Monthly Archives: March 2007

Caffeine-induced megalomania

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JavaOh god I love caffeine! Welcome back into my life O wonder drug.

This post finds me half an hour after my second coffee of the day, a very fine cappuccino  courtesy of the Food Inc. at the bottom of the tower. At this point I am still talking waaay to fast and feeling deliciously omnipotent. I have just come from a meeting in which I introduced the two managers who control my job and who hadn’t ever properly met before to each other. It rocked. In another 25 minutes I will be running off to another meeting (at which I am at risk of being fed more coffee!) with a guy who has been the intermittent bane of my existance and one of the aforementioned managers. In the interim I have to read a dense five-page project plan and work out how I feel about it so that I can speak coherently and lucidly about it in the meeting. Nonetheless, I am pausing to write this blog post (insanely quickly and with minimal quality control) because caffiene has made me ALL POWERFUL and I am quite confident that I can do ANYTHING in fifteen minutes or LESS! I know that a crash will likely follow the boom, but right now I DON’T CARE! 🙂

WARNING: Falling people

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park warning signFalling peopleThis gem found at the Eagles Nest in Bunurong Marine National Park, between Inverloch and Cape Paterson.

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Silly WordPress really wants very badly to truncate these images.

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“Fly, you fools!”

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The only solution to the truncation issue appears to be LOTS MORE TEXT! If anyone knows how to cleanly and appropriately force WordPress to do a break-clear or similar, so that images longer than a post don’t get truncated and mess up the formatting of subsequent posts, please coment or otherwise tell me.

E and I had an excellent day yesterday driving down random and nameless roads around Cape Paterson, looking for various things including dinosaur bones and long vanished shipwrecks, or even the beaches upon which the aforementioned wrecks allegedly occurred, and having fun despite mostly only finding dust, slime and infinite midges.

I am wishing now that I’d taken a photo of the one piece of shipwreck we found: a mysterious old metal wheel, about the diameter of a basketball, so rusted as to be fused onto the rocky shore. Signs around wreck beach indicated a historical marker, but all we found was the wheel and a large, important-looking piece of rock set in a concrete plinth, with absolutely no adornment on any side. Very odd.

Working from home: Is it sustainable?

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Right now, as I write this, I am theoretically ‘working from home’, even though I’m not at home. I’m in Wonthaggi, telecommuting from the study/lounge of the flat that E’s employers have given her while she serves the term of her indenture completes another educational and fulfilling rotation.

I have been advised by various people that Wonthaggi is not a great place to be if you want to do anything, or at least, anything other than farming or surfing. I am looking forward quite eagerly to the challenge of doing anything other than sit in front of this bloody laptop and attempt to work. The phrase stir crazy covers it nicely: this lounge/study is a nicer place in almost any imaginable respect than my office in the city, yet it is also an unspeakably boring place. There’ something intensely perverse about all of this: I don’t generally enjoy chatting with my workmates. What do we have in common besides work? Very little. I don’t enjoy being surrounded by people typing and and talking on the phone or to each other: they disrupt my work and make me twitchy. But, take them all away, and it is literally a matter of seconds before I start to gibber.

This leads me now to question a fundamental life goal that I have long cherished and held dear: The idea that one day I will be able to only work from home.

It’s like I’ve been saving up all this time to buy a car, only to discover that I hate driving. What do I want to do with my career? I know I’m good at system administry, but that road leads to roughly here and then meanders off into management, a future akin to eternity in hell as I see it.

I could have a go at making Trouble into a company, but I fear that I just don’t have the immense metallic gonads necessary to found a real tech startup in this post-dot-com-boom era, nor the large pile of cash that some lucky buggers carried away at the end of that particular free-for-all.

I had many plans, when I was twenty, for what I would have done by the time I was thirty. It never occurred to me that I might need a plan for what to do after I turned thirty. 🙂