There’s very little of a “which day of the week it is” concept left for me after being in my office all of about…3-4 hours this past week? Day starts, I stay around my apartment most of the day doing various tasks, I go to sleep. Repeat, repeat, repeat… I’m actually kinda looking forward to Monday not because of there being “work” (which I’m positive there will be plenty of) but more because it will just being something new to my daily schedule. This snow week would have been much more appreciated by me in March or so when I wouldn’t have been on a vacation for a while.
The one segment of the day during which I wasn’t at my apartment involved going to the Comcast service center and exchanging my Cablecard that I acquired last weekend for a different one. The setup of this card went flawlessly, and I now have triple tuners with which to record TV. I need to get the Xbox moved over to looking at the computer running Media Center that has those tuners added to it, and after that, I should be just about golden. If there’s ever an instance where there are four things on TV all at the same time that I want to record/see, I’m not sure whether I’ll need to congratulate or berate the network executives.
Personal - Seattle
The melting didn’t begin quite early enough to facilitate a trip into work, so that makes 4 days staying at home on an entirely non-holiday week. Once the temperature rose above freezing and the rain began though, there was definitely no lack of liquid water anywhere in the Seattle area. There’s still definitely snow on the ground outside (you don’t get rid of all of it that fast), but there will be absolutely zero danger for a standard work day on Monday. Well, standard in the sense of going into the office anyway because I’m pretty sure with it being the first day back at work for the majority of the company, the contents of said day will be anything but standard.
Last night after I was in bed (and was still under the impression that I might be going into work today), I really wanted to watch Galaxy Quest. With nothing else to do tonight since Will was finally able to return back to Seattle, it made a great way to spend the evening on my couch. I even busted out the Blu-ray version of it since I hadn’t configured something right on my new WHS machine, and I figured that just using the disc was the path of least resistance at that point when all I really cared about doing was watching the movie.
Personal - Seattle
Today was supposed to be a day where the temperature got up into the upper 30s and began to melt all of the snow. In reality, it stayed relatively cold, rained/snowed some more, and there’s not noticeably less snow than there was when I woke up this morning. That whole thing yesterday about probably going into the office tomorrow is looking less and less likely as the night goes on and my browser is telling me that it’s currently just 30 degrees outside…
As a part of needing to go sit in a Microsoft office today to get portions of my work done, Will and I took the opportunity to go see a movie. Since we’d already seen everything high profile that was out, the second-tier one we decided on was Contraband. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it definitely felt like its length of two hours and isn’t a movie I’ll ever feel the need to go see again. My score: 5/10.
Personal - Seattle
Well, the snow finally came overnight, and today was most definitely a day to stay at home and work. So what did I do? I walked to City Center and worked from there to have a more reliable network connection. Granted, it was only uphill in the snow in one direction, but that still counts for some amount of dedication, right?
Tomorrow will probably be similar given how nothing has melted, but maybe there will be more staying at home involved. Depending on the reliability of accessing our bug database I may have to walk back over to City Center, but I can stay hopeful that the entire day can be spent in the warm confines of my apartment. By Friday though everything should be back to “normal”, and I’ll be hard presses for an excuse to not got into the office.
Personal - Seattle
So, today actually managed to be a fairly snow free day. Nothing happened overnight, and I actually went into work for half a day. Sleet started coming down (and sticking) right around lunch time, so I got scared and left to go home, but once that small storm passed, the remainder of the afternoon was pretty clear. Of course, at 2:00 AM (based on the current forecast which is ever-changing) the bottom is supposed to fall out, and I think everyone at Microsoft is planning on working from home tomorrow.
How will I entertain myself with this second working from home day this week? Well, Microsoft’s servers didn’t stand up too well during the previous snowpocalypse (alternatively: snowmageddon), so I may be limited to OWA or walking over to City Center should I want to get any meaningful work done. Benefit of living in Bellevue is that I can do the latter extremely easily whereas in Seattle, that’s not really an option since we don’t have any offices downtown anymore. So really, I’m more productive by living here, or at least I have the potential to be.
Personal - Seattle
Spending a day (potentially the first of many given the forecast) working from home today, I took some downtime in the afternoon to work through my gradually expiring Amazon movies. Hooking my Roku box up with an ethernet cable solved all of the problems it was having, so I was able to fully appreciate Super 8 on my TV rather than my computer monitor. When I say “appreciate”, I don’t mean it was an outstanding movie because it wasn’t. However, in the “alien movies with a title patter of Word Number”, it was leaps and bounds better than District 9. So much better that I at least finished this one. Completely appropriate for it to be in this rental pile instead of in my DVD collection though. My score: 6.5/10.
