I have to re-evaluate the meaning of “personal best”

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Marchbanks

As I’ve just noted, I match and dispatch refurbished whole-system exchanges as a big part of my current job.  (That may be changing soon, but it’s too early to say.)  As I also just noted, matching refurbs is a very detail-oriented, fiddly process.  It’s a good day when you can get twenty-five done.  Except for me.  Until now, I counted anything over thirty as a good day, and forty was the ne plus ultra.  I had only done forty twice in my life, and one of those two times was last Friday.

It would now appear that either I ran out of work or I just wasn’t trying on Friday, because today when I shut down, I had dispatched fifty-three systems, including two servers, which are lots harder to do than desktops and laptops.  That means I just topped my previous best day by more than twenty percent.

And before someone asks, yes, my managers are taking notice ’cos I particularly told them what I’d done, and they were impressed.

Posted in Empire, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | 2 Comments

I can haz slo(er) week?

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Marchbanks

Last week got more frantic the longer it went on.  Wednesday I matched and dispatched 37 used exchanges; Friday I dispatched forty. (For scale, handling anything over twenty exchanges is a respectable day’s work.  Anything over thirty is heavy volume.  Anything over 35 means I’m going as hard as I can go, and there’s enough workload to support me going at that speed.)  Thursday morning I mentioned to a colleague that I’d done 37 on Wednesday, and he plaintively replied, “I wish I could do that many,” so maybe I’m setting myself a higher standard than average.

Matching used exchanges is a fiddly job ’cos I have to make sure that all the components in the system I’m proposing to send out are at least the equivalent of what the customer already has.  Even something as minor as the wrong wireless card or battery can make me have to flip an exchange to new-build.  And if I get it wrong, the customer will inevitably catch it and throw it all back, and I have to do it all over.

I happen to be fast and good at matching for two reasons, neither of which I can share with other team members:  first, I have a good memory for detail and can remember things that make a good match, and second, I hacked together a tool to keep track of all the part numbers I need for the last generation or two of systems, so I can use those part numbers as filters to cut down on the number of candidate systems I have to wade through to find a match.  My team lead doesn’t like me using the tool but can’t say a lot because my results are so good. But he can say don’t spread it around or you’ll end up with something you have to maintain, and he’s right about that.  As Rick Cook said, there’s a huge difference between something an expert hacks together for his own use, and a production system with full user interface, error-checking, and documentation.  I don’t want to get myself into having to maintain a tool for everybody, so I’m okay with not sharing it around.

But really, I would like it if this week piled on a little less than last week did.

Posted in Empire, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | 1 Comment

De-accessioning

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Marchbanks

Every library does it.  You probably have done it.

You get rid of books.

And that was what L and I just did—we culled the fiction shelves and pulled out about six shelf feet of things we didn’t like enough, or don’t think we’ll read again, and stacked them all on the dining table, ready to go to Half-Price Books.  And once we had the stacks, I looked at them and said, “L,” I said, “maybe I could offer some of these to my Small but Faithful Readership instead of ditching them outright.”

And that is where you come in.  Tell me if you want any of the following list, and we’ll see what we can arrange.  If you’re local you can come after them at The Old Gray House, and if you’re not I’ll mail your picks to you for the cost of mailing.  Offer ends at midnight Friday the 19th.

HARDCOVER

Auel, Jean. The Clan of the Cave Bear. Crown, 1980.
——. The Valley of Horses. Crown, 1982.
——. The Plains of Passage. Crown, 1990.
——. The Mammoth Hunters. Crown, 1985.
——. The Shelters of Stone. Crown, 2002.
——. The Land of Painted Caves. Crown, 2011.
Davies, Robertson. Happy Alchemy. Viking, 1997.
——. The Merry Heart. Viking, 1996.
De Lint, Charles. Waifs and Strays. Viking, 2002.
Dufresne, Frank. No Room for Bears. Holt, Rinehart, 1965.
Kelley, Douglas. The Captain’s Wife. Dutton, 2001.
Kinsella, W. P. The Dixon Cornbelt League. HarperCollins, 1995, ©1993.
Kraft, Eric. Reservations Recommended. Crown, 1990.
Larsson, Björn. Long John Silver. Harvill, 1999, ©1995.
Lawhead, Stephen. The Black Rood. Eos, 2000.
Pearson, T. R. Blue Ridge. Viking, 2000.
——. Polar. Viking, 2002.
——. True Cross. Viking, 2003.
Reader’s Digest. Nature in America. Reader’s Digest, 1991.
Twain, Mark. Tom Sawyer, Detective. Grosset & Dunlap, 1924.

TRADE PAPER

Borges, Jorge Luis, ed. The Book of Fantasy. Carroll & Graf, 1976.
De Lint, Charles. Yarrow. Orb, 1987, ©1986.
Hamilton, Virginia. In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World. Harcourt Brace, 1988.
Kinsella, W. P. The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt. Penguin, 1988.
Muller, Gilbert H., ed. The McGraw-Hill Reader, 4th ed. McGraw-Hill, ©1991.
Proulx, Annie. The Shipping News. Touchstone, 1994, ©1993.
Thompson, Flora. Lark Rise to Candleford. Godine, 2009, ©1945.

