gushue.net

I haven’t been updating this weblog as often as I do my LiveJournal, but that’s ok. Not every day do I feel like writing much. But it’s my weekend (I’m off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays), so I thought I’d update with something.

After Inventory (sometime in June), there should be a major scheduling change, which is good. Supposedly everybody will have some weekends off. Before I got hired as full time, there were two teams - A team having Friday and Saturday off, and B team having Sunday and Monday off. The other two people that got hired the same day as me were classed as B team, but I ended up having Tuesday and Wednesday off instead, so there would be at least one of us in a certain department every night. That was fine with me - I’d rather those days anyway. A while later, it was announced that all new full time hires would be listed as available for any of the 7 days of the week, to prepare for this schedule change. There are only 4 people left on the A team. One is on some kind of leave, another is on holidays (and often doesn’t come in half of the time anyway). That just leaves a couple of people off on the weekends (besides part timers), which doesn’t make many people very happy.

Work has been better this past week - partly because I’ve given up on working my ass off just because there aren’t enough people working. I won’t stay past 7:30am anymore when the reason is lack of people. I don’t mind so much when there’s just an obscene amount of freight to go through. As much as I hate to leave things unfinished, I think it’s best to not stay behind until they start hiring more people, and/or giving the part timers more hours.

In other news, I’m still waiting for my aquarium to finish cycling so I can add more fish. Even though I’m not totally sure what I want to add next. Possibly some tetras or catfish. Later on, I want to add a betta of some sort. And some new things for my setup, like a digital thermometer with a probe that is inserted into the water instead of something stuck on the outsid of the tank, and a decent heater with an automatic shutoff at a certain temperature. I sometimes wish I got the 20 gallon tank instead, but I didn’t think I’d have the room for it (I do). Oh well, maybe I’ll get another aquarium sometime in the future.

We’ve had a couple days of rain, which seems to have gotten rid of most of the last bit of snow around here. And it’s actually somewhat warm outside this morning. Maybe I’ll go take some pictures later, before I go to bed. I just can’t wait for summer :(

I’ve spent most of the night trying to get subversion and apache2 to work properly. I finally got it compiled right on the third try. Except now I seem to be having problems getting the basic repository stuff set up. I’ve been reading the guide, but it’s either confusing, or I’m just not paying attention and reading it completely wrong.

I had troubles getting CVS working properly before, too.

I’m going to stop fiddling with it for now though, and try again when I’m more alert. And when it’s not so hot in my room. I really want to get this working. I want to start hacking on bplog again, but it would be nice to have a local subversion repository to use, instead of CVS on SourceForge.

Sometimes I just can’t get things working right. It pisses me off.

I just did my first partial water change for my aquarium. The water seems clearer now, which is good. There was some gunk that got sucked up by the gravel washer, I’ll have pictures of that up soon. I can’t wait to be able to add some more fish.

I’m so exhausted after this week at work. It was a shorter week, only from Friday to Monday, but there was just so much to do. And it shouldn’t have to be like that. Although I do find it amusing that the day before the District Manager is due in for a store visit, the trucks usually mysteriously have problems getting there. I’m pretty sure that they just don’t want all that freight around for when he gets in. I don’t see what all the fuss is about. We do our job the same regardless.

Anyway, I’m glad to be off for two days. My aunt and uncle and family were supposed to be coming into town today, but their plans changed due to a funeral (my uncle is an Anglican minister, although he is far from a typical minister). So they’ll probably be in tomorrow or Thursday. I was looking forward to having a day or two off while they were in this time, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Relaxing and having a beer now. I don’t know what I’ll be doing tonight, but it’ll either be going out to do something, or stay home and do little. Doesn’t matter much to me either way.

So, it’s Easter Sunday.

I was never really a religious person, and wasn’t brought up that way at all. I don’t think my mother was, either. So the religious aspect of Easter (and other holidays, like Christmas) doesn’t have very much meaning to me. But the family aspect of those holidays definitely do. Our family gets along really well, and there aren’t really any huge arguments like there are with some families (on my father’s side, it can get like that at times - but I’m not as close to all of them).

Of course, one main reason I enjoy those holidays are the suppers my Grandmother cooks. Over the years, I’ve gone from eating maybe half a plate, to two big plates, and a little more besides. Plus desert :) Turkey, ham, dressing, potatoes, carrots, red cabbage, gravy, and homemade wine. Delicious. I’ll definitely be taking along another plate to work with me tonight.

I should add some categories to this weblog at some point. And I’ve been using w.bloggar for posting entries. As much as I hate the term “blog” - and the XP-ish style of the program. And that it doesn’t respect my default web browser for opening links from the menus. But, it’s still better than other programs I’ve tried. Version 3.01 is supposed to be out soon though. Wonder what bugs are being fixed.

Small update on the situation at work. Last night was terrible. For the night before (Thursday - only a few people were working), there were two trucks in. There was another Friday afternoon. So when we got into work Friday night, there were basically three trucks waiting for us.

