die_kluge

GenderAnalzyer thinks I'm a man.  That's a relief.

http://www.genderanalyzer.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdie-kluge.livejournal.com%2F

I've been a bad, bad boy.  :)

Actually, I'm surprised I can even get to LJ from work. They've blocked all the fun sites.

I'd actually try to post an update here, but that hardly seems possible.

Jesus. I get this email from my consulting firm stating that I now need to enter my time into something called Progata.  WTF? I think to myself.  So, long story short, apparently EDS (whom I work for) has contracted with two prime vendors - Pinnacle, and someone else. My firm is not one of those two firms, so now my firm gets paid by Pinnacle, who gets paid by EDS, who gets paid by the client I work.  Fucked up, huh?  You betcha.  So, now in addition to the two time entry systems I'm already entering my time into, I get to add a third one to that list.  Fucking-A.


I did manage to figure out why we're getting duplicate reservations into our data warehouse today.  So, I considered that a small victory. Of course, I figured out *why*, but I still have to figure out how to fix it, which could ultimately prove to be the bigger challenge.


The wife is out of town this week. I have the whole house to myself. I'm painting the kids rooms tonight. That should be fun.  Hopefully I can get some stuff accomplished on it that are too hard to do with two little kids running around everywhere.

Wow, I'm really slacking here, aren't I?

Anyone still reading this?  :)

Moved to Tulsa in March.  I think we're finally managing to get settled in a little bit.  We've mostly got moved into our new house, and we're starting to make little improvements to it.  We're painting my oldest daughter's room currently.

Work is going fine. It can be a bit crazy at times, but I think I'm going to learn a lot.

A bit of weirdness going on at work.

A couple of weeks ago, my supervisor pulled me aside and told me about some strangeness that was going on at the executive level. Apparently, they decided that they (the company I work for) would only deal with companies whom they considered "diverse". Turns out, the consulting firm I work for was not considered "diverse". Although, given the number of Chinese and Indian contractors that work for any IT consulting firm, I don't understand why not. I have no idea what definition of "diverse" they are using. What this meant was that if they needed to lay off a consultant, and there were two of them on the team, and I worked for the non-diverse one, I would get the axe. As luck would have it, my team has two consultants, but we both work for the same firm. So, I didn't really bother to do anything, since I'm quite happy with my firm, and I don't think they could really legally get away with doing that anyway.

So, last week, I was told that the *other* consultant's contract was up at the end of September, and would not be renewed. Interesting. So, I spoke to the Supervisor again regarding the state of the company, and he said that it's all about Wall-Street expectations. That they are trying very hard to make their third quarter results look good. If they can have a strong third quarter, then Wall-Street will leave them alone for a while. If they don't, then they're going to be scrutinized for the next year or so. Which they want to avoid. So, apparently, for the remainder of the year, they are simply not renewing any contracts at all. So, what this means for me is, taken at face value, when my contract expires (presumably on December 5th), it won't get renewed. But it's possible that, once new budgets get approved at the start of the new year, they would want to re-hire me. That would mean that I would basically be unemployed during December on the gamble that I could get rehired back in January. The risk for my employer is that all the people who they let go would leave and find new work elsewhere.

As it turns out, I have lunch with a recruiter with a different firm on Thursday. He's just one of those guys that constantly calls to see how I'm doing. So, I'm going to ask him about this situation. I'm not even sure my employer is one of the clients they deal with, so it would be interesting to see if he has any other opportunities in the area that he might know of. If I could leave, and make the same amount, and have more stability, it might not be a bad idea.

Of course, a lot could change between now and then, and I may end up playing a few cards to see if I could convince them to keep me around. For his part, my supervisor really seems to be going to bat for me, and I think he's positioning it such that I'm in the middle of a very critical project, and he can use that as leverage to keep me around when push comes to shove.

Joy. Well, at least I'm making more now, and I feel like I have more options available. Still, this kind of shit makes it hard to plan for the future.

I've neglected my journal for a while now.

