Random chatter

Well, tonight's the big night for Jack Bauer fans. The third-season premiere of 24. Set your VCRs, Tivos, or alarm watches. For me, I'll be taping it, since I won't be home in time to see it.

Ah, such sweet agony is 24...going through the day an hour at a time, with a horrible cliffhanger at each episode's end and at least one week and sometimes as many as four or five between each new episode. It's almost worse to watch it as it airs than it is to wait until the DVD set comes out.

Other stuff...yesterday I spoke to a financial dept. rep with a rather unfortunate name...a victim of the fad of creating faux-ethnic names by taking an already existing female name and adding "Ra-" or "La-" or some other syllable to the front of it. This poor representative is named "Latrina." She must have had some rough high school years.

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Today's kind of a slack day at work...we had two hours scheduled to go over training materials, and ended up going only half an hour...so I'm essentially getting two lunchbreaks.

The bad news is, I just learned that Thursday and Friday, our two big days of retraining before we're incorporated into Small Business Local and leave ComX behind...are going to be 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. shifts. Words do not exist to describe my utter lack of enthusiasm for this prospect.

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Found this article in tbutler's LJ...it's all about how programmers can modify their programs to simplify installation on OS X, so that it's not necessary to apply a series of cryptic shell commands. I can certainly agree with the sentiment, having gone through my share of cryptic installation procedures on my Linux box. Just because I like the command-line doesn't mean I like extra hassle, after all.

Still, I can't help but find it a little ironic. For years, a commonly-heard complaint geeks had against the Mac was that "if you make a computer that even an idiot can use, then only an idiot will want to use it." And then along comes the dichotomy of OS X, which manages to be both a floor wax and a dessert topping—offering ease-of-use to average joes and a UNIX interface to people who like to go in and mess with the guts of things. So there are these two groups of people with needs and usage habits at two opposite ends of a spectrum who are using, and developing for, the same system...and it seems that sometimes they need a little extra help understanding each other.

Evening wrap-up

Well, don't I feel dumb.

I set the VCR to record 24 all right...but I forgot to put the tape in it. Whoops. Fortunately, 24 has one of the more devoted Internet mpeg download followings...and I've already located a BitTorrent site that has it available. With any luck, it should be watchable by tomorrow morning. Really just as well, I guess; I really ought to get in bed right away to start training myself to get up earlier for the 8 a.m. Thursday and Friday training days.

It didn't hit me until one of the co-workers mentioned it: tonight was the last night I'll be coming home from work at 11 p.m. Training on Thursday and Friday, then the new schedule is five days a week from 11:30 to 8. And the next couple weeks are going to be a stressful time, what with having to relearn old skills and learn new ones, actually have to do more for customers than transfer them to where they need to go, and lose my middle-of-the-week rest day. I'm...really not looking forward to it.

OTOH, at least I'll have more hours per day to play with the new computer...

Well, off to find something to eat and then collapse into bed.