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.
