"It's a big one...and it's made of chocolate!"

I haven't posted in more than a week, but I have an excuse this time: I've been working. Well not so much last week but this week has been and will be non-stop.

Technically it's not really 40 hours, closer to 35. It's certainly better than between 7 and 14 though, as in the last few weeks. And better than nothing.

Today and yesterday I was replacing hard drives in a really large number of Dell computers at a famous name-brand hospital branch. Seems they recently made a sizable (every hospital location in CA, a lot) purchase of Dell computers with Maxtor HDDs, which turned out to be defective. Or the case was improperly designed so the HDDs were too hot and failed. Either way all Maxtor drives are being replaced with another brand. So I record information about both drives, hook up the new on tandem with the old, boot from a floppy to copy the information from the old to the new and reboot the machine. Basically. There's actually more to it than that but lets not get into details. It now takes me about 20 minutes to do one computer. Which I guess is pretty good.

Didn't, as far as I know, make any screw-ups yesterday but I only apparently did about 5 computers. Others were doing multiple computers at once, which should be easy enough when I'm writing down all the necessary information so I can't get anything mixed up. But I continued with one at a time. Today most-likely I'll try doing more than one at once.

Now I'm trying to figure out if this sort of semi-exciting driving from location to location stuff is actually what I want to be doing as opposed to driving to the same location every day, blah-blah-blah. Who knows? I mean inside these hospitals the floor plans seem almost identical so it doesn't much matter it took me 90 minutes to get to that location because it looks like the one 20 minutes from where I live on the inside. I do get to work with more-or-less different people every week though. I suppose I'll eventually meet them all and know them all well. This strikes me as a high turn over sort of position to I'll probably be meeting different people all the time anyway if I stay with this job.

I mean I would like to stay with this company a while anyway otherwise I won't have much reason to put this on my resume. At most I think it will take maybe another 2 or 3 weeks. That's only 5 or 6 weeks. I have learned an awful lot but it just doesn’t seem to be enough time to brag about really.

So I'm staying down near Walnut Creek, at a relative's house. Which was nice of them to do really. I didn't really want to commute this every day this week. I haven't been doing too much. Yesterday I just went to my sister's place, which is also nearby, to get some stuff I left over there on Monday. Ok so I brought my computer with me for some reason. But hey I could have needed it, who knows? I haven't needed it much yet. I though if I wanted to watch a movie or play a game I could just hook it up. But today so far I've just checked email and made this blog entry on my relative's computer and that's it. Nice to have the option though. I just realized everything I typed up to now has been pointless.

I would like to mention the long-waited season finale of The Shield I watched last night. As you may expect the main lead star of the show did the whole "pining-for-Emmy" moment or moments. But it wasn't some sell-out over-the-top symbolist dream sequence crap. I thought it was real and authentic and a natural progression of the season. I only missed one episode this season but the finale still made sense I think. This third season is, in my opinion, the best of the three seasons.

Expanding on the above has anyone else ever noticed how shows really going for a "gimme an Emmy" approach always have dream and/or musical sequences? There's Third Rock From the Sun, musical dream sequence won an Emmy, symbolism-ridden dream sequence episode of MASH, not sure it won but I know that episode was nominated, this season's Sopranos, long boring symbolism-ridden dream sequence, obviously pining for a nomination for Gandalphini and the show as a whole. But the The Shield didn't sell out like that. It did have an extremely amazing performance from the main star, but no dream sequences! Or I'm the only one who notices lame dream sequences with no point but to get an Emmy nomination.

There's also HBO's Deadwood, a western with extremely good writing. A seeming tribute to the ability to use the "7 worst words" the other commercial networks can't ever use, especially in these days of arguably over-zealous decency enforcement from our friends at the FCC. And forget about what effect such material has on little kids, this show is starting to have an effect on my 52 year old father. That show and The Shield deserve some sort of award or other recognition, but as is expected The Sopranos will most likely win.

I should mention I wrote this entry over three or four days.

So Wednesday night was a very bad night on account of the psychotic poalish guy I have to work with. Hopefully I won't ever work with him again, it's entirely too stressful. Last night (Thursday) wasn't that bad on the other hand. I just swap hard drive after hard drive. I'm starting to get some what better at it, I guess. We're doing nothing but NT4 machines. I guess those have more data because they take 5 minutes to ghost versus a minute and a half for the Win2k machines. I think I did four or five machines last night, I lost count. Takes about 25 to 30 minutes a machine. How that worked out to 7 hours I'm not sure. At least I got out on time last night.

In other news I got into the "gmail" beta via this nice blogger thing here. The service is still in beta but seems to be very common so account invites aren't worth $30 as they were about a month ago. On eBay gmail accounts are worth about a penny, as I saw when I researched the proposition. It is worth noting Yahoo! mail now allocates 100 megs of space, as opposed the 4MB allowed last week. Perhaps that sent the market price for Google's email service down a bit. I did get an extremely good account name for my gmail account so I will have it if I need it. Took about 10 minutes (using Google) but I found a Gmail checking utility, it is called GTray.

I suppose that's all I have to say for now. I brought my PC down with me in case the mood struck but it's now almost 2:00pm on Friday and I didn't use it. So there wasn't much point in bringing it. I didn't work on the win98 project or play any games. Didn't have time really. I have to get ready to go around 2pm as it stands if I want to leave at a decent time and not hit bad traffic. The place I am currently working for is only about 10 minutes down the freeway when there's no traffic.

Ok maybe I'll explain the title: it's from Whose Line (as usual). Two cast members were doing the "selling a compilation CD" bit. One says something like "2000 songs on one CD" then adds "it's a big one...and it's made of chocolate!". I thought that was a pretty good line. But as you know I have a weird sense of humor.

  ¶ 12:19 AM