Just A Quicky
Just a quick note before I go to bed (since I have to get up in the morning to catch a flight to Colorado for my long trip).

Let's see... worked Thursday and Friday.... I can't remember what I did, besides something Beatles-related....

Over the weekend, I'm not sure what I did either, but know I got a haircut and went out to dinner with my mom on Sunday....

Today, Gordie Tepper came back to work in Data Processing (he had worked there before, but not since I came along). Wasn't exactly the greatest day. Now, if I knew him outside of work, he'd be a great guy, but his presence at work is kind of hindering, for lack of a better word. "More on that as the story develops", I suppose. Oh, and his girlfriend is actress Shawna Waldron. I may have a comment on that later, as well.

Anyway, back to the point of this post.... I'm going to Colorado, then Canada, then back to Colorado, for a trip that will total 10 days. I'll be taking lots of pictures, but I won't be able to update my blog through most of that time. Expect a bunch of pictures when I come back, including those that I took last week.

I think that's all I wanted to say, except that I began beta testing the next version of EasyMOD today. Well, see you in 10 days!

Time Now: 1:42 AM
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/27/2004 01:35:00 AM [ 1 comments ]

 
This Land is MY Land
OK, even though I just posted, I found this on Jelly's blog, and I found extremely funny. Have a look: http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/this_land_af
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/21/2004 11:10:00 PM [ 0 comments ] - Related Link

 
Week in Review
As per the last entry, I'm not going to talk about you-don't-know-her on here until further notice, And you shouldn't either. It's no longer a public issue, but a private one. End of story (for now).

Anyway, into the news....

It's been over a week since I last posted, but honestly, nothing major has happened (other than the aforementioned event). I've been working pretty much the whole time. We did go to lunch at the Corner Galley out in Seaford (or thereabouts) on Saturday, though. It was a fun time; so many different opinions about so many different issues (6 adults, plus my sister and me). Their grilled chicken/melted mozzarella sandwich is delicious, by the way.

As for work, Jaime is some character, man, I tell ya.... He won't let me install Mozilla on my computer, but he will Netscape. Aside from the fact that that makes no logical sense, it sure is fun to argue with him about it. On top of that, the guy likes karaoke, which leads to some fun afternoons. Thanks to Ronan Dowling for the karaoke site. It had Jaime singing things like The Police's Roxanne and Jewel's Foolish Games (and he's married with a couple of kids, so ha!). Oh, it was pretty funny. I had my share of tunes, too. And, of course, you can't forget The Beatles. I brought that CD in today (thanks again, Casey), and I was having a grand ol' time. Especially at the end of the day, when we had just finished arguing about Mozilla. I kept singing Hey, Jude in his face. It was pretty funny.

Well, I actually got to do some work this week. People were moving offices, so we had to hook up a bunch of computers, along with some other stuff. And you know those rubber strips that you can run wire through to keep flat and unmoving on the floor? Well, it turns out that it's impossible to talk directly about them without sounding risqué. This is what Jaime said to me while we were feeding wire through the thing:

You push it in here while I spread this.

We both started cracking up laughing. I forget what else he said about it, but it didn't come out any better. And later, I was gonna call it a "strip", and, while not as bad, it really wasn't any better, either....

So, I guess that's about it.... I was gonna take pictures for Chuck Jacobi's site during my lunch break, but the camera's batteries died before I could. I did get a couple of shots of Jaime, though, so I guess I'll put them up as soon as I get more batteries.

One other thing I just remembered: Regis & Kelly are doing their shows (at least partially) from Long Beach all week. I brought my portable TV into work to watch it, since it starts at 9:00 am—the same time I have to be at work—but of course the batteries on that died too. BUT, before they did, I was able to see some of the parts live from Long Beach. And who was there on the beach, talking about good gadgets for the beach? None other than Cat Schwartz, from (G4)TechTV! And, of course, I was stuck in the office, mere blocks from where she was (basically, the amount of blocks between Park Avenue and the beach). Ah well. All of Friday's show is gonna be from the beach (but rumor has it that it's going to be taped on Thursday, possibly due to the bad weather forecast for Friday).

OK, really, I think that's it. See ya 'round the campfire.