MASS MARKET

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Bantam, 1981.
Bradley, Marion Zimmer. Star of Danger. 1983, ©1965.
—— Two to Conquer. ©1980.
Deitz, Tom. Windmaster’s Bane. Avon, 1986.
Friesner, Esther, ed. Chicks in Chainmail. Baen, 1995.
Gaiman, Neil. Anansi Boys. Harper Torch, 2005, ©2004.
Goldman, William. The Silent Gondoliers. Del Rey, 1985, ©1983.
McAuley, Paul. Pasquale’s Angel. AvoNova, 1997, ©1995.
McSherry, Frank, ed. The Fantastic World War II. Baen, 1990.
Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. Bantam, 1987.
——-. Anne of the Island. Bantam, 1987.
Moon, Elizabeth. Divided Allegiance. Baen, 2000 ©1988.
——. Oath of Gold. Baen, 1989.
Robinson, Spider. Callahan’s Lady. Ace, 1990, ©1989.
——. Lady Slings the Booze. Ace, 1993, ©1992.
——. User Friendly. Ace, 1998.
Saberhagen, Fred. Merlin’s Bones. Tor, 1996.
Scarborough, Elizabeth. Bronwyn’s Bane. Bantam, 1983.
——. Song of Sorcery. Bantam, 1982.
——. Songs from the Seashell Archives vol. 2. Bantam, 1988.
——. The Unicorn Creed. Bantam, 1983.
Silverberg, Robert. The Gate of Worlds. Tor, 1984, ©1967.
Turtledove, Harry. Sentry Peak. Baen, 2000.

Posted in Books and Bookselling | 9 Comments

The plumber has been and gone again

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Marchbanks

And THIS time the right hoses got replaced!

Posted in House | Comments Off on The plumber has been and gone again

Or maybe not

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Marchbanks

While the drain is fixed, the hot water line isn’t and is still dripping.  Complaint call is in to the plumber.

Posted in House | Comments Off on Or maybe not

There is kitchen water again

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Marchbanks

The plumber came, and discovered the water-line drip just needed a fitting tightened and not to replace the whole line, and mashed the drain piping back together so it’s tight.  He charged us $120 for a half-hour’s time, which is unsurprising:  plumbers charge heavily for knowing how to deal with other people’s shit, often literally.

So this evening I’m going to my next-to-last meeting as secretary of the neighborhood association—my term is up on September 30th, and none too soon.

Posted in House | Comments Off on There is kitchen water again

Drip, drip, drip

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Marchbanks

The under-sink refused to dry out, and kept coming up with more and more water even though I stopped using the side with the leaking drain.  Today I found out why.

I couldn’t be satisfied with one leak.  Oh, no.  I had to have two—the drain, and a drip from the hot-water feed line, which seems to have electrolyzed in the way that hot-water pipes will.  That one, being metal, I’m unwilling to tackle myself:  this calls for a plumber, and that’s what I’ll have to do come Monday.  Meantime, I have a huge sinkful of dishes that I expect I’ll have to do in M’s bathtub, since it’s the only one whose stopper works.

Posted in House | Comments Off on Drip, drip, drip

Well, that answered that question

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Marchbanks

The source of the under-sink leak is found—a handyman-engineering job that finally came apart.  L theorizes the house shifting so much in the drought was what pulled it apart; I think it may have just got banged into by something being shoved under there.  L’s sister, an architect with construction-industry experience, thinks I’m capable of fixing it myself if I will.  Her observation was “PVC is a lot easier to work with than copper or black iron.”  I’m going to think about it, and see how I feel this weekend, ’cos fixing it right will require pulling out and redoing the P-trap and cross-piece going to the main wastepipe.

Posted in House | 1 Comment

What fresh hell is this?

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Marchbanks

Everything under the kitchen sink is wet, as I just found when I went to put soap into the dishwasher and the carton started to come apart in my hand.  I pulled everything out and left it to dry as much as it will overnight, but unless I’m godawfully lucky, this portends a plumber’s visit and a bill.

Posted in House | 4 Comments

Damn Intuit’s over-fast development cycle

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Marchbanks

I had to spend a couple of hundred bucks’ worth of the baleboosteh’s money on a new copy of QuickBooks that we really didn’t want or need, because:

  1. Intuit pushed an update that caused a runtime error in QuickBooks.
  2. Our version of Quickbooks is the 2006 release, which worked fine until the update this week broke it.
  3. QuickBooks 2006 is an end-of-life product.  Everything older than QuickBooks 2009 is an end-of-life product.  This means, three years and you’re SOL.  (By contrast, Microsoft will continue to support Windows XP, introduced in 2001, until 2014.  They offer extended support for the Office 2007 suite, released in 2006, through 2017.)
  4. Intuit will not support end-of-life products.  Not even if it was their own gorram gone-wrong update that caused the need for support.
  5. The only thing they will do is to sell you a copy of QuickBooks 2011 at full price, not upgrade, after which they will grant you thirty days’ free support that you now don’t need, because the 2011 release isn’t broken.

This kind of crap is why I would go elsewhere as fast as possible, were it not that their products are basically better than anything I’ve seen in competition.

Posted in Færie, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | 2 Comments