The Penalty Box

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about getting a non-laptop mobile computing device. I still haven’t gotten one, as once again I am plagued by indecision. My views on getting an all-in-one phone/PMP/PIM device haven’t changed a whole lot; I’d still rather keep the phone at least separate and I haven’t yet encountered a device that does all three in a fashion that doesn’t fail horribly at one of these functions. The iPhone’s phone sucks (not to mention random blowups yielding an unusable phone), Blackberry’s media player is terrible (and the Storm’s interface bloooooooows) and various entries from Samsung and LG have produced have been plagued with interface issues and twitchy firmware. Oh, and I’m still stuck on my contract for another year and a half. However, recent Samsung phones (like the Instinct and Omnia) have shown some promise and Nokia’s smartphones (like the N97) have less retarded operating systems (Symbian).
I actually was really leaning towards buying a Nokia N810 tablet, but of course reddit had to show me the next thing up and coming: the N900. My plan was to get a data plan for my phone and tether the tablet via Bluetooth (though I hadn’t actually walked into a Bell store and asked if this was possible yet). But the N900 looks a lot sexier, has a better profile than the N810 and Maemo > Symbian in comparison to the N97. Of course, it really is only worth it if you utilize the cellular feature of it (otherwise, it’s just an N810 with a slightly better profile and Maemo 5). Considering I’m locked in for another year and a half with Bell, that won’t work. But it’s so shinyyyyyy…

I suppose step 1 is to talk to a Bell monkey to see if tethering is actually allowable on a Bell phone without ludicrous data charges. If not, then there’s no point in getting a new tablet for now; I might as well continue trying to hack my old Palm into working with Linux. The one upside to all this indecisiveness is that it’s keeping money in my bank account.

There’s nothing like thinking you’ve lost your cell phone, spending two hours searching for it and finding it sitting in the grass outside your place of residence because the stupid belt clip broke off of the carrying case. It’s amazing how, despite never using anywhere close to full minutes of my plan, my life becomes so much more inconvenient without a phone. There’s also the irritation of the prospect of needing to spend money on a new phone because I have a year and half left on my contract.
The ironic part is that yesterday I was researching how I could back up my contacts from my phone onto an old Palm Pilot I have that I’m not longer using for anything.

Lesson learned: don’t rely on belt clips that come with the phone. It’s going into my pocket now.

The intarwebs reports that there’s a script, the entire original original cast is back and that it’ll be a “passing of the torch” type movie with a new generation of Ghostbusters. As much as I love the franchise (Ghostbusters and Ninja Turtles were the staples of my childhood), nostalgia can only get you so far.  The original guys are in their 60s and are fat.  There’s a reason why Schwarzeneggar wasn’t in Terminator 4 and why Harrison Ford looked awful in Indy 4.

While I have a faint hope that this could work (Aykroyd’s a decent writer), this has the potential to be like Blues Brothers 2000.  I suppose if it is, at least the soundtrack will be awesome.

• Do not leave a mess when you are done. I understand that you have to cut pipe and that it is a bit of a messy job. Just clean it up afterwards. Do not leave pipe shavings and sawdust in my kitchen.
• I am not here to entertain you. If I am watching playoff hockey, that does not give you the cue to talk over the announcer to make small talk. I don’t care that your new truck is broken. I don’t care that you hate your landlord. Fix my sink, that’s your job.
• If you don’t have a part to finish the job, get it. If the hardware store is closed, get it the next day. Home Depot/Rona does not close on a Sunday. You have not finished a job, so you better make it a priority to finish it. I don’t care if you’ve had a bad day, you’ve made my weekend bad by leaving a leaky sink.
• If you are too busy to finish this job, you should not have accepted it in the first place. Learn to manage your time better.
• There’s more to being a plumber than pipes. There’s customer relations too. Not answering your phone when you have an unfinished job is unprofessional. If you do not wish to deal with customers, hire someone to do that for you. If you cannot afford that, then deal with it and stop acting like a thirteen year old pissant.
• Don’t get all Mike Holmes on me saying the builders did a crappy job with the pipes when you can’t even make a sink stop leaking. There are no specialty parts that you need to order. Stop making excuses.
• Don’t complain that jobs are always more complicated than you expected. It just means you’re unprepared.
• FINISH. THE. JOB.

It’s now been the better part of a week that the kitchen sink is leaking due to old pipes. Once I get the name of the company (he’s self-employed) from my landlord, I will edit this post to inform everyone to never contract the services of this plumber.

Edit: The name of the company is Precision Plumbing.  Tack BC on the end of that, add a .ca extension and you have his website.  I’m not linking it because he doesn’t deserve any help on his Google ranking. For extra lulz, here’s some quotes from his “guarantee” section of his site:

We guarantee your home or business with be treated with the utmost care and respect while completing your project.
We guarantee all excess material or left over parts will be removed from site with minimal or no cost to the home or business owner.
We guarantee all our work will be done right the first time and strive to maintain our name in quality.

Oh yeah, he ended up leaving the dirty pipes behind too. He just said to throw them into the garbage can. So yeah, don’t use this guy. Ever. Tell your friends.

…don’t talk to me about hockey for the next 24-48 hours. I might bite your head off. Let me brood.
Just a warning.

One of the constants in life, aside from death and taxes, is employee turnover. There have been people who have left my company before, but it has been a while since someone working longer than me has left. Work has been a little crazy these last few months, and while the craziness has not affected me directly, it has had some ripple effects throughout the company. I suspect that craziness has caused the departure of one co-worker today. Politics rose its ugly head, and how each type of person handled the situation differed depending on the position. Despite my bias in favour of my developer peers, I have been able to observe how the situation arrived at its current destination. Change is most definitely needed, yet it may require a genius feat of social engineering to pull it off considering the number of strong personalities at play.

Another co-worker decided to take a leave of absence to go sailing for four months. I don’t know if he’s actually coming back, although I hope he is. I’m not sure if I could ever take that much time off to travel; there’s something comforting about a daily routine of work that allows for some semblance of order. Not having any idea what the next day could bring disturbs that large part of my brain that encompasses my obsessive compulsiveness and organization. It’s true that the unknown and the unexpected add to the quality of life, but I don’t think I could take that much unknown at once. Of course, my co-worker has been at the company for more than five years now, so this could very well be an introspective to help him decide where he wishes to go next. Maybe those two GPS units he’s taking along will help him out.

Now that I’ve been working a couple of years, people often ask me how long I’ll be staying at my current job. I find that as long as boredom does not set in, and there’s some kind of fulfillment to the work I do, I don’t feel a need to change jobs. Of course, other factors play in, but that’s the general gist of it. Changes within the company itself, whether they come from company direction or employee changes, generally provide new challenges and opportunities. I suppose there’s a bit of unknown and certainty in all of that, both in the long and short term respectively.

Change causes adaption and re-ordering. Guess I have some sorting to do. Wonder if I can do it in O(log n).