At Her Leisure

I was woken up at 5:40am this morning by the truck that empties the dumpster. My condo is not near either of the two dumpsters, but I heard the first being emptied, then the truck rumbled up the driveway right next to my bedroom and I heard the second being emptied.

I cannot imagine how loud it was for the buildings on either side of the dumpsters, all that bashing around. They usually show up in the middle of the day, so I'm awake when I hear them. Now I know they're loud enough to wake me up. What possessed them to arrive at o-dark-thirty I cannot guess. Bastards.

I took today and tomorrow off to take a free training that Google was offering partners for International Women’s Day. It’s a two day training that can lead to a test to earn a Generative AI Leader certificate. I figured it’s free, and it gives me something official looking that I can add to my resume that proves that I’ve got some familiarity with AI.

I’m regretting signing up for this course. The first half hour was literally a Google commercial. For this course. That I’d already signed up for and WAS LITERALLY ALREADY ATTENDING. I kept thinking, “When are we going to get to the AI part?”

And then when we did, good Lord, the presenter. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing or what, but she drove me crazy. She was peppy to the point of obnoxiousness. At first I was wondering, is this woman high or drunk? Especially when her dog started acting up and she showed us the bottle of hemp treats she was giving the dog to try to calm them down to stop being disruptive. And I had her pegged as ADHD long before she commented (around hour six) that she was ADHD. She was all over the place, moving around in her chair, waving her arms around, leaning closer to and further away from the camera, playing with her hair. It was distracting just watching her.

And OMG the dog. It was excited because it was snowing out and that was making noises on the roof. Then she had workmen in the home and the dog was growling and barking to protect its territory from strangers. The presenter was distracted by the dog growling and barking. And I was distracted by her being distracted, and occasionally commenting on what the dog was doing. She was petting the dog with one hand and running the class with the other hand. Then all the dog lovers in the chat wanted to see the dog, so we had to stop to try to get it up on her lap on camera. The dog was in the background, the dog was under her desk. This went on the ENTIRE seven and a half hours of the class. We had four breaks and a lunch, and at no time did she take the dog out of the room to remove the distraction. So fucking unprofessional when you’re presenting to over 4,000 people.

It's never a good sign when I start taking notes for my review before we're even a quarter of the way through a course. I'm going to have to go back through the course with the sound muted and closed captions on, and try to arrange some other window to block my sight of the presenter to see if I can pick up on some of the content that I just wasn't able to concentrate on with all the distractions. Grrrr.

OMG, we hit 74 degrees (23.3C) today. I had the windows open because it’s time to air out the winter funk. Things are melting quite nicely, when I peeked my head out after lunch, there were already large swaths of lawn bare of snow. Now to just get working on the plow piles melting.

*****

Last week I learned about Democracy Sausages in Australia. I wish we made voting as much fun here. I’m not looking forward to the midterms, with the way the First Felon keeps talking about taking over managing voting from the states, never mind that it’s unconstitutional. Our national terrible toddler wants it!

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One of our executives spends a few moments of his day wishing people Happy Birthday and Happy Anniversary (for their hiring dates) on Slack.

I really hate having my birthday mentioned at work.

I also really hate that he somehow missed doing birthdays on my birthday.

I am nothing if not complicated. =P

*****

I’m really disappointed how much trouble I’ve been having lately ordering books in a series. I had to order the fourth book in the Modecai Tremain three times before I got a copy. I placed my first order in early December. Twice the vendor that Amazon was selling for sent me a message asking me to confirm that I still wanted the book. After the second order had dragged on for over a month, I ordered a used copy that arrived in a week (from the UK!) and canceled the order with the Amazon vendor who for some reason didn’t want my money for one of the eight copies they claimed they had in stock.

I’m also working my way through Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn series, and there’s a whole chunk of titles in the middle of the series that seem to be out of print for some reason. I had to track down used copies to order of those titles too.

*****

Whoo today was a busy day. Up early and onto the laptop, trying to get the final pieces of my troubleshooting project approved, merged, and published. I kept finding small things that were borked that needed fixing (formatting errors, one last missing error message). I finally got everything merged and published, went to check the website before I made a big announcement and found two more problems (an inconsistent file name, broken links, BAH!) Took forever to get someone to approve those changes, and then had to wait for the website to update again. Announcement is happening tomorrow morning. Whee!

We’re also about to let some members of the Community take over publishing the Helm Chart (installation files) for our product. So I was also trying to get a bunch of updates merged for that, so that when they take over the files (and move them into their own repository where they have admin permissions) that things are semi clean and up to date.

I made 41 merges today. It was a busy day. And I did a load of laundry too!

Is it Friday yet? I’m pooped, and it’s only Tuesday.