kevin_standlee: (Wigwam)
After yesterday's rather hectic at times and long day (I was merely along for the ride with Kayla, but that was enough), I took it much easier today. I woke up around the same time as my weekday alarm, took my time getting ready, and strolled down to the Wigwam, where I was the first customer in the restaurant. Dawn took that is stride as I ordered my usual (big) breakfast, and for a change, managed to eat it all. (I did not eat a whole lot more for the rest of the day, though.)

The rest of the day was quiet, and that's fine with me. I ended up getting sleepy and lying down around 2 PM and sleeping for several hours before being awakened by a bad dream. I know work is getting intense when I dream of hunching over a computer trying to untangle complex inventory reconciliation issues at the Day Jobbe.
kevin_standlee: Kevin after losing a lot of weight. He peaked at 330, but over the following years got it down to 220 and continues to lose weight. (Default)
Despite someone online who seemed to think that unless you were making multiple millions of dollars per year, you can't possibly be "well off," and that anyone else was obviously a pauper, I think I'm pretty well off. I have a good job with excellent health insurance, own my home, could pay off the mortgage if I had to do so and still have more than $1 million in my 401(k) account, and am technically considered economically "upper class" where I live, because my income puts me in the bottom of the upper quartile. No, I'm not a multi-millionaire, but I sometime wonder if those people are leveraged to the hilt and are teetering on bankruptcy. I live a pretty comfortable upper-middle-class existence.

The Day Jobbe is important, of course, so I try not to get too grumpy when work gets intense, as it has been of late. It does mean that we have work to do and we're not under threat of job reductions.

Meanwhile, my new computer keeps throwing more updates at me. You'd think it would have had enough by now, but no, every day there seems to be something else. I also still have to keep telling it variations of "No, I don't want you to install lots of marketing software so you can try and extract more money from me."

I hope eventually I will have enough time and energy to figure out why the computer seems to know that the 15 TB network hard drive is out there, but won't let me map it to the new machine.

Update Day

Apr. 18th, 2025 04:27 pm
kevin_standlee: The letters GXO in orange on a white background (GXO)
My company is in the process of rolling out Windows 11 updates to all of their computers. This a very large task, as there are thousands of computers all over the world that have to be updated. Fortunately, they didn't require me to go to the Fremont office to get the update. Nevertheless, what probably should have only taken an hour took much of the day. The engineer handling my computer remotely had a whole lot of trouble getting things to install. Even after he handed it back over to me with instructions, there were several more Win10 updates that had to be installed first (and the computer restarted) before we could even start the Win11 update. The Win11 update itself, even over my decently speedy internet connection, took more than an hour to download. (I don't know exactly how long it took because Kayla decided it was time for us to make the trip to Sparks about which she wrote on her journal after an hour of waiting.)

This morning, the computer had downloaded yet more updates, and they also had to be installed and the computer restarted again. That seems to be all of it for now.

So far, Win11 seems to be working okay, and it didn't reorganized my computer or change the user interface as much as I expected it would do.
kevin_standlee: The letters GXO in orange on a white background (GXO)
It does seem this week that I'm working some pretty long hours. Monday was the worst, but it's been more than eight hours every day. I'm not an hourly worker, so some of this is self-inflicted, because the nature of my work is such that I hate to leave a task half-finished, and would rather get to a logical breakpoint rather than spend my off hours thinking about the Day Jobbe.

And I am trying to get other things done other than the Day Jobbe, like updating the Westercon web site with some news that is going up later today.

Aftermath

Apr. 15th, 2025 05:49 pm
kevin_standlee: The letters GXO in orange on a white background (GXO)
I slept in an hour this morning, i.e. getting up at 0530 to start at 0630 instead on an hour earlier as usual. Nobody seemed to mind. As I feared, the mess last night was indeed a mess, with conflicting changes causing more problems. This is what happens when the pressure is on to produce things. We'll get it cleaned up.

Speaking of cleaning up, I felt like I did accomplish something meaningful this afternoon when I managed to clear up a multi-million-dollar inventory inaccuracy. It was much more satisfying than sorting out a few missing screws or untangling a mismatch of cardboard boxes.

However, for now, all I want is more sleep. Let's hope I can get some tonight and not dream of trying to fix inventory issues.

Grinding

Apr. 14th, 2025 08:21 pm
kevin_standlee: The letters GXO in orange on a white background (GXO)
Today was a pretty intense one at the Day Jobbe. As usual, I started work at 0530 PT and working what I call my "morning routine" until my morning staff meeting at 0730. During that meeting, we determined that there was no shortcut to the problem I'd identified, and I would need to do a sizable number of manual changes to a complex table of information. (I'm obviously not going into specifics.) I spent the rest of the day trying to make those changes, except for 30 minutes I took for lunch, and then about two hours when I went to the chiropractor to make up for the appointment I missed last week and then collect the mail and run an errand that had been pending for a while. Then it was back to the grind. It was not easy. It was made worse by (I think) someone else making changes in the same table that were overwriting mine, meaning I had to keep back-tracking and fixing things again.

