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Category Archives: Rants –

Today must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursday. These posts will be my excuse to talk about whatever I want. Maybe start a discussion, or rant about how shitty or awesome my life is.

Change isn’t uniformly bad.

So every day at work, we add up (using a calculator) all of the money spent on Fines, Prints and Faxes. This is generally a ton of small transactions … .20 or .60 cents, maybe a couple dollar transactions and a few larger ones (generally faxes).

And of course this has to be done twice (since the everything is doubled checked for accuracy by a second person). And if there’s an error… it might be four or more times that all of these transactions (which can easily be more than a dozen) have to be calculated.

Now once we’ve got all this information figured out, we have to put it into an excel spreadsheet. I figured, why not save a bunch of effort, and make a temporary worksheet, where you just list each transaction, and let excel add it up for you. This has the added advantages that the second check person doesn’t have to enter anything, just compare the number you entered to those on the sheet, and if there errors it’ll be much easier to spot them by comparing the paper copy to what’s on the screen than it would be to re-enter them all into the calculator.

So I (tried) to explain this to my semi-boss and she seemed rather put off that I was trying to change things… explaining that I shouldn’t be doing anything that would create more work. Thing is, I’ve already revised the form/through-put 2-3 times now, and each time has made dealing with the daily deposit easier, and less error-prone. I’m fairly confident that if I can make the form do what I want it to (which I can, I just need to figure out how), this also would make things easier, more efficient, and harder to make mistakes (or at least, easier to detect them).

Ugh. Sometimes I just don’t get people.

Regardless, I do wish I had one of these:

Two posts for the price of one

So of course when the store owner leaves the country everything gets messed up. First off, we didn’t have any new DCI cards, so one player in the Draft tonight is playing using mine. Second, Conrad is working his other job, and will didn’t realize he was covering the 6 to close shift… so I’m heading back soon as I get my computer assembled and started.

Gah.

Happy belated discover and misname a continent day.

So will be starting to assemble my new ‘puter in a couple of hours, and I expect I will be distracted enough that I won’t think to post here, so I’m going to go ahead and write today’s post early. One of the joys of working for the government is we have non-closed holiday’s where we get time off, so I’ve got today off for Columbus day.

And yeah, I happen to think Columbus day is about the stupidest holiday in existence.  Or at least, the stupidest officially recognized one. Regardless, that does mean I have almost two whole days off in a row (a rarity), with just a one hour fill in shift at FNG for one of the few times we need two people on duty at the store.

For today’s picture you get all the parts for my new computer laid out ready to be put together. Soon, my precious, soon!

New Computer bits

Another shitty day for no good reason

So I only had to work three hours, meaning I got to sleep in, then goof off before work. Yet when I get home I’m so exhausted and depressed that I just sleep for 2 hours. I’ve got the next two days off, I should have a fancy new computer by the end of that. Really I’ve got nothing to complain about at the moment, yet I feel like complete shit.

Okay so nothing new to complain about. Love life, still non-existent. Roommate situation, still nada. Finances are better than they could be. Things could certainly be worse. Oh well, in a few days I’ll have a new computer, and a new video game to distract me from how crappy reality is.

Here’s a picture of the final boss of FTL right before it is destroyed. This was a real pain in the ass battle, I ran out of missiles  and only had Ion Weapons, which can stun systems, but not take them out. Fortunately I had a boarding robot and plenty of drone parts… I managed to kill all the crew, and so the automated systems came on and very slowly repaired the ship, at which point I could send a boarding robot over. Eventually the ship would cloak, destroying my robot, and I’d have to send another once it uncloaked. As you can see from all of the holes, I sent nearly a dozen boarding robots over before finally destroying it.

So tired, so very very tired.

Still haven’t quite recovered from getting up 5 hours early yesterday. Was it really only yesterday? Seems like at least 2-3 days ago. So I’ve got a full 2 day weekend (minus a half hour of covering at the game store on Friday), which just happens to fall on the projected time of arrival of my new computer… so hopefully I can spend Thursday (or worst case Fri) putting it together and playing X-Com and all that good stuff.

Of course that means I should probably be getting my D&D session for Saturday done tonight or tomorrow. Also cleaning the house some so I don’t have to sweat that for a while. 

Also snuck a peek at the new Michonne spin-off of Walking Dead, am a little disappointed by the amount of new content, but it’s not so tragic I won’t pick it up tomorrow when it officially goes on sale.

Here’s your random picture for the day:

New Computers, Monster Hearts, and Sleep Deprivation

So I finally bought a new computer. Or rather, I bought the parts for a new computer. Thursday or Friday I should have all the parts, and Lego-Like assembly can begin.

I also woke up at 5am this morning to the wonderful find of digital delivery of my Monster Hearts PDF… which I read most of on the ride up to Martinsville, where we demonstrated our Technology Petting Zoo to three or four dozen Librarian type people from the area. Enroute I also received notification that Apocalypse World’s Digital Delivery had also arrived. Once Curtis and I had all of the fancy eReaders, and tablets and the Wii and cameras set up, I tried to open the AW files on one of the Android tablets. Nope. So then I tried it an iPad. Still nope. Eventually with a bit of hoop jumping I was able to download it to a PC laptop, unzip it, and re-upload the PDFs to my Google Drive. Then I tried to access it again on the iPad. Limited Success… i could as long as I wanted to stay logged in. Downloading the Google Drive app for the iPad wasn’t much of an improvement, as while there was finally an option to save for offline use, I’d still have to stay signed in as me, and since it was Curtis’s iPad I didn’t want to do that.

Long story short, once through a fair bit of finagling we got the Actual PDFs on the Actual device, it was quite nice to be able to read it on the iPad.  I finished reading Monster Hearts on the way back to the ‘burg, and am terribly looking forward to running a game of it. Of course, I think I am more looking forwards playing some more Apocalypse World, especially now that I’ve pulled the curtain back a bit and taken a peek out how the game is run (or at least, how a variant is run, as I didn’t really delve into the AW rules much.)

Anyways, I’ve been up for 17 hours now and should probably get some of that mythical seeming thing called sleep. I expect I’ll update again in a year or so. (;

I’ll leave you with a random picture: