< Notes...

Looming upcoming changes at work. As of 8 January 2024, show up to office on Mondays and Wednesdays. Mandatory. As of August 2024, show up to office three days a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Also mandatory. This is going to be the biggest mistake of 2024.

On January 2021 our Chief Information Officer (CIO) was hired. His last day will be 15 November 2023. He is moving to greener pastures at Texas State University. Go Bobcats!

It is going to be an interesting period this year end… and half of the next.

My open case with Canonical has been worked, back and forth, for over a month. It started at severity level 3, and now is at 1. Every time I thought I was seeing the metaphorical “light at the end of the tunnel”, it became dark once more. This is beyond painful.

My currently open L3 support case with Canonical just passed the 20 days mark. I have asked to raise its priority to L2. Let’s see now. 🙄

The whole “VIP” system is discriminatory. I provide priority service to them, because it’s policy, but don’t agree with it. Priority should be assigned based on certain parameters, I agree, but not on someone’s pay scale, or “bourgeoisie” status.

So, everything “accomplished” since 8 September 2023 until today, 21 September 2023, was scratched. We are back to square one now. Lovely.

In my experience, the easiest and most difficult people to work with are those on a short countdown to retirement. Easiest because they become really agreeable, or disagreeable—but they don’t masquerade it. Difficult because they become almost impossible to get a hold of—they stop giving a duck about things.

Sending the true spam to “Junk Email” at work has gotten so bad, that it is, precisely, “Junk Email” the first folder I check each morning, and the last at the end of the day. Granted, it is a relatively quick glimpse, but nevertheless a task that most be done. False positives are aplenty.

Haven’t played Diablo IV the whole week. Way too busy at work, and I have gone biking each day afterwards, and ended up too tired for anything else. Maybe I’ll play a bit tonight, after the TV is left alone. Right now some Chinese drama plays, I can hear it from the office room.

I truly don’t like Outlook, the program that runs on your computer, which started as a mail client, and now wants to do everything, and does it badly. I use it in a Windows VDI for work purposes, because there is no other practical choice. One of the things—amongst the many—that irks me about it is the “Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages” option enabled by default. That’s because—yes, you guessed it—I compose my emails in plain text.

Our engagement with Canonical to deploy and manage Ubuntu with MAAS and Landscape is over, and now the “fun” begins. So much to customise, and tune! I have spent the entire day tunning and rebuilding images, back and forth. I am hoping to work on post-install scripting tomorrow.

My closest work mate is on vacation this week. Though it is a short week—having had the day off yesterday for Labour Day, and all—it is going feel like a long one.

My weekend starts in around 45 minutes from now. Work closing for game day, taking tomorrow off, and then Saturday, Sunday, and Labour Day Monday! Ohhhh yeaaaah!

A co-worker of mine reply when I told him I disliked our current enterprise web font, Gotham (yes, I am into fonts this week; it won’t last, I promise!): “It is a matter of taste, and yours is undisputable.” :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Emails with a “friendly reminder” phrase in it irk me. Especially those requesting feedback—over, and over—for a service rendered. I know they are automated, but there is always a human behind them.

I am just surprised this didn’t come along earlier, and that it took a pandemic event to make it a reality. Going to an office to sit all day, and then go home never made sense to me. When pushed for a change, all we got—begrudgingly—was one “telecommuting” day per week.

“If they were to say ’everyone back in the office’, I would probably be asking for a raise,” said Coomber, who still visits the office once or twice a week. “You get more family time. You can actually finish work at five, rather than finishing at five spending 45 minutes trying to get home.”

Saw this on the Fediverse, from an automated account (bot) suitably named Picard Tips: “Don’t assume anything is possible or impossible until you’ve asked the people who will be doing the work.” Oh man… so true!

It is “Pizza Day” at work’s old offices. We finished a migration (moved half of our VMs to Azure), and management is treating us to it. It will be an opportunity to say hello, face-to-face, to old, and new co-workers. Looking forward to it, just let’s see how traffic behaves.

Today we kind of ended the most disorganised, painful, and convoluted engagement ever in which I have being a participant. We are left with a non-functional solution that is bound to produce headaches, and unpleasantness—and surprises!—for years to come. Yay! 😒

Working physically—as in, not remote—at one of our datacentres today. Last time I went there was at the end of year 2022, let’s see how much it has changed. I expect visible changes in our cage, as we are trying to vacate it. Off I go to waste over an hour on commute!

Every working day, without a fail, I feel sleepy right when I am about to return to work after the lunch hour. The thing is, I don’t eat at lunch, so it has to be a game my mind is playing on me. Ugh.

I am forced to use Outlook at work, as we use O365. Outlook has sucked for quite a while (since birth?), but the “new look” Microsoft is going to soon enforce is the very worst. Horribly looking, and it makes Outlook even more so slow.

Partner works from home today, so no gaming-during-lunch-hour for me. What am I going to do with these never ending 56 minutes?!

Update: 20 Feb 2026 @ 18:22:26

Ended up working during lunch, as I remembered I had a scheduled call at 13:00. Ugh, need to use my calendar much more! My mind is starting to accept as much help as it can get. 😅

We are getting a new manager on 1 July 2023. He will be our third. The third is the charm!

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.

All tasks planned for the weekend completed. Monday came faster than I wanted, but that’s not new. Let’s see how this week goes. So far, so good!

Today’s, on a Team’s meeting while still driving home:

• K.:
• “New microphone? 🙂”
• Me:
• “In the car. 😂”
• K.:
• “So, yes! 😄”

First time in three years that I had to join a meeting while commuting. Ran an errant for Kim at lunch, and extended a bit over.

Just realised that, ever since we started micro-managing our time in September 2021, I have worked over 40 hours every week consistently.

I think I have finally migrated my work wiki to Obsidian. After many tries, I have left my trusted Typora (which I still use, just not to keep my wiki) behind and embraced Obsidian. Now I only use two tools for note taking, knowledge repository, and outlining: Obsidian, and Logseq.