Monday 25 April 2016

Now That I'm Not So Bummed About It

Last Tuesday, I received an email from my cousin in Russia. He’s had a baby in the past few weeks so I didn’t think twice about opening up an email with an attachment sent from his address.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I should know better – I do know better – but I was so excited about the thought of baby pics… stupid ovaries being all “cute babies, YAY!”

In the general scheme of things, I got off fairly easy. To use my laptop to do actual work (you know, for the people who pay me) from home, I log into the server and it backs up every night. When I load pictures, I immediately put them up on my closed picsa account (which I did learn the hard way). The volunteer work I do is loaded on a shared site so they can review the updates.

The only thing I lost was personal writing I was doing. I usually tend to have three or four writing pieces on the go at any one time, but because I was so focus on this one project… it’s a very dull and tarnished silver lining, but I’ll take it nonetheless.

I’m still bitter and probably will be for a while – I mean, I’m still bitter about a French handball in 2009 and the remarks a Quebec politician made in 1995 – but on the whole, I’m not as bad off as I could have been and I recognize that.

It also made me happy that I live in the future where Internet-capable phones are a thing. Entertaining myself with the Social Medias was still possible while I waited for programs to reload on my computer. Remember the dark ages when a computer going down meant you’d have to talk to your family? Yeesh!

Despite my near-total meltdown on Sunday – I really am not exaggerating when I say there were tears – things are going well. I still haven't stepped on a scale because morning me is forgetful as... as... I dunno, something. But I have upped my weights (again!) at the gym and there is less gut than there was before. Not enter-in-a-bikini-pageant less gut, but a noticeable-hour-glass-figure-is-developing less gut.

My eight days of being my manager are nearing an end. While it wasn't without a few hiccups, we're not going to hell in a handbasket like I told our Director we would. Yay, for the small victories.

I recently completed a review of all the information in our training database. It took roughly 2 weeks and I have never been so happy that I snuck in so many nerd references into the database. It was fun to sit at my desk and giggle as I reviewed the file for the fake company Godzilla Inc. which is located on Gorilla-Whale Rd. (And if you nerdifacts, you'll know why that's funny.) But the best laugh I got was when I reviewed the data my coworker put in.

This coworker was in charge of handling the creating of the training scenarios and the original implementation of the database. One scenario involved creating 20 employees on a group and she called down to me to give her names for the people. I started calling out names of my extended family including my cousin, Declan.

I found Declan in the replicator data during my review except she had named him Dekleyn.

Dekleyn!

Google tells me that de Kleyn/DeKleyn is a moderately common Dutch last name, but no examples of it as a first name. In fairness to her, it's not too far off the sound; but if you're not sure wouldn't you just ask the person who said it in the first place?

At any rate, I'm sad I didn't call out Donagh. Would have loved to have seen her version of that name.

Sunday 24 April 2016

Technology Can Go F Itself

Since January, I have been working on a series of posts on Irish history to post in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin.

In other words, the first post should have been up this morning.

Saturday night, my computer went on the fritz. I was able to fix it, but I had to roll back all my items to my last backup... in early March.

Dammit!

First thing this morning, I phoned my friend who knows computers but no dice on retrieving my recent documents.

DAMMIT!

I have my links and rough drafts so I'm working on getting the posts done soon, but DAMMIT!

There may have been some tears this morning.

And some swearing.

Fine, a lot of swearing. I went full Malcom Turner on my computer. (Sorry, mom, for the swearing in this video.)


Hey, at least I backed up my files in March and not a year ago. Silver lining and all that jazz.

On the upside, a friend of mine who is a Latin Graduate Student turned a year older today. In a true show of friendship, I left her the FB message "Romani ite domum!" because it's some of the only Latin I know. If you don't understand the reference:


Naturally, this led to a conversation about Eddie Izzard's bit on the Latin language.


If you're ever feeling bad about something, going for a walk and thinking "Quad the fuck!" when you see something odd or silly is a great way to cheer yourself up. Trust me on that.

Tuesday 19 April 2016

Another Monday Down

Every Sunday night, I head to bed with the plan that I'm going to weigh myself first thing in the morning. The reason for this is for consistency in showing actual reductions in overall mass and not just "I took a really big dump after lunch and lost 5 lbs."

