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2007.01.30

Well, these last few days have unabashedly been the weirdest set of days in quite a while, and certainly the weirdest trip I've been on in years. I boggle.

Think

2007.01.29

Despite waking on my own at 8am (EST), I couldn't drag myself actually out of bed until after 10:15, cleanly missing the chance to go to watch a crazy arial troupe kick off the corporate day in the freezing cold. Ah well. I got to spend my midday doing what I love most to do in a strange place: walk for a few hours with no particular destination and on no particular schedule. I walked up 42nd street to 5th ave and then down to Madison Square (after being disappointed that the New York Public Library was closed for the day, considering it looks like they have a neat Japanese exhibit at the moment); it's a cold, cold day today, but mostly clear and sunny (no snow like last night), and overall it was a lovely day for a walk. Now if only I weren't breaking in new shoes... (wince).

(I like parentheses)

Now to stick my feet up on pillows and watch TV for a couple hours until I get to go look happy for the VIPs. Heh.

Think   2 Thoughts

2007.01.28

OMFG. >_< I hate early morning flights TO THE MAX. I inevitably get just barely one REM cycle in, even when I've not been insomniac in the weeks leading up. UGH.

Well, today ranks right up with the deportation weekend of '03 for shitty ass travel. I was sitting in the boarding area at WA Dulles for two hours, facing away from the podium, diligently listening to announcements, when I suddenly heard not first, not second, but last boarding call for my flight. I bolted over to the desk to have them let one other person onto the flight and then close the door in my face. Now, if I travelled less often, I'd be willing to say that I dropped the ball, but I will lay my hand on any religious text and SWEAR that not once before that had they called my flight. And I can't fucking believe that they gave my seat away without calling my name at least once. I freaked the fuck out.

Anyway, upshot was that there were no more flights into JFK, so I had to hang out in Dulles for another two hours to get a flight into Newark. Time passed uneventfully except that other than grabbing a snack and a beer to calm me down, I just sat staring at my gate to make sure it didn't run away from me. And it was this that led to the fucking insult on top of injury. On the flight to Newark, a combination of stress and the beer meant that there was no way I could wait until we landed to go to the bathroom. It was too short of a flight to have a stretch without seatbelts required, but I begged the stewardess and she had pity on me. If only she hadn't! For I went to the bathroom.

AND GOT TRAPPED IN IT.

The door got wedged somehow and after a couple minutes of fruitless yanking and jiggering, I gave up and started banging on the door and calling for help. Another passenger had to came back and throw his weight on the door to get it to give.

I don't think I should ever fly again, at least not alone. I'm fucking jinxed.

Okay, for something on the awesome side, my sites have started to go live in their various markets! Simplified Chinese launched today at 2:30 pm PST. Starting tomorrow, because I'm fucking proud of my work, I'll be posting links for what's live and what rolls live. Who cares that most people who read this won't give a shit? I DO!!!!

But let's start with mainland China!

Windows Vista Help and How-to: Simplified Chinese for Mainland China

Mileage will vary in some browsers, but IE and FF of various flavors should do pretty well. If you click over to any of the other sites on the black navigation bar, you're out of my world, but everything under windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/<language_code> has been shepherded (and in several cases directly coded) by moi. Preen.

Think

2007.01.27

Chillin' for the night in an airport hotel, as my flight is insanely early in the morning. I should go to bed, but really, even if I fell asleep right now, I'd still be exhausted when I had to drag myself out of bed in the morning.

Spoke to Dad on the phone for a while this evening; he's a little shocked, along with most people I know, that I haven't planned to "do" anything while I'm in NYC. The truth is, I'm a horrible trip planner, and I decided this time that I'm just not gonna do it, because it stresses me directly the fuck out. I've been to NYC before: I've been to shows, I've seen the sights, yadda yadda yadda. This time, I'm content to let the company roll me as they will. I plan to get a massage. That's about it, which is funny, because technically, I could do that here. But I wouldn't here, and I will there. Mmmm.

Think

2007.01.26

I love my friend Mike. Voicemail this evening:

I sincerely hope, dear girl, that you are not currently at work, as it is quarter to six on Friday night, you just shipped 55 languages, and you're being shipped off to New York, by the company, to do nothing but party and look at Bill Gates. If by chance you are at work, though, we should go out for beer. Give me a call back. Bye!