Time Now: 10:56 PM
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/21/2004 10:22:00 PM [ 0 comments ]

 
Oh Boy...
Last night, she asked. So I told her.
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/13/2004 06:56:00 AM [ 0 comments ]

 
People Are Still Dumb
That has nothing to do with this article. I just wanted to make sure you didn't forget it.

After that last entry, I had nothing to do.... In fact, I didn't do any actual work for the rest of the day, now that I think about it....

So anyway, I tried to call Casey, but it appeared that his cell phone was off. Instead, I called my house. Talked to my sister for a while about absolutely nothing, just to kill time. Then she passed the phone off to my dad and I relayed him the correlation between the two guard-thing stories. That killed about a half-hour, and the Fire Commissioner's call coincided with my lunch break time. So I went to lunch. Saw the oh-so-nice guard guy on my way out the door, and he apologized for the morning. Except, his voice sounds the same whether he's angry or happy or kidding or whatever. So I said, "Yeah, OK." in as neutral a voice as possible and just kept walking. I had two Sicilian slices of pizza at Gino's. Nothing exciting.

I got back around 12:30 pm. Now, I can't remember the exact timeframe, but eventually Jaime got a call from the City Manager upstairs, as one of the City Council members needed a cell phone. None of the working cell phones had charged batteries, so that meant that he needed a matching charger. Anyway, Jaime's going all around looking for one.... Eventually, my favorite-person-in-the-whole-world walks in. Imagine that. Three times in one day. Apparently he knows where Jaime could find a charger or something. I don't know. But he told Jaime the story about that morning, apologized again, and shook my hand. I still don't like the guy, but I tried not to let it show. He's very odd—it's like he's a guy with girl's eyes. It's very strange. Anyway, it's hard to explain, and it's not important.

Moving along.... Jaime took his lunch about 40 minutes late. And he didn't leave me with anything to do. So, I talked on the phone with Casey (and Jimmy...) for over a half hour. But then Casey got hungry and left, and Jimmy hung up too. So, still bored, I called my house again. Talked to my mom this time, then my sister again. Then they put me on speakerphone. Poor puppy. He was hearing my voice and he didn't know where it was coming from. They said he was looking around for me. I told them to bring him with them when they came to pick me up (and they did). But then I had to go, because I actuall had some tech support to do.

It was only a file association problem, though. Someone was sent an attachment of a WordPerfect Document (WPD), but they didn't have WordPerfect on their computer. So, I looked up the extension (I wasn't positive what it was), and then I suggested opening it in Microsoft {ack!} Word. That worked already, so that was that.

After Jaime came back, there wasn't anything more to do. I started cleaning up my work area and stuff—making room, straightening things up, etc. I continued with that until I went home.

So, essentially, besides answering phones and giving a tiny bit of tech support (which I do online, for free, all the time), I haven't worked since 11:30 this morning. Which leads into something I forgot to mention within the timeframe: Jaime was finding out about my payroll or whatever you want to call it. It seems that whoever needs my paperwork didn't get it, so I'm not currently on the payroll. However, by now, I think things are (at least partially) straightened out. I'll find out tomorrow, I guess. (Jaime says it's not a big deal, since I wouldn't have gotten paid until the next cycle [or whatever word he used].)

Time Now: 5:32 PM
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/12/2004 05:15:00 PM [ 1 comments ]

 
People Are Dumb
Ah... I hate Mondays....

It starts off with the receptionist/guard guy working at the desk in the lobby, similar to my first day here—except it's a different guy. Anyway, it's 8:45 am. I walk in and head to the elevator. They guy says "Building opens at 9:00". I say, "Yeah, OK." and I keep walking. He keeps saying it to me, and I keep saying that to him. Then he goes, "You know something I don't?" "I work here." "Oh, well why didn't you just say that instead of being a smart guy? I don't have x-ray vision... I can't read minds." Bla bla bla. Oh yeah, and as I'm getting on the elevator: "Have a nice day." "Yeah, you too." Idiot.

Then I wait 10 minutes for Jaime to get here, since the door's locked. "I had to take my kids to camp." OK, I'm gonna need a key.

I finish up the water contamination fliers... It's about 11:15 am. A guy from that Water Department comes in right after to look at them. He notices that the "Date Distributed" is not printed. On 8,000 fliers. Needless to say, I noticed this before we even began printing, but since we hadn't printed the actual fliers ourselves, there wasn't much we could do about it—and technically, we weren't supposed to.

