Category Archive: the job
WFH!
Today I took advantage of one a sort-of-benefit of my job. Last night I took my work laptop home with full intentions of working from home today. I totally recognize this is a luxury. My colleagues have been taking advantage of it for a while now. I’ve been meaning to give it a go for a long time. The only thing that was really holding me back was just bringing the darn thing home. So finally I had resolved to just do it. It was going to be awesome. I’d just open it, connect to the private network and start coding away. Well, it didn’t quite turn out so perfectly. I had some issues with connections, and some applications that I could have sworn I had installed were missing. It got so bad that I was actually considering heading into office just to get the laptop set up. I put on some work clothes and was set to go, but in the end I managed to make some appropriate connections. I was able to get on the network. Unfortunately for me, the people I needed to talk to once I was connected were already gone for the weekend. And so, that’s my sort-of-wasted day. First day in terms of setup is always the worst. It all becomes easier from this point forward. To be honest I don’t think I’m going to use this option all that much but it’s certainly good to know it’s available.
Crop circle action
A lot of weirdness today, eh? Let’s start with the extreme heat. Yeah, hotter in plenty of other places but this is bloody Toronto. This shouldn’t happen. Anyway, as I was passing by a window in the office I saw that the lawn outside had this weird pattern. Totally strange. This grass is actually on the roof of the underground parking area. I would imagine that the centres of each circle corresponds to some sort of vent or pillar. Or maybe at the centre of each circle is a pop-up sprinkler whose radius only reached that far. I don’t know what the case is. I suppose it doesn’t matter. This just looks cool and quite unnatural.
Team player
Being part of team is a wonderful resource. It’s easy to take it for granted though. Being a team player is an active role. Being a team player doesn’t mean giving up personal opinion and following the herd. Part of being a team player means standing up and being supportive when appropriate. There’s no point in trying to isolate yourself because later on when you might actually need the aid of your team they might not be there for you. There’s a lot of give and take.
My personal sandbox
In my last job there was a period of about 3.5 years where I was doing a lot of web development heavy work. As stressful as it was it did me a world of good. I learned so much in terms of design and tech. Prior to that job AJAX was just a scrubbing powder, or a town east of Toronto. It forced me to keep up or get swept aside. Even if I wasn’t in charge of creative bits and pieces, I developed a good appreciation for what good design looks like. The separation was probably for the best. The creative people have a really good eye. If they provided a good mockup with pieces that I can cut up I was a happy guy. These days, that pressure isn’t on me anymore. My job doesn’t require extensive web skills–although the skills are useful when working with interface related tasks. There’s just less incentive to keep my skills sharp. Well, for whatever reason I decided that it’s important for me to stay sharp. I decided to purchase a new personal domain that I’d keep in conjunction with garneteye.com. The big problem with domains is generating content to put on them. I know that that will be my biggest issue. However, there’s a lot of random web stuff that I’ve wanted to try crafting for a while now. My intention is to use the domain as a sandbox. The only way to get better is to just keep creating and experimenting. The intent isn’t to get publicity or anything of the sort; I just need to be able to play around. I suppose I could do it with this current domain, but…part of me wants to keep this random business to its own place. I’m diving right in!
Master of none
I know it’s a bit silly, but I had a bit of a eureka moment at work. For a long while I feel like I’ve been trying to find my place on the team. In putting together this team, my manager decided to put together a diverse group. It seems like everyone else is up on their technologies and strange acronyms. I just hear them and keep my head down focusing on my own thing. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I do my work. I’m good at what i do. Still, for a while I was wondering if I’d ever get into the swing of things in terms of becoming knowledgeable in general about what’s going on. I finally came to the realization that I don’t need to be master of everything. A colleague was expressing frustration with a Perl/CGI page he was working on, and how a snippet of jQuery wasn’t working for him. I offered to jump into action. In those moments I was the expert. I felt animated and invigorated. It was a good feeling. So, no, I don’t need to know every single thing. I just need to make sure that I’m really good at my areas of expertise. If I wasn’t a good fit for the team I wouldn’t have been hired in the first place. So there.
Bursts of inspiration
Bursts of inspiration come and go. I spent my afternoon chasing down the source of a specific bug, only to find out the cause and effect creating the issue was elsewhere. I got a ridiculous amount of satisfaction fixing the unrelated issue.
See, if I ever find myself wondering whether I’m in the right line of work, I can look to moments like this to realize that I’m good at what I do. At the very least, the job pays the bills, but really it’s much more than that, isn’t it? I just want to feel useful, and feel like I’m contributing. That, I am doing. Just took a few bursts today to remind me of all that.
Sick days exist for a reason
Took a sick day today. When I got up out of bed my gut cramping pretty badly, and I was light headed. I already had my work clothes on, but when I went to put on my shoes I had to spend a few moments leaning on the closet door to regain my sense of the vertical. I figured out pretty quickly that that was a side-effect of being severely dehydrated. Anyway, it was at that point that I had to give up and write to work saying that I wouldn’t come in. I spent a lot of the day sleeping and resting hoping that the symptoms would ease up. Still…nothing.
I remember the day before we my colleagues and I were discussing sick days. I’m of the opinion that taking sick days when necessary is an important thing. Presenteeism isn’t a good thing. When the body is aching, how can you focus? You can’t. And if you’ve got something contagious, there’s a good chance you’ll pass it on to someone else, and that would also hurt overall team productivity. We’re given sick days for a reason, right? And so here I am, recovering over something that’s really just horribly uncomfortable. Make it stop!
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