Look, it’s not my place to gloat. Firstly, I don’t have all that much to gloat about and secondly it is wildly against my general disposition in regard to how I present myself. I will admit to being prideful; indeed I will admit to holding my ground when pressed on a subject or activity in which I feel any sort of confidence. I will also admit to not pressing myself too heavily to bend my person to make those around me feel better about themselves; those days are over.

That said, it is ridiculously difficult for me not to sound very much like I am gloating in saying my life is just about as awesome as I am prepared to deal with just now.

Read On

You’re out in the wild, doing your thang thang, and you get the approach. Maybe you’re at a bar and you should expect this, or maybe you’re just on the train on the way to work; you get that doe eyed look from someone you’ve never seen before – or perhaps you’ve met him/her only briefly – and he/she wants to talk.

You do the smalltalk thing, looking over his/her shoulder so as to draw attention to the fact that you are not at all interested, but he/she persists. We all know you; you’re a great person who is normally not like this but in this one nagging moment you desperately need to tell this person to go fuck him/herself with something not at all unlike a small Buick.

You can’t though because of how great you are. You wouldn’t want people to think poorly of you, right? You wouldn’t want the whole world to know you hate people, especially when they are interested in you. Or, perhaps, maybe you are frightened; this person may have the ability to actually kill you if spurned directly. Or perhaps you’re just not interested and don’t want to deal with the big let down just now.

No matter the case, we’ve got you covered. A little bit of creativity, a little bit of programming; Lex and I present to you Coastertoast.com.

The premise is simple: Give out a fake email address (anything@coastertoast.com) and Coastertoast rejects your would be suitor/stalker. Use your own name! Use your friend’s!

Dig it.

At the office, a ‘task force’ has been created to tackle one of our more ambitious goals. I have been chosen to represent the ‘ones and zeros’ aspect of the group and, ostensibly, to provide rapt attention to aspects of the group’s function which others within the group may miss as an effect of being consistently productive; aspects like the name of the group, the group’s wrist/armbands and any secret encoded languages we may need and those gadgets we may, in turn, need to cipher/decipher them.

I have named our elite team of ninjas, “The RedShift”; named so after the Hubble method of measuring the expansion of the universe (or any other trigonometric parallax for that matter). The idea, of course, being that we will measurably expand as a direct result of our efforts. That and the fact that there is a Half-Life expansion called “Blue Shift” into which I have lost many long hours of my past.

The rest is in the works. I imagine an enigma type device operated by a troop of trained monkeys whose brains have been replaced by hamsters and who have been trained to respond only to differently inflected versions of the phrase ‘Chuck Norris’.

What do YOU think?

I work too much. By that I don’t mean to say that I work 60hrs a week and have to come in one weekend a month; by that I mean that I come in at 6-7am, leave at 6-7pm and work a good portion of every weekend. I’ve had 2 days off in 3 years and have worked both days. For one of them, my mother – with whom I was going to spend the day off – sat next to me at my desk while I worked an 8hr shift.

There is no denying that my time is needed here, or that we are defiantly moving forward. There is no denying that I am appreciated or that I am relied upon. There is no denying that I do my best and sometimes that isn’t enough. There is also no denying that I am being beat to hell with this work schedule and my life is, for all intents and purposes, on hold. It is no coincidence that I’ve got 3 year old projects I haven’t touched, or that it has been 3 years since I put any real effort into anything but work.

Read On

1:00am rolls by with little regard to the fact that its eagerness to proceed with the chronological status quo directly contradicts my eagerness to not at all be awake right now. As it stands, however, the gauntlet has been thrown and the project must launch, personal preference be damned.

I was once merely a developer. A cog in a great wheel. I was assigned simple tasks which I spent far too much time on. I had wiggle room. I could innovate and mess around and make myself look pretty badass while my seniors paid rapt attention to whatever the crisis of the moment was. There are times in which I long for those days. Not the money, mind you, nor the absolute lack of credibility or respect; But sometimes the ability to leave the office at 5:30pm and close the door behind me, blocking out work entirely until the following day, seems terribly attractive.

As Sr. Developer, top of the food chain, master of my domain, great ruler of my employer’s swath of cyberspace, I have no purchase with such whimsy. As a matter of fact, I don’t have much but responsibility these days. The glory I thought was up here at the top of the little contained corporate stepping stool is actually just reliance. The Sr. Dev doesn’t get all the attention because he is some sort of inter-company celebrity; He gets all the attention because when something’s busted it’s his ass in the sling.

So here I am again. Even the goddamned sun has gone to sleep. The cold cathode my window to my future, I am stitched here by priority and responsibility and launch dates and project management.

It takes a few moments to do it, but if I stop for a moment I can see how worth it this is. micro, I’ve got 1/2tb of music to keep me company until sun-up and an office full of people who really appreciate the effort. I can’t at all say I have it that bad.

The Jolt has me jittery, though. Optimus is my pusher, I am his fiend.