then she appeared

They laid a couple of people off in my department yesterday. Apparently more to come, although they had a meeting with a bunch of us and told us we were ok. It's supposed to be something like 15% of my global department. And apparently 15% of many departments, all over the firm.

Why, when supposedly we had our best-ever year last year, why do they need to do this shit? The last time they started to belt-tighten they were entertaining offers from outside buyers. They rejected the offers, so we went back to business as usual. I asked if we were in that kind of situation, but of course that was an off-script question so my boss had no answer.

I feel terrible for the two people they've already laid off that I know about. Waiting to hear who is next (the boss has only met with half my local department). I told an underboss that I would volunteer to be laid off. She laughed and said "wouldn't we all!" — but something tells me that a severance package and the opportunity to collect unemployment is not everyone's dream.

I am going to lose my MIND today! I have this weird sort of itchy feeling in my brain. Like when you get sick and your throat gets itchy, way in the back, and you can't do anything about it other than try to scrape your tongue around. Except this is my brain! It's focused right at the base of my skull, all pins and needles and ugh!!

I'm thinking an ice pick might be good...

My new hero is S.I. Russel, the inventor of the heating pad. I don't think I'd make it through work today without him. So thanks, S.I.!

"An American, S. I. Russel, invented the electric heating pad in 1912 as a medical aid for tubercular patients sleeping outdoors: it was a small square of fabric with electrically heated tapes running through it."
- De Bono, Edward, ed. Eureka! An Illustrated History of Inventions from the Wheel to the Computer, 1974

I am making progress on my behind-ness. I finished the two things that needed to get done yesterday at work, plus I also got a bunch of stuff organized for school, and even part of a lecture written. One of the benefits of getting organized is that I found another lecture mostly-written that I'd forgotten about, so I am 75% prepared for the last two classes of the semester. Go me! Sometime on Monday I will finish the mostly-written lecture (on ethics, DRM, and copyright), and hopefully finish the last lecture (flashy what's next Web 2.0 stuff).

So after spending a day getting files organized I feel compelled to extol the virtues of my very favorite piece of freeware out there. It's NoteTab Light, and it's just plain awesome. I've been using it for years, since grad school (1999), and it never occurred to me just how awesome it is and how much I love it until yesterday.

I use it in a number of ways, for a number of things. It totally replaces Notepad and Wordpad for me, and on the whole it replaces Word, too. I prefer to do most things that are non-graphical in just plain text files, both for space reasons and because I loathe MS Word with the heat of a thousand suns (and trust me, I know Word and all it's little persnickety oddities better than I want to). NoteTab is also a great little HTML editor, as it has the handy "view in browser" feature and has all the tags you could want built right into a little menu down the side.

But the aspect of NoteTab that I heart the most is the ability to have multiple documents open at the same time, in tabs. I've always used it to take quick notes in meetings, which I would then name based on project. You can set it to always remember which tabs you have open when you close the app, so that the next time you launch they all open right back up. Very good if you're scattered, or if you're impatient. (hello)

I wasn't really putting any effort into learning its capabilities, however, until it just occurred to me yesterday that it probably has a feature that will allow you to open a bunch of tabs on demand, i.e., if I want to open all the files that have to do with my job, I can click on one thing and 10 files will open. And of course it has that feature! Happy day! So I just finished setting up three topics, work, school and personal, and now I can focus more closely on the task I'm supposed to be working on, rather than having tabs running off the page.

I <3 NoteTab Light. I <3 it very much! I love it so much I might actually buy the Standard ($19.95) or the Pro version ($29.95). They deserve it.

At the end of class last week a student waited until everyone else left, then came up to me and asked me my opinion about whether she should take a public speaking class. She told me how even in a normal classroom environment she gets nervous and her mind goes blank, and she ends up asking questions she knows the answer to. (She asks a LOT of questions)

I told her that I believed that almost everyone could benefit from more exposure to public speaking, and that it was possible that she'd learn some tricks to help her think before she spoke and to help her focus. I said that in my experience, the more you know your topic, the more confidence you will have with presenting it, and that when I was teaching if I lost my train of thought I'd get very flustered and have to pull something out of my ass to get back on track.

She said she was very surprised at that, and that she thought I was completely confident and a natural at public speaking, which is why she asked me my opinion. Huh! I blathered something about how I knew my topic, had been teaching for over seven years now, and how I still get a tiny bit nervous on the first day of class. But inside I was thinking "really? me?" I understand the power structure that we have -- me teacher, her student -- so I know it might not be completely genuine, but it was still surprising.

Surprising mostly because I just don't feel all that confident when I am teaching. When I was in college I thought of myself as an extrovert; over time that hasn't really seemed to fit, though, and I recently read an article describing the introvert -- the need to be alone a lot of the time, the need to be forced to attend social events, the need for downtime after social events, being completely happy being alone. That's totally all me. [Although when I've taken the Myers-Briggs test it claims I am an extrovert. Maybe I'm schizophrenic. Or those tests just suck.]

Anyway, I've been getting really good feedback at work from the training sessions that I'm holding at my day job, too, so this is a pretty big ego-boost week. I don't know how my head will fit through the door.

Why do you always have to learn life lessons more than once before they stick?? Seriously.

I've been really busy at work lately — kind of crazy-busy, which isn't normal. I have about six projects going on outside of my normal workload, and while I am making progress every day, not one of them is done to the point that I can toss my notes and cross it off my to-do list.

I also have the last seven classes of the semester to prepare for right now. I taught this class once before, so I have ideas and I could recycle some stuff, but I'm at a weird point right now that I hate what I'm teaching and so I can't think creatively about it.

I also have a few projects at home that I need to finish soon; pretty much before the holidays. Of which the first is in a week.

