January 2002 Archives

I bought my tickets to travel last Friday. $2075 for airfare from here to Australia then on to New Zealand, Fiji, then Honolulu and home. I've thought and talked about traveling for a while but hadn't ever done much beyond looking at REI for cool travel gear. Now I have tickets… I am going… and it's a mixed bag of feelings. I'm going to miss my dog. It's probably bad that that's the thought foremost on my mind. But I rescued her from a shelter and I remember the animal control officer who I filled out the paperwork asking me if I was going to keep her forever. I'll have her when I come back and she won't want for anything staying with my dad, but I can't help feeling that I'm sort of abandoning her. She was so scared when I first got her and now she trusts me implicitly. I can do no wrong. She loves everyone she meets, but she really loves me. And I'm going to leave her for several months. But enough depressing thoughts – she'll have fun with Pete and the month she'd have to stay in quarantine to come with me would be much crueler than having to live in my dad's big house eating chunks of steak… damn lucky dog. But anyway.

I've been reading lately a couple of other travelers' accounts and adventures in Oz and I'm starting to wish I had about twice as much time as I do. I definitely want to see Ayers Rock, I want to try Crocodile and Emu – and maybe Kangaroo meat if I can get the cute faces out of my head. I want to dive the Great Barrier Reef and see Daintree rainforest. I want to visit the studio of Triple J (the radio station I've been listening to for a while now). I want to visit Tasmania and hopefully see a real Tasmanian devil. I want to drive (or just ride) along the east coast, and through a bit of the outback. If I have the time I'd like to see Perth, but I'm not likely to venture much farther west than Darwin just due to time constraints. New Zealand will be a quick tour and acquisition of all things sheep. I'd like to snowboard at least one day while either in Oz or Kiwiland, but then again I'd also like to bungee jump so we'll see how much of either of those I do. Fiji and Honolulu are really mostly just relaxing on the beach after the “stressful” preceding portion of the trip. That and to break up my plane flight so I don't have to sit for 16 hours on the way back too. Man I hope the doc will give me more anti-anxiety drugs for the plane trip – they made the flight to Italy a breeze. I also want to meet people. I want to meet two backpackers traveling down the east coast. I want to meet a nice waitress in a roadhouse along the way in the outback. I don't doubt I'll meet nice guides and farm stay hosts – anyone who's serious about wanting people to stay with them is always nice. I doubt I'll become life long friends with any of those people – if or when I meet them – but I want the experience of meeting them. Knowing interesting people is never a bad thing.

I've also been thinking about the manner in which I'll be traveling. I'm going to be backpacking in the sense that I will be carrying a backpack and have only a rough itinerary, but I get the feeling I'm going to be traveling with more money (note to thieves, the money is in traveler's checks) than most backpackers would use in a year, and I'm only going for 3.5 months. But I suppose it isn't about being forced to live on low resources, it's just about experiencing as many aspects of where you're traveling that makes the backpackers lifestyle. I definitely worry I'm going to bring way too much crap. Already I'd realized I was going to bring twice as much clothing as needed (two weeks worth would be a hell of a lot to lug around). Well, this is supposed to be a learning experience.

I'm going to try and write down as much as I can while traveling – and typing instead of my illegible scrawl will probably help. I always regret not recording more of what I do or think or notice or feel when on even a modest length trip – heck I think I've probably written more in this one page then I have since Germany. I also want to take a lot of pictures. A metric buttload as my friend Matt would say. Digital or film I don't know – probably both, film for the album, digital to send to my friends back home. As much crap as I give my brother Martin about it, he's right – taking the 5 seconds it takes to stop and snap a picture of something so that you do have it and won't regret not having taken one later is well worth it. I'm certainly happy I shot 14 rolls of film on my last two week venture – there's only one thing I didn't take a picture of that I thought I might have wanted, and of course now I regret not having taken it.

And now, the geek side of me has clawed its way to the front of my mind and I must go design a photo-album/travel log for the website.

I read Fark about every 1-2 days (whenever I remember) and it's usually pretty amusing. For whatever reason the picture to the left caught me just right, I laughed so hard my sides actually ached.

Dizzubble Dizzutch.

