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Thoughts on Being Thirty

By Chief Oddball on February 23rd, 2010 at 11:22 pm

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At 6:43 p.m. this evening I officially turned thirty. For the last few days — weeks, even — I haven’t known exactly how to feel. Mostly I wasn’t even thinking about my upcoming milestone birthday; I’ve been too preoccupied with how wholly dissatisfying and depressing life seems to have been of late. My wife and I have dealt with a lot of stress: career issues, medical issues, and some that have been a combination of both. This has been going on for months, and is largely responsible for the dearth of posts on this site. On any given day, after I finally get done with work and chores for the day, I don’t want to think about doing much more than playing video games or reading.

I feel like things started taking a turn for the better today, though. It seems odd to say that now, because the first half of the day was filled with little stresses that really got under my skin: incompetence at work; awful seasonal traffic filled with bad drivers making dumb decisions; my doctor treating me like my time wasn’t valuable by making me late for a meeting while he carried on a conversation with his next patient during my appointment time. After that, though, things got a lot better — thanks in part to my wife and family, and thanks in part to my simply freeing my mind, taking charge of things and declaring, “Fuck it.”

I had an impromptu meeting (which I was late for, as I mentioned) at work, during which I received another massive assignment that came out of nowhere as they always do, to design all the user interfaces for a new web app that’s going to do project management, customer management, task management, time tracking, employee management, support queueing and just about everything else. At its conclusion, I pretty much said, “Bye, fragsters.” I hung up the phone, logged off the computer and went to Gamestop. Yeah, no shit.

My wife bought me Heavy Rain (the new PS3 game) and more Microsoft points. We picked up my parents, who are here in town, and went to Carrabba’s for dinner. After a good meal we came back home for some birthday cake, and queued up the Office Space DVD for a few laughs (we’d been quoting it in the car all the way home). It was a great time, and a great way to kick off the next decade of my life. For the first time in a while, I felt like I actually have something to look forward to as that next decade marches on.

I’ve always allowed myself to be taken advantage of to some degree, and I’m about tired of it. If I could make one personal resolution as I enter my thirties, it’s to stop being such a goddamn pushover. Or, if I absolutely must accept being pushed around, to have the balls to push back when it’s strategically advantageous. My company has really put the screws to me over my health care, and since Christmas it’s been one stress after another, more and more bills, confusion and red tape — all so they could save their W-2 employees a few dollars a month while I lose my coverage entirely. For the month of February I’ve paid for two insurance companies at once while my employer drags me through this transition, and most of it I don’t really expect to get back. How bad do you think I feel about “cutting class” early today so I could do something for my own birthday? Not a damn bit, frankly.

I am, however, going to go into my work tomorrow with a clear head, with a renewed focus and energy on my tasks. I finally feel like I’m breaking through into a place where I can actually care about my work again, in a way that I haven’t been able to for weeks upon weeks. At the same time, I’m going to remember that that in this world, no one gets ahead without taking advantage. If you play the nice guy every day, you’re not going anywhere. You just have to know when the right time is to unleash your inner “bad guy.”

So, while I go forward into my thirties with the aforementioned in mind, what else have I got in store for my week? Well, when I’m here at home — this doesn’t apply in Thailand, where I don’t have full control over my activities — I like to bring a little slice of birthday celebration to every day of my birth week. A nice meal, a slice of cake, a marathon session of gaming, a favorite Star Trek episode, or whatever else suits my fancy.

On the gaming front, there’s plenty for me to do. I’m still going through Mass Effect 2, which is easily the most amazing game I’ve played in 2010 — and which I feel will be a Game Of The Year contender, even knowing the kinds of titles that are yet to release this year. It’s the perfect blend of adventure, role-playing and shooting, all tied together by a well-written story with a cast of excellent characters voiced by some real powerhouse talent. If you even remotely like sci-fi space opera, Mass Effect 2 is unquestionably a game you must play.