I'll keep it brief.  We moved back to Kansas City.  We got all of our stuff unloaded, and are slowly putting our new place together.  They had to replace the carpet downstairs since it was stained with urine (nice, huh!). We're renting a house in Olathe (a suburb of KC). It's close to work. Looks like I won't be moving to the Sprint Campus until early October. So, that's fine. Where I am is ok with me.  It's quiet, and close to where I live.

The family is all good. We had a lot of help this past weekend unloading all of our stuff. So, that was nice. I think Kelly is happy to be with all of her friends again, and my game group is going good, so everything seems to be falling into place. I've been running my game via a message board until we game again in person next week.  So, that's been nice, since I've been throwing in lots of little details.

Current Music: Carl Orff

Counting down the days. I think Erin is finally warming up to me a little bit. She actually talked to me on the phone yesterday. So, hopefully she won't hold a grudge against me for being gone so long.

Kelly apparently has pretty much everything packed up at this point. So, when I get there essentially all we'll need to do is load it. She went ahead and ordered the biggest trailer that U-Haul has available. So, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we won't need that second POD, but I suspect we will.

I've got pretty much everything lined up here. I need to call the landlord company to schedule my final walkthrough. I'll need to do that before Thursday, obviously. They need a cashier's check for the first month's rent, along with pet deposit and an application fee.  So, I'll need to make sure I get that to them before I leave as well.  I signed a piece of paper last week stating the Bev (my MIL) could pick up the keys on Monday if we weren't in town in time.  But she can't pick up the keys if they don't have that cashier's check. I guess they require a cashier's check or m/o for the first rent, and then just regular checks after that suffice.  I guess they need to know you actually have the money for the rent. Probably smart...

I need to try to set up my DSL service. The phone should get turned on today, but when I go online to see about DSL service, it keeps telling me the phone number is not an AT&T number, so I just don't think it's in their system yet. I'll try later today, and then again tomorrow to see if I can get that scheduled. Heaven forbid they don't have DSL service in the area. Not sure what I'll do then.

There are so many Indian people that work in my building that when I step into the break room around lunch time, it's like I've entered an Indian Buffet. They all bring their lunch to work, and it's all very heavy in curry. So, the whole breakroom just sort of smells like curry during lunch.

Ran a good game last night. Despite most of the players getting mildly drunk, it was a good game. Very intense battle with a wight that proved nearly fatal for the party Knight.

So, a couple of weeks ago I had booked a flight back home for the 18th of August.

Then, we sold our house, and the buyers wanted to close on the 14th. Which meant, obviously, we'd need to be out of the house before then. So, I had to change my flight to the 10th. After some searching, I found a flight that was actually $15 cheaper than my original flight. So, I took it. There was a $100 cancelation fee, which I had to pay, but I never got the $15 back.

I called Expedia, and they said that residuals less than $25 the airlines just keep. This wasn't an Expedia thing, it was really an airline thing. But she informed me that Expedia should have not allowed the transaction to complete because of the residual, and that I should have contacted an agent to complete the transaction. Because of their error, I asked to speak with a supervisor. The agent was friendly, and offered me a $50 coupon for the error, but I wasn't interested. So, I went on hold... Eventually, the agent came back on and verified that the airline already processed the transaction, and in a polite way, told me I was fucked. This time, she offered me a $100 coupon good for a hotel purchase. "Fine", I said reluctantly.

So, last night, I booked two hotels for our trip back to KC from Richmond. One in Charleston and another in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. This splits the trip more or less into thirds.

In addition to the $100 coupon I had, I had a $50 promotional coupon as well.

The caveat is that these only apply to Expedia Special Rate hotels, which means you pay for them up front, and not at checkout. After I called and figured out how the coupons worked, I was able to book two hotels.

I got a 3 star hotel in Charleston for $14.85.

Then I booked a Super 8 (choices were slim) in Mt. Vernon for $19.

Not too shabby!!

