Jay McGavren’s Journal

Just got introduced to Hornsby’s Draft Cider. Tasty stuff. I’m always looking for new recommendations - what’s everyone drinking these days?

There are “organizational changes” going on upstairs within IT - a lot of management types have been sacked, and the grunts could be next. I’m still safe down here in my department, but I’m worried my opportunity will evaporate before my eyes… Well, as long as certain key individuals are spared the axe, my name will still be known upstairs.

But I wish I had my degree under my belt, so I didn’t need to tie my fate to this one company…

Diana and I went out this weekend to a few desert locales and shot some photos. Here are some highlights:

Diana’s:
http://spook.myserver.org/images/diana_szymanski/2004/painted_mountain_2004-01-24/saguaro_hole.jpg
http://spook.myserver.org/images/diana_szymanski/2004/painted_mountain_2004-01-24/huge_saguaro.jpg
http://spook.myserver.org/images/diana_szymanski/2004/painted_mountain_2004-01-24/jay_on_sunken_picnic_table.jpg

Mine:
http://spook.myserver.org/images/jay_mcgavren/2004/painted_mountain_2004-01-24/overhanging_branch.jpg
http://spook.myserver.org/images/jay_mcgavren/2004/superiors_2004-01-25/crooked_tree_2.jpg
http://spook.myserver.org/images/jay_mcgavren/2004/superiors_2004-01-25/superiors.jpg

The whole collection:
http://spook.myserver.org/images/jay_mcgavren/2004/superiors_2004-01-25
http://spook.myserver.org/images/jay_mcgavren/2004/painted_mountain_2004-01-24
http://spook.myserver.org/images/diana_szymanski/2004/painted_mountain_2004-01-24

We’re gonna head out again this spring when the desert blooms, so look for more then!

Diana:

http://spook.myserver.org/images/jay_mcgavren/2004/painted_mountain_2004-01-24/jay_and_diana_640_x_480.jpg

And son Lenny (18 months):

http://spook.myserver.org/images/diana_szymanski/2003/lenny_oh.jpg

Isn’t he cute? Isn’t she cute? :)

At work chomping on an orange that came from a tree in a backyard, not a supermarket. Sometimes living in the desert *can* be cool…

Changed my first diaper this weekend. :P And before my friends start to worry, just because I’m turning responsible doesn’t mean I’m turning mature. :)

My project manager is originally from India (I think), and while his English is quite good, it’s not perfect… He was planning to call me later, so he told me he’d “give me a tinkle”. :P

That was funny, but communicating with the Chinese guy on our team is definitely not - his accent makes him really hard to understand, it takes him forever to get a point across in meetings, and the XML specification he made for us recently (which we’ll have to publish to customers eventually) was riddled with misspellings.

These are both really smart people, but there is definitely a language barrier.

Welcome to the world of international business. :P

I kid you not… The program I’m analyzing contains the following line of code:

set you_smell 'Y'

I *think* that’s supposed to indicate that there’s a problem with the system connection. Of course, in other places they indicate that with the “hosed_ua” variable.

I want to go upstairs and inflict serious bodily harm on the person who wrote this unreadable crap…

The ad I posted in the Arizona Republic to sell my sofa has been out of the paper for nearly 2 weeks, yet I’m still getting calls. WTF?

Just woke up from a nap and remembered my dream quite clearly, which is a rarity, so I’ll recount it here.

I had several MP3s of Diana’s songs - not ones she’d downloaded, ones she’d recorded in a studio. But I had filed them under the wrong name, so I was moving them to their own folder.

In another part of the same dream, I owned some kind of futuristic jet that was parked in my driveway - it was reddish-orange and could do 30 knots per second (which is really fast, though that’s not how they measure the speed of planes). My youngest brother, John, was showing me how to activate the teleporter so I could leap into the pilot’s seat. (This was an instantaneous teleporter - not like that crappy Star Trek one.)

He was also showing me a Palm Pilot adventure game he’d written. It had cheesy 2D graphics on the Palm, but when he hooked it up to the XBox, it turned into an amazing VR game with theater-quality sound.

There are even more details than that, but they’re a bit hazy.