402accessdenied

… that I’m not completely delinquent when it comes to updating my blog. Let’s also assume that I’m not fairly delinquent in keeping in touch with people, so you already know what’s going on with me, and so it doesn’t matter that I haven’t made a real post in almost a month. (Over a month if you don’t consider me rambling about random tech topics a real post. I would like to point out that the incredibly accurate subtitle of this blog is “Rambling. Lots of rambling.” It’s on the left side, just under the “accessdenied402″. See? So there.)

Let’s just pretend.

It’s actually been a pretty eventful month, so my excuse isn’t that I just haven’t had anything to write about. On the contrary, I’ve been fairly busy, and most nights I just haven’t felt like staying up late to blog (and I haven’t felt very inspired as far as any particular topics).

I’ve been getting more involved with my church (the fields), and I absolutely love it. Due to several random occurrences I’ve actually missed a couple of Sunday services in there, but I’ve been hitting the Monday night men’s bible study (awesome), hanging out with some people that are kinda in the same phase of life (college and young & employed mostly) on every other Tuesday, and hitting the beach for our Wednesday night outreach (basically we chill on the beach, grill up some hot dogs, play volleyball, and put up signs to welcome anyone that wants to join us). Most Wednesdays I’ve ended up going out with a few people from the Tuesday night group to chill afterwards. Great for hanging out, bad for my plan of getting to work early. Oh well.

Speaking of work, it’s actually been a lot better. I’m getting some more things on my plate, so that helps with the boredom and with the feeling of accomplishment. It’s also a daily reminder of how much I need to learn still in order to really do my job. I remember thinking (almost worrying) when was in school about the fact that none of what I was learning really seemed that applicable to a real job. The simple fact is, that’s the way it really is. Virtually all of my classes were (at least at this point) solely to learn the basic background theories and topics that I need to do my job. Do I need to remember exactly how to solve a Laplace transform of a circuit? Heck no. Do I need to remember some of the basic principles of circuits, computer architecture, and digital logic? Absolutely!

Which brings me to my second point about work. Those of you that went to engineering school (I figure, out of the people that actually read my blog, that’s about one person) remember how we were forced into technical communication classes. Classes we hated with a passion. Our technical classes were mostly about the technical problems, with only the slightest emphasis on communicating those ideas. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, as the technical skills are obviously very important, and we surely would have all gone to LS&plAy if the classes were 10% technical and 90% writing/presenting/etc. What I am saying is that this bears very little resemblance to the real world as I’ve experienced it. You don’t actually just sit down and solve a problem. No, first you look at it from a high level, get it reviewed, look at it at a low level, get it reviewed, implement it, test it, look at the results, get it reviewed, and so on.

At the end of the day, that means a lot of writing. I guess what they told us about the best engineers being the ones that could communicate their ideas (and not necessarily those that could solve the problem the fastest) was true.

Which brings me to the mini-rant of the day. You’ve been warned.

I HATE Microsoft’s software. Not because I’m a Mac user and an Apple fan. Not because I think I’m too l33t for Windows and worship at the feet of the Linux/Unix gods. Not because beating up on Microsoft is the fashionable thing right now. And not even because Windows is so bad. I own Windows, I use Windows, I like how Windows does some things.

No, the Microsoft software I’m talking about are those cornerstones of modern office “productivity” (and I use that term very loosely), Outlook and Word. Now I was under the impression that Windows was a modern operating system, that one program couldn’t bring the whole thing to a halt, etc. If you’ve ever used Outlook, you know this is not true at all. Every morning when I launch Outlook, it freezes everything else on my computer for at least a minute. Half the time, it complains that it can’t contact the server. Hate to break it to you, but the server hasn’t gone anywhere. I experienced the same thing when I worked for DCO, and I assumed that Outlook just didn’t deal with IMAP mail servers well, as Thunderbird had no problems. Oh no, it’s not just IMAP servers. We use it with an Exchange server (Microsoft’s mail/calendar/etc server). And still I get the freezes when it tries to update my Outlook. AGH!

Word is a completely different matter. Now it may be that I’m working with a flakey document that completely abuses the styles system in Word. But this document has to be formatted a certain way, with headings and sub-headings and sub-sub-headings, and numerated tables and figures, and cross-references between text and tables, and a complete table-of-contents, etc. And for the life of me I can’t understand why simply selecting the number next to a sub-heading can completely change the format of all of the same level sub-headings (usually it indents them by an inch or so). Or why trying to add a new sub-heading causes Word to completely re-paginate the document (which slows it to a crawl and renders it unusable). It’s not that hard!! The last sub-heading was 10.1.1. This one should be 10.1.2. You don’t need to renumber the whole document to figure that out. AGH!

Well, there’s plenty more to say, but I have to wake up in the morning, and I suspect certain people (ahem) are already skimming at this point, so I’ll wrap it up. Laters y’all.

Hmm… So i can definitely blog from my phone, but its pretty slow. I guess i should learn to use T9 text input, but it’s hard after doing manual text entry for so long. At least it seems to be pretty good at guessing words, but punctuation is a pain. I’d been thinking of switching to wordpress or moveabletype, but this feature of blogger might make it worth keeping. Anyway, i suppose i should get back to work. Later y’all!

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/sigh. I should have known Verizon would have to get their name in this somehow. Bastards.

If I can actually blog from my phone that’ll be the coolest thing ever!