There’s also Heavy Rain, a PS3 exclusive that I just picked up today (thanks honey!). This is a different type of game — a sort of interactive narrative that makes you feel like you’re playing a movie. Admittedly, there could be limited appeal with such an approach, leaving players to grow bored or complain that they’re not playing so much as watching. But the free demo I tried was actually quite engaging, and despite the fairly wonky controls, I decided it was worth a purchase. I like these “interactive story” type games, and felt like rewarding and supporting the developer rather than saving it for the bargain bin or the rental store.

I almost picked up BioShock 2 today as well, but had to be realistic: I wouldn’t be playing it for weeks to come. I’ve still got Mass Effect to get through, and then — although I am embarrassed to admit it — I still need to finish the original BioShock! It was a game that I got about halfway through before putting it aside thanks to a tidal wave of amazing games that all landed at the same time, and the fact that I missed the first three weeks of the game’s launch due to my Xbox failure. Once I get ready to play the sequel, I may frankly pick it up used. To be honest, I never thought of BioShock as a game that needed a sequel — but I hear that, as a sequel, it’s actually quite good.

As an outro, I’d like this post to serve as a the first in a new line of posts that return to my original theme — commentary on news items, reviews of movies and games, and general gabbery about work, music, life, and whatever else I may be into at the moment. I’ve really let this place go, because in a way I think I really let myself go, emotionally at least. With so much to talk about in the news now that personally interests me, and with my goal to set foot on a new path, now seems like the perfect time to get back to that. Starting tomorrow, I hope, that will come to fruition. Stay tuned.

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Work/Play

By Chief Oddball on January 16th, 2010 at 4:32 pm

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Local headline: Woman crashes BMW into photo shop while attempting to park.

Well…welcome to winter in Florida. The fact that we’re having our busiest “snowbird season” in two or three years must be a bittersweet pill to swallow for the owner of that Fifth Avenue photo shop, who says this is the third time in 16 years that a car has driven through his front window. Oh well, perhaps the additional business this year will help him pay his undoubtedly increasing insurance premiums.

Anyway, I would also be remiss if I didn’t welcome you officially to Oddball Update 2010. Contrary to recent evidence, this blog has not fallen under new management. I’ve simply been too preoccupied with not doing anything constructive to give much of a crap about posting anything. In truth, the holidays this past year were rather hit-and-miss. The last two weeks of December were an emotional roller coaster of good and bad, hair-pulling frustration and classic good times. It was hard to know which you were going to get when you woke up in the morning.

Things have settled down a bit in the past week or two, but the “head in the sand” mode into which I regressed during the holidays is still here. I work every day ’till six or six-thirty, take a brisk walk for my daily exercise and fresh air, and play some enjoyable video games in the evening before kicking back with Apple for some chatting, gossiping or giggling like schoolchildren before bed. The routine hasn’t varied much, if at all, in a month. It’s quite comforting, really, like your grandmother’s fresh-baked strawberry pie or a nice hot bowl of soup on a cold day.

Unfortunately, this routine hasn’t been very conducive to creative pursuits, such as writing, designing, recording or any of the other constructive tomfoolery I like to get up to from time to time. Even so, I’m trying to move beyond caring about such matters. Somewhere after I got out of high school and into a job where I actually had to (and wanted to) care about what I was spending my time doing, I started getting very sensitive about how my hours were spent. I’d get all guilt-wracked if I felt like I hadn’t “accomplished something” or “done something constructive” even during my off hours. So on those nights when I’d just feel like playing a game, watching a movie or reading a book, I’d go to bed feeling like I wasted the evening.

Not anymore, really. I’m eating it up. Give me three hours to explore the wasteland in Fallout 3, or explore the galaxy in Star Trek Online (which I’ll talk more about some other time). I’ll go to bed happy. Usually much happier than I was before I started playing, when I’d just gotten off work for the day. In fact, during the holidays I was pretty damn surly just about every weekday, at least until the sun set.

For a time, there, I really felt like the guys at work were trying to screw me. Not really on purpose; I had no illusions about them deliberately designing a conspiracy against me or anything grandiose like that. I just felt marginalized, like it was easy for them to make choices that ended up screwing me because I’m out of sight and out of mind down here in Florida, whereas the rest of the crew is in another part of the country (or the world, in some cases). See, when I was first asked to sign on with this firm, I was part of a small Florida satellite office that no longer exists today. Or, more to the point, I’m the last remaining member of its former ranks.

