Shoes rule.

Okay so in some ways I'm almost as bad as a woman.
I have 2 pairs of dress shoes, a pair of running shoes, and a pair of sandals .... and I just ordered a new pair of shoes yesterday, from Zappos. They're totally awesome though.

I'll definitely be wearing the black laces with these. The white would just be too much white. I totally love em though. And they're Vans, so you can't go wrong.

Hopefully these will arrive here at work tomorrow. UPS says they are on time... and I keep refreshing every few minutes to check. Yay!

I see stupid people....

And they make me want to cry.
I've probably spent as much time at this job fixing and covering for stupid stupid stupid things that were done before I was here, as I have spent on new development.

Then, there's the users .... don't even get me started.

Microwaves suck!

Why the hell can't all microwaves just be a standard power and all that? I just put a bag of popcorn in for the recommended time... 2 minutes, 30 seconds... and even before I opened the door, I could smell that it was burned. So I pull the bag out, open it up, and find out that probably half the bag is burned. Hell, there's a chunk of BLACK popcorn. It's like freaking charcoal! And now the entire office reeks of burnt popcorn.

Dammit.

Database Relief

So, I've been battling with a database problem for a while now. I have this table that records all the traffic to every website we host at work. Needless to say, this grows. Quickly. At a rate averaging about.. ehhh... 35k hits/day.

Now, thanks to the wonderfully forward thinking engineers in this position before me, we have run into a built-in limitation of MySQL. By default, when you create a table, it's built with the ability to grow up to a size of 4gb. Well with as much traffic as we get here, that 4gb point has quite obviously come and gone. In just over a year worth of traffic. Brilliant.

I have finally found a solution to get us by for now though, as opposed to deleting old traffic records for inactive accounts. (I hate deleting archived data. Always bad.) One little query has made my world all better:
ALTER TABLE traffic MAX_ROWS=1000000000;

Yes, that is 1,000,000,000. One billion. We're at around 12.4 million records in that table right now. I figure if we get to a billion, I'll be retired on a tropical island, sipping on drinks with little umbrellas in them. Now, in the process of rebuilding this table with the greatly increased row limit, MySQL went ahead and recalculated the maximum amount of disk space the table could take up. The new number it came up with is 281474976710655 bytes. That comes out to exactly 256tb. Two hundred and fifty six TERABYTES. Yeah. Drinks with little umbrellas. Definitely.

I complain a lot.

I'm realizing that I really do. I feel sorry for anybody who has to listen to me.

Body modding

I've been thinking very seriously lately about getting into body modding.

I already know that I'm going to do tattoos over a large part of my torso. I have a back piece planned, as well as something for my left shoulder. I would like to get pieces figured out for other parts of me as well... and I know already how I'm going to link them together. That way it's not just a bunch of random patches of ink across my skin... they will actually flow together in a way.

More recently though I've been thinking about piercings as well. Partially because these are much cheaper than tattoos... and partially because I've always liked piercings. Once it was suggested that some piercings might look good on me.. well, it was all over.

So far, I'm thinking I would like to get (eventually) ears, septum, labret and bridge... all nice and symmetrical. The bridge might be a bit awkward, with the way my glasses sit... since I've got such a narrow bridge, my glasses sit right exactly where the piercing would go.

I still have a huge fear of needles... and I would definitely have to give my standard disclaimer of me + needles = passing out when I got pierced.. but I think this would also help me overcome that fear. Maybe.. somehow.

My other problem is, I don't know how these piercings will be viewed at work. I'm not even sure about ear piercings simply because of my job. Granted, this is a business casual environment... but some of these people are also very straight laced. Plus the fact that I actually have to meet with clients on occasion... which I hate (see my previous post about that.) I really want to start doing this stuff.. it just really interests me. I guess I'll have to ask if there's any kind of policy here about that. It just somewhat bugs me that work might actually restrict me from doing things like this, when really, it doesn't change at all who I am or how I perform my job. It just changes how I look... which really, they shouldn't give a damn about, as long as I'm presentable.

Management

So I posted here previously that I will soon have somebody working under me, and the stress and doubts associated with that. I think I can safely say that I'm over those fears. I'm certain that I will be a strong leader and also a good teacher. I have no doubts there anymore. The problem is, now I'm doubting if I want to be in that type of position. It may be that I was born to be in a leadership role of sorts... I have always somewhat fallen into that role in most situations in my life. I'm just not sure if I want that to be my job. I like obscurity... I like being the man behind the curtain, making things work from the shadows. I like having the freedom to actually work, without constraints, without distractions. Most of all though, I hate dealing with political bullshit. And to me, that's what comes with a management role. You have to deal with customers and other managers all the time, and you have to play political footsie with them. That's not something I enjoy, that's not something I want. Sure, I can bullshit with the best of em when I have to, but I couldn't live with myself if that's what I did for a job. I would start to hate my job, and I just got myself out of a position where I couldn't stand waking up in the morning, because it meant I had to drag myself in for another day of worthless time at my job.

Then again, who knows, maybe it won't be that way at all. I may be over analyzing. Being in a management position here might be just what I need. I suppose only time will tell.