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For the week of july 6, 1997
Another week gone by.
Summers are weird that way. Life is weird that way for that matter, but at least there's a lot more stuff going on during the year. That's not to say that I don't enjoy work, but it is still work any way you cut it.
Have been doing some interesting stuff though. Just installed the new login scripts for all of the students last week. We'll see how many calls we get tomorrow when people find that they can't log in any more. Heh. That would be funny.
Now we get to do more hardware stuff, upgrading one of the elementary schools. It's nice working in a school district because I know that a difference these machines can make for kids and learning and all that jazz. I remember going into a classroom last year and watching the kids run in to play with the computers. The older kids were supervising the younger ones while the teachers were off doing teaching stuffs with the rest of the class.
Now that was cool.
Working here does cause some problems though. Policy ones mostly. All students don't get access to email. All students don't get web access. Was talking to one of the people I work with who said that we was going to filter out access to hotmail.com because students found that they could get email that way and we couldn't allow that.
Fears are, I suppose, that students will start spending all of their time playing and not doing any work. That, and they'll be eating up resources (read: machines) that other students could be using. My take on the whole thing is that the school already has the capability to give email to all of the students, so they should give them access. If there are problems, deal with them as they arise. But email is such a useful tool that I don't think that it's fair not to give students access.
I'm also curious to find what students have been using the machine for anyway. If they can't access the web and they can't email, then they can write papers. And that's about it. That's right. The schools have just spent a couple of million dollars on some typewriters. I don't know about that.
Whatever. Don't even get me started on the filtering that they're doing.
Gotta love that policy shit.
wednesday, july 9, 1997, 03:05
Three hours ago I started writing this. And then I fell asleep. And I lost my connection. And the modem disconnected. So kiddies, always save your work.
In under twelve hours I'm going to be getting paid to be a theatre grunt. Not sure exactly what I feel about that. I've pretty much decided that I'm going to play tomorrow by ear, do the work, and then make a decision. It's nice to still have the time to try different things and find what I may or may not want to do with the rest of my life.
Or may or may not want to do at any point in my life.
Since I still have the time to play.
Still going to be just a summer of learning. Seeing what is going to be in my life in the future and what has no place there at all. Funny. Mike and I often talk about what's going to happen in the future. Whether it's just talk or something more remains to be seen. Last year we were going to do theatre lighting installations for schools. This year it's networking.
(and aside about networking. i've found that i really like it. just the right mix of hard- and software. possibilites for the futre? possibly...)
Who knows what's going to happen. Maybe i'll be doing stuff with mike. Maybe with other people from home. maybe with people from school. Maybe with none of them. I have absolutely no idea.
And it's probably better that way. Too much planning ahead and life doesn't hold that much interest any more.
thursday, july 10, 1997, 00:28
So I'm going to try to type this whole entry by using the home row and do all of that proper hand placement stuff. It's not working. The backspace key is too far away, the shift key is in a pretty rotten spot, and you can forget about the arrow keys. Oh well, i have the rest of the summer to practice, right?
Went to my call today. That was pretty interesting, and i met a bunch of cool people and i got to do theatre work, and i will be getting paid for an 8 hour call that i only had to be at for two and a half hours since the original call was cancelled.
I could get used to this.
I shouldn't though, since i probably won't be getting any more calls since the summer is so quiet. I do have to remember to tell Philip that Hic says "hi" when i get back to school.
And then tomorrow is back to the computer stuffs. cool.
it was really nice to get back into the theatre. and soon enough i'll have some summer theatre stuffs going on, so that'll be neat as well.
i keep talking about things that i'm going to do this summer. and before i know it, the summer is going to be gone (again) and i'm not going to have had done anything.
let's not let that happen.
For example, i don't want to get through this summer without having slept. So, here goes nothing.
sleep...
It's been one of those days.
You know. One of those days.
Got home tonight and my dogs were going crazy. Not exactly sure why. Probably just because I'd bee home a total of about half an hour all day. So I took some time out to brush them and play a bit, and now they're getting calm.
Which is good, because I really want to go to sleep.
Work today. Wrote some scripts to do some database parsing. User password import stuffs and stuff. And the scipts took me 10-15 minutes, tops, to write.
Three hours later, the database still wouldn't import and I was getting frustrated. Not only was I pissed at myself, but I was looking like a real dork too. Nothing I was doing was right, and I kept on making really stupid mistakes. It wasn't so much the mistakes, but I kept on thinking that it was my scripts that were having the problems. Turns out that it was some stupid typo stuff, but still.
I hate feeling incompetent.
I also hated all the crap I was getting from everyone at work. Not really bad stuff, but I felt like I gave them a reason to babysit me. Like I couldn't do the work on my own so they had to constantly check up on me to make sure that I wasn't doing anything else stupid.
Just wasn't a happy feeling.
Everything went well after that, but still, that was most of my day.
Feh, I'm just glad today's over.
Good stuff? I had dinner at Mike's again tonight, and afterwards we talked computer and theatre stuff for a couple of hours. Was nice and fun and stuff. Like the "old days."
Creepy. Old days.
I'm also finding that I'm missing school. Just all the stuff there is to do there, all the people that are there. Although i get the feeling that I'm just looking for something to feel. Some emotion. So if I feel like missing everyone, it gives me something to fill myself up with, even if I'm not really feeling it.
Or maybe I'm just miss them.
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