Which wouldn’t have been so bad, if the people working the night before and that day actually did something useful. But no, we had to spend at least an hour fixing all the crap they had done, and cleaning up their mess. And that was just the beginning. Since we were shorthanded as usual (none of the part timers were in last night), we ended up having to go to a LOT of different departments to try to get things done. And I ended up staying an extra 25 minutes. Which I seem to have been doing all week. Now, the department I normally work in really needs to have two people there for the whole night. That hasn’t been happening lately, because they won’t hire more people. And I think they even cut the hours for part timers. That’s just insane. I don’t mind sticking around late, or rushing through things, if the reason is simply because there is a lot of freight on the floor. But NOT when the reason is lack of people employed. I’m getting pretty pissed off with it all.

I really hope that after this week (apparently a couple of trucks each night this week), the store is in a complete mess. It’s quite likely, since the week after Easter tends to be busier than other weeks this time of year. Maybe they’ll rethink whatever the hell they are thinking with (not) hiring new people and (cutting down) part timer hours. I don’t like doing a half-assed job, but there hasn’t been much choice lately.

For those who don’t know, I work nights at Wal-Mart, stocking shelves and other random related stuff. Up until the couple of months, I never really had any problems with it at all. I’m not sure how much of this coincided with our new assistant manager, but I won’t put the blame fully on him. Part, but not all.

Since I have a shiny new weblog, I might as well put something of value (how much value depends on the reader).

Life has been pretty boring lately. All I seem to do is work, sleep, and sit at my computer doing very little other than chatting on IRC and listening to music. Every now and then I’ll go out and do something, but not often enough. I bought a Gamecube last month, but don’t play it very often - I have to go downstairs to play, and I usually just don’t feel like doing that. I need to get a small TV to put in my room, then I’ll play those games more often. I haven’t really done any coding lately, even with various projects in my head and on paper. The motivation just isn’t there. I have dozens of unread books, but I’m starting to read less again. For a while, I was reading for at least an hour every day before I went to bed, but haven’t done much of that in the last month. My local web server needs to have its design cleaned up and turned into a template, but it’s still sitting there as it is. My spam graphing stuff needs some really simple things set up, for automatic generation of mails delivered/rejected. But I’ve been lazy with that, too.

I still enjoy my job, but it’s been getting more and more frustrating all the time. The Assistant Manager does a lot of stuff that really shouldn’t be done, and ends up making more work for us than is really necessary. Luckily, I get left alone for the most part. And our Support Manager has a clue, and is pretty good. Probably because she used to work with us until she got that job. But the fact that we just don’t have enough people working nights is exhausting. We end up doing much more work than we should have to. Not enough people, not enough time. Shit ends up being done half-assed, and there isn’t much we can do about it. Because they don’t seem to be too interested in hiring more fucking people on nights. I know it’s not a popular shift, but I’m sure there are people out there that would love to get hired.

I’ve been single for a while now, and essentially single for even longer. It’s not great, but it could have been worse. Working nights and weekends doesn’t help for meeting people, either (but supposedly in the next couple of months, the scheduling at work is going to change so that everybody has occasional/regular/something weekends off). I haven’t even been doing very much with my friends for a month or two. But I don’t mind that so much - I was never one for excessive partying, at least in the last 5 or 6 years.

I’m not totally frustrated with things, though. Living at home is good for me, since I get along well with my family. It’s a lot cheaper - I can’t really afford to live on my own at this point due to student loans. But I have enough left over to spend on myself. I should probably be saving money, but I don’t see much point in doing that right now. Maybe later. Or not… I was never good at saving money. I finally have a digital camera to play with, a Kodak EasyShare CX4230. But the battery life on the rechargables I have is almost non-existant. I need to get proper batteries for it. And it’s too damn cold still to go outside and take pictures. And I have fish now, after thinking about it for months. It’s relaxing to just watch them swim around. I can’t wait to add more fish to the aquarium.

I’m sure that this post makes things sound worse than they really are. And why didn’t I post this to my LiveJournal? Not sure… but I guess my friends don’t need to have an entry like this forced upon their friends page. I think I agree with teferi’s view on LJ vs. weblogs - LJ is more for day to day crap, and a weblog is for more “meaningful” things. What attracted me to LJ in the first place was the community aspect of it. And it still does. Before that, I never really had any interest in having any sort of weblog at all. But now I do. Things sure can change in just a few years.

Thanks to teferi, I have MTPerlScript set up here, so I can easily update the Links and Weblogs parts of the sidebar without having to edit the template. It only seems to update the links on a rebuild, but that’s still better than it was before. I’m sure I could change the output of these pages to .php and add a little code, but that seems like overkill.

Well, I decided to stick a weblog on this domain, just for something to do. I have no plans to abandon LiveJournal, though. But it would be nice to possibly have an alternate place to post about stuff.

I’m going to be using MovableType here as well, just because I’m familiar with it, and don’t know of any other good weblog software.

I’ll be customizing this a bit more than my aquaria weblog and book weblog. Eventually.