I finally got the issue fixed around 2000. So much for getting to bed early today! I hope it says fixed and isn't broken again tomorrow.

At least the issue really was fairly important and moderately valuable. It wasn't like I was counting paper clips or something like that.

Wipeout

Aug. 9th, 2018 09:42 pm
kevin_standlee: (Kreegah Bundalo)
The hours I've been working on Day Jobbe plus Worldcon prep caught up with me today. As soon as I could today (about 3 PM) I logged out, had a slight snack in place of dinner, and fell into bed and slept for several hours. I woke up around 9 PM, but will be heading back to bed after dealing with (what else) more Worldcon business.
kevin_standlee: Kevin after losing a lot of weight. He peaked at 330, but over the following years got it down to 220 and continues to lose weight. (Default)
I was a little later getting away from Sacramento this morning because I realized that if I worked a few hours from the hotel room this morning — and there were some good work-related reasons for doing so anyway — I could save a half-day of vacation time. My manager was agreeable to this, and my co-workers happy to have me working during the busy part of the morning, so I hung around getting stuff done from 5 AM to 8 AM before getting breakfast and then leaving for San Jose.

Shortly after I moved to the San Jose area to take a job running a small non-profit association (not SF/F/fandom related) in 1994, I opened at PO Box at the Sunnnyvale post office. Now that I'm a full time Nevadan coming to the Bay Area only a handful of times a year, and now that I've had years to transition all of my "real" mail to the address in Fernley, it was time to shut it down. Conveniently, I had to be here in the area on a weekday during the month that the mailbox rent would have otherwise automatically renewed.

One Last Look )

I turned in my key and got my deposit back, signed some papers forwarding what little real mail I still get here on to Fernley, and that was the end of an era.

That PO Box was also the mailing address for Worldcon Intellectual Property, the small non-profit corporation set up by the WSFS Mark Protection Committee to hold legal title to the WSFS service marks. (This was necessary before registering the marks in the EU, because the EU Intellectual Property Office doesn't understand the concept of an unincorporated association.) I've never been completely comfortable with this setup because it was a single point of failure. Fortunately, SFSFC (which shares two directors with WIP) has its address just a few boxes down from here, and agreed to be WIP's new mailing address. Therefore, there are multiple people who can get at the mail (not that WIP gets much real mail) and no more single points of failure. Along that same line, I took the opportunity while driving down from Sacramento to stop at the bank where WIP's bank account is located and officially change the mailing address. While we do all of our banking online, we should keep the address updated. And a few weeks ago, while renewing routine paperwork with the California Secretary of State's office, I changed WIP's mailing address as well. All the necessary organizational stuff is done, and I am relieved that it's resolved.
kevin_standlee: (Fernley)
We got out of Yuba City about 9:30 this morning and convoyed home, staying in touch between me in the Astro and Lisa in the Small Orange Pickup by ham radio. We took our time getting home, including stopping for breakfast in Marysville, coffee in Grass Valley, a leg-stretch at the Alpha-Omega overlook trail of CA-20, and a late lunch at the Peppermill in Reno before getting home around 4:30 or thereabouts.

The Peppermill lunch buffet was closed when we got there, so we tried the seafood restaurant and gave their version of shrimp pan roast a try. Never again. It wasn't as actively bad as the version at the Atlantis, but both of us were feeling uneasy with the dish sitting on our stomachs on the ride home. We'll stick with the Nugget Oyster Bar version as long as the new ownership there allows them to keep making it. (Given the other changes at the Nugget, we're concerned that they'll ruin the Oyster Bar too.)

After unloading our luggage and personal affects, we tried to rest a bit. Lisa lay down for a while and I ground my way through e-mail. Work caught up with me even on my day off and I had several hours of work to do this evening for the Day Jobbe. That's probably just as well because we have to go to Reno tomorrow afternoon for a car-repair issue, then again on Wednesday morning to take Lisa to the TMJ specialist, then probably again to retrieve the vehicle from the air-conditioner-repair place later in the week. I'll be working in the evenings, but I need to get ahead and did so by turning around a request tonight so I could actually start on the things I'm supposed to be doing tomorrow morning.

After getting some rest, Lisa came and got me and we unloaded the "battleship" desk and the various boxes from the Astro. It only took about twenty minutes, and Lisa was able to arrange things so there was still barely enough room to park the pickup when we were done. The desk is in a temporary location until she clears enough space from her workshop for us to install it. I also will need to clear out the drawers in the desk, which are still full of the filed papers from ConFrancisco and other stuff circa 1993.

Finally, we went over to Scolari's for a small grocery trip. We expect to do a larger one tomorrow after dropping the vehicle at the AC repair shop. (We'll be convoying in so that we can leave it with them for a few days.)

It was uncomfortably cold in the house when we got back, enough so that I had to light off the fireplace. And here we thought we were done with the fireplace for this season. Oh, well, we still have some firewood left, and we needed to either use up or move the remaining wood stacked on the front porch anyway.

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