Work Politics and the Stationary Career Path

Work has been a pain. There’s really no other way to describe it. Everyone is getting pissy because of tight deadlines and it’s only a matter of time before the finger pointing begins. I’m OK with that. Finger pointing doesn’t affect me as much. I just shrug it off and laugh. Usually in front of the person doing the pointing.

One of the things that really bugs me though is the fact that my career there feels stagnant. I’ve asked for a title increase once and been shot down. It’s not the fact that I was shot down that upsets me. It’s the response I received from upper management. Something about “implications” surround the idea of promoting me. I’ve been told by several people at the company that my name comes up often as the “go-to” person when it comes to getting things done and picking up where others left off. I’ve been told by higher paid employees that I am far more knowledgeable than they are and that I am highly regarded.

I don’t get it. I think they want me to quit. I’ll ask again, but I fear I will either get the same response or worse, no response.

Ruby

I was all gung-ho the other night about diving into Rails. I still am. I am just running out of steam these days. Between the nine hours at the day job and a couple hours after on the side gig that doesn’t pay, I just can’t find the time.

It is going to happen though. It is. Shut up.

VMware and Unity

Is it me, or is VMware really giving Parallels a run for their money? I’ve been using VMware Fusion as my virtual machine of choice for the past several months. I’ve always felt that VMware has had a slight leg up on Parallels in the performance department. Now with Unity, I think VMware has a solid lead in the VM race. It is just an awesome product. I highly recommend trying it out. It’s still in beta, but so far, I haven’t had any issues running XP or Ubuntu (Feisty). Best of all, if F R double E whilst in beta.

Cable vs. DSL

We’re cutting back on the spending around the house lately. One of the things I’ve chosen to sacrifice is Cable to DSL. As much as I hate the pone company, I’m willing to save $20 or so bucks per month for (what I thought was) a slightly slower interweb. Slightly was a total understatement. While downloading the latest VMware, I really felt the pain. First off, my download speed was a measly 68Kb/s and then to top that off, the transfer died 50MB into the download. Luckily, I just hooked this all up tonight and have not canceled cable just yet. I pulled out the cable modem and finished the download in four minutes (averaging ~700Kb/s). Pathetic. I think if I do a cost per bandwidth, I’m actually getting ripped off by DSL.

There was a whole host of other mishaps with the DSL order, but, I’m not going to get into that.

The time has come. I need to discipline myself to learn Ruby (on rails). It’s been around for quite a while now and I just have dig in. So I’m making a new personal goal: learn Ruby or bust.

The problem is that breaking the PHP habit will be dificult. Although, I’ve become more OOP aware and always try to create objects instead of random functions. I suppose I could stick with PHP and use Cake or Zend’s Framework to build MVC style applications, but, that sounds increasingly boring these days. I need something new to obsess over.

So, I’m off to learn. I can’t really learn by book; it just doesn’t work for me. I have to get my hands dirty. What better way to do that than to build something. I’m not talking about building a blog in 15 minutes (especially since there several other blogging type applications written in RoR already). It will have to be something somewhat unique that will keep me interested enough in the language and challenging enough to keep me busy. I’m open to suggestions and always open to collaboration (if anyone is interested).