April 11, 2016

50/240

By Daniel

I really dislike this business of moving offices in the middle of the biggest server implementation in the last five years. Neither us nor the people in the room we’re headed to want to do this right now.

I did manage to snag a pretty sweet 30″ monitor along the way, but I can’t get the full resolution out of it without an adapter. This irritates the piss out of me. The monitor is DVI-D Dual Link. The docking station is also pinned out for DVI-D Dual Link. However, it actually runs as single link, halving the throughput and leaving me with 1/4 of the maximum resolution, so Lenovo could save a quarter on a dock they sell for 300 fucking dollars. This leaves me to have to buy an active DVI-to-DisplayPort adapter for like $125. That’s some shit.

I was pleasantly surprised that I went all day without even the 0mg juice. I might go through a fair amount of chewing gum at this rate, though. Might have to figure out how to buy Doublemint in bulk. Did you notice they stopped the fat packs of gum? Everything’s these slim packs of 15 now, and I swear to god there’s less gum to a stick now, it’s either thinner or smaller, maybe both. I double up on the gum, I’m not a part of your system.

I tuned in to DI today for the first time in ages. They’ve grown up so much, it’s incredible. They also have a lot, and I mean a lot, of advertisements. Pandora seems to have hit on the appropriate price to go ad-free and the number and duration of ads to endure if you’re not a paid subscriber. DI is 40% more, and the ads per hour time is probably six times what Pandora is. Three times as long, twice as often. Obviously, they have a niche but it feels a little like taking advantage of your dominant market share. Is there revenue sharing going on with the artists? I hope so.

There’s been less of an internal focus with these pieces lately, less getting stuff off my chest. My mind’s an odd thing, whatever expiation it was looking for it seems to have found. I’m not stressing out over things, I’m in an overall better mood. I had a conversation with Diana the weekend before last on what could be simplified as a desire for things. It was a conversation I was very nervous to have because I was afraid of the potential for it to be taken the wrong way. I was bothered by the fact that she had several thousand dollars of home improvement purchases lined up after buying the house, and I’ve been working the new job for four months, making great money, but hadn’t bought any number of things that represented a quality of life improvement during that little sliver of time off. And to her credit, she was very understanding. I think there had been a bit of growing resentment there, having what amounted to the next year’s purchases mapped out when I hadn’t felt like I was seeing any rewards for my labor. But it’s better now, and I’m going to buy some of those things I’ve been mentally keeping track of; it particularly makes sense when we’re not planning on picking up the house hunt again until November.

I’m hoping that doesn’t boil down the cause and effect to “I feel good when I buy things.” I’d much prefer that if it were something in that vein, it be “I feel good when I have something tangible to show for my skilled labor.”

I got bad news. The coffee maker does not follow us to the new office. We’re gonna all kick in and get a new one.

I was told that we’re going to take the plans for the new file server infrastructure and wrap them into an “initiative” which basically adds more bureaucratic overhead but also provides more logistical and transitional support. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff, or we’d end up having to be Tiers 1-3 for this project. It also makes for more writing, and I’m debating whether it would be worthwhile content for bluesoul.me or not. I think it would, if for no other reason it gives me opportunity to sanity-check myself.