Sphere of Archives

April 12, 2002

Bad Week

Must... control... fist... of death....

Today I swore at my phone. That's how bad it was.

April 15, 2002

Will My Holiday Be Cancelled?

First, my manager gives me a future raise. That's a raise that won't happen until sometime next year, if at all, because of budget restraints. Second, my manager says I've earned valuable stock options. You remember stock options, right? They were those slips of paper that filled the economic bubble last year. But the best part about that "bonus" was that by the time I got them, the company stock price had already dropped, making them already worthless. (On the good side, their exercisable over the next three years. Cross your fingers.)

Now, I might not be able to go on holiday this summer because all of the people in the building where I work are being moved to another one across the city. For twelve weeks, certain people must be constantly available in case someone's cell phone doesn't work. I am one of those unfortunate people. Well, if my holiday is in fact cancelled, then I can bank it for next year, or take three weeks at Christmas. Naw, maybe I'll bank it so that I can live in my Mont Tremblant timeshare at least once.

April 16, 2002

Happy Birthday to Me

Pretty much all of the people I know in Ottawa came to my house today. It was pretty tame, I suppose. We're all getting old; our joints are starting to creak, and I'm careful that I don't fall and break my hip. The guys monopolized the couch and talked about wood and fish. The women sat on the unfurnished part of my living room and cackled at old photographs of my life.

May 9, 2002

The Parents Have Landed

They're going to help me with my house. This should be fun. I get the waterbed.

May 11, 2002

Wood for the Masses

A lot of heavy lifting today: move the lumber here, pile the cement blocks there. One of the benefits of living in a government town is the most common task have been bureaucratized. A person fills out a triplicate form checking off what they need, or having an expert do it for him -- check, check, check. Then that person takes the yellow and pink copies to a queue. The attendant takes the pink form and puts the stuff on the counter or in the car. Then the person takes his remaining yellow form and stuff to the drive-through window, hands the form over, signs a couple of places for payment, and then drives away. RONA has a huge drive-through lumber yard and a fenced-in drive through gravel and stone place. It's fast and efficient.

May 12, 2002

Tipping Through The Tulip Stems With You

Since my parents got here, it's been icy wind or driving rain or both. I still wear shorts, though, because it's summer.

This morning we went looking for tulips. We started down Prince of Wales until we hit a huge backlog of traffic. A marathon was in progress. Eventually, we got downtown to reach City Hall. There were a bunch of painted plastic or wooden tulips, and some nice art displays, but no real tulips. It was cold, gray, windy. Exhausted marathoners clogged the halls, sipping water from bottles.

May 19, 2002

Aftermath

It took a week, but I now have a few freshly painted rooms, freshly painted window trim, a new deck and straight front steps. Hooray! See the results here.

Oh, my last night in the waterbed. Someday I will get covers for it.

May 23, 2002

I Control the Vertical

Isn't it wonderful to be needed. I mean really needed, needed as in "(knock knock) Oh, you're having lunch? Well, can you do this for me? Your phone is ringing. I need it right away." But it's all good when you're working on cutting edge stuff that someone might even buy eventually. This week was worse than usual. The project team were so concerned that they asked me if I was getting overworked. This was the first time in six months that they showed any concern for my well-being. So then they offered to spread the work around their group more by having someone trail me and learn from me. How logical. Yes, I could free up precious seconds of my time by training some bored, English-as-a-second-language, arrive-at-10-leave-at-3, self-learning-impaired workaphobes from the project.

That reminds me: I have to update my resume.

May 24, 2002

Close to the Bone

I got home late, just in time to catch my friends Ken and Jason reminding me about playing indoor paintball at a place called Delirium. It's in Vanier, so that meant we'd be ten to fifteen minutes late. Vanier is where a lot of prostitutes and drug dealers hang out. A local band wrote a folk song about it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. At the edge of this is a little indoor maze filled with badly-painted "Dungeons and Dragons" imagery, phosphorescent paint and strobe lighting. There were 16 or 17 of us, most of them were from StatsCan, where Jason works.

For two hours we ran around shooting little rubber balls at each other, and it was enjoyable for the most part, except for the last game, called "President." One woman was the target, a big rotund guy was chosen to be her invulnerable bodyguard, and everyone else had to find and shoot her. By chance, I was the one who found her cowered in at the end of a short dead-end corridor, so I shot her. She just stared at me for a few seconds. Then she screamed at me, "Why are you shooting so close! You are a fucking asshole!" I was a little dumbfounded. I'd been shot at much closer range, and I was wearing a thin T-shirt, not a thick sweater like she was, and I said nothing. Still, how could she say that? I'm not an asshole. I may have beat my chest a couple of times in victory, but that doesn't make me a bodily orifice. It really put a damper on my mood.

The next few hours were spent gulping pints at the bar next door. Things seemed pretty chummy. When I got up to pay my tab and leave, the ex-President approached me and apologized. She said she was an ex-army trainee, and had been taught that anything less than 20 meters was a no shoot zone. It sounded a little insincere to me -- the entire maze was less than 20 meters wide at any point. It made me wonder. With Ken's and Jason's avoidance of cold, moisture and physical labour, and this woman's fear of suffering a small bruise, I wonder what is it about army training that makes people so whiny?