It all started just days before Christmas, when the company admins decided they wanted to switch our health insurance group plan to a new vendor by the first of the year, in order to save everybody some money on premiums. Unfortunately, since I work out of a different state and am thus a 1099 contractor (so the company doesn’t have to play by Florida’s rules), the new heath insurer decided I wasn’t going to qualify because they don’t like contractors. So this touched off an immediate scramble where I and the human resources coordinator tried to put together a solution that would allow Apple and I to retain coverage. Given that we’re still trying to get pregnant right now, the possibility of losing health coverage was not something I wanted to hear.

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2009: The Year Entropy Accelerated

By Chief Oddball on November 6th, 2009 at 2:51 pm

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· 3 Comments

As the ill-fated 2009 starts to wind itself down, it’s making it more clear than ever that it’s not going to let us forget how much pain and suffering it inflicted on us all. Some more than others, obviously, but by-and-large it’s been a pretty depressing year. My family in particular was hit harder by more cataclysmic events at once than at any point in my lifetime, with my dad losing his job due to the slowing economy, the deaths of two family members (just a month apart, no less) and a myriad of other problems besides.

Although Apple and I have fared pretty well in comparison to many other Americans — even other members of our families — we’ve still received a disproportionate amount of negative reinforcement from The Powers That Be. This week, in particular, was like a microcosm of that very idea, presenting us with one out-of-left-field event after another: breakdowns, unforeseen events, ridiculous instances of lightning striking twice. The Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to have conspired against us to accelerate entropy to an almost comical level.

I used to do a lot of bitching on this blog. Not so much anymore. But today is one of those days where I feel like if I don’t get it off my chest here, I’ll take it out on someone who doesn’t deserve it, so away we go with a little old-fashioned rant.

Forfeiting the Comcast Battle (But Not Quite the War)

My seemingly eternal struggle with Comcast over the billing and service for my TiVo HD came to an anti-climactic end early this week. (You can follow the history of the saga here.) After apparently getting a solution from corporate to the two HD service fees I was getting charged — one for each CableCARD in my TiVo — the celebration came to an abrupt halt last weekend when my second tuner lost all HD service. Again.

Sick and tired of it, I bypassed phone support altogether and filed another corporate complaint. This time, however, despite the corporate head office’s agreement with my position, the “corporate liaison officer” at our local Comcast department gave me a call to say there was nothing that can be done. In my area, she explained, the billing system requires that a separate HD service charge be assessed on each single-stream CableCARD. So, if I want HD service on both tuners of my DVR, I have to pay for it twice. And that’s that.

So I asked her, if Comcast would offer me a multi-stream CableCARD to replace my two single-stream cards, would I only pay one HD fee despite getting the exact same service? She said yes. Of course, Comcast still doesn’t have multi-stream CableCARDs here. As a result, I pay twice as much for the same service, because of their lack of equipment. Oh, that’s really nice; I’m so glad I could help. Is that extra money I’m paying you going to finance, say, acquisition of any fucking multi-stream CableCARDs, by any chance? (The woman did say that multi-stream cards were currently being tested and would be offered to us early next year, but I’ll believe that when I can hold one in my hands.)

As a consolation, the Comcast corporate liaison officer told me that they’re already crediting me for the extra $6.95 HD service charge by lowering our second CableCARD fee to $1.50, because it’s normally like 8 bucks. Huh? According to Comcast’s own CableCARD FAQ, the second card fee can be only “up to $2.05.” They’re saving me 55 cents, not $6.95. And if you check that same link, you’ll see that I wouldn’t even be paying a second card fee if I just had a multi-stream card. That’s another $1.50 I wouldn’t be paying if Comcast could offer current equipment.

But by this point I had had it. I’m sorry, I really had. I just can’t do this fucking song and dance anymore. I told the woman to just go ahead and restore service to my second CableCARD, and I’ll pay their extra $6.95 monthly fee. What else am I gonna do? At some point you have to recognize that it’s just seven fucking dollars. I will be hounding them next year to make sure I’m one of the first people to get a multi-stream card — assuming that wasn’t just a line of bull — but until then, I have more important things to deal with.

