[this space will more than likely include more random rants for your reading pleasure]

work
so this is december up at work, huh? only ever done that once before, and it was 5 years ago, i was in high school, and the girl i started dating that month has since been married. so in other words, it was a long time ago. december's just goofy cuz you've got a lot of people with all this PTO to blow so random people just don't seem to show up on certain days, so productivity naturally suffers. i've actually done some pretty good work this month, but it's about to come to a screeching halt with the big giant break coming up. then of course it'll take a week to remember what the hell i was doing when we get back in january. at least there's some sense of festivity in the air, people throwing holiday parties, special events, etc. sure as hell beats the insanity that hits you in the face when december comes in college. i think in college the first 2 weeks of college can best be describes as hardcore exams mixed with rampant laziness. usually at some point during that period you slept for like 15 hours straight at one point, but then went 48 hours without sleep at another point.

so i guess i've been a software engineer for roughly 6 months now, so i should prolly have some sorta opinion on it, huh? maybe it's just the typical job -- sometimes i hate it, sometimes i love it, it's bad, it's good, etc. it's kind of like (at least in my situation) you have to be a team player and an individualist at the same time. it's the right kind of job for me in which you have to be able to take criticism and guidance from others but 75% of the time you're working on something yourself. i know a lot of people can't do that -- they just can't be by themself and be productive for too long. i can be just as bad at times, churn & burn for a while, then end up googling/surfing for an hour off task. hell, right now i'm writing a blog, right?

i can't really bitch about my job too much cuz i've just got it too good compared to too many other people. i wear jeans to work 95% of the time, an untucked shirt prolly 80%. i've totally come to realize that i can actually work better when i just put on a regular shirt & jeans rather than come in and wear slacks and a button-down shirt. it's just not comfortable to write & compile code, run down to the lab, crawl behind shit, etc in that kinda gear. i think that's kinda how it should be: if you're coding and "engineering" all the time, you need to be more comfortable than anything, but if you're tap-dancing for the customers all day you should grin & bear it in your suit & tie.

as far as the people i work with, they're mostly good compared to what i've typically seen. they can be pretty laid back, which really helps a lot when it comes to how secure you feel about your job. you have to admit you see these people more than your own family a lot of times, so you almost have to like them to really enjoy what you're doing. we could use a bit more young blood in the group, but they're understandably reluctant to hire recent grads lately. in general, there isn't a particularly strong young group here. i mean there's a group of college hires that have come in within the last year or so, but it's kind of the usual hodgepodge of dorks and antisocials, heh. just kinda seems like it's gonna be sorta tricky making a ton of friends up at work.

dork news
the latest tivo doomsday article came to my attention off of lost remote today. i can't completely disagree with some of it, although it is a little unfortunate. us proud tivo owners could very well see the company go completely belly-up within the next couple years. their flaw (although they have a terrific product) is that they refuse to believe they'd be better off as a pure software company. their boxes could easily be made by motorola or samsung with tivo software loaded on it, and it'd prolly be just as good.

i'm a tivo supporter, i've had my subscription for about a year and a half now and hardly had a complaint. but i can't really argue with those (typically tech-adept do-it-yourselfers) that say that paying $13 a month for their service is a crock of shit. that is pretty goddamn high, and the article states that it only costs tivo 94 cents a month to provide each user with guide data. the only way i justify it is that it's spent to help save me the trouble of recording things more manually and wasting a bunch of time watching everything live. plus, it looks like directv might drop them for dvr support sometime in late 2005, which doesn't exactly make me too eager to buy the HDirecTivo i've eyed for a while. if anything, tivo has taught me that shaping your entire life around a television schedule is dead and gone. no matter whether they flop or not, that's for sure.

there's also an article on there about HD penetration in the marketplace. they predict 50% of american households will be using hdtv's by 2007, which is so fucking wrong it's unbelievable. we'll be LUCKY if it's half that. as expected, so far my 6 month foray into high-definition television has been full of highs and lows, the biggest problem being it's lack of penetration so far. it's just too obvious at times that there's no real huge demand from the general public for pristine HD. directv has started to heavily compress their feeds quite a bit, and you can actually tell that they're hurting the signal, the picture doesn't look quite as good as it did at first.

content's also been pretty shitty in HD. HDnetMovies is a completely worthless channel, HDnet occasionally has good stuff, UniversalHD is largely suckage, DiscoveryHD Theater is typically pretty as hell but not very interesting and ESPN HD doesn't yet show enough events in high-def. over all those channels there's too many shows from like 2000-01 that got cancelled in a year, and HDnet or whatever bought the rights to the show and now try to hype it like we care. i think my general rule is, if a show sucked in standard-def, it ain't *that* much better in high-def. i can pull in NBC and CBS HD feeds over satellite and antenna, but most of the shit on those channels isn't really worth watching in HD.

plus, why the hell is gaming so far behind HD tech? i thought games were *the* new industry, if so, why isn't it following the current adopter curve? people are playing these games on huge HD monitors with 5.1 audio support, why the hell aren't the games using it yet? very few games in this generation can do better than 480p, so why do we have tv's that'll support 1080i and 720p? it's the same thing with dvd's still being so hot. dvd's are still a great idea, but they're way behind what's flying thru the air and into your antenna/dish. as soon as you get a 50" hdtv be sure and tell me how NOT excited you are about 480p dvd's anymore.

homelife
i finally had to move the ps2 into the living room with the gamecube, cuz it wasn't getting enough play in the bedroom. so that was kind of a failed experiment, but at least i got a modded ps2 out of the deal. i'm so much more a cube guy than a ps2 guy, but they're both great consoles.

in a few days i'll hafta start preppin for the annual big colorado trip, which means sorting out all the music/games/etc i gotta bring just to stay sane, heh. so it's just another 4 days of work and then off for a few weeks to sleep weird hours and blow time on video games, tv shows and movies. actually that kinda just sounds like every other week, i dunno.

in one last note, i'm officially fed up with my integra. it drives like complete shit, putting the new distributor in didn't seem to fix it. i've got the distributor cap & rotor plus new plugs & wires to install, but something tells me that's not gonna make the thing run like a champ. i think come january i'm just gonna hafta suck it up and leave the car in an import shop for a week to sort out all the damn kinks, cuz god knows i fuckin hate driving that thing now. the closest thing i'll make to a promise is that i won't be driving "the teg" in july 2005. if i can get it fixed up and running somewhat properly i might put some more effort into the car, but if i continue to have issues i'm trading the fucker in for something else and never looking back. 5 years is long enough to have a car, especially when a supposedly reliable car has had as many weird issues as mine has.

thanks for making it thru that one, i only spread it out over like 5 hours at work, heheh.

rgds,
justin