Finished my second assignment for my current class yesterday. My plan of reserving Sundays to do my assignments seems to be working well. I have two more Sundays before I fly back to Virginia. After that, I'm sure my Sundays will be shot to hell, but at least I can make good progress on the class in the meantime.

We had a concert at the Gardner airport here yesterday. It was pretty hot, but the concert went ok. The Olathe Band is funny. An automated thing sent out a message stating that rehearsals would be canceled for tomorrow. Its like they look for any excuse they possibly can to cancel a rehearsal. I hate to say it, but the Richmond band was a much better organization. Much better managed; much more cohesion.

Kelly reserved the POD for us to move in. I guess it won't arrive at the new place until the 19th of August. So, we're going to be without our stuff for a few days. Since we weren't sure whether or not we could squeeze everything into a single POD, we are going to rent a UHaul trailer as well. And since we won't have our stuff for several days, we can pack up dishes and food, and the kids beds in the trailer, and that way we'll have them at the house before we get all the rest of our stuff.

Work is boring. It's driving me crazy. I hate what they have me working on. It's like, "hey, here's this train wreck of a project that we need you to jump on to make sure we don't miss our deadline, and oh, it's far enough into the project that we can't actually alter the design or code or anything, so just disregard the fact that the entire thing is a complete and utter mess."  Gah!  It's amazing any of our shit runs. And they wonder why we have performance problems and difficulties keeping our jobs running all the time.  Wonder no further.

Well, we sold the house.  Kelly called on Wednesday to say that she was having a showing. Or maybe it was Thursday. So, that was good news. Then she called on Friday to say that the same couple wanted to come back to look at it. Apparently it was between our house and another one. Kelly called back Friday night to say that they'd given us an offer on it, and she accepted it. The realtor wanted to know if Kelly needed to talk to me first, and she's like "No, I know what he'll say". The offer was very nice, and wasn't nearly as low as I thought it might be. So that was nice.

The funny part is that I'd already bought a ticket to fly out on August 18th. They want to close on the 14th. So, I had to change my flight.

We put a deposit down on a rental house here. I guess we'll stay there for a year. It's in Olathe. I went and looked at that place last week. They wanted to know when we wanted to move in, but I didn't give her an answer. I guess the answer is middle of August!

So, lots of work ahead of us. I think we'll probably go with a POD to move in. We're thinking it will be tight, but that we can get everything into a single pod. A POD is 8x8x16. We moved out there in the ABF freight trailer, and that was 8x9x20. But, it wasn't piled all the way to the top for the most part. We've gotten rid of a few things, too - a black chair, some big speakers, a baby swing that didn't work anymore. We haven't really bought anything large except for Erin's big train table. We're debating on selling the washer/dryer so that'll be a lot of space we'll get back if we don't move those.

I'm at work today, trying to work on this project they've assiged me to. It's very tedious, very boring work. I hate it. So, I'm procrastinating. :)

I got my first assignment for my class back - 86. Which was better than it deserved. I just wrote crap for answers just to get done with it. I'll do the same for every assignment. I hate this class. It's just worthless. I think I'll try to plan on using my Sundays to work on assignments. I have a band concert tomorrow, too, though. So that will make working on it a little harder. Fortunately, it's not as long as the first assignment.

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Queen

Been too tired/bored/lazy to update my journal lately.

I guess we're planning on trying to get Kelly out here by mid August.  I just booked a flight online for August 18th. We'll plan on having a PODs or Smartbox thing available for us that weekend. We'll see about getting someone to watch the kids for us, and we'll try to get everything packed up and shiped out.  We tried to figure out our options. This seemed like the cheapest option. I mean, I could fly out, and then drive them out here, and then at some point Kelly and I could fly back, but that would have meant more plane tickets down the line at some point.  I don't think furniture in the house is going to sell it one way or another, really. Hard to sell a house regardless if you can't even get people to come look at it!  Anyway, this way we take care of it in one fell swoop. We'll ship the stuff out to KC, load the van up, and drive back out. I figure it'll take 3 days to drive back, give or take. I imagine that I'll end up having to take that whole week off. Kelly is looking into renting a house here somewhere. Kelly refuses to get an apartment. It'll be easier, I guess. Renting a house means we won't need to keep stuff in storage, I guess. Kelly found one that comes available in September. She'll stay with her parents until then, and maybe go down and see my parents for a bit too while she's there.