June 1, 2002

Homewrecker

Today I dug me a big hole. It's for the lockstone patio I'm building next to my new deck. I'm making a big mess. I think about Jeff and Sheila, the people who used to live here. Years ago they picked this place above all others as their dreamy dream home. I'm destorying their dreams and replacing them with my own. How Nietzschean.

And talk about keeping up with the Joneses. My neighbour Jeff is building a deck as I'm digging a hole. It's a low cedar platform -- no permit required, and no railing. He got several of his friends to help him, too, so it was finished by early evening, while his wife videotaped the final screws going in. It was sunny and warm, too. Some people have it so easy.

June 3, 2002

Whiny Bastard

Working on the 1xEVDO project gets more fun, exciting and downright sexy every day. Take today, for example. One of the testers is demanding super-user access to one of the network devices, a big security breach. Who's job is on the line in regards to security breaches? I am, so I denied the request. I linked to corporate security policies on the Intranet, provided hypothetical examples, and suggested alternatives. He responded with a terse demand marked urgent, copying a string of managers in the process. So I left for the day. It's people like him who make my job so enjoyable that I would never think of leaving.

June 10, 2002

Those Are the Before Pictures

I know there are some doubters out there that think I am incapable of handling tools, and therefore think that I could never help build a deck. They say it's a figment of my imagination, the half-mad dream of caffeine-soaked, cheezy poof-addled mind. Now I have obtained incontrovertible proof that I was present at those events.

I moved several shovelfuls of dirt
Chopping bricks, like I do every day
I was there! (in the vicinity of my house)
Not actually drilling, but holding a drill
Here I'm touching the drill quote-unquote bit
You can't deny I played a key role
Enjoying the deck that I had a major role in building

June 11, 2002

Another Classic E-Mail

Every eclipse, I get to take a free computer-based course. In keeping with the culture of sharing information, I publish my course notes on the computer network, and announce it with a broadcast e-mail to the group, including a little review. My choices are quite practical, nothing to do with object-oriented programming, understanding network protocols or circuit board design. It's my time, and I want to learn things that will help me as well as the group.

"Another classic e-mail from Eric Clara." It was one of the managers, praising me for another tactful announcement. When I took the course "Preparing for the Behavioural-based Interview," I called it "an excellent course that will help anyone looking for a job." For this course, titled "Interpersonal Skills for the Fast Track", I called it "a personal networking course typical of the 'Go! Go!' eighties", and signed it "P.S. Do you want to be part of my network? Let's do lunch! Only respond if you can advance my career, please." Yes, I think the course is working.

June 22, 2002

Feel My Man Boobs

Many people ask me, "Eric, what's up with your friend rubbing his nipples?" And I say, "Which friend? They're both doing it." And then they say, "The tall one." And then I say, "He's comfortable with his body, that's all." And then my taller friend says, "Wanna feel my man boobs?" And then we avert our eyes.

But it's true that he's just very comfortable with his corporeal self, and he has no shame. He'll touch them at parties, in stores, on the street. He'll cup them in his big hands and make appreciative noises. He's saying, "Yes, they're mine, and they're fine." You go, guy.

June 23, 2002

People Who Like to Watch

I finally completed that lockstone patio in my back yard. For three weeks I ate supper while staring at a big 8-by-10 hole off the side of the deck, until today when I had a day free. Three weeks of preparations -- getting the gravel, the stone sand, the finer sand that goes in the cracks, planning the layout, pricing rental machinery. It almost didn't happen today. I was lucky enough to rent the last gasoline-powered compacter from Home Depot, but they had rented both of their vans. I had to wait an hour until one became free, allowing me to take the compacter home.

I started at eleven when the patio has still in shadow, but soon I was full in the sun. Dragging the heavy machine around, I think I lost track of time. Meanwhile, I think I heard my neighbours talking about my work. They never looked over to ask how I was doing, but they implied that the gravel was being very well flattened. Packing down the stone sand was a bit fun. The grains tended to stick together. They made a pleasant-looking flat surface.

After taking an hour-long break on the phone (what? Home Depot is charging me by the hour!), I went to place the stones. At this time, I discovered the flaw in my plan. I had plotted a patio of 10.5 feet by 7.5 feet, but the actual space was 10.25 feet by 7.5 feet. Argh! Not a big problem, though. The pattern is simple enough that lopping off a row bricks had no impact. Half-way through, I discovered another flaw, which was packing the bricks too tightly, so that they started not fitting together. I had to re-do the work a couple of times until I got the spacing right. I hadn't noticed, but all this time the sky was clouding over. Just as I was placing the last few bricks, there was a flash and a rumble and then the rain and wind came. Even as I poured the fine sand over the bricks, it turned to mud. I was determined to finish it, spreading the ooze around with a broom and tamping everything down for the last time.

So, it's done. It's not perfect, but it'll do for a few years. Now I can spend the rest of the summer painting the house and watching the grass grow.