Tag: work

Truer words were never spoken

Posted on By admin

I have the dumbs today.

I had a rough night last night. I blame the quiche. It tasted really nice but gave me a really evil case of heartburn at 2am. I also blame the really psychotic dream I had at around 3am. I hate that sort of dream, especially since I tend to have it regularly. When I'm involved in a particularly challenging or interesting project at work, I tend to take it home with me and I dream about it. Intensively. As in, I'm compiling code bit by bit in my dreams, or trying to create a Theory-Of-Everything or something of the sort. The worst thing is that I know I'm dreaming, and I know it's all crap, but I can't break out of it and I keep going through the motions. The most annoying thing is that when I finally manage to semi-wake up, I'm still thinking about my dream and I have to consciously work at trying to think about something else. It's harder than it seems. You try *not* thinking about something.

Today will not be a productive day.

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Show me a way to go home.

Posted on By admin

Today is not a good day.

The doctor's appointment that I thought was this afternoon is, was, in fact, yesterday. As such, the glorious excuse I had to get out of a full day of sitting on my ass in uncomfortable chairs listening to boring talks all day just went poof!

Conferences are evil. Even if I'm interested in the topic (which is rare), I can't stand sitting in cramped uncomfortable seats all day. I get fidgety. I get bored, and then I get pissy. It seems that academics are enamored with conferences. How people can enjoy them is beyond me. And now there's a full day of them.

YAY

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well, it seems that i'll be in the UK for at least 3 years

Posted on By admin 12 Comments on well, it seems that i'll be in the UK for at least 3 years

Last night, before leaving for home, my boss asks me to come to his office for 5 minutes. My 6-month probation period ends at the end of October and he needs to send the paperwork in soon. Thus, my evaluation. Words like “immediately productive after arriving”, “perfectly happy with your work”, “can't think of any criticism to say” were spoken. This makes me happy.

The salary raise I will be getting in October makes me happier.

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Ain't it ironical?

Posted on By admin 2 Comments on Ain't it ironical?

I've been doing a big push to get major work done on my ontology lookup service before I leave for Munich tomorrow. I added a ton of new features and loaded an assload of new and interesting data on it.

Since this was all in development, all that code and data is on my laptop. It works fine. It takes about 2 hours to load 33 ontologies, 120000 terms and 790000 relationships between those terms. That's fairly decent – loading about 1000 terms a minute. Now, being all happy to get it done and wanting to deploy the friggin thing, I turn to the production servers. You'd think it would be blazingly faster, given the size of the things.

Of course not.

My load is about 10 times slower.

So I'll have to work late tonight if I want the last hour not to have been a complete waste of time.

Blergh.

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weekend redux and a look ahead.

Posted on By admin 1 Comment on weekend redux and a look ahead.

The weekend was not one of the more relaxing ones I've had. In fact, I'll just say that it was rather emotionally charged and leave it at that… My shoulder gave me grief for most of it and, as a new twist, a glass of bad rose wine went down like a molten goblet of acid and took up residence in my stomach for most of last night. That was really horrid too, because I'd cooked a kick-ass curried roast beef too. Bleh.

This week is going to be a wild one, I forecast, cause I have to do a lot of prepwork on short notice. I need to write up a conference poster for PRIDE and get the student intern geared up to maintain PRIDE in case there are problems while I'm away next thursday and friday. Katy's leaving for Leicester on tuesday night and having her op on wednesday. I won't have a chance to see her until thursday night (if she's home) or friday morning (if she's not). She's getting anxious about it. It's a routine operation… it should go ok. Right? Right!

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Welcome to monday morning

Posted on By admin

Nice way to start a week.

Get into work, check my email, do some routine sanity checks on the servers… only to find that PRIDE has been down all friggin' weekend because the database server went belly up on friday night. Nice. The log partition was full. Nicer. Tables got corrupted. Nicest.

I hope this isn't an omen for my week.

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A week of hard work!

Posted on By admin 14 Comments on A week of hard work!

*does the happy dance*

I've finally released all the documentation and bug fixes for PRIDE that I've been working on all week.

For those of you who might want to have a quick read to see what it is exactly I work on, you can have a gander at the user namual. The more adventurous can also read the implementation documents.

Edit: This just made my day. Email from my boss:

Hi Richard,

Great job, especially on the documentation side!

Best regards,
H.

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