And beer was acquired.

Think

2007.01.24

Details are trickling in about going to NYC for the launch. It appears so far (cue Burns eeeeexcellent) that in essence, the company is flying me out to show up for a party and be in NY for a couple days. I currently have nothing I have to do other than look pleased at one particular moment.

(booty dance) Gonna go to New York (shimmy) gonna expense everything (shake) gonna get some swag!

I prepped up my deployment package and handed it off to ops today. I'm gonna launch something like 55 sites next week. I'm a little happy.

Think

2007.01.23

I am supposed to hate the lake. I'm supposed to hate it for getting in my way and for having awful freeways across it. But as I drove home after a much too long day, and gazed out over the glassy black water reflecting my home, I found once again that I just can't do it. I can't hate the lake; I never have and I doubt I ever will. I love everything about it, even driving across it (it's the getting to it that can be a pain). I count my lucky stars that I grew up and live in a city with such lovely water.

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2007.01.22

I won't stop doing it, but if I were to stop, this would be the argument that would make me:

When you dream, your mind asks all kinds of questions that it's used to asking the senses (what's that? Look over there!) but your senses are temporarily turned off (you are, after all, asleep), so they get back sort-of random answers, which you combine into a funny story in your brain called a dream. And then when you try to recount the dream to your boyfriend in the morning, even though it seemed totally, completely realistic, you suddenly realize that you don't know what happened, actually, so you have to make shit up. If you had stayed asleep for another minute or two your brain would have asked your senses what kind of mammal was swimming with you in the rose bush, and gotten back some retarded, random answer (a platypus!), but you woke up, so until you tried to tell the story, you didn't even realize that you needed to know what was in the rose bushes with you to make the story coherent to your partner. Which it never is. So please don't tell me about your dreams.

(from Joel on Software)

I thought I'd be able to pull off going to sleep at a reasonable time; I'm exhausted but I'd managed to at least wind down and watch a couple hours of television, a complete luxury lately. My eyes were tired, and I set aside my DS and turned out the lights. Forty-five minutes later, still awake and chest knarled into knots of stress, I burst into tears. Awesome. So now I'm on the couch, typing this out and hoping that catching up on the last month of my webcomics will calm me down enough to get to sleep. And I have an emergency meeting that I have to go to at 8:30 am. Great. Just great.

Think

2007.01.21

Well, that was unexpected. There I was, minding my own business, drinking coffee, reading The Stranger, and listening to Cake over the speakers at the Wedgwood Ale House, when I suddenly realized I was a hair's breadth away from bursting into tears. I wasn't reading anything particularly sad or moving, nor does Cake, despite how much I adore their music, usually start me bawling. I think it's just that I'm finally reacting to being hugely overworked.

I came up with something to make me feel better, as I drove home. As silly as it is, I called my mom to ask if she could take my car to get washed. I just haven't done it and haven't done it, and it passed the so-dirty-it-makes-me-cringe point, oh, about six months ago. I can't explain how much better I feel for knowing that someone will get that done for me today.

...

I just realized that I lost an earring today.

Think   1 Thought

2007.01.19

Mike was my hero tonight and took me out for Taco Hell and beers after I decided around 10 pm that I was too frustrated to do any more work. Not quite the nicety of a company-paid drinkfest, but dearly needed (I miss my WIMs!). Really, no matter how bad and stressful and full of work a week is, it can always be made better by being capped with some delicious ghetto Mehikan food and some Mac and Jack's. Ahhh.

Think

2007.01.18

I pulled my latest solo night at work ever tonight, clocking out at just past 4 am. Admittedly, my day started late (almost noon), but it was the back to back meetings all day starting at 1 pm and running until 7:45 that killed me: my work day essentially didn't start until I got back from dinner, around 9 pm. I don't have to be in until 1 pm tomorrow, but I'm pretty much looking at this sort of schedule through the weekend and possibly through next week. I am going to need a vacation.

But speaking of vacation, considering that I have tickets reserved now, I guess I can spill the beans about super-awesomeness: Microsoft is sending me to the big Vista consumer launch event in NYC at the end of the month, zomg!