Every Monday morning, I remember that I'm going to do this as I'm walking out the door or already at work. Or sometimes I forget about it until Thursday.

But when I got up this morning... I totally forgot again.

Well, why not just do it another day of the week first thing in the morning?

Because I forget those mornings, too. Trust me. I've tried.

I really need to take a whiteboard marker to my bathroom mirror and leave myself a reminder. Something like "Is it Monday morning, dumbass? Then weigh yourself!" (Maybe I'll do that on my way to bed.)

Or I could write something nice. Whatevs!
While my ability to remember to step on a scale has been lacking, my attendance at the gym has not. To make it easier on my trainer's schedule, I moved from 6:30 am workouts to sometime after work workouts. I really thought I was going to hate them but I actually don't. I'm not super keen on the 5pm-everyone-just-got-off-work-and-went-to-the-gym workouts, but a little bit later is great. I have time to go home after work to grab a bite and the gym has cleared out enough I don't feel like screaming at people taking up my equipment.


Another important gym note: my trainer is Brazilian and I recently learned how to say "go [sorry mom] yourself" in Portuguese. These things are totally related.

This week is the start of 8 days of filling in for my manager while she's on vacation. She and I had a long meeting about what was coming on Friday, I took lots of notes, she sent me various follow up emails with files, etc. I sat down at my computer this morning and had couldn't make heads or tails of any of it. It was like my notes were in Russian. Then there were emails from people about things my manager and I had not discussed.

::breathes into a paper bag::

I already alluded to it on twitter but Business Kitty is my spirit animal this week. I might need to get a toy version of her for my desk.

Although, 1980s-something Spaceman would also be a pretty apt description of me at the moment.
SPACESHIP!!
I celebrated a birthday a few weeks ago. Every year I think that I should really do something for my birthday but I never do. My tentative Saturday-night-out plans were kiboshed when my one-drink-after-work Friday plans ended with us shutting down the restaurant. I'm mature enough to know that one night of heavy drinking on a weekend is enough.


Side note - hasn't this whole post just been a series of side notes? - my little brother and I planned out a pub crawl around Victoria after seeing this movie. It would have hit 9 pubs. We never did do it though. Hmm, summer goal perhaps?

The other two big things going on are that I'm back at studying Swahili and it's been going well, and Alumni Band is back on for another session.

I honestly don't think I could type a sentence that makes me more of a nerd than the one I just typed.


Only four more days to the weekend!

Friday 1 April 2016

Éirí Amach na Cásca (Easter Rising)

The last few weeks of March ended up being very Ireland-centric for me. And it wasn't just because of St. Patrick's Day. In fact, my St. Patrick's Day celebration this year consisted of making boozy cupcakes for my coworkers, and then hunkering down at home to watch "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" which I drank a solitary pint of Guinness. 

So, just a typical Thursday night, then? ;)

Guinness Chocolate Cupcakes with Bailey's Cream Cheese Icing.
It took a lot of will-power not to eat them all myself.
I'll never get a job as a barmaid with head like that!
What really made it an Ireland-centric month was that this past Easter weekend was the 100th Easter since the Easter Rising in Dublin (and a few isolated events in other parts of the island but mostly Dublin) so I spent a lot of my free time streaming the live stream of RTE of the centenary celebrations.

The date of Easter 100 years ago was at the end of April so some might argue that is isn't actually the 100th anniversary yet (that would be April 24, 2016) but as it's known as the Easter Rising, I'd give the centenary celebration committee a pass on actually planning everything for the Easter weekend.

Having said that, I've been working on a series of posts covering Irish history leading up to the Easter Rising and the subsequent War for Independence and Civil War which I was aiming to coincide with the April date because that's actually 100 years since the event.

Semantics.

In the mean time, if you're wondering what the Easter Rising was about and you can't wait for my much more detailed but probably considerably more boring account of it, here are two drunk Irish guys to explain it to you.


Any Questions?

(You can hear the Proclamation of the Irish Republic being read in front of the GPO as part of the centenary celebrations by clicking here.)