DJ quits!

Wow! I was not expecting that one. DJ runs all of our operations across all our geo regions. His crew are crazy but do a swell job, at least when they are not packing on a release night. They all like guns far too much for my liking and I'm from the mid-west.

Never seen somebody with such a big smile. Henry announced his departure at the company meeting, said that he was going to "find himself". Stacy thinks he will continue to write his political blog and may even run for a state seat in the elections in the fall. He's some sort of Libertarian, which when I first heard that I thought he was in favor of people who file books in a Library!

Constantine has taken over Operations in the short term. I think this makes sense, we need to get the Engineers and Ops guys closer together, we have too much of the "throw it over the wall" attitude. If anybody can bring the groups together I think its Constantine, since those guys really respect him.

Looking forward to my first date with geek-babe next week. That is going to be sweet! Is there love in the air? I hope so!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!))
Shots : 8 (I don't give a crap, so I drink at my desk)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 184 lbs

Moonlighting!

Ops guys are weird at the best of times. They work strange hours, act weird and have a big interest in guns. Generally you should not mess with them, especially if its open carry week.

So I'm not surprised that DJ ever question the fact that one of his guys volunteered for night shift work. Its kind of easy, since there are not customer to piss off if you take out a server or database and sometimes pull a wire on the wrong switch. Its all scheduled so the customer have low expectations. Somebody has even written a script that you can cut & paste from.

But then there's the rub. Dude was actually working for a competitor, some outfit in Dallas during the day and then doing work for us during the night. He was getting double pay for doing the same thing twice. Explains why you never got on answer on the pager when he was on duty, always claimed to be sleeping. We all heard Henry screaming down here in the dungeons all the way from the Management Tower.

Super dumb for DJ letting this slide. But then something super crazy happened. They kept him on and doubled his pay, the theory was that the company could not cut is wages because he was in too deep with the Chinese Mafia. Cutting his wage was like giving him a death sentence and that is totally bad karma. So dude is still here and making more money than ever! Whoever said Henry is not a humanitarian is on crack.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 177 lbs

Popularity contest!

Lonely-James, he heads up a team that I don't really get. I go to see a lot of bands and always, always get a t-shirt or something else to remember the night. So I'm a total sucker for merchandising.

So Lonely-James does the tech-sess this week and its all about "Merchandising" and "Popularity". I mean the guys is pretty weird to begin with, always has lunch by himself and I never see him hang out with his staff like Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir does (my boss rocks). But I don't get it. From what I can work out, they gather a bunch of analytics (sort of a poor mans Google) and then basically decide through some complex algorithm (aka a case statement) that you get either a), b) or c) pop-up displayed to buy something else. Sounds cool, but why do you need 12 people to build that?

Then he talked about "Popularity" and how you get your users to choose which is best. I mean that bogus right, just because Henry choses to buy Feline Pine Scoop Kitty Litter in no way would swing my vote for Safeways store brand even if I was given the choice. I'm sure at YahBay it made total sense (apparently he used to hang out with DJ who runs Ops), but for Hank? Sure I have just brought stock in GM through our Stock App (full disclosure, I'm a shareholder) and then get a recommendation to buy Toyota or Feline Pine Scoop Kitty Litter. No way! Bogus!

Worked out twice with Geek Babe, weight at least stayed the same. Skipping on free dinner sucks. I like, have to go to Safeway to buy stuff, that sucks.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 bottles (same as last week)
Shots : 2 x Bourbon Shots (same as last week)
Dinner : 3 nights (3 x Pizza)
Weight : 182 lbs

Awesome, lets all get electric staplers!

I totally get why I can't order Eclipse. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir sent me over to the IT and Ops guys. I think he wanted to have a fun and watch them beat me down. I'm sure he's bi-polar or something else weird.

So the long and short of it, I get dressed down for asking to spend money to improve my productivity. Not only that, DJ the VP of Site Ops at the company meeting then gave this long horsewhipping about spending money. How we need to stop using Microsoft Office and buy Electric Staplers on Ebay. I was confused until somebody said it was a joke. It was something about how one of those costs the same of Microsoft Office and why would anybody want either. So, I dig it. I never got Microsoft Office, I got OpenOffice (which is cool) but all I wanted for Christmas was IntelliJ.

I got so busted in the company meeting on a different front. Could not help myself, but got caught casting an eye over "her". I think Henry has me down as a marked man. I avoided talking to him at the beer bash afterwards.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (up three from last week)
Shots : 0 x Bourbon (down 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (4 x pizza, 1 x Una Mass)
Weight : 168 lbs