I've known people who work at Microsoft since I was in high school, but in all these years, I've never known anyone who got to go to a public launch. It's a high honor and I'm completely twigged about it. It's vaguely related to the award I got back in November, after RTM; all of us who got that award were pushed on to PR for interviews... and as a result, some of us (like me omg) are being sent to the launch. I completely didn't expect that result after I spoke with the marketing folks; I had the impression that they were going to use some anecdotes and quippy quotes in some marketing materials, maybe send some international press my way to interview me as a person who worked on the international product... getting an email two weeks later saying that they want me to go to NY for the launch blew my goddamn mind. Looking up the other people being invited to go with me, you see high-level leads, group managers, the primary release manager for the product... and an International Project Engineer who spent most of her Vista time as a lowly LPM.

I'm just waiting for the list of things that I can and cannot say. I'm willing to bet that at least 75% of my opinions about my employer are going to be strictly off limits, heh. I still don't know what I'm going to be doing other than showing up for a lunch and then the PARTAY, but even if that's it, hell, Microsoft is paying for my flights, accomodation, and a bunch of sweet perks on a mini vacation timed right as my work of the last year and a half on Vista-box and the last few months on Vista-site go live to the public across the globe. And that's pretty fucking awesome.

Think   1 Thought

2007.01.17

I need to get off my ass and finally get some new damn shoes. My mary janes, which I loved to bits for a year, had a strap break a few months ago, so I've been down to just my boots. And my boots have had some splits along the sides of the soles for over a year now. With all the slush and cold weather lately, I've felt as if my feet got cold and damp a week ago and have never dried out. Ugh.

Think

2007.01.15

In a stunning inverse of Friday, today started off completely and utterly lame but ended up fanfriggingtastic. Work began awful and turned out all sorts of peachy-keen... I've been working on a Web site, you see, or rather, I've been working on a metric fuckton of localized versions of a particular Web site. Today, I got a full ten language's worth of sites pushed into our primary test environment. Ten languages equals twenty seven market locales, each with their own config and unique set of site pages. When all is said and done for launch I'll have many more up and running, but to have twenty seven of them up and looking good is a huge accomplishment.

When I was working on the loc versions of the actual in-box Vista, I teased some of my core-team friends, saying, "well, how many languages did you ship?" While perhaps funny only to me, it just keeps getting better the more languages I work on, and we're shipping boatloads for the Web presence. I've decided I need a tshirt, a black one with a small and discreet Vista orb on the back, and the text underneath it:

... and how many languages did you ship?
ja-JP, de-DE, de-AT, de-CH, it-IT, fr-FR, fr-BE, fr-CA, ko-KR, zh-CN, zh-TW, zh-HK, pt-PT, pt-BR, sv-SE, uk-UA, es-ES, es-XL, nl-NL, ru-RU, sk-SK, en-AU, en-CA, en-ZA... <etc., so on and so forth, the more I could cram on the better...>

Think

2007.01.14

Forgot until I woke up this morning that I needed to work. Whoops. So no gaming for me, unfortunately; d20s and d8s were rolling in my head during an afternoon spent in Source Depot and Product Studio. It was nice, really, to end up with the entire weekend to myself and the cats. Laundry, some cleaning, cooking; all the things that so often don't get done, did. Curiously, I found myself utterly unable to play Kingdom of Loathing, continuing the last week's worth of apathy on the gaming front. But the less gaming done equals the more other shit around the house done, so all's well that ends well, I suppose.

Now if only I weren't so impatient about finding out certain things over the next few weeks! ARGH!

Think

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2007.01.13

It's a little chilly out, but I had errands to run and decided to head down to U Village to do them. The wee bit of snow falling seemed perfect for a walk, and indeed it was: a good coat, headphones, and my scarf, a little snow in the air... a good evening. I meant to take the bus home, but missed it by the whim of one walk light, and walking home up the hill in the dark turned out to be faster than waiting for the next one. Mental note, though: I need gloves like gangbusters.

Heh. Came home and turned on Top Chef, which I haven't watched before. Money quote:

I love how mayonnaise really came through in this challenge. I knew one day it would help.

