02/10/2006: "BLAST OFF"
I found out last night that I have at least one confirmed reader. This terrifying revelation has shaken me to my core, and induced feelings of guilt and irresponsibility at my lack of updates. So, Cathy, this one's for you!
Travel looms in my future. I'm making a fun trip to St. Louis next month to attend a two-day meeting wherein a team of geographically diverse and clueless but well-meaning souls hammer out a solution we'll never use to a problem we don't have. Following that, we're tripping out in late April to attend EMC World in Boston. I've never before been to Boston, but it ought to be a fun trip. Plus, the Barenaked Ladies are playing at the conference's closing party. w00t!
Lately work has been a series of weighty teleconferences, where everyone pretends to put on their most serious phone voice and acts as if they have extremely important information about the situation at hand, when all that's actually happening is that everyone's trying to make themselves sound terribly important. This all goes back to my employer's high level of bureaucratic kung fu, to which I alluded several entries ago.
I also tried telecommuting--"working virtually", in the new parlance--for a day this week, and found it to be an awesome experience. Contrary to my expectations, I actually got WAY more accomplished than at a standard day in the office, and felt much less rushed and much more calm at the end of the day. I did two telecons, a ton of business case thingies, created a bunch of documents, and worked on several projects--IN MY UNDERPANTS!! MUAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
It was really fun to set up, too. I'm connecting in to work using a virtual machine inside of VMWare Workstation, and that virtual machine has all of the work-required stupid software (antivirus, IPSec client, some other required crap) so that it's in place and functioning, but not touching my real computer. Plus, since we use VOIP phones, I got the VOIP admin guy to give me a copy of the Cisco Softphone application and he helped me set it up such that my desk phone now rings inside my virtual computer at home. It's nifty-neato-keen!
I had a dream last night that I was an astronaut and that I needed to transfer into space, along with some other astronaut buddies. We had to launch and rendezvous with a giant floating office building in orbit, because that was where we were going to work from now on. The problem was that the rocket we had to ride was a jungle gym, with no seats, no seatbelts, no walls, floors, or in fact anything--just a smallish metal jungle gym. So me and the rest of the astronauts went up to it and climbed up and tried to position ourselves as comfortably and securely as possible--without any kind of spacesuit or environmental protection except for the blue astronaut coveralls--and then we blasted off. Except the mission control guys were screwing with us, and instead of flying directly into space, they were flying us under bridges and really low over the ground. It was freaky.
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