At work they've got me working on some critical project that was falling behind, I guess.  Everyone seems so happy that I'm on the project now.  It's weird. It's like people I don't even know where like "I was so glad to hear that you're on this project!". I guess my reputation precedes me. It seems like I have a lot to live up to.  :shrug:

Anyway, the project is a mess. They've got something like 900 of these test cases that they are trying to recreate. Each can take about an hour to do. You have to go through and analyze all these situations, and find an appropriate data source to modify, and make sure all these steps are followed... And each one is different from the last. I mean, there are usually a series of cases, but each is different.  The analyst on the project wanted me to go through and look for "problem" cases. Which I did - I found 20 that were complete duplications. So, I guess that was productive. But in doing these things, I've managed to actually do -two- today. That's how complicated these things are. I think they have something like 5 people working on these things now. They have 6 weeks to finish all of them. It's going to drive me crazy.  I just have to keep telling myself that the money is good, and it won't last forever. :)

Not much else going on here. Pretty quiet. Bruce (my roommate) tends to keep to himself. He was gone big chunks of the weekend anyway. I barely ever even see the guy. I guess I should be happy he isn't obnoxious or annoying. So, that's good.

I've made some good progress on painting my miniatures. I'm down to two non-dragons - a fire giant that I got free at Gen Con, and a gnoll shaman. The fire giant is almost done, and he's looking really good. The gnoll shaman I have put off to the last. He's exceedingly complicated - he's got this big head-dress, and bamboo armor, and skulls, and feathers, and all this ornamentation all over him. He's going to take a week, I'm sure of it.  After that, I've got two dragons that I want to paint. One I'm going to paint white, and the other black. After I paint those two, that's the excuse I need to go buy some more.  :)  I did pick up a few plastic minis at the local game store here over the weekend. I'm going to need a bigger tackle box soon.  Actually, I could use a new one right now. The big one Kelly got me for my birthday last year is already full.  :)

Gonna try to get a woodwind quintet put together from people within the Olathe band. I'd emailed the oboe player whose email I knew (she is also a board member of the band). She said she was interested, but would not be there next week. So, I may ask the other guy if he wants to sit in a bit to play with us. I'd rather play in a group like that consistently than play in an actual community band. I like the music much more, and it's much more challenging. We'll see how it goes....

Got back home last night. Had a good time with the wife and kids. I thought Erin was going to cry when I had to say goodbye. That was hard. We went to the zoo on Friday. Tried to get a family picture on Saturday ("try" being the operative word; we did manage to get one decent one). I took Erin to the pool on Sunday and let her swim "in the big pool". Monday we ran to CostCo and Home Deport - I needed to caulk some stuff around the garage door. I managed to get the yard mowed, and Brigette's crib lowered a level.

Back to work today.

Not much going on here today. I fly out to Virginia tomorrow night. Looking forward to that. Tried to do a geocache yesterday, but couldn't find it. Got a little exercise out of it, so I guess that was ok. I've got a few others I'd like to try to find. Maybe next week...

Worked yesterday during the day. Left around 6:00. I never did go see any fireworks. I was too lazy to go anywhere. I guess I didn't care about them enough to go see them.

Went to Arkansas for the weekend. Dad and I went fishing in his new boat on Saturday. He has a very nice fishing boat. He let me drive it. Amazingly, I did ok considering that I hadn't driven a boat in years. I even loaded it on the trailer, and got it on the first try. I was even able to fish again. I guess it's sort of like riding a bicycle. You never really forget how to do that. It was far too hot to actually catch anything though. So, we didn't stay out very long.

