Jay McGavren’s Journal

OK, this is getting seriously weird - *another* person greeted me by name in the hall today, and I have no clue who they were. Have I actually met these people, but my memory is going bad? Or have I gained that much of a reputation?

…after spending a day home sick. (Lenny was out sick with me - he had a fever of 103, which has since come down, though his cough is still terrible.) I also just got over a case of the hiccups - that had been running for over 24 hours straight. :P (Well, except when I was sleeping.)

I had a bizarre dream this morning… I was watching a trailer for a comedy by Pixar, that pitted God (the Hebrew one) against various figures from Buddhism in a barrel-chucking battle royale. Pixar depicted Yahweh as a bit of a hillbilly, I must say. :P

I just learned that while I’ll be doing the technical design for the new version of my GDS update program, coding work will be handed off to four coders in India.

Either I’m defining the role I’ll have within the IT organization (strictly design, which is actually the fun part), or I’m training my replacements. Until I know which, I’ll be polishing my resume.

Since suddenly acquiring a family at home and being shoved into the bureaucratic dogpile at work, I feel like my life is always on fast forward. I’m praised for my work in meetings and thanked for my efforts at home, and I know I can do what’s being asked of me, but I don’t feel in control of the situation anymore. All I can do is dive in and give my best effort.

Well, I suppose this is what everyone goes through. I never even kept a calendar before, so of course there will be a period of adjustment for me.

Heh… We have this application that watches our various servers to make sure they’re still running. It’s called “Big Brother”.

I was amused to learn that all communications with it are done via port 1984. Guess even network administrators have a sense of humor.

If you weren’t watching the Five Days to Midnight miniseries this past week, they’ll be rerunning it on SciFi Channel ad infinitum, so be sure to catch it. The hero’s nemesis is truly wicked, so other bad-guys-in-training (Mooph) should take notes.

In completely unrelated news: iTunes’s Party Shuffle just went from playing The Prodigy (hardcore jungle) to Sal Severe’s How to Behave So Your Children Will, Too. I think I’m gonna have to take my audio books out of there. :P

I just went through one of our documents and marked up a set of “exclusions from the tactical phase” of this project. We may be only be updating a hotel database, but I feel like we’re building a missile or something.

When you’re driving through Texas, if you see that *everyone* around you is strictly obeying the speed limit, make damn sure you’re doing the same yourself! I couldn’t resist speeding, because we had a 16-hour drive ahead of us, but now I’m out over 100 bucks for the ticket I got. :P

Add to it the fact that Diana and I both caught Lenny’s cold during the drive down and still had it on the way back, and you have the makings of one miserable trek. I don’t care how much it costs; we are *so* flying next time.

At least we had fun while we were in Dallas. Diana and Lenny got to meet the rest of my family, and vice versa. (They all adore Lenny, and he got lots of presents.) We all visited the aquarium. (Interestingly, its setup was a lot like the Kaiyukan in Osaka.) Out of the blue, I was given an Omnifi MP3 streaming unit as a belated birthday present. (Sometimes it’s nice to have a rich uncle. He also gave my brother a (real) gun from his collection. :P ) We swam in my Gram’s pool, which had a miniature waterfall and gorgeous Japanese maples next to it. And throughout, we ate. A lot.

Come to think of it, the ticket and the long drive and the illness don’t seem so bad in the end…

Last night I had a dream that I was Brad Pitt starring in a remake of Fight Club along with John Cleese. After defeating the giant demon that was controlling the entire city, we were suspended over a 100-foot drop while Cleese’s character tried to figure out a MacGyver-like contraption with some fishing wire to get us down.