Speaking of which…I’m just getting started.

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Ketchup

By Chief Oddball on September 20th, 2009 at 10:33 pm

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No. It’s not a post about condiments. It’s yet another: Random Posting Surprise™. As in, I’ll start writing something and surprise myself as to what it’s about. I once again started slacking off on posting here after a fairly good start back when I last updated the Oddball Update’s design. This weekend I finally got around to recategorizing all my old posts in the archive — well, I started, anyway — and this left me feeling like I should take a break from that to post something new for a change.

Last week we were in Michigan for a few days, visiting friends and family. We spent Labor Day there, and I actually got to take a couple of days off from work, so it ended up being a four-day weekend for me. The weather was perfect most of the time we were there; sunny and in the mid-70s with the exception of a couple back-to-back rainy days. We had ample opportunity to chat with my family members, I got to see my friends Pooch and Reaper (and pick up Donutown besides, which simply has to happen every time I’m in town), and eat out at our favorite restaurants. We also did a fair amount of eating in this time as well, which was fine with us, because it meant enjoying that much more of my grandmother’s home cooking.

Surprisingly, I did not have much in the way of allergy troubles. I often get bouts of asthma-like congestion and an uncontrollable runny nose when I’m back in the homeland, likely due to the dust and molds present in my old house’s ductwork, if I had to guess. The season contributes a lot to this phenomenon, especially because when it’s cold enough to warrant firing up the furnace, the warm air blowing through those ducts is usually enough to put my sinuses on an express elevator to hell. This time, though, the furnace was not needed, and we only ran the A/C a couple of times. For the most part, I had no trouble. That was certainly a relief.

And, as I mentioned in my initial review of The Beatles: Rock Band, my video game day with my friends was inspiring enough for me to reacquaint myself with the “plastic musical instrument” genre of games after a long hiatus. Since then, Apple and I have continued to have a blast with the Beatles game. I’ve been able to re-familiarize myself with my old favorite songs, which I mostly haven’t listened to in a while, and Apple was introduced to a whole swath of the Beatles’ catalog with which she was previously unfamiliar. The other day she came into my room and took all the Beatles albums off my CD rack, then proceeded to arrange a mix disc which she put in her car. Listening to it on the way to dinner the other evening was like going on a trip down memory lane.

The Beatles’ music makes me think of my high school days, for it was then that I first started listening to them. My friend Pooch introduced me to the group and their music besides, and I promptly started buying up the albums, working my way back from the Beatles’ latter years, the tracks from which I was most familiar. Hearing those songs again today mostly reminds me of driving my old Grand Prix, for a Beatles CD or cassette tape was never far from my car stereo whenever I went home from school, drove to or from my friends’ houses or wherever else I was off to. There were a lot of things wrong with those years, but the smaller they get in my rear-view mirror, the more the good times come to the fore — hanging out with friends, discovering new music, playing the great computer games of the era, and enjoying Junes, Julys and Augusts filled with relaxation and creativity in the pleasant summer weather of Michigan.

Pooch is still introducing me to bands, although this time they’re mostly Japanese in origin. Last week’s trip to Michigan was no exception, for we got together and I picked up some new albums from Shoko Suzuki (whose lovely retro-sounding song “Hi, Hello” I’m listening to right now), Shonen Knife, Ayumi Hamasaki and Ryoko Shinohara.

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Plans

By Chief Oddball on July 17th, 2009 at 1:35 am

Filed under Journal, Site ··· 6 Comments

I ought to be posting something here, but not much has been coming to me in these last few weeks. If I haven’t been too busy with work to figure out what to say, I’ve been in no mood to actually say it.

I’ve decided that I’m a much happier man when I’m working for just one boss. Although I’ve worked a number of extra hours in the evenings since this past weekend, those hours were all spent in service to a large project we were just awarded at my main place of employment. Just this afternoon we delivered the final materials to the client, ending the harried design draft phase of this endeavor. Although the client was pleased, I think it was my boss who was even more pleased by the energy with which I approached this project and enabled us to deliver something really top-quality to the client. And despite the near-monolithic amounts of effort I’ve put into this, I feel energized and in high spirits about what we’ve accomplished.