Got back home Sunday night. I loaded the rest of the stuff in my car into the new house. Bruce, the owner, is in Dallas for the weekend, and will be back tomorrow night. I washed a load of clothes, and watched some TV. Unlike my former roommate, Bruce actually has cable, and he has HBO and some other stuff. Plus he has this bigass HDTV downstairs. Nice. I watched Star Wars Episode III on HBO, and just couldn't stomach watching the scenese with Anakin in them. That guy is such a horrible actor. That movie is just really bad - save for the action sequences.

The drive into work this morning was a dream - 1.5 miles. I can even go home for lunch, though I don't really have anything at home to eat for lunch. This opens up a realm of possibilities for me - I can actually cook grilled cheese sandwiches, or something like that for lunch now. That will be nice.

Gaming tonight. So, I'm working on my game a little bit. I might actually get around to doing some work today, but I haven't yet. :) It's very quiet here today, as was expected.  I borrowed my parents GPS from them this weekend. I think maybe after I get back from Virginia, I might do some geocaching here.

Told Ray I was moving out last night. He didn't get home until after 10 o'clock. Not sure where he went. He took it better than I thought he might. I told him it was just a lot closer to where I'd be working. And then he's like "was it something I did?"  God, the man is so self-conscious it's amazing. I told him that I knew he would wonder if it was, but I assured him that it had nothing to do with him. I'm going to go by the new place tomorrow evening to get a key, and take all my stuff. I probably should call Bruce tonight and just make sure everything is still cool with me coming over tomorrow to do that.

It's Kelly's birthday today. I guess she's going to go to Olive Garden since Erin wanted spaghetti for dinner, and they had a dessert she wanted (probably the tiramisu, I'd guess). Apparently, the check she got yesterday was from our current county, which makes a bit more sense. But it's still curious, as we're unaware of any overages that we've made. Apparently, it's overpayment for something. Perhaps something we did last year. I've no idea. We're not going to question it.  :)

I got my check today. I looked it over, and they're calculating the overtime wrong. It's being calculated as the per diem rate * overtime hours. It should be based on the base rate * the overtime hours, not the per diem rate. Per diem is only paid out for 80 hours, at the per diem rate. Overtime is based on the base rate, and never the per diem rate. So, I think they're figuring it wrong. So, it's about $300 short. I don't think my first check had any overtime on it, so it should be fine. The guy I emailed deferred it to another gal, who's already on vacation for the long weekend, so she won't get back to it until next Wednesday.

Went by and met Bruce - the guy at the new apartment Monday afternoon. Seemed like a nice enough guy. I'm going to take all my stuff over before I leave for Arkansas on Friday after work, and dump it off, and then get a key from him. He might actually be gone all weekend, but he was ok with me coming back on Sunday and going in his house without him there. That's awful trusting of him. He showed me around the place. It's nothing fancy, but it's a lot bigger than Ray's house. He's going to put in a hot tub in the back yard eventually, so that will be nice! He has two kids. I only saw one of them. It was a big furry thing that weighed 18 lbs. I thought Princess was big!  Wow. I haven't told Ray yet. I'll tell him tonight maybe.

Apparently, for whatever reason, the previous county we lived in in Richmond sent us a check for $1200. Kelly wasn't entirely sure why they had done that, but she wasn't going to question it. I don't think I would, either. So, that was an unexpected present. I assume maybe we overpaid on property taxes or something.  *shrug*

Not much else going on.

My debit card was apparently compromised somehow. We noticed a few transactions on our online banking. 3 of them were gibberish transactions, and each was around $1.30. There was also one for $124 to GameSpy.com. So, we called the bank. Apparently they had already recognized the transactions and flagged them as suspicious. I'll go by the bank and get a new temporary card until the permanent one arrives. Of course, they'll be mailing mine to Richmond. Just one more thing... at least we caught it quickly.

