The past few weeks has been slightly trying. The server has been up and down as we've tried to configure it in a way that's sensible. I've re-fanglemajigged my email at home, and everything should be running smoothly from now on. Hopefully.
I went to see Spamalot and Les Miserables in the past 3 days. Both were slightly underwhelming, in a strange way. Both were technically excellent, but missed out on having that bit extra that makes you stare wide-eyed at the stage going 'wow'. Spamalot was funny, but not that funny. Everyone in the audience knew half the jokes and that was a problem. The stuff they did that was new was actually quite good, but you expect a comedy and get a half-hearted attempt. Les Mis was even weirder. Fantine had a cold which meant she sang about a quarter-tone flat, the extended family of the kid (the one that gets shot) was in, so every time he appeared there was rapturous applause, and the entire production gave me the feeling that they all wanted to get the thing over and done with as quickly as possible. Now, apparently there are union regulations which mean if you go past a certain time, you have to pay everyone more, so my solution is simple: start earlier. Yes, it's a long show, but it needs to be to get all the plot in. Starting at 8 and ending at 11pm precisely spoils it a little. Enjoyable though.
Annoyingly, I seem to have sat in on a meeting today where something interesting is going to be started. Something that could really be a good thing for customers and get rid of a lot of nonsensical crap that's currently sitting there. Had they started this at the beginning of my placement, I would be over the moon. As it is, I've a month to go, and I'm going to miss out on doing something interesting. Sucks to be me. Still, means I'll be busy for the next month.
Season 7 of the West Wing was released on Tuesday, so I'm off home to watch it all.
I've been having an interesting week. I went up the Empire State Building a few days ago and took some pictures. I was therefore fairly annoyed to discover a large circular shadow across most of them along with a curious diagonal pattern on a bunch of them as well. I have no idea what this is, or what caused it. Seems no-one else does either.
I put a search thingie in. Currently, it only searches news entries, but I'm going to get it to do everything else when I get round to it. And I'll improve the results pages.
So it's November 15th, which means that in exactly a month it'll be my last day in the office here in NY. In that time, I've got quite a lot to do - most of it documentation. The advantage of this kind of thing is that if there's an issue or an uncertainty with the system I'm designing, I can just write that the solution to that particular bit is "yet to be determined" and leave it to the next guy to figure out how to solve it. This way I can pick and choose the problems that are easy to solve and those that aren't and conveniently avoid having to think too hard about the problems in the second category. It also keeps the documentation short and that's a good thing.
Next week is Thanksgiving. I was recently informed that I've still got something like 17 days holiday to take this year. I'm taking two weeks at Christmas (between placements) which leaves me with something like 7 days to get through between now and December. Thanksgiving is an obvious time, so I'm taking two days next week. What I'll do then, I'm not quite sure. I had a plan to go to Washington for a day or two, but that rapidly turned into a rather expensive plan. I could take the bus and only stay for a day, but I'm not sure if that'd be worth it.
I'm going for lunch now. I think I'm going to miss the guy in the Europa downstairs - he always knows what I want for lunch (not hard as I have the same thing every day) and his nametag says "Jesus". I think the next time I come to NY, I'll go there for lunch again and see if he's still there.
No I didn't buy one. I didn't even think about it.
However, on Saturday, I was sitting there doing nothing and I read about how the Wii was going to be launched in Times Square at midnight. Given that I live next to Times Square and how a large queue of people who'd been in the freezing cold for 20+ hours would be a good opportunity to take some photos, I headed out the door at about 10pm.
It was quite an amazing sight. The queue stretched from the front door of Toys 'R' Us, north for one block, then east for one block onto 6th Ave, south for another block and then back around the corner west for a bit. There were lots of interviews going on, lots of people looking silly playing tennis on the console-stands they'd set up at various points in the queue, but most of all, the number of people walking around going "Is this the PS3 thing?", "Wii? What's a Wii?", "Is something going on here?" etc was quite amusing.
Anyway. I turned up, took some pictures, got bored, and went home at half eleven. Couldn't bear to be around when they finally opened the doors. Pictures will be up at the newly created photos.growse.com site.
Well, progress is definately being made. I invented the concept of Picsie a while back during my failed quest to find a decent photo-storage-management system. Now that I've got my own server and oodles of space to play with, I decided to revive the project after I killed it. I can't quite remember why I killed it - usually I have a very good reason for killing projects which I then handily forget. I then attempt to bring the project back to life before discovering why I killed it in the first place.
Anyway, I'll put some blurb up on the projects page, and eventually let people download the code :) In the meantime, I'll be redirecting my photos page to Picsie.