Valentine’s Day

Surprise flowers delivered to your workplace’s reception and picked up with a huge surprised smile on your face == amazing.

Best. Valentine’s. Ever.

How did I ever get so lucky? :)

Also, my new dentist is awesome. No more painful manual scraping with metal picks FTW.

It’s A Post

Wow, I haven’t written anything here for a while.

Last week at work was admin training… basically learning all about the application. It was good.

This week was my first real week of work. Fixed some bugs, wrote some tests, fixed some more bugs, wrote some more tests… somewhere along the line I started learning some of the codebase, which is good. I still feel overwhelmed by all the code, but at least I’m not feeling completely stupid and frustrated like I was feeling Wednesday.

Life besides work has been uneventful. Last weekend was rock climbing followed by bars with people from work, and it was quite awesome. I really should get out more… it’s just that I always feel so tired after work and just want to sleep. Meh.

I miss people in Pittsburgh, but I’m really happy here in San Francisco. I guess that’s a good state to be in.

Living here is expensive. Let’s go shopping.

I. Have. Internet.

I have internet. It’s about goddamn time.

I hate AT&T so much. They didn’t even need me here today… I was expecting someone to come in to look at the ports inside or something, since they had already sent a tech to look at the outside yesterday. Nope. The guy basically only needed access to a room in the garage… and the key to that room is in the front office. He messed around on the same switchboard the guy yesterday had been messing with (there was even a note on it with my apartment number, taped to a wire, dated with yesterday). Why I had to leave work early and wait around here for 3 hours… I don’t quite understand.

Of course, if this hadn’t fixed the problem, it was “my fault” and we would have had to pay $70 for a tech to come out and look at the stuff in our apartment. How is that at all fair?

On totally unrelated topics, work is amazing. My boss is awesome, my team (security) is awesome, the company is awesome, and free soda and cereal and snack bars and fruit and oatmeal and tea and coffee and gatorade is a nice touch… never have to buy breakfast again.
Also, today featured a team meeting during which everyone drinks lots of booze and gets drunk. Mmmm 15-year-old whiskey. Best place to work ever. <3
I love my job.

Annoyances

Despite work going pretty well (if a bit slow), the rest of my life today hasn’t gone nearly as smoothly or happily.

So I still don’t have internet at home, despite the fact that I was supposed to have had it this past Monday. Three calls to ATT later, no luck. They’re sending someone out to look at the line tomorrow (which I fortunately don’t have to be home for). If (and likely when) that doesn’t resolve the issue, they’re going to have to send someone to look at it inside, which means I’m going to have to be home and skip work (at least for a bit). This sucks. Sucks sucks sucks. Hate.

Also, the calls and such have used up around 40 minutes on my cell phone, which is 40 less minutes I have to call people I really need to call instead of calling people to deal with things that shouldn’t even be problems in the first place.

So I come to the coffeeshop to try and read my email and whatnot. My laptop can’t connect to the wireless. I try rebooting, and it refuses to shut down. When I finally do get it rebooted, it still can’t connect. Try turning it off (which of course it refuses to do) and waiting… no luck. Just when I’m about to give up 40 minutes later (when my tea is all cold and my muffin is gone), it finally decides to connect. Hate. Hate.

Had a ton of trouble at work today with even the most simple of tasks, like installing software so I can set up my development environment and start writing code. Sometimes I feel like I fail so badly at things. Hate.

Also, I’m looking at flights to Pittsburgh for April (Carnival) and May (graduation), and they’re all really expensive. Major suckage. Hate.
I’m half tempted to not put down the $300+ it’s going to cost me to fly there in April (since I’m going to be there less than a month later anyway), but meh… I promised a bunch of people, and I am really missing everyone there. So yeah. Hate.

Also also, the floating holidays I have at work (4 of them) aren’t usable at any time… only a preset number of dates (such as your birthday, MLK day, etc) which means I can’t use them for April or May… which means I’ll be using up 4 days of PTO (two for Carnival if I fly in Thursday like I want to, 2 for graduation). This sucks… and it’s also frustrating because I feel like spending so much money to be in Pittsburgh for, essentially, a weekend isn’t worth it… I’d rather spend an entire week there. We’ll have to see… maybe I can justify missing more days (I do get 15 days PTO per year) in April so I can get there for the opening of Carnival (maybe fly out Wednesday).

I also feel weird taking so much time off given that I’m so new and that I’m likely going to be taking a month off (unpaid) in June to visit Thailand with my parents. I’m emailing my boss asking his opinion.

Relatedly, I found out today that our next major release is in June. If I can’t get the time off, I wonder if I can move the Thailand trip we were planning to July instead. Blar.

So in general, I am in a really shitty mood at the moment. Nothing’s going right today.