I thought this message on the back of a Winchester Mystery House ticket was pretty funny. By the time you read this, these tickets will be posted on the trash cans in my office.

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Not sure why I don't have much of anything to say. I bought Rock Band a couple weeks ago and for a while everybody wanted to play it just about every day. If the novelty has already worn off, it was an expensive week, I guess, because I had to buy the Playstation 3 too (in which I, so far, have zero interest beyond Rock Band). Mostly I play the drums, with all but a few songs on Hard, and about half on Expert. I can't play the guitar for more than a few minutes because of my hands. And it annoys me a little that everybody assumes I will suck at singing. I'll have you know that I was once told my singing was "pretty good for somebody with no voice lessons." I'm not claiming that I'm going to be starring in any musicals, but I'm not tone deaf, either.

Last week everybody went to Disneyland courtesy of crazy Uncle Google. Chrisi and Kacirek and I got the awesome Jungle Book tattoos you see here with our corn dogs. Yet more Rock Band was played, in a hotel room, because Walker brought it down there.

That's about it. Beth got a job. Megan got a new apartment. I am tired and don't do much besides work again. The only way I can do any actual "engineer" work anymore is at night or on weekends, such as tonight, until 10 minutes ago. That's because 8-10 hours a day are now occupied with meetings, training, and crap like making sure everybody has work to do. Oh, and referee the pissing contests that always end in sulking and abandoned projects unless somebody constantly pushes. That's my new hobby.

If I am on the same track two years behind Steve, then I have about another year to go like this before I am given a job where people stop expecting me to do real work too. Or I can burn out, abandon any pretense of climbing The Career Ladder, and commence what has been called "rest and vest." There are plenty of role models on that track as well.

I have a new mentee, Ian, who started on Monday, and I heard myself explaining to him that we don't have much in the way of engineering problems that are both interesting and solvable. There were more of those to go around two years ago, when my group was formed. But by now most anything that's either necessary or interesting has got a solution that was Good Enough For Now, meaning that even though there's room to design something better, the payoff is marginal. The big problems we have now are political and social. This is because most of the people involved have outstanding technical skills, but many of them have poor-to-zero social skills. And trying to solve social problems in this environment is as excruciating as I imagine it would be for a sales office to try to write a program.

13 Feb 2008 02:43 PT - persistent link - trackback - 3 comments