TV Night

After work today, I was burned and bummed out.

Casey was just ripping on me today about the new site. I should say, I'm technically an engineer, but somehow I got roped into writing code for website backends. I don't even really do much HTML or anything anymore. I used to create websites for all sorts of interesting shit (have you seen the whole Spunk Monkey's fan website? That's all my stuff. Yeah, I know they aren't really so big anymore after their last disc. But they were huge 5 years ago, and I was just out of school and all over them. Dave and I followed them on tour of the whole Washington, BC area. We were back and forth across the border like six times in a week. They were playing lots of little places where nobody had heard of them. Where we would have been jammed in back east, we were just with like 150 people in this little place jumping around. We had a ton of fun!

Anyway, just before that tour I had started the fan site, and kept it up while we were on the road following their gigs. I had all sorts of cool stuff. Jip Franklin from the band even sent me a few emails and helped with out with some mp3's that I set up to stream for them. They didn't really have much of a band site, so the fan site was huge for a while. We were getting like a thousand or two hits a day sometimes.

But when Franklin left to do his whole solo thing in Europe it didn't hold together. They said they would still be doing another disc, and all that, and he'd jump back and forth between his solo stuff and back here, but I think they had been waiting for it to fall apart and they just let it go.

I kept the site up for a whie, because we were all still loving the music, but what the hell. I haven't touched it in two years now - I don't even know if it's still up.

And I don't do all that obsessive web site stuff anymore. Hell - I'm just using old Blogger here, and have hardly even changed my template. So clearly I'm not doing squat outside of work.


So there I am at work today and Casey is going on about the spec rewrite and why did I check it back into the repository if I knew that section was messed up and all that BS. I guess I'd better not mention the company or Casey will be googling his own name and come across my rant. Oh wait a minute.... Nope just checked. Casey is a common enough name by itself he'd never come across this.

And I shouldn't rag about work too much on here - it's not going to help to obsess about it. I should look for something else. I'm getting tired of designing XML schemas and writing perl and all that stuff. It would be alright to just sit and write something cool, but in a big company I write like 10 lines a day on average, and everything is so much about big build schedules and shit. Everyone has a tiny piece of the project, and only the integration guys see any of the stuff come together. We just hear about the bugs and what we need to.... ah hell. Let's leave the work stuff off.


Dave dropped by last night after work and we ordered some 'za and watched TV. Nothing on of course, but we watched News Networks for a while and were laughing about the coverage of the shuttle launch coming up tomorrow. The US coverage is so self focussed, and the Canadian coverage is all about what nut or bolt we provided. No Canadians on this launch. But at least there's some acknowledgement that there's a Swedish guy going up this time. The US coverage seems to ignore that. Dave was funny he was doing his Stan Markdale announcer voice saying "An these four brave Americans and some foriegner are about to go into space..." And then doing a Nouston voice saying "Commander Phillips, is the foreigner giving you any trouble up there."

He cracked me up. This Phillips guy who's the mission commander though, is almost 60 years old! I couldn't beleive how old some of those guys are. I guess it's a lifetime of experience that keeps you cool when you're inside some tin can, facing potential micro-meteoroid perforation of your forehead at any momemt.

Tomorrow is Saturday, so we'll probably go to the Snark for breakfast and watch the launch on the big screen. Stuey will change the channel for us - we're there enough. Hey - maybe I'll send a text out and see if I can get 1's from the other guys.

Shit we're supposed to try and get new people to join the group aren't we. That's really going to cut into our trashing all the posers if we can't get new people to hang with us sometimes.

Hmmm, maybe this is an opportunity to ask that chick Kate to come along. She's works upstairs, but she's rather hot but doesn't ever seem interested. She's friendly enough though. Maybe she'd see it as less threatening than a date though if she new a big group would be along?

Then again, maybe just asking one of the guys from work would be better. Don't know if the Snark guys would give her a hard time and ruin my chances. Then again, Mina will probably be there and I want to keep that option open too - so yeah, probably a bud from work would be better.

Or maybe some other time.