(snicker)

Think   2 Thoughts

2007.01.12

Guys and Dolls was on TV tonight. After a ridiculously optimistic and cheerful day, I hit a slump around 5pm and couldn't be cheered by anything other than a campy 1950s musical, obviously. It's been years since I watched the movie version; I'd forgotten how many songs from the stage production aren't in it, and how the tempo of the songs is slightly slower than that in the Broadway recording I'm more familiar with. Coincidently, the Fool gifted me with an actual (heh) copy of the CD for Christmas.

(humming) Luck be a lady tonight...

Think

2007.01.11

Dear Self, please remember to do these things more often:

  • Sleep for 14 hours (special bonus points for doing it on a weeknight)
  • Work from home
  • Get no more dressed all day than sweatpants and bathrobe

That is all.

Think   1 Thought

2007.01.10

I came home relatively early today, meaning to play games or watch TV, but with the snow outside and a headache interfering with the ability to concentrate on a screen, I find myself considering just crawling into bed. It's 8:30 pm. Aggie is desperately pleading to go outside, but I bet she wouldn't like it if she did. Perhaps I could convince her that a warm bed would be a viable alternative...

Think

2007.01.08

I hadn't realized until tonight how little I'd been eating lately. I haven't had much appetite, I guess, and apparently my stomach fucking shrunk! Went out for dinner and drinks with Brandon and Anita, and I actually ate most of the food offered on a plate for the first time in... oh, weeks, and now I feel positively ill. Considering that being a great eater has always been something of an identifying characteristic to myself, I'm frankly a little shocked. It's probably a good thing for me to learn to eat more reasonably sized portions, but what if it means I end up having to... eat breakfast? Horrors!

Think   2 Thoughts

2007.01.07

(happy little sigh) I got Civ IV months (a year?) ago, but my old machine essentially wasn't able to play it, and so it wasn't until today that I was able to obssessively play for hours. Ahhh.

Think

2007.01.06

Well, crap. I thought that I'd just temporarily lost comments for 2006, that I'd find the file they were stored in and they'd be back, right as rain. Well, I found the ones through March of 2006 and that's it. I think the rest really are gone. How irritating, and an indication (for the second time) that I need to come up with a better way of handing those things on the backend of the site. Now that I've got a database set up for other purposes.... hrrrmm. Perhaps my project for the weekend is clear!

Think   4 Thoughts

2007.01.05

Better than worst imagination, less than pie in the sky ideal... reassuring, in a way, to be in the middle road. Could I get some sleep now?

Think

2007.01.04

(gales of laughter) Well, I'm glad I'm able to search the Internets. I'm not sure I ever would have figured this one out on my own:

Enable file sharing between Windows Vista and Mac OS X
To enable Windows Vista to connect to Mac OS X with Windows File Sharing enabled, you will need to change the following policy in Windows Vista:

  1. Click the Start Orb, type gpedit.msc into the Start Search field, and press Enter
  2. Click the Continue button on the User Account Control prompt. This will launch the Group Policy Object Editor for the Local Computer Policy.
  3. In the Group Policy Object Editor, expand: Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options
  4. Open the 'Network security: LAN Manager authentication level' policy and change the Security Setting to:
    Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated
  5. Click the OK button to save changes, and then close the Group Policy Object Editor.

Takako (the Mac) still can't SMB connect to Shiran (the new Vista sweetness), but Shiran can browse to \\takako\ and hey, I'll take that for the night. Woot! <3 playing with new computer. Look what's working again! And zomg Vista can be so pretty. Tomorrow's task... install pseudo langpack. Shiran's gonna be hella 1337, yo!

Think   2 Thoughts

2007.01.03

Omg yays new computer. New machine (for those that might wonder, it's an Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 2 gigs of RAM and some video card I was reasonably happy about getting at the time) is all set up and pimped out to the nines, complete with a brand spankin' new Vista install and some really ridiculous LEDs. Now if only I can get Ken to get my data off my old drives, I will be such a happy frigging camper.

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2007.01.02

Figured I'd roll over for the brave new year... crazy short page, newly lengthened sidebars! Still sick, yay. And not sleeping much. Yay. Yeah.

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