vegas half marathon with Team Challenge again. This year it will be at night under all the lights of the Vegas strip. 

I can't believe how fast this season has gone by. 14 weeks ago, I was just meeting my new group of mentees, assuring them that they  A.) won't die and B.) can raise a ton of money for Team  Challenge and the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation. I am so proud of them and how they have done such a good job with their training and fundraising.

I am a bit worried about how to prepare for the race. With it starting at 5:30 pm, it is much different than I'm used to. Trying to figure out when and how to eat and drink. I don't want to have to stop and pee or be not hydrated enough.  I was planning the run out a bit and was happy to see that there were 8 water/GU stops along the course. That means I won't have to carry any water with me.  Yeah!!!

I was a bit disappointed to see that Steel Panther won't be playing at the House of Blues or GVR this year.  It was a blast seeing them last year. I just may make the trip to Chicago to go see them at the end of the month. I still have three vacation days to schedule.

Also looking forward to a few places for beers. It is nice that the Burger Bar is in our hotel. I can stumble back to the room.  I'm hoping that we can hit up another place or two after the race on Sunday.

Stay tuned for race updates next week!

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Cranky

For the past couple of weeks it seems like I have been more cranky than usual.  I have less tolerance for people. It seems like everything is just irritating me. Neighbors who insist on parking on top of the pile of leaves in front of my house and then the city doesn't pick them up. Co-workers who change things mid stream or give us crap data and then when we do what they gave us are not happy because it is crap. People in stores who stop in the middle of an aisle and give you a dirty look when you say "Excuse me" when trying to get around them.

I'm blaming it on the lack of sunlight.  I'm leaving work and it is dark outside and by time I get home it is dark outside. And the cold. I hate cold weather. Give me 90's any day over the 30's.

I'm walking the dogs in the dark at the park. I'm not overly fond of this because of the deer and coyotes that roam the area. More so the coyotes.

By time I get back from walking the dogs I don't feel like working out so I put my lounge pants on, eat dinner and snuggle with the puppies on the couch. Some nights I feel like I could go to bed by 7 pm. 

I'm hoping my trip to Vegas will help cure this grumpyness a bit. If not, it will be a long winter.

I've also been looking at some vacation options for Jan/Feb. I would like to go back to Mexico. The weather and scenery were beautiful. The resort was fantastic.

So who's up for a tropical vacation?

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

One of Those Days

Today at work was just one of those days where I wonder how anything ever gets done there.

I have been working on a small project of documenting several processes that our group performs.  The one I started yesterday involved going to a vendor website, downloading some updated files, unzipping the files and repackaging the files that are needed by our system. We then move these smaller file packages to various servers depending on the package type.  Because of how we do our development work, this mean putting the files out in four different environments.  Development, IT Testing (we test how good our development is), UAT (where we let our users do testing) and production. I figured this would take me a day to perform the action and write up the processes.

That came to a screeching halt.  Because this is a fairly new process that was implemented about eight months ago there have only been two updates to this area.

It turns out that each of our four environments are set up differently.  Not good.  They should all be the same.  How else can you expect something that you developed to work properly if, as you migrate it up the chain to production, everything is different? You can't.

So at 2:30 this afternoon, I pull together two of the people who worked on this previously.  No one knew why everything was different.  The guy who did most of this work went to another area shortly after this was implemented.

Now it is my mess to clean up.  We have to get each of the environments look identical.  That means trying to figure out what they did in production and working backward to replicate it.  This means making server changes, database changes code changes and who knows what other changes.

This may now consume the rest of the month if not longer for me.  I don't mind it, as I am learning lots of new stuff but I hate going back and cleaning up other people's messes that they were too lazy or incompetent to do right the first time.

It also meant that I didn't get out of work until almost five and hit some crappy traffic on the way home.  It took me an hour to get home and I had to walk the dogs in the dark.  That made no one happy.