39 posts tagged “work”

I just finished a majority of the new development on this large project that I've been doing for work. Just in time for my 4 day vacation. Woohoo!

This week marks the first week where our reduced hours are in effect at work. I've elected to take Monday afternoons off. If there's one thing that I could do with less of, it's Monday afternoons at work. Although all things considered I'd rather be working than not.

I did some calculations, figurings and general budgetary voodoo and I've come to conclude that I should be ok with the reduced income. I'll need to curtail my entertainment spending quite a bit and try to watch my unnecessary food expenses (as well as try to keep dinner costs around the level of spending that we've been doing for the past several weeks). I'm probaly playing it safer than I have to but it's hard estimating expenses due to the move and not having a good idea of how the budget is going to totally shape up with that. And now I have less cash per month to play with too. I'd rather err on the side of caution until I'm really sure of the numbers.

So it's not quite as bad as I had feared but definitely not ideal My already limited play money supplies have been nearly eliminated. I also ended up curtailing my contributions to my 401k plan for the time being. I'm still young and I already couldn't afford to drop the kind of money that I really needed to put into it. So it's not like that'll make a huge impact in my retirement savings. And there's no company match, so there's no incentive to keep it going. I'll readjust it when my financial situation improves, one way or another.

This week is going to feel pretty long as we already have plans for Friday. Wassy's finishing up her current semester of school this week so we're going to have a little celebration to commemerate the ending of her very annoying Digital Illuistration course. So there's going to be a week ending party situation going down here. Should be very fun.

I haven't posted much of anything since Monday I know, but I've been pretty busy with various things.

The main update is that the morning meeting on Tuesday wasn't good. In addition to the layoffs, they're cutting everybody's hours by 10%. Which, frankly sucks. I get paid on the very low end of the computer programmer pay scale for a bunch of reasons (started part time here, with no degree...pay scale never really adjusted to where it should be and by the time I got my degree there were financial troubles in the company and they couldn't give me a raise to compensate) and now with this cut it's basically erasing the past 2 years worth of raises and then some.

My budget has always been a little tight and with the decreased income it's going to pretty much chop off whatever free spending money I had. Which isn't going to work.

At least I still have a job but this isn't going to work long term, so it's finally time to start trying to figure out something else.

Just wanted to update my last posting. I've still got a job, and aside from a company wide meeting that's happening tomorrow regarding the situation and some changes that might be happening to save money, looks like most of it is over.

I just feel very drained right now though. I work in a small office, so you really get to know your co-workers so you can't help but feel really bad for the people that got let go. Especially in a situation like this where it's all about the finances...not job performance.

Ah well. I'm going to have to get up early tomorrow in order to make it into the meeting on time. It's scheduled for 30 minutes before the time I get in to work.

Two basic things that are being mentioned today.

First off, the wine and chocolate festival that I went to on Saturday was very awesome. There was much sampling of wines, and a few new wineries discovered which is always good. Upstate New York has a thriving wine country which is handy for me since I enjoy a glass on occasion and there's a lot of good stuff being produced right in the area.

We ended up buying a bunch of bottles for future consumption. Lakeland Winery had some really awesome fruity wines. Especially a melon flavored one. And the other big find was Tickle Hill for their Peach Fuzz and Hector Nectar. And a bunch of other things too. I'm doing this from memory and I can't remember them all.

We also sampled the cheese, chocolate and olive oil/hot sauce booths. Found some really awesome champagne cheese which I was tempted to buy, along with some all natural fudge sauce and actual fudge which I REALLY wanted to buy. I managed to hold off because I knew that if I did actually buy it, it'd be gone in about 3 hours. Which would be ungood for me. I did get their card though, so I know where to go if I ever do want some for something.

Sunday was mostly spent relaxing and watching South Park. I made my chicken alfredo for dinner which went over really well. I'm still getting used to the stove so I had the sauce done a lot faster than the pasta, but I'll adjust that one and get it right the next time I do it.

