The Raging Tech

Ch-Ch-Changes

Tags: Kylara, Life, stress, Work

And So It Begins… 12 Days of Fun

So, Monday began the time of year where we work 12 days straight, right on through the weekend, because first student workers come back and we train them, and then the regular students move back to campus for Fall semester. The good thing is, we also earn a lot of comp time. Working 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on a weekend (which usually ends up being ’till 7:30pm) at time and a half is a lot of extra hours, about 30 to be exact. With 30 extra hours, you can totally go on vacation - and that’s exactly what I plan to do as soon as I can.

Kylara leaves in 5 or 6 days. I’m certainly not happy about it. We’ve been trying to make the most out of what time we have left before she moves away. I know she’ll do well at whatever she does - I just wish it could have been with me.

And after that, I think I and everyone else need a LOLCat to brighten up the day:

more cat pictures

Tags: LOLCat, Personal Life, Work

Protected: Just… Venting

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Tags: people, relationships, stress, Work

New House, New Stuff, New Bills

So, the move went pretty well. I had help from lots of people: my roommate, his brother James, his girlfriend Kendall, Kylara, Aron (who is recently married and was just back from his honeymoon in Italy!) and neatly enough my old friend Becca from back home came up for the weekend to help me move. They all did a lot of hard work, so I’d like to thank them publicly!

Now I’m all moved in with all of my belongings in this world, and I’ve lived in a much smaller world for so long that my stuff, even all spread out, still leaves the house feeling sort of empty. I need to get some nails and my level and hang some pictures. I need some plants, or maybe just some fake ones. Kylara is giving me her cat Meow Kitty’s two kittens, I’m not sure what I’m going to name them yet. Maybe I’ll name them both “Station,” like the alien(s) from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

I’ve been settling in. Monday satellite was installed, and the guy had a heck of a time finding the “sweet spot” to put the dish up. He finally put it up on a pole in the front yard. At least it doesn’t look too terrible. Verizon DSL was activated on a dry-loop (no local phone service required) on Tuesday, so now I have internet too. I used our old wireless DSL modem from the last house because Verizon sent me a modem without a built-in router like I ordered.

I’ve got some new pots & pans that I got on the cheap from Wal-Mart for about twenty bucks. They’re non-stick and have a brushed metal finish on the outside. Kylara found me a skillet and a pot at the flea market for a buck or two each, and a nice pillow for my couch for another couple bucks. It’s nice to live within five miles of a huge flea market. I also found a nice serving plate for two dollars at the local Food Lion an exit up the highway from me.

Everytime I walk by the room with my unpacked boxes I wince a little, because I really don’t want to break them all down, but I need to get to organizing or I’ll never feel moved in.

This morning I made sure all the utilities are getting switched over to my name. The funny thing is, my water company’s office is pretty much just one guy, operating out of the back of a Maytag Repair Shop in a nearby town. When I looked at the EPA web site’s record of our water system, it says it supports a total population of 292. That record may not be up to date, but that should give you an idea of the town to which I’ve moved.

The change in my sleep schedule is killing me. I have to go to bed earlier now because I have to wake up at 6:30am instead of 7:18am, so that I have time to get up and get ready and eat breakfast before I leave for work. I also started watching the news in the morning. Did you know they cleared that Jean Benet Ramsey’s parents of her killing, and now the case is wide open again? Crazy.

The drive to work isn’t so bad, it takes about 30 minutes because they closed the left-hand lane on either side of the highway, so it bottlenecks behind people who do 10 under through the construction zone. I imagine when they open that up again my commute will shorten to 20 minutes.

The in-town driving is also crazy - apparently around 10 minutes to 8am, every person with no particular place to go drives through town like it’s a lazy Sunday. At least a morning drive gives me time to listen to my iPod. I think I ‘m going to download some audio books or some podcasts that are about 30 minutes long, and start listening to those on the way to work.

Tags: driving, Life, The Move, Work

The Tech Wishes He Had a Place to Rage

I’m not really angry about anything. My brain just hurts. Today is one of those days where I just didn’t get started out on the right foot, and every step after that seems slightly off.

This morning I woke up at 7:18 to get ready for work at 8am like I always do on Monday mornings. After I got out of the shower Kylara called to ask me to bring her some files she left on my computer at home. I wasn’t able to, and I felt bad not being able to help her.

When I got to work, I set down my stuff and called her to let her know I was downstairs in the call center, and she said she’d come down later. Then my coworker reminded me I didn’t have to be there until 10:30am, because I was staying late until 7:30pm. Great, grand, wonderful.

I went up to take her the files at that point, and the door was locked. I had to call her to come back towards the stairs to let me in. I told her what was going on. I felt sick to my stomach and head. She then let me know her project in GarageBand was broken because a nightly script wipes the drives on the iMac she was using. I went and got the Digital Media Director to come over and help her. I stayed for about an hour trying to help anyway I could. I finally just had to leave, my stomach hurt so bad.

I went home, let my stomach settle, ate some breakfast, and then came back at 10:30am. I got to go update the director’s iMac with the latest VMWare Fusion and fix another couple of issues on it while I was there. That’s always neat when you get to fix things for the big bosses, so not everything was so bad this morning.

There are more issues with the DNS servers at work again today. We have a small percentage of users whose DNS settings aren’t automatic, and so when the first server fails, they don’t automatically fall back to the secondary and tertiary servers. In layman’s terms, about 30-40 calls for each technician where someone can’t access some websites, but can still get to others.

In house news - Country Classic real estate, one of my past landlords, are holding up my closing on the house because the one guy authorized to return the rental history form to the bank is out of town on vacation until Wednesday.

Apparently they “lost” the first one sent to them three weeks ago, so when my banker sent them the form again last Friday they said it’d be Monday or Tuesday. But now it’s going to be Wednesday before they can fax it in. Which means we can’t order the appraisal until at least Wednesday, which means we probably won’t be able to sign the contracts until another week out.

Then it all has to go off to the headquarters at the state capital, where they’ll either finalize the approval or reject it, and then I can close. So I won’t officially own the house for probably another two-three weeks from now.

I’ve got to pack things up pretty much every night this week, and then I move out of my rental on Saturday and into my new home - since I know the owners they’re letting me move in and rent the house on a weekly basis until I can close, so that I don’t have to keep paying my current landlord rent. I’ve got DSL and Satellite scheduled and all that’s left to do there is to switch the power and water once our closing date is firm.

My life, it is crazy. It’s good, but it’s hectic, and I think I’m stressed out a pretty good bit today. Thankfully, all the callers while I’ve been on duty this morning have been pretty nice people, and I think God’s giving me patience with them.

Oh, and official GMAT scores came back: I got 590 (out of 800, 65% ranking) on the Verbal/Quantitative sections, and 5.5 out of 6 on the Analytical Writing (83% ranking), so - not too shabby, statistically doing better than the average GMAT test-taker. Waiting now to hear back from the Grad School about whether or not I’m in the program.

That’s all for now. At least today’s pay day.

Tags: GMAT, grad school, House, personal, update, Work