Long Way Up

Long Way Up
Originally uploaded by stormdog42

I have so *very* much to say about Windycon and about my weekend. But I'm buried here at work this morning, so I'll try and capture it in writing this evening.

For now, just to get my mind off of what I'm doing here today for a moment, here's one of the pictures from a trip that jimcyl, myself, and the LJ-less Eric took to a power plant in a south suburb of Chicago on Sunday. I have more to post, but not as many as I'd like since my batteries were being flaky. We'll be going back in the Spring, I'm sure.


It was so otherworldly being in here and looking up through the oddly organic curve of the stack and seeing birds flying about overhead. That little line that starts about two thirds of the way up and goes to the top? That's a ladder.

(no subject)

Today is so fired.

A combination of work being crazy to begin with and me having to get caught up after being out on Friday of last week (ok, combined with just a hint of post-con lethargy) led to me spending most of the day playing catch up. This was not helped by the three people who came to the door to ask when their new hire was going to have his accounts and equipment, all of them having been announced on Friday. I was not happy with people today. But serinthia is going to help with watching the queues tomorrow so I can catch up on terms and new hires and feel like I'm doing something useful. Thanks Serin!

On top of work, I once again have a dispute open on that stupid tablet I sold. That thing is cursed. I added the tracking number to the dispute in Paypal, which shows delivery on the 7th. Hopefully that will be enough. I'm worried that it won't be. If it's not, I may have to start shipping everything via signature confirmation, which would suck, but so it goes.

At least I have warm, happy thoughts of the weekend to get me through this transient, though frustrating, rough patch. Nothing is really that big a deal. It's all small stuff. At least, that's what I'm trying to remember. I also had a very much appreciated reassuring note from moiracoon and some lovely conversations with rileybear67 that kept me going through the day. Love to you both!

One more note on the 'plus' column for today: I decided that I wanted to do something brainless and shoot zombies or something this evening. It's been a long time since I've done that. So, in what I'm sure is a heinous abuse of my power as a Help Desk Desktop Services technician, I assigned a spare 20" widescreen flat panel to myself and brought it home with me to play Half-Life 2 or maybe Portal (which, I know, is lacking zombies, but other aspects make up for it) or something.

Now, I haven't gotten to that yet, but I decided to look at a few of my pictures from the power plant on this thing. Holy shit! The difference is nothing short of night and day between this and the laptop display or the nigh-on-to ten year old monitors I have at home. I mean, wow. I used to think that maybe for some reason my camera just wouldn't give me a really crisp, sharp focus most of the time, and that maybe the sensor was dirty or the calibration on the auto-focus was off... Nope; it was my crappy monitors. I can't even begin to describe how much this monitor rocks; I don't ever want to go back to the 21" CRT, or the 1st generation Eizo flatscreen I scavenged from work a while ago. Those are ok for day to day work, sure, but for photo editing and manipulation, they don't hold a candle to this. I'm just amazed at what I've been missing. And, should I have occasion to work from home again, as I have a few times in the past, this screen will give me much more room to work with when I just have my laptop, which won't support the four monitors I'm used to. That is also my justification for having this thing at home, should it ever come up. Which it won't; our asset tracking system is for shit. Not that I have the intention of walking off with something like that, but in our system it would be so easy to do it it's not even funny.

I'm going to write more about my weekend tonight or tomorrow. It depends on when my brain reconstitutes itself from it's current primordial soup state. But I want to state again how wonderful it was to have spent the last few days with the two wonderful people who graciously accompanied me to Windycon this year. You made a simple dog very happy.