My other big non-work project for the day was to attempt to get my new Cablecard set up, but that didn’t really go as planned. Every time I called Comcast I get very competent and helpful people, but despite saying that everything looked fine on their end, my card would never activate properly. So, once it becomes safe to drive again, I’m going to try swapping out this card for a different one, and if that fails to solve the issue, then I’ll have one of their techs come out. However, that could easily be next week if the weather leans towards the more negative outcome of all the various predictions.
Personal - Seattle
Snow + Seattle is never a good combination. The fact it snowed yesterday (but pretty much all melted), today (with some still on the ground), is dropping below freezing tonight, and there is more snow in the forecast through Tuesday equates to the extreme likelihood of Snowpocalypse 2012 coming. Sure, I live closer to work, but if the people I’m supposed to meet with aren’t there, what’s the reason to go in? Unfortunately it doesn’t work like when HP wouldn’t have school because of a snow day and my mom just wouldn’t wake me up, so my alarm will be set for 8:00 in the morning regardless. I’ll be assessing the situation then, and make my call as appropriate.
There was more football, more Old Republic, and more BSG today, so really you could think of it as pretty much a duplicate of my yesterday (minus the Green Lantern portion). I’m at the nice level of engaged but not addicted to Old Republic at the moment, so it should continue to fit in nicely with the rest of my daily plans. Of course, my guild didn’t take the two week break that I did and is already doing some of the current endgame stuff. It’s called pacing yourselves, people. Sure, if you get bored of this you could always go back to WoW, but isn’t part of the reason that you’re playing this to begin with because you got bored of WoW in the first place?
Personal - Seattle
So far my Roku box isn’t getting super high marks as it continued to have issues playing Green Lantern today, so I just finished it up on my computer (where even IE crashed once, so maybe it’s the file on Amazon’s end and not the hardware). Anyway, I didn’t feel like it was as bad a movie as it seemed everyone was making it out to be. No, it wasn’t Iron Man or Batman level, but did it need to be? I was entertained by it, so for the low price of free that it cost me, I think that’s a worthwhile return on investment. My score: 7/10.
I finally got around to giving The Old Republic some love this evening once it was clear that the Broncos-Patriots game wasn’t going to be interesting, and because of someone else’s Facebook post, I’m going to give BSG some attention as well between now and when I go to sleep. I still have the remainder of the fourth season to wrap up, and then after that maybe I can find another show to give my attention to. Ok, perhaps “find” has the wrong connotation here…select? Decide on? I have plenty; it’s simply a matter of which one gets the TV (or monitor) time.
Personal - Seattle
At the start of the week, Will (for lack of a better term) “peer pressured” me into going to Coachella in April. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a big three day music festival that happens down near San Diego. Well, tickets went on sale this morning, and after a far too long and convoluted process involving their ticket purchasing system (accompanied by close to 100 tweets between some of us in the group that are going), I guess it’s now “official” that I’m going. If not though, I can sell my ticket at a ridiculously high markup considering they’re already sold out of everything but the insanely expensive variety.
I ended up not calling Comcast yet and the box I mentioned arrived today, but my apartment still got about 75% of the way clean. The boxes are at least all in a single pile now with the packing contents stuffed back in them, ready to be taken down and thrown in the recycling room off the parking garage. The presence of the box that arrived though means that Green Lantern will have to wait until tomorrow to get finished, and the review will be delayed as well as a result. I understand that you’re heartbroken, but you just have to realize that the sick children are more important than me watching a movie.
Personal - Seattle
Green Lantern was set to expire from my Amazon rentals extremely soon, so I sat down on my couch to test out my Roku for the first time (considering I basically bought it for the sole purpose of watching videos from Amazon). Well, aside from some very strange breaks for buffering, it also just stopped playing the movie about 30 minutes in because it said it couldn’t communicate with Amazon. So, I’ll give it another shot tomorrow and/or watch from my computer as a last resort. Be looking for a review to come then.
I’m finally going to call Comcast tomorrow to do the switch of my Cablecard on their backend, and at that point, everything should be good to clear out of my floor. The one potential wrench in that plan would be if I have to take a box to someone that finally gets delivered tomorrow, but with no real idea if it’s even going to show up, I’m safe with making my cleaning plans for now. Hey, and if I get snowed in this weekend, I’ll at least have a clean apartment to lounge around in.
Personal - Seattle