good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye

its been a long, brutal >1 month since i last blogged it up.  first came the visit of a sendes amigo, cut short by poor planning (on my part) and a professional conference i jetted off to in chicago.  the con was a total waste as i only parroted trivia at a booth, shilling for a well-meaning open standards body that is insufficiently adopted.  no time to network or learn; the only worthwhile activity was a brief, but glorious meeting with the mccraw clan.  rockin'

upon my return, work went to hell - literally we are at day 十九 of degraded performance on our primary enterprise application: performance ranging from sluggish to 30 seconds before a single 512x512 image shows up (in a series of hundreds or even thousands of images).  not to mention the downtime and data corruption (not permanent, but annoying and requiring multiple re-sends, wasting network and human resources on symptom-solving instead of problem-solving).  our vendor has generally been arguably worse than useless, leading us off track, being argumentative and resistant.  only a few members of their company seem to have any semblance of regard for our organizational well-being and patient care quality.  it seems to be the generally-accepted idea now that we broke our storage system by messing with it continually trying to prove it wasn't our storage system's fault (since the predicating event was a reboot of some gateway servers that act as cache buffers for source data before being archived, as well as conduits for data distribution from short-term cache).

as a result, our team has been working 10-12 hours days 6 days a week, and the burn is starting to show.  staff meetings have are grim affairs and tcons are verbal battlefields, with the more sane-at-the-moment jumping on the mute button to prevent further decay.  its a terrible situation, feeling helpless, not having the sources, and fighting the only people with the resources you need.  right now its hard to separate the trees/forest, but our fearless leader is braving the charge to get us what we need to bring things back online.  at this point, determing root cause has a lower probability than finding out why wtc 7 collapsed and all we care about is restoring service.  a return to the normal.

i took a comp day today to get my shit sorted at the MVA; even showing up 30 minutes early at 08:00 and getting place 2/50 in the frozen line, i didn't leave until after 11:00.  at least i blend in with the pack now; only $708 to get the man off my back.  at least i declined the voting registration.  i realized it was probably a bad idea too, but i had seriously considered bringing a flask of JD to shotgun while in the line...good thing i don't have a drinking problem.

in the meanwhile, i've been enjoying life when i can.  a drunken appearance at the dept. holiday party felt disastrous, but no pink slips have been received yet (in fact, i'm told my team was toasted by the chairman).  since then, the personal liquor stash approaches collegiate levels, for use when not on-call.  certainly not as healthy or safe as other stress-relief, but sadly effective.

i conquered mass effects lack of documentation by re-rolling a combat-focused character, which made the game much easier in early stages.  the godawful inventory management system is a blight on an otherwise mostly fantastic game.  certainly the best AAA title released since Deus Ex, lightyears ahead of Bioshock (perhaps portal had potential, but it was only a wet dream compared to owning the harem).  i haven't adequately galaxied yet, and rock band is too depressing to solo...just a reminder of how all my friends are in WI.  i did briefly hold the number 3 or 4 spot for vocals in one of the bowie DLC tracks a few hours after it came out and get a throne for the kit.

not much else cool, aside from that the discbox landed finally. vinyl sounds painfully good - a sad reminder of how CD mastering is part of the cancer killing modern music.  the bonus disc is ripe with raw win.

back to jack, coke, and yorke, thanks to my friends at sony, yamaha, and klipsch, and BGE.