Now for the second thing. We've got some impending staff reductions going on at work today. I hesitate to say this, but I'm not terribly worried for my job considering the big projects that I just started. But you never know with these things. I won't know much of anything until this afternoon and even then there's a company meeting tomorrow morning so it probably won't be totally over until then.

We'll see what happens...

Today has been extremely busy and I've just now found a moment to catch my breath. Lots of things happening today at work, from one of our servers going down rendering our online bill payment system inoperable for an hour to a security audit and the usual program tweaks I need to do.

One of the good things though is that I've redone my desk setup a bit. Ok, some background is required here. At my office everyone has a laptop and a docking station. They're not bad laptops but they're not great either. Pretty cheap Dell Latitude D510's. I've never had a monitor at my desk since I've always used a laptop with it's LCD screen which was going fine for a while. But recently I've started getting back aches and such, partly from staring down at the screen (since it's a laptop on the desk). I could have used one of the CRTs we have hanging around but they really mess with my eyes after a while. I can't go back from CRTs now.

So I brought in a 17" LCD (located a spare one...work never would have bought one for me...tough times and all that) to use at my desk and set up with my laptop in a dual monitor configuration. This has made me realize two things. First, the colors on my laptop LCD are so dim and horrible looking. I have no idea how I managed to survive with them for this long. And second, having dual monitors really, really helps my productivity. I like having the second one over there to stash the tickets that I'm working on or any information I need to glance at (like database tables and such) while I'm doing my work on my main monitor.

And it's helping my back out a lot so far it seems. So this has been working out rather well.

Ok, that's it. I'm tired of winter. When you wake up in the morning and it's -4F, it's time to take drastic measures. I quit winter! I'm done.

...

Ok, so that doesn't work real well...but man, I wish canada would keep it's cold air up there and not have to shove it down here every other week. It's their air, I'm more than happy to let them keep it up there where it feels safest.

There's been nothing much of interest to report over the past couple days. Work has been extremely hectic as our billing cycle and some reports that the upper management needed converged into the same time period and I had to do a lot of running around. As far as personal stuff goes, I've just been spending a lot of time working on my C++ programming and a little bit of time playing Mass Effect on my 360. I believe I'm almost done with Mass Effect, so expect a post with a really late review of that coming soonish.

Time marches onwards to the weekend, which I am looking forward to eagerly.

Well, this morning certainly was different. I was getting ready for work when I got a call saying that there was a gas leak at the office and they were telling everybody not to come in, but to instead go to one of our other offices. It seems like the construction crew that was working on the sidewalk across the street from the building here totally ignored the neon yellow signs which informed them of a buried gas pipe.

Luckily, we have laptops, so somebody grabbed all the computers from our office and brought them out to our temporary dwellings. This was my first time being out there, so I was a little worried I wouldn't be able to locate it, but it ended up being pretty easy as it was right along the road I usually take to get to that area. Pretty nice in there, but I couldn't get my laptop to connect to their wireless network, so when the word came that the building was all clear, I packed up and headed back.

It made for a good time killer though! by the time I got back to my desk it was around 9:30-10:00

I've started on a quest to make tea at work. Usually, in the afternoons I get a craving for something that's a little bit sweet that isn't water. And since we really don't have anything of the sort easily available, I usually end up hitting up the vending machine, which is bad.

So I've decided that I'm going to start bringing some supplies in order to make tea. First up, I'm going to get a little mug/infuser combination so I can keep doing the lose leaf thing. I figured I'd bring bottled water or use what's down there...not using tap water, especially not the tap water we have at work. And that I'd use the communal tea kettle in the break room to heat the water.

That is until I took a look at the tea kettle that was down there. It appears to be...rusting or something. It's got some black gunk on the bottom and it doesn't really look all that safe for use...so I think I'm going to have to find an alternate method of heating water.

I was thinking of getting a smallish tea kettle for me to bring in and use that instead, but I would rather not have it be used by other people (lest it look like the one that's already down there) which brings up the question of where the heck would I put it so that nobody else contaminates my hot water source?

Sigh...things are never as easy as they start off sounding.