fine whine

I didn't post as much this year. Notable things about which I wrote nothing:

• Both of my grandfathers died in December. I still haven't figured out what I want to say about that.
• I failed once again to complete a 50,000 word novel in November. But I came up with a much better idea for next year's.
• Natalya turned 1 year old in October, meaning we could finally officially stop worrying about SIDS. Not that I ever did anyway.
• I left the fashion industry in September. I also read the complete Harry Potter series (for the first time) in under four weeks. These two events are not at all related.
• In August (I think) the guy housesitting for my neighbor across the street passed away in her house, and was not found for a week. I was one of the few people on the street who had ever even met the guy, and I didn't even know his name until he was already gone. In cleaning up her house, my neighbor gave me a nice desk ending the four years I'd used my computer with it and me both on the floor.
• I can't really remember much of anything from July. So ends the monthly portion of this wrap-up.*
• The two hundred or so photos I've posted on flickr aren't even a fraction of the over seven gigabytes of JPGs I've created this year.
• I survived watching 61 movies from India, most of which could be considered "Bollywood". Two I watched without any subtitles at all.
• The entire year passed without me attempting to access the internet with my mobile phone, despite it being capable of doing so.

More ideas may occur to me - I just didn't want to let December pass without any posts at all. Happy new year.

* The only other month-based item of note is in January, wherein I visited Chicago the weekend of B-Fest but was unable to attend it because I was in Illinois for less than a total of 24 hours. Eating dinner in the Signature Room of the John Hancock Tower was superb. Being back at my desk eighteen hours later was not.

Sometimes I give the impression that I am very busy at work, and don't have time to do anything other than my official responsibilities*. While I would not want to dispel that impression, I do know that I occasionally get distracted and find myself doing things other than work at my desk.

There's something to be said about all work and no play, they say...

One major facet of my job, albeit one often overlooked, is hanging garments on hangers. I know it sounds very, very exciting, but the real tedium sets in from the sheer number of garments that need to be hung, and accordingly, the never ending boxes filled with hangers on which to hang them.

Let me tell you about hangers. All of the hangers we use are not created equally, and many of them aren't even made by the same companies. I imagine our specifications for the hangers are relatively loose (they need to have a hook on top, two shoulder-like protrusions, and whenever possible, some capability to be cascaded) and as such we end up with something of a mix.

I don't really spend much time thinking about the hangers, but one day recently I did notice that one of them was stamped with a patent number. Knowing that among the wealth of knowledge accessible by Google is a patent database (or two), I looked up that patent (5096101 for the curious) and learned a few things, among them, these:

* There are a number of patents for hangers, which would ostensibly be very simple things.
* The patent in question was for a feature not on this hanger - the little tab between the hanger and the hook that shows the size, or other information (as seen at Target).

So this is ultimately what I have found: A&E Products has somehow stamped some of their hangers with an almost completely irrelevant patent number.

As opposed, say, to writing a completely irrelevant post.

* Time that could be spent otherwise on things like, oh, posting to a website, for example. I've back-dated this entry to around the second week or so I didn't post it, but meant to do so.

I returned to work today, earlier than I had originally planned to do so because I can't count and Jessica didn't want me home if I weren't getting paid. My plan was to return next Wednesday, but these things happen. Some people were surprised to see me and all of them seemed happy to see a couple new baby pictures (I had, of course, sent a good number of them from the hospital lobby). I got through much of the day just talking about the delivery and what the first week of a new baby is like.

Which is not to say that I was neglecting my work. As they weren't planning for me to return for another week, my team didn't have all that much that I could really do. Moreover we're in something of a holding pattern at the moment, as some of our people are overseas doing last-minute (and after-the-last-minute) approvals and changes, and there isn't much we can do here in the home office until they return anyway.

So I ended up cleaning and organizing and telling people baby stories. All in all, the only measurable* thing I did today was answer emails, and even then, I only sent two.

And after I sent it (to people not in our Exchange system, so I couldn't recall it), I realized that one of them was from last week, and had already been answered at least once.

But at least I got paid, or rather, will be, at the end of this week or the next.

* I.e. trackable by my manager, or more specifically, a deliverable.

Those who have never piloted a desk before or faced confimement in a cubicle often don't realize the politics involved in so many people's daily dealings. Turf wars are much more common than they really should be.

I'm somewhat in the middle of one right now, and unfortunately there's not going to be any possibility of resolution for at least a few weeks. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The issue at hand here, the one with company-shaking implications, is a tale of two drawing programs.

The system we use to issue our garment specifications is horribly out of date. Its version number is so low that we don't dare utter it in the presence of our fellow captains of industry, lest we face the inevitable scorn, derision and painful ridicule.

One component of this system is the drawing program everybody loves to hate*, which is also of a version so old the comany that made it has been bought out, run into the ground, and now exists only in rumor.

That said, we have some sort of support contract, but I think it's with a company that pities us more than actually providing any useful help beyond the standard (and completely applicable) answer of "That's been fixed in the newer version" to which we respond with great gnashing of teeth.

But we knuckle down, and continue fighting with the program to get our work done. This is the way things have been since the software was't out of date, and this is the way it will continue until another software package becomes obsolete, at which point we will adopt that. I've been brushing up on Adobe Illustrator's third most recent version, which is probably what we will ultimately end up using, if the past is any indication.

That's not how it seems to be working lately, though. Two of the newest hires (the continuing saga of the turnover in my area is the subject of a post someday) have the newest Illustrator on their computers. Last time I checked it cost in the neighborhood of five hundred dollars. The price doesn't matter so much to me as the fact that the program isn't compatible with anything the rest of us are using.

Well, except me. I've installed (against the rules) a tryout version of Illustrator, and have had some modicum of success (after much failure) converting and using the renegade drawings.

I've also stirred up some trouble by mentioning the situation to some controversy-loving co-workers. This is an issue that needs to be resolved, and I know that only with the complaints and feedback from people more senior than me will any discussion happen or decision be made.

So on one hand I'm helping one group of people to use software they probably shoudn't, do do things they're not supposed to be doing. On the other I'm riling up others to be indignant at what's happening. It seems almost like I'm playing one side against the other, setting up some sort of final confrontation (a la Yojimbo -- remade as A fistful of dollars and Last man standing) except that I'm not really interested in the aftermath either way.

I think I just like stirring up trouble, even over something as menial and dull as this. Too bad the meetings to discuss this won't happen for another two weeks, and until then I'm more or less stuck in the middle helping out both factions, by assisting the new people in working with Illustrator and converting it to what the rest of us can use, and then leveraging what I learn from doing that (i.e. complaining about it) to the rest.

* Microsoft Word is also tightly integrated with portions of the system, or perhaps vice-versa. It is worth noting, I suppose, that this is not the most painful aspect of the system.

Lately at work I've found myself closing my eyes to do a mental calculation*.

I don't recall doing this as a child, and even doing this months ago.

It's likely I've been a little more sleep-deprived lately than usual (though somewhat of my own doing) and work has been tenser and more stressful than usual (somewhat less of my own doing), but are those factors enough to degrade my mental abilities this much?

Also, am I sticking my tongue out as I do it?

* Well, actually I'm just doubling a measurement: seeing, for example, 11 7/8" and needing to write down 23 3/4". Why I now need darkness to concentrate on this simple task, I do not know.

If Microsoft Outlook (the second-newest version) is so advanced, why doesn't it have a simple image viewer built-in for attached photos? It understands images, since it renders them in the messages, but it farms out attachments to whatever the system uses for viewing images.

On other file types (PDFs, ZIP archives, Office files, etc) this makes sense*, but not on images. When I'm reading a message with seven photos attached, I want to be able to toggle back and forth between them without going back to the message window. My image viewer of choice (IrfanView) can only open one at a time, since they are dowloaded to the temporary directory when you load the image, not the message.

I cannot say exactly how much time and productivity I've lost over the years of using Outlook, but I'm certain it can be measured in minutes... sheer tens of minutes.

* Even then, I must but wonder why a program that can embed Microsoft Word as an editor (and probably a viewer) isn't smart enough to take a message that contains no text, only a .DOC attachment (or worse yet, PowerPoint) and save me a click or two by just displaying the attachment.

I mean, if you're gonna make an email program dumb enough to trust every file it gets, why not make it smart enough to make things easier?