So naturally yesterday I went to lunch and then the movies with P (saw "The Depahted" and reveled in the mostly-decent Bahstan accents — and the overall Scorsese awesomeness), bought a new shinyshiny 80GB iPod (my old one finally died), and spent the rest of the night playing with said toy.

Today? Woke up at a reasonable time (it *is* my day off, 10am is more than early enough), went grocery shopping and ran errands, came home, played with shinyshiny toy again, then went to S&V's place for dinner and chatting. All good, right? Relaxation, friends, food, fun!

Except...
I have to train a roomful of consultants tomorrow and did no laundry so I had nothing decent-looking to wear. I have to teach a class full of students tomorrow night and had nothing prepared to teach them. Around MIDNIGHT tonight I decided it might be a nice idea to stop watching television and get my ass in gear, and what time did I finish my prep for tomorrow? 1am. Whole thing took me an hour. Which is usually what happens when I finally concentrate on stuff and stop procrastinating. I could have enjoyed my whole weekend if I just did all that shit FIRST!

(I am no miracle worker, of course. I pulled the stuff for school out of the textbook's lab material (I rarely resort to this, but what the heck); and it turns out that my closet is filled with treasures; some nice-looking stuff I never wear because, well, I don't have to! So there.)

When will I learn? Work first, play second. Enjoy play more. Stop stressing. I should have learned this in college. Or grad school. Or any one of my jobs. How many times do I need to keep learning this?????? Bad brain.

So I work in the Design department of my company. This means that I spend all day long looking at tiny things, and as I get older I've been noticing eyestrain a little more. We got five new snazzy flat panel monitors into my department. They are black ViewSonic 21" ones, and they're just keen. Our old monitors were 21" ViewSonic CRTs, which are still perfectly good, but are simply enormous and heavy. The supervisors and my boss got three of the new ones, leaving two for all the rest of us to scrabble over. (Presumably we will get more as time goes by)

They've been in the department now for about two months. The idea was that we would get one when our monitor died. One coworker snagged one earlier this week (her monitor was "broken") but couldn't get the refresh rate to work on her system. She's the kind of person that nothing ever works right for, though. She got our crack IT guys to come and help, and, not surprisingly, had no luck there. So she offered it to me. I don't know how office politics will work on that, but I just installed it, reset the refresh rate on my system, calibrated stuff, and it works great.

Well, as great as these things work. So now I have to decide -- do I keep it? It might make everyone else cranky. I figured a Pros and Cons comparison might help:

Pros

• It's pretty!
  
• It takes up a lot less space on my desk
  
• There is no glare! Our old CRTs have shiny slightly rounded glass faces that reflect light from the windows, the ceiling, and everywhere. I have to keep my blinds down just so I can see because I hate those antiglare screens. This doesn't have that! In fact, it's completely glare-free
  
• It lets me change my resolution to 1600 X 1200, which are Monk-like shiny round numbers, but which also gives me more space to work. I can see my workspace better.

Cons

• Office politics. Why should I get it and no one else? My old monitor still works fine. Of course, I'm the one most likely to be bitter about someone else getting it (I like the shiny pretty geek toys), so maybe I am overstating this one.
  
• Display quality. It's not a huge deal, and I managed to get used to my system at home with a less expensive flat panel, but it's noticeable. I've futzed around with the refresh rate and stuff, and no happiness. I think work probably bought the least expensive version of these.

Hmm. Basically many pros, but all superficial (except the glare), and one con, which is pretty serious (the quality). I don't know what to do!

10 things that make me happy during my daily grind
(Meme courtesy of cicadabug)

1. Diet Coke and the endless supply of ice in the fridges all over the building
   
2. Livejournal, BoingBoing, kottke, metafilter, making light, all the other bloggy things I read to keep me occupied
   
3. My commute — 15 minutes, seven of them through woods
   
4. My iPod, and now that it's baseball season again, Gameday Audio, so I never have to miss a game
   
5. Some of my coworkers, including the bestest cube-mate ever! (Other pictures of my office in that set, although the pictures of my cube are old)
   
6. The nap room; sometimes I take break there. There's a bed, and a clock-radio, and you can turn the lights OFF. Nice.
   
7. Having two monitors — makes me feel VERY tech
   
8. My ottoman that I bought especially for work and keep under my desk. Every day I love it more. Happy legs!
   
9. I have a wall of windows behind me. Of course I keep the blinds down a lot of the time due to glare, but I like having them anyway
   
10. My laptop, even with previously mentioned issues. It's a Thinkpad T41 and has pretty good battery life and is cute

Um, I guess it also makes me happy that I do a really good job all day long and am a department resource, yadda yadda?

More thoughts on my work schedule over the last 15 years:

• Pre-1991: Worked a multitude of jobs, usually 2-3 at a time, with varying hours; nights, weekends, days, etc.
  
• 1991-1994: I worked retail management; Saturdays were required for managers to work (busiest day)
  
• 1994-1998: I worked supervising a call center; I was the weekend supervisor, so of course I worked Saturdays
  
• 1999: I worked as a teaching assistant in the tech lab during my master's program; Saturdays were one of my days
  
• 2000: Current job, working in the Design department of a consulting company; have worked Saturdays since day 1 -- although my very first schedule here included Saturdays AND Sundays

I have worked every Saturday (barring the occasional vacation) since 1991. When are all the fun things like flea markets, yard sales, book sales at libraries, free concerts on the Esplanade, etc.? That's right, Saturdays! How badly does my life suck?

On the upside, I've worked almost no Mondays since 1991.

It's snowing a lot out. Earlier, it was sort of wimpy lame snow, with just a hint of wet annoying rain. Then it was just plain rain. Suddenly:



Other pictures here. Fun!

Thank god I can work from home on days like this. Back to it!