Posted 8:21 PM by RedSox
The Experiment Continues...

Well, hello there. It has been a while. A solid month since I put anything out here. Why is that?

Good question. I'm not sure I have a good answer. There are a couple of possible explanations.

One, The Sims On-Line (TSO) has reclaimed me in its addictive powers. I should clarify that. As a game,
TSO quite frankly, sucks!!! It is a rather dull cycle of gaining skills, making money with those skill,
buying stuff with the money, maintaining skills, making more money with those maintained skill, buy more
stuff, etc. However the social aspects of the game are quite addicting. I've met some amazing people out
there. Some of which I feel I have developed real friendships with. They are the reason I go back in every
night. The thing is once you are in there; it is hard to do anything else. In order to keep track of
conversations and stuff you need to pay attention. Even when I am doing the boring stuff like working on
my skills I having a conversation with someone. So the Sims has taken up a lot of my time.

The second and far more primary one is that I had just lost interest in chronicling my life. My life has not
been all that exciting lately. There is a lot going on in it but none of it is all that amusing. And a
prerequisite of me writing here is to amuse myself. Writing post after post about how much work I have
and how many deadlines there are and how difficult it is to keep a already spread thin team's attention on
my project is, is just not amusing to me. It is what I have been living everyday for over a month now.

How is that project going? Well truth be told, it isn't going horribly. Our biggest issue is time. We have
found lots and lots of issues but, hey, that's what testing is all about. That's why we are doing it. The good
news is we have been able to explain and fix every issue we have come across. Where it is getting
stressful is in the fact that starting Monday, we are supposed to be capturing production data and storing up
to apply in May. We will begin on schedule but our testing is just not done. We identified issues as late as
this week. We wanted to run AT LEAST one more test cycle which, we won't have done until tomorrow,
at the earliest. Now the good news is the part of the project that was my direct responsibility has worked
like a charm. Very minimal problems. The data extracts that feed my process on the other hand have been
the main area of problems. Now that is good for me but not good for the project. If we start to accumulate
data starting Monday with faulty extract criteria then we are going to have to re-extract every time we find
a problem going forward. A scary thought.

But if you put a gun up to my head and said sign off or don't. One chance. I would sign off.

What else has happened since I last wrote?

Well I celebrated a birthday. That was fun. RedSox, Mr. Boddington's Pub Ale, and Mr. Tullamore Dew
celebrated the occasion in fine style. At least until I turned into a pumpkin at midnight. Oh man!!! I went
from 60 to 0 in less than 3 seconds. Boogieshoes took one look at me and said, "It's time to go." What
followed was not one of my finer moments. Boogieshoes covered the events that followed in adequate
detail so I won't go into them here. Let's just say it had been a long, long; time since THAT had happened.

Again, not one of my finer moments.

That's not to say I didn't have a good time. I really did. A bunch of folks came out to celebrate with me
and we had a really nice time. I hung in there pretty well until everyone but Jupe had left. That's when
things went downhill in a hurry.

What else happened?

Oh this was pretty cool. I was invited by Ginger to write occasionally on her fine site. I was very happy to
accept and I posted my first thing out there yesterday. I encourage you to go over to her site
http://www.ephemeron.net/ and check it out. I also have it linked on this page under Ginger. My humble
offering is a little piece I called "Just Another Story With No Point" and is something I enjoyed writing.

While you are there, I highly encourage you to read Heather's and Matt's posts as well. As well as look at
Heather's very fine photoblog. Please read Matt's March 30th post titled "Super Rainbow Happyland". Look for it under the Apocrypha Category on the right side of the page. It is a fine piece of writing and it really blew me away when I read it. Matt is very talented and has the same semi-warped (Yes Matt, I am being diplomatic) sense of humor that I have. He has the art of making his point through absurdity down to a science. And Heather has a great sense of fun and a knack for finding interesting things to bring to the table to discuss.

Writing something for a different audience than I write for here was an interesting experience. Here, the
only audience that I always try to entertain is myself. I am here to amuse myself and hopefully in doing so,
I amuse someone else who may read this. For Ginger's site, I tried to actually have a point and tried to lead
up to my ending. It was a nice exercise that I enjoyed doing.

I think the thing that I enjoy most about it is that Ginger's site lets the readers leave comments for each
post. I love getting feedback. I like to see if what I wrote was enjoyed or not. I like to generate
conversation. That is one of the things about my blog here (as it currently stands) that is frustrating. I have
no idea if anyone looks at it. Reads it. Enjoys it. Hates it. Or couldn't care less. I truly enjoy writing it.
And as much I really like most of what I have written here, it is nice to know sometimes that others have
seen my efforts.

So I will occasionally be posting there when a topic hits me that I feel I can write something a little bit
different about. I'm not giving up this site. I still need a place to indulge my petty amusements and
myself. But occasionally when I want to try something a bit more, look for me on Ephemeron.

Until next time... (Hopefully sooner than a month next time)