That Not So Fresh Feeling

For the first time in a very long time (probably > 4 years), I’ve hit the wall and become completely unmotivated. I won’t get into the specific details, but there’s just a hodge-podge (technical term) of work stuff going on that leaves me feeling empty, defeated, and broken. I feel like I’ve actually been a fighter for change (positive change, at that) in this company, and I know that I’ve worked extremely hard to make things better for the company, my co-workers, and our customers.

Don’t get me wrong, the company has (financially) treated me well. I’ve gotten the opportunity to do a lot of great things, and gotten opportunities I wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere.

But I kind of feel like we’re drifting in different directions. The company (as an entity, not necessarily the employees) is headed in one direction, and with that has come changes in tone, process, and even our moral compass. The things that made me excited and energized to come in and change the world have taken a back burner to onerous processes, misguided and (often) conflicting objectives, and just a grand feeling of a lack of efficacy.

So here I sit, entirely demotivated, chugging through the work I have to do, but watching as the little things that we used to do so well and made us successful (and got us to this inflection point) are falling through the cracks, people knowing ignoring them, knowing that they’re going to bite us in a month or two. But since that’s not right now, not this exact moment, no one really cares. Hell, every one of our systems is currently down and has been for a couple of minutes. Not because people are bad at their jobs, but because we aren’t taking the time to do things right.

We’re basically at the point of considering everyone in the company cheap labor. “Don’t worry if it’s scalable or the right solution, just do it and we’ll deal with the consequences.”

Easy to say when you’re not the one getting woken up at 2am.

It’s frustrating, it’s somewhat demeaning, and it’s utterly demotivating.

Sadly, it is fixable, but I don’t think I have it in me to fight to make people recognize that something needs to be fixed. Instead, the only motivation I have right now is to make a change to my own situation.

Today we had a visit from a good friend. Our friendly neighborhood office chipmunk (or squirrel). I’m pretty sure this is the guy who used to poop on my desk, before I got my handy-dandy office. He’s probably usually a night time guy, but this morning, he was out and about digging our cubes.

We tried to catch him. He was fast.

A couple of hours later, he showed up in a neighboring office, hanging out in a hat that was on the floor.

That lead to a mad chase into another office, where we cornered him, successfully coaxed him into a trash can, and freed him outdoors into the wild.

He was promptly eaten by a lion

He didn’t really get eaten. Later word was that he tried to get back into the building to hang out with us.

Saw this today browsing the web. I’m pretty sure that’s Little Pete.Stock images from like 15 years ago are awesome.

Pete & Pete is still awesome, by the way. You should know it rules.

They’re filming a movie near my office. It’s affectionately referred to by IMDB as “Untitled Kevin James Comedy.” I’m betting on it being a huge hit for a couple of reasons:

• It is written by *and* stars Kevin James
• It is also written by Salem the Cat
• It also stars Jayma Mays
• It is being filmed in Burlington, MA. At the Mall.

I smell a hit.

Anyway, they’ve apparently set up a production office right behind our building, and as I was walking over to talk to someone on the other side of the office, I saw some guy go zipping down a zip wire. I tried to get my camera in time, but missed any other awesome festivities. I did, however, take some awesome pictures of the amazing movie production set.

A ramp and a crane. No idea what they’re for, but they’re obviously super cool.

Some dudes and some metal stuff that looks like they’re about to have a steel cage match.

What movie would be complete without a Segway scooter-thingy.

Sadly, I missed the casting call to be an extra, I think. But that’s ok, I’m sure they’ll grab me from the Apple Store and decide to make me a leading character, ideally with magic powers and a talking cat (who once tried to take over the world).

So, last week:

• I worked pretty late every night on stuff that, for the most part, has nothing to do with my job
• Worked late enough on Wednesday, that I had to drive all the way to the Garden to not miss the entire Celtics game
• Rather than parking at the T and paying $3, I drove around and finally parked at the Government Center garage for $20
• I missed the first half of the Celtics game
• I then spent 40 minutes in park waiting to get out of the Government Center garage
• On the drive home, because I parked at Government Center, and not Sullivan Square (like I normally do), I took 93N home
• 93N was some of the worst road conditions I’ve ever driven in, leading me to skid towards parked traffic in front of me
• To avoid said parked traffic (already slowed by an accident), I ended up cutting my wheel as hard as possible, resulting in my car doing a 540 degree spin on 93N, catching the rear left bumper against the concrete median and sitting facing into oncoming traffic who had as difficult a time stopping as I did

So not the best week. Topping it off, my poor girlfriend had all of her wisdom teeth out and has been in pain for the better part of 4 days.

Here’s to Monday bringing on something better.

(For what it’s worth, it isn’t all bad. I went to a fun party, got to see the second half of the Celtics win over the Cavs, had a moral victory over a douchebag trying to cut me off in the garage, and got to spend a lot of time with the recovering girlfriend–including watching Blade Runner for the first time. And my car is in pretty good shape, all things being considered.)

In lieu of actually writing something, I bring you random work pictures from the past few days.

Shots of the road leading to work that I took through my windshield. This is after that big ol’ storm we had on Monday.

I think it’s funny to put signs on people’s doors and cubes and whatnot.

I’ve been super lazy about posting, mostly because I’ve been ridonkulously busy with work and the holidays and all that fun stuff.