Now I just wish I could siphon some of that energy into my personal projects, such as this website. Not long ago, I was reading the personal blog of one of my favorite TV reviewers, Jamahl “Jammer” Epsicokhan, when I came across a post that I found especially relevant. In it, Jammer describes the evolution of the weblog from a pointless vehicle for personal piffle into a powerful vehicle that allows bloggers to become the 21st century equivalent of the editorial columnist. I found this interesting because I’ve been doing what might be loosely described as “blogging” since 1999, and my own blog(s) have gone down an inverted path, in fact de-volving from sources of commentary, reviews and rants into a space for little more than updates about what I did during the week or how much work I have to do.

It occurred to me that the content on this site has essentially become the “free-form journal updates” that more accomplished writers and journalists like Jammer once shrugged off as “stupid.” In the process of freeing myself of negativity by shutting off the deluge of you-can’t-stop-it doom and gloom in the daily papers, TV news and talk radio, I also robbed myself of what was a generous source of content that could be discussed, commented on, ranted about or lampooned mercilessly. I’m still not in a hurry to go back to inundating myself with news, so what other options do I have for making these so-called Oddball Updates a bit more relevant — or at least interesting?

Since I am so well-versed in the sphere of gaming, I’ve decided to put more focus on writing reviews and commentary on games both old and new. I’m also considering reinventing the Oddball Oddcast as a gaming-oriented podcast meant to deliver news about upcoming releases, impressions and reviews of games I’ve played, and even info about how to save money or get some good deals for your gaming fix.

I’m not going to turn this into a gaming blog, though — there’s also plenty of room for book reviews, tales of the new recipes for tasty and healthy organic meals that Apple and I have been enjoying, the usual updates about life and how things are going, and yes, maybe even a little news commentary as well.

I’m also tired of feeling constrained by the one-post limit on my front page, so I’ve also been working on a new layout for the site which will be going live as soon as I actually get around to finishing it. I’m actually putting the new design together from scratch, in a self-imposed exercise to actually get my creative juices flowing again, as it had been too long since I actually did any kind of meaningful web design (either for work or for pleasure). More important than the look and feel of the site, though, is the need for me to regularly and consistently post on it, so that’s what I’ll endeavor to do — even before the new design goes online.

A lot of crazy stuff went down at work this week, and it sounds like there’s more to come tomorrow, even though it’s Friday, a day on which I personally believe people should keep their crazy stuff to themselves until the following week. But I’m looking forward to working on these new ideas for the Oddball Update this coming weekend. Hopefully I won’t feel too burnt out.

The laptop battery’s about to bite it, so I’m gonna end this now. Hope to have something more to say soon.

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Trepidation

By Chief Oddball on July 1st, 2009 at 12:41 am

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A lot of stuff is going through my mind right now.

It was a strange day. The weather, ironically, was analogous to my mood: It started off cloudy with a few spurts of rain, then the sun came out. Soon, clouds moved in once again, only to vanish nearly as quickly as they had returned. Then, this evening, it poured rain not once, but twice, with an overcast period in between. Mother nature must have felt like she was being catapulted from one extreme to the other.

That’s about how I felt today, too.

For a start, I don’t think I slept that well last night — it was a slow beginning to the day, and one mostly executed in a haze, as my eyes felt perpetually tired (complete with an annoying muscle spasm in the left lower eyelid, in fact, which probably made me look like one of those twitchy-eyed anime characters). In the early afternoon, before lunch, I had an acupuncture appointment to keep. Fortunately, the weather decided to brighten up just then, and I decided to take the GTO.