In about 10 years I'm going to need to find a new job. I never figured I'd do this forever, lord knows I'd die of stress long before standard retirement age, but it's a little odd to actually know your upper limit. It works like this; if I get hired on full time at Microsoft (a given if I want it) then I start the whole review/bonus/promotion cycle. It seems that corporate policy around here is that if you get above average on your reviews it's basically impossible for them to not give you more money. What am I complaining about, right? Well unless you move into management (something I don't think I'd want to do even if I could handle dealing with people well enough) then there is a hard cap to how high of a job position you can attain in microsoft. Technical positions only go up so high and eventually - after about 10 years - if you haven't moved to management it basically just becomes too expensive to have you stay around. They can't pay you more becaues your job has a hard salary limit, but they can't Not pay you more because of the review/bonus/promotion cycle. So you get the boot.

10 years is a long time though, and I never really pictured doing this more than like 7 years, but before it was my decision to stay or not. Oh well, looks like I'll have to start studying for my next career sooner than I thought :)

Sounds like Mr. Microsoft needs to get himself some chunky soup...

How, HOW, do some of these people get hired on here?!? I've been waiting for the design spec to redesign our dev support site for 9 weeks - the same spec that they've scheduled me a total of 5 days to implement - and today, the day before the spec is due, word starts to drift down that the massive site redesign doesn't actually change anything! It's the same damn graphics and layout that were causing all of the problems that we were supposed to be using the redesign to fix. The same problems that the design I offered 9 weeks ago actually fixed. I swear, it's like trying to eat soup with a fork here somedays.

A small portion of my job here is to handle access rights for part of the Marketing teams collection of servers. It's basically just cake work for when I need a break or have nothing to do, but they appreciate it. So today one of my two contacts down there stopped by to drop off a gift from the two of them thanking me for all of the hard work I do - pretty nice of them. It's wine. I hate wine. I don't drink, but if I did I'd most likely still not drink wine. It's like someone took a perfectly good drink and left it in the sun for too long. Beer can't be anything but beer and harder stuff is supposed to be pain in a bottle, but wine could have been a nice grape juice. I smiled and thanked them, it was a nice thought afterall, and am now trying to think if I know any recipies that call for good cooking wine.

Oop, just looked down farther in the little baggie - toffees. Not a total waste afterall. Scratch that, Coffee flavored toffees. Well crapola.

Working on the Xbox team is a pretty sweet gig - beyond the whole "looks good on a resume" thing. We get cool toys :) Basically every couple of weeks our admin pops by with something new branded with the Xbox logo. In the 7 months or so that I've worked here we've gotten a small assortment of T-shirts, pens, bouncing/flashing balls, a set of juggling balls, random stuffed animals and today Mints. Yeah I know mints aren't inherently cool or anything, and I suspect these are actually those strange Listerine sticks that are advertised everywhere now, but the tiny little box is of course stamped with the Xbox logo. You'd be suprised what they can stamp logos on. Now if only I can fenagle myself one of the little cast metal prototype xboxs they gave out for our launch date (contracters excluded, damnation).

In other news, using old development kits as server hardware proves to be less and less a good idea every day.

I had no idea how difficult it would be to travel once my contract is up here at The Evil Empire. Of course I have to find a space to store my stuff, make sure my dog is safe and healthy and all of that, but there's more. You need - or should really consider - a will, granting someone power of attorney for several things, health insurance, travel insurance, insurance for the crap you leave behind. Tons of stuff.

So of course I spend my time looking at gadgets and gear to take :) Eagle Creek has some nice packs - the one pictured at right is their "New World Journey" pack. It's not too expensive (around $250 at REI) and is a little more travel oriented than the standard internal frame backpack. It's got a few too many straps and the detachable day-pack has never been a concept I could really latch on to, but it seems like a nice setup regardless. I've got a smaller Eagle Creek pack that I got for graduation from Highschool and it's served me faithfully on all of my one weeks or shorter.

But for now I'm back at work. First day back from a longish vacation and my boss calls in sick to work. I've got a list of stuff to do, but it's always harder getting clarification over email. Which reminds me, it's time to check my email. Need to see if Aimee has found herself a perfect yellow lab yet. Though in all likelihood she'll just be a sucker for the first cute furry face on PetShelter.org like I was.

Chemical burns blow, I need to remember to use gloves or at least not have cuts all over my hands the next time I use bleach on the hot tub.