But, I try to update my Twitter (if you care). And I’m going to try to post a bit over the next few days of my vaca (top music of ‘07! the drizzling shits that is affiliate marketing! something else!). In the meantime, hope your holidays rocked as much as mine did and the jolly fat man (or whatever the representative of your holiday might be) brought you Jelly Bellys.

I should spend sometime update my del.icio.us links too. Merry Festivus.

I’m waiting to get on a red eye back to NY (and then on home to Boston). When checking in, I saw a boat load of teens heading off to go somewhere.

I hoped to hell they weren’t going to be on my flight, since I’m hoping to sleep.

I’m not going to sleep. Fun.

On the bright side, I’m at least watching some TV I missed this week thanks to fox.com.

Vacation means I do stuff.

Like changing the theme on my blog (thanks http://www.blogohblog.com/).
Updating plugins.
Writing.
Other stuff.

So, if anything is broken, let me know.

It’s been a busy few weeks. The biggest news is probably my latest purchase: I got my first non-PC in the form of a MacBook Pro. I’d been looking at getting a laptop for a while, mostly because my existing laptop is old, underpowered, has a half-working keyboard, and had been resigned to sitting on my stereo so that I could stream music to it. I couldn’t even bring it anywhere, as the battery life was simply miserable.

Working at a web hosting company, spending a majority of my day ssh’d into a Unix box, I’d gotten very comfortable at the command-line again, much like I was back in my college days. Between the command line and the browser, I didn’t really use any major Windows applications at the office or at home. I use MS Office, occasionally, but I don’t even use that at home (where I use OpenOffice). My PC is still a great box, but it was a glorified game machine.

Taking it one step further, I’d realized how much of my life really is in the browser these days. My mail goes to Gmail; my calendar is Google Calendar; my RSS feed reader is Google Reader. A few years ago I ranted that I couldn’t see ever moving completely to a thin client/browser world. Granted, it was in the middle of a major Comcast outage, where they weren’t sending any traffic to Yahoo!, which is pretty significant. These days, while there are minor outages, it’s rare that I can’t get to my data online. When I can’t, I can get it via my cell phone (and once Google gets Calendar working on a phone, I’ll be pretty much set). Finally, with Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo!) exposing your data in interesting ways (RSS, iCal feeds, private HTML), you can always pull it down into your thick client and access it offline, should you need to.

I’ve also had a desire to get creative again, whether its restarting the podcast (which will happen), blogging more, working on my website, or just generally brainstorming other ideas, I’ve needed a way to get untethered from my PC. It’s cold in my little office during the winter, and I can’t neatly multitask in front of the TV. With most of the creative ideas requiring the authoring of at least a little bit of code, I was looking for a laptop that would let me use my friendly Vim application to hack some HTML, CSS, or Perl.

All that put together lead to me looking at a Mac. Not because they’re trendy, but because it’s the nicest Unix machine you’ll see. OS X is a very pretty, and functional, interface on top of a Unix backend. I can take my laptop to work and scp files from a terminal window to our data center at rates that greatly exdeed anything I can get over FTP. I can pop open a terminal window and quickly turn on apache and mess with some Perl code before I upload it to my website. I can open up GarageBand and pull together a podcast a little more easily than I can in Audacity on the PC. The ability to neatly run Windows in either VMWare or Parallels while inside of OS X is what pushed me over the top. (Actually, it was one of my co-workers showing me IE running in coherence mode inside Paralells, which meant he could have IE next to Firefox next to Safari on his desktop, allowing him to test 3 major browsers at the same time. Very cool.)

So, I pulled the trigger and picked up a MacBook Pro. It took me a little while to get used to the differences between the Mac and Windows, but the learning curve to being productive is really shallow. I’ve nearly replicated all of the functionality of my Windows PC, but with the ability to do it from anywhere in my house. I can listen to music streaming from my iTunes library while I type this up, waiting for Heroes to buffer up enough on the DVR so that I can watch it without commercials. Soon, I’ll probably throw together another episode of my podcast, which I can do significantly more easily now that I don’t have to start up a bunch of different applications (I’m still figuring out how to make the built-in mic work, as it seems to record to quietly).

So, I hope that my new found freedom will allow me to be a bit more prolific. With work and general life stuff, I’ve had to cut back my posting at The House That Dewey Built — I’ve sort of just become the tech guy and will let Jeff and the new folks concentrate on posting (though, I might have to throw something up there when the feeling hits me). I’ve got plans to at least throw something up at ryantoohil.com and let it be my testing ground for learning more CSS and JavaScript. I’m feeling a bit more invigorated, which is nice.

I actually want to build my home page around my little Mii off of my Wii. I haven’t gotten a good screenshot yet, but here’s an approximation. And yes, I’m a huge dork.

Hopefully, this desire to be creative will last. I’m going to try to get something up most days this week. I’m thinking that I’ll finally revisit the “So you want to have a web site” series. I’m planning on getting up a Dear Leader-centric podcast.

If you’re still out there reading, feel free to leave a comment. I’m curious to see how many are actually reading this. Checking my logs, I’ve got at least two readers in Google Reader (1 is me …) and 2 in NewsGator. If I was smart, I’d move to FeedBurner so I could track it, but I’ve got no desire to do that just yet.

That’s all for today. Heroes is starting, and I’m hoping that they’ll recover from their recent doldrums and put together a fun episode that doesn’t smell like fish.