After an invigorating drive to the clinic, I received some good news: My blood pressure was back to normal. When I first started acupuncture, the doctor checked my blood pressure and found it a little high. In retrospect, I’m chalking it up to the tremendous stress I had been under for the entire week preceding that check. Things have been going a lot better since this past weekend, and I think I was able to cool off a bit. I even think the tip of my tongue is a little less red than it’s been, although the doctor didn’t seem to agree. (According to Chinese medicine theory, the color of one’s tongue is indicative of the level of “fire” in your heart. If the tip of your tongue is too red, you suffer from too much stress and worry. Mine’s been pretty red lately.)

I felt pretty energized by the time I got home — not sure whether it was the acupuncture, the GTO driving, or both. Apple had made a nice chicken fricassee for lunch, which I enjoyed with a side salad and some black olives. I thought things were going to get better from that point on. Unfortunately, they got worse.

In addition to having continual problems working efficiently, I was treated to some disturbing developments in other aspects of my life which contributed to a general undermining of my Great Faith in the Universe™. I’m not going to detail any of those developments here, but what really kicked me out of my comfort zone was that some of them forced me to take a look at the way I do business, and how the roles I’ve assumed at my place of employment are affecting my overall skill set.

There really is no better way to describe my business acumen than “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” Throughout my career, I’ve always worked for relatively small software shops — with my current place of employment being the smallest one yet. Now don’t get me wrong; I like these close-knit companies where everybody knows each other on not just a professional level, but a fairly casual level as well. When he still lived in the local area, I used to hang out and play video games with my boss (sometimes, at his specific request, in lieu of actually doing any work!). The trade-off comes when you realize that you have to assume so many duties at the company — “wear so many hats” is another way of putting it — that you wind up spreading your skills thin across an increasing number of specialties.

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And I Thought Last Week Was Bad.

By Chief Oddball on June 25th, 2009 at 11:59 pm

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What is it, Thursday already? It’s been nothing short of a ridiculous week from start to finish. I’ve worked until after 11:00 p.m. every day thus far. One night I went to bed with a headache severe enough to blur my vision. Tonight I paced back and forth in my office for nearly an hour, hashing through the apocalypse running through my brain. Tomorrow I’m expecting a sidework client to review the completed work I sent him last night, but assuming he doesn’t drop a bombshell on me, I might actually be looking at a fairly quiet Friday night…and even a quiet weekend.

This particular client doesn’t have a habit of dropping bombshells — quite the opposite, actually — so I think I’m safe. Probably.

Most of this week’s frustration, however, came from a project with a somewhat tight deadline that I signed on for, and which progressively became more and more difficult to deliver on as further and more detailed requirements streamed in. It recently reached the point at which I had to take a serious look at the way things were going and be brutally honest with myself: Did I have any hope of meeting the requirements given the time and resources I have available to me? I spent literally hours hashing this question out, trying to find a formula that would produce an answer of “Yes,” but in the end, I could not.

I still don’t know where that project is going to go from here, but I couldn’t continue to watch it spiral further and further out of control (if it was ever within control, a thing of which I am doubtful). I did some research, analyzed the situation as I saw it and wrote up an honest report for the client. Not much else I could do, in good conscience. Now I guess we see how it pans out.

The current state of my various jobs, however, seems to suggest that I’ll have some time to recover some sanity this weekend. I have another acupuncture appointment on Saturday afternoon, but other than that, I’m hoping to not make any plans. The only thing I might do is go see the new Transformers 2 movie, although in that case, I’d want to first watch the Blu-ray disc of the first film which has been gracing my countertop for the last month and a half. We rented it from Netflix, you see. It’s been weeks, I think, since I had time to watch anything from Netflix. (In the interim, Apple has been going crazy renting Korean shows, so more power to her — at least somebody’s using the service.)

I’ve also continued to enjoy my iPhone 3GS, what little time I’ve had to use it. The few calls I’ve placed or taken have sounded phenomenal, and I haven’t even bothered to look at the signal strength indicator because I never worry about it dropping a call. Slowly but surely, as well, the apps I use that were broken by the OS 3.0 upgrade (eReader chief among them) are being fixed. Now I can finally read my eBooks again. I still haven’t had an opportunity to take much in the way of interesting photos or video with it, although I did set myself up with a YouTube account so I can upload whatever I shoot directly to their service. I tested this feature once and it worked pretty well then.