I'm thinking about switching apartments. Ray is a nice guy, but it's a 20 mile drive to work. Plus his house kind of stinks because he used to smoke a lot in there. I had a headache the other night, and I was thinking that it was due in part because of the smell of his place. Every time I walk in his door, it's like I'm entering an ash tray. I usually get used to it rather quickly, but it's not a nice welcome, regardless.  I found a place on Cragislist that's just a few miles from work. Actually, I just mapped it, and it's 1.5 miles. Very nice. The rent is the same. It's a 4 bedroom house on a cul de sac, and he's a non-smoker. So, I emailed him back and told him I'd like to drop by this evening to take a look at it. He said he might have another guy come too, but he has two rooms, so that's not a problem. I'm sure Ray will be sad to see me go. I think he's likes my company as much as anything. But cutting my commute down from 20 miles to 1.5 miles will be awesome. I'll only have to fill the tank up with gas once per month!

Going down to Arkansas this weekend. Mom, I want to go fishing with Dad on Saturday. Do you think you could check to see if the Supermarket sells 3 day fishing licenses? They sell them online, but if they sell them at the grocery store, I won't need to get one online.

Had the DM Dinner thingy on Saturday. It went pretty well. I guess I had about 7 people total come, counting two couples. From ENWorld, it was LiquidSabre, Michael Silverbane, Taren Nighteyes and myself. LiquidSabre (Bretty) brought his wife. She is a non-gamer. Another couple I had met through an ad I found at one of the game stores came. I had invited her and her husband through email. And then later on, Reddist (Wade) came. I used to play with Wade when I lived up here before. I hadn't heard from him in a long time. It sounds like he's interested in gaming again, so I'll definitely include him in my plans for a group. I was blown away when he showed up. I guess he'd just read about the dinner the night before.

Still no news on the house. Apparently Rebecca said that there's just no movement at all. Apparently new construction is not even selling. I guess people in Richmond just aren't buying houses. I don't understand that. It's just uncanny. She said that adding a seller's incentive doesn't work, and she didn't really recommend doing that. So, I guess we'll just sit tight and wait. It's really all we can do. Kelly is insisting that she just wants to wait it out. She absolutely, positively doesn't want to rent ever again. Apparently, the smelly apartment we had in Richmond sort of did her in in that regard. So, she just refuses to rent again. I don't know if I'll be able to live without them for 3, 4, 5 months or more. I'll go insane, I think. I think it's harder on me now since Erin is so much more verbal about missing her daddy. It breaks my heart to hear her on the phone say that she misses me.

I am flying out to see them at the end of next week. So, I'm really looking forward to that. It's going to he hard to fly back, though.

*yawn* Not much going on.

I sent a directory of all the employees to my recruiter. They took me to the Cheesecake Factory for lunch today. I ate too much, so now I'm tired. Recruiters just eat that kind of stuff up, since they don't normally have access to work directories. I didn't tell them that I also sent it to another recruiter who called me a few days ago. He's offered to send me and my wife to dinner somewhere. So, I'll take him up on that offer when Kelly gets here. :) 

Taking my Project Mgmt final tomorrow. Then have the DM dinner get-together thingy tomorrow evening. Probably just take it easy on Sunday and paint some miniatures. I've already painted 4 since I've been here. I'm working on #5. I told myself I couldn't buy any more until I painted all the ones that I have!  So, that's my incentive to finally get them all painted.  I still have two large dragons that I need to paint as well. Those will be fun.

Nothing exciting going on today. Still at work, but not doing much right now, as you can tell. :)  I got all the databases compiled today. That took a lot of work. I ran over 2500 queries to do that. The result - over a terabyte of information, and that doesn't even include indexes, which I haven't found a way to determine how much space the indexes are taking up, but I suspect it's a good chunk. I'm trying to correlate programs to tables now, and that's really, really hard. Still working on that. I have C programs, ksh scripts, stored procedures, java code, and other things. Not sure how I'll figure all that out.

Thus guy at work, Ron is driving me crazy. He's just really obnoxious and likes to hear himself talk. Doesn't know when to shut up and leave me alone. Just one of those kind of guys that doesn't get social cues. And he grunts all the time, like he's clearing his throat. He's just really obnoxious to talk to. I'm going to not like dealing with him much, I can already tell.