So, we're all standing around trying to figure out what to do. We have 8,000 fliers all ready to be sent out, without distribution dates. By state order (or some I'm told), they've had 30 days to print and send these—and they're supposed to be distributed by Wednesday. Not on Wednesday. By Wednesday. Even if we had to reprint them all (which I'm not doing), they wouldn't be ready to be mailed by Wednesday. So we're waiting on word from Health Department. Or something.

So anyway... I hate Mondays....

Time Now: 11:37 AM
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/12/2004 11:32:00 AM [ 0 comments ]

 
Working Man
As promised, I will get into the details of my two days of work in this past week.

On Thursday, I had to get up at 7:00 am to get ready for my first day of work—whatever it was I was gonna do. I had to be there by 9:00 am, but I was ready by around 8:30 am. So, we (my dad and me) get there around 8:45 am and head up to the 5th floor, where the City Manager's office is.

The guy at the front desk in the lobby kinda gave my dad a tough time about who he was and why he was going upstairs... and my dad likes to be powerful without telling anybody. He could've easily flashed his badge or something, but instead, he has the guy calling upstairs warning them of us coming.... It's actually pretty funny, now that I think about it....

Anyway, we get upstairs and we sit down in the chairs outside the office, because we're early and we're waiting for Garret Rooney to come meet us. By 9:45 am, he still had not showed up. By that time we were getting bored and kind of antsy, so one of the secretaries/receptionists there (I forget which one) called or paged Jaime Roman, who had been doing water bill-related things in the Water Department. He had actually been in an out of the office during the time we had been waiting there. He didn't actually come back up, but Karen (one of the secretaries/receptionists) took us down to the Water Department where he was.

So we (Jaime and me) stood there chatting, after my dad left, about computers and stuff, like what it was I was exactly getting myself into. After finishing our discussion and me waiting around there for a while, he took me back to the office—Data Processing—and showed me around. They have a whole storage room full of old computer equipment that they plan to auction off or throw out. Needless to say, I was interested in that, but there's more to talk about, so let's move on....

He showed me the servers for the entire building (I think). Most were various versions of Windows, but there was one UNIX and one Novell (I think that's what it was...). They were all hooked up to one monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and he switched between them by using a key combination (I think it was Scroll Lock, Scroll Lock, and then a number).

After showing me all that stuff, he had to return to the Water Department to finish up what he was doing. That left me sitting there at a Windows XP computer with a 20-inch monitor and a resolution 1600×1200 with nothing to do. So I sat there, basically trying to entertain myself. I browsed a few websites, made a few phone calls to various people, and played around with the paper-folder machine. Eventually he came back, and I can remember the proper order for this, but we had to go figure out a printer problem (frozen queue, it appeared) and then we had to go get 20 postal bins and 20 boxes of blank water bills.

[Note: I somehow got distracted and began looking at camcorders, for some unknown reason.]

So... for the rest of the afternoon, we printed up 8,000 water bills by postal section/category. My lunch hour is from 12 noon to 1 pm, so I took off around then to go to lunch. Jaime's is 1 pm to 2 pm, so that's when I'm working by myself.... We worked on those water bills all afternoon, until I got off at 4 pm. Jaime wound up staying until 6 pm to finish.

As for Friday, it was a little easier and more laid back. Again in the morning, I didn't do a whole lot. Jaime arranged for me to have an e-mail address (ghemsley@mail.longbeachny.org), and also an account on the internal instant messaging system. I was answering the phone a few times during the morning, as Jaime was out doing "calls", if you will.

At around 11 am, we began printing and folding fliers that talked about something in some of the water that was found and corrected in the beginning of June. After I came back from lunch, Casey and Jimmy stopped by, and I gave them a tour of the place. They hung out for about half an hour, but then they left. Jaime went to lunch soon after.

While he was gone, and after he came back and starting running "calls" again, I did 5 or 6 postal sections before I stopped (I finished up to number 10). For the next half-hour to an hour, we both stopped working on those fliers. I went through a box under "my" desk, which contained really old cell phones (many from Nynex, the phone company that became Bell Atlantic and then Verizon), as well as many Intel i486 CPUs and some other stuff.