Having spent next to no time on any of my own pursuits in well over a week, and only insignificantly more before then, there’s a lot of stuff stacking up around the house that needs doing. Apple’s laptop (which used to be my laptop, actually) needs a serious dose of reformatting; I’ve never seen anything run so slow. I’ve got Netflix to catch up on, a story I want to get back to, and even some minor modifications to make to this site. It’s fortunate that I’ve been feeling energized by some unknown force these last few days, otherwise I shudder to think how I might have (or not have) gotten through the week.

One last warning: I’m probably going to be switching web hosts again soon (possibly very soon) due to some email issues, so yeah, you’ve been warned.

That’s all for today, I guess. Somehow, it’s already midnight.

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One Insane Week

By Chief Oddball on June 21st, 2009 at 10:40 pm

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Only on rare occasions do I look forward to the dawn of a new Monday. However, I’m going to take the arrival of tomorrow morning as official closure on this week from hell that we just got done wrapping up. It was hell not only for me, but for essentially my entire family as well; partially for the same reasons, and partially for different reasons altogether. The end result for all involved, one way or another, was exhaustion. At least, I’m happy to say, this weekend got progressively better, finally ending on a high note.

It all begin at the beginning of last week, when I learned that my great uncle had passed away. I belong to a very small family, so the loss of even one of its members — particularly one as cherished as “Tex,” the only great uncle I ever had the opportunity to get to know — is always keenly felt. As hard to take as losing him was, the experience was nothing short of a nightmare for my mom, grandmother and the rest of Tex’s family, as his final days were a flurry of emergency medical response and hospital bureaucracy that put some of the worst aspects of the U.S. health care industry in the spotlight. In the end, though, the family can at least rest assured that Tex is now at peace, and no longer suffering the mind-robbing effects of Alzheimer’s Disease as he had been for the last several years.

I’m the only child of two only children, so that should tell you all you need to know about just how small my family is. Not having any actual aunts or uncles, it was my mom’s uncle Tex who filled that role for me, and we always had a great time together. As early as the mid-1980s, he and I would go out shopping at the record store and have lunch together at one of my favorite restaurants, where we would talk and laugh and snark about countless things — like that time at Bill Knapps in 1987 when the “Happy Birthday” song got stuck on an endless loop, and we giggled about it for the rest of the afternoon.

Visiting the video arcade at the former Wonderland Mall was another of my favorite “Uncle Tex” activities, and for my birthday one year, he gave me a suede leather pouch filled with quarters. I still have it. Although most of the quarters have been spent, I saved a few of the originals, whose dates indicate they were minted in the early ’80s.

Into the 1990s, I became enchanted with Tex’s stories of World War II, particularly the Battle of the Bulge and all the other lore he used to tell me about. Sometimes he would tell stories I’d heard before — like the tale of the briefcase-bomb assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, since chronicled in the film Valkyrie — but I always listened with rapt attention, because they were always just as good the second or third time around. When my wife and I recently started watching the Band of Brothers miniseries on HBO, I found myself telling her further details about some of E Company’s actions — especially the tale of General McAuliffe’s famous “Nuts!” reply to the German call for his surrender, one of Tex’s favorite war stories. My wife finally asked me how I knew so much of this stuff, and I had to stop myself and realize that it was all because of my Uncle Tex, and the further reading that he inspired me to do on my own.

Like every member of my small family, Tex was an incredibly generous and caring person, someone whom you knew always had your back. It’s a different world now — almost every last one of the places we went or things we did no longer exist to be enjoyed by future generations — but I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have had the times with him that I did. Although they are times that won’t be repeated, neither will they be forgotten.

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Trial of the Marketer

By Chief Oddball on April 9th, 2009 at 6:51 pm

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· 2 Comments

I don’t recall exactly when it was that my job description broadened to include “marketing,” but it did, at some point in the early 2000s. Back then, I worked for a small tech company in my local town whose staff had just been decimated in a round of layoffs following the 9/11 attack on New York City, where most of our client base was located. I was still the new hire, the protege of our senior graphic designer — but when she was let go, I became the graphic designer.

Shortly after that, our New York office folded altogether, after it was revealed that the marketing staff blew through millions of venture capital on tchotchkes. Since this malfeasance was my first exposure to marketing, I was immediately disgusted by our own marketers and by the very concept. So you can imagine how I hung my head in ironic shame when I was made the acolyte of our newly-hired in-house marketing director.

To her credit, she was quite talented and devoid of most of the typical stink of self-serving corruption you often smell around self-proclaimed marketing gurus. (The only time I seriously shook my head and said “WTF, lady?” was when she asked me to embed a Flash animation in an email campaign. That’s notgonnahappen.com.) I learned a lot about marketing from her, and when she moved on in 2005, the company approached me and said they’d be willing to pay for me to get a bachelor’s degree in business administration if I would agree to be placed on a course to become the new marketing director.

In response, I resigned.

Now, to be fair, I didn’t quit for being offered a BBA. I quit because, at the same time, I was offered an exciting new opportunity by some former coworkers who had started their own little company, and who were creating a much more compelling product that I could really get behind. Additionally, I’d get to hang out with some seriously cool dudes, spend most days working from home, and make more money. That — and the fact that I really did not want to become a full-time marketer — led me to make my choice.

Of course, I still wear the “marketer” hat these days. That small little company I joined in 2005 got bigger, then smaller again, but throughout it all has constantly been on a path to greatness in our market. It’s the kind of company where nobody really has a title — you can make up whatever sounds good at the moment you’re asked — because we’re all multitaskers who have our hands in a million things at once. Ironically, I’ve done more marketing since I’ve been with these guys than ever before — Google AdWords, email marketing, print advertising, banner campaigns, Flash videos, yada yada. It’s tough keeping all of those balls in the air, and keep up with my product development, tech writing and webmaster responsibilities, but somehow it happens.

But the trials of the marketer are still many…and great. I was reminded of that today, when one of our houses of marketing cards collapsed.

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Whipped.

By Chief Oddball on January 22nd, 2009 at 1:07 am

Filed under Journal ··· 2 Comments

And I mean tired.

Yes, that’s my excuse for why this site was neglected for the past week. I actually was on track to maintain the “post once every two or three days” schedule that I had fallen into since the new year started, that is until the Scheiβen hit the proverbial Lüfter on Friday.

I was just coming off a week of exceptional productivity at the office, wherein I actually finished ten Flash animations — plus an impromptu 11th on just hours’ notice — thereby crossing off my entire slate. After this feat, I was ready to enjoy a quiet weekend here at the house in advance of the Chinese New Year festivities on the 24th and 25th. But right at close-of-business on Friday evening, our Asia/Pacific office advised that they wanted me to review the API documentation for our software development products in advance of the following week’s major release.

Review all of the API documentation? I thought in bewilderment. That basically amounts to a 500-page, jargon-filled reference manual. They must be talking about something else. They weren’t. After clarifying it with one of my bosses, who heads up the AP office, I learned that I was indeed being tasked with going through the last 8 months’ worth of haphazardly-assembled documentation, acting as editor and proofreader-in-chief. An for extra fun factor, a large portion of this documentation was written by our Chinese developers, whose native language is obviously not English.

The ESOL-style writing I can handle, but when you combine the unique English grammar mechanics of a native Mandarin speaker with the fact that I have very little idea how to actually use our products — I’m not a .NET software developer, after all — it makes for an even larger challenge than you’d expect. I’m finding myself able to get through approximately 50-60 files a day, depending on their size. And their sizes do vary greatly. I always groan inwardly (okay, not so inwardly) whenever I open up the next file and discover it’s 3500 lines long.

These files aren’t Word documents or pure text, either. They’re C# source code. We use a C#-based help authoring system that compiles into a Windows standard CHM in Visual Studio. So I’m making my edits in the source code, using a software development tool that has no spell checker, no ability to wrap overlong lines, and only a rudimentary find-and-replace engine.

So, naturally, I had to tell the AP office that there was no way, absolutely no way, that I was going to be able to review all of the documentation in time for this week’s release.

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