Not much else going on.... Going back to work tomorrow.... I don't think much happened over the weekend, so, until next time, I'll collect more stories from work. Heh.

Time Now: 3:51 PM
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/11/2004 01:14:00 PM [ 3 comments ]

 
Lotsa Lag
Well, since I have to chronicle from July 4th onward, and don't have a whole lot of time, more recent events will be mentioned in the next post.

July 4th was a somewhat hectic day.... I had to go to work with my dad (which I wanted, because they have some fun there...), but I also had to get CMSform^E 0.0.3 out the door.

I didn't get to finish that before I had to leave, but I just chose to forget about it and not make a whole big deal about it. I came back later that night to find that Jelly threw a release together haphazardly and half-heartedly. Bugs still existed, and I didn't even finish what I was working on. Needless to say, I was a little perturbed, but I chose to not worry about it for the time being.

Since the night of July 4th, I have not slept in as good of a pattern as I would have liked. I stayed up all night that night, and then went to bed when we got home at 9:00 AM or some such. After that, though, I stayed up pretty much all day, taking naps in between. All of them were uncomfortable. The next night, I went to bed looking for a good night's sleep, but I wound up being woken up to give tech support—and I wasn't going back to bed after that.

If I'm calculating correctly, that was the same day as my dad's birthday (I have a bad memory, you know, so it might not be the same day...). But anyway, my aunt and uncle came over for lunch/dinner/dessert. (Lunch & cheesecake wound up being dinner that night...not fun.) My uncle, who's a photographer and who works at Cameta Camera out on the island (he can actually be seen in one of their TV commercials), is like a Little Rascals fanatic, and my dad likes them too. He was able to get in contact with one of them who is still alive (and is on the island, too), and the guy came into the store to sign pictures and stuff. So, for my dad's birthday, they gave him a picture of the gang signed by that one guy, along with a picture of the guy and my uncle, and a book about the show, its history, and the actors.

The day before my dad's birthday, my great-aunt and great-uncle stopped by for a while, but I can't remember the relation of that to my sleep pattern (though I do know that it was Tuesday, because I had an orthodonist appointment right before).

So, you're pretty much caught up to Wednesday. On Thursday, I started work, which is what I gotta go get ready for now. Expect the details of the past two days in the next entry.

Time Now: 8:16 AM
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/09/2004 08:06:00 AM [ 1 comments ]

 
Sleep Much?




Photos of the car accident at 4:00 AM on June 30, 2004. 
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/06/2004 01:18:00 AM [ 0 comments ]

 
It's All About the 1st
First off, all seems well on the you-don't-know-who front. Now into the news.

July 1st went well. My site got transformed into version 3 as I had planned, though the forums still need to be upgraded and such. Also, I didn't have to work. Something strange going on, but I have (at least) the July 4th weekend off. I'll find out more on Monday or Tuesday. July 1st was also Canada Day, so Happy Canada Day to everyone!

And as for CMSform^E, it's crunch time. It's July 3rd, and I always like to have things released, essentially, for when people get up in the morning. Which means, I have less than 24 hours to fix any known bugs, test everything out, and all that wonderfully fun stuff. I'm gonna need Jelly and Mike's help on this, so hopefully you're all available. I've done some work already this morning, but there's much to do, I believe. (Not to mention that I'm going to bed soon, so you won't see more for another 9 hours or so.)

Let's see... also on the calendar this month is my dad's 51st (gasp) birthday on the 7th. So, yeah, I keep forgetting, except when I see the monster truck show commercial that's gonna be on the 7th. It makes me go, "Woah, his birthday is really soon! But no one's said anything about it...."

And, though it seems like there's something about this in every post (and lately, there has been), Alexa's journal has now become friends-only. This means that all you stalkers out there (me included... err... heh) have to announce your presence and be added to her friends list to be able to read a majority of her posts. I dug up a three-year-old account for this purpose. Check this out.

Last night there were fireworks and lightning (no e) for us to watch.... I even got the lightning on tape. Yeah, so, that's verrry interesting.

I think that's all for now.... Yup, seems like it.

Time Now: 6:57 AM
Posted by Gordon P. Hemsley @ 7/03/2004 06:42:00 AM [ 0 comments ]