January 11, 2007:
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
~ Agatha Christie
Ok, a real entry!
Last few days have been interesting. I'm not exactly feeling the best due to the penicillin and it's just been a sad week.
On Tuesday, Rich called and gave me some very bad news about an old coworker of mine, Derrick Artero. Even though Derrick wasn't my best friend in the whole world - he was a great guy. He was a nice guy. Derrick had been dealing with some health issues for the last few years and on Tuesday, he died. He was on vacation with his family in Hawaii and sadly, died there. I hope the last few days of his life were filled with happiness because everyone deserves that - especially Derrick.
So that was Tuesday. Left a bit of a cloud hanging around my head because life just isn't fair sometimes and I've been thinking about that, especially with Rui's mom dying from the brain tumor as well.
I haven't seen Joel since Sunday and I know that is affecting me. And especially because I'm a little emotional, I'm super sensitive. I hate that about me and I'm trying to work through it, hoping that I stop imagining little slights when they aren't anything. It's hard because it's like rewiring my thinking ...
Wednesday night was the first night of class and I'm taking the second of five or six technical writing classes. This class should be interesting and definitely a stretch for me because I need to write four reports. One progress, analytical, proposal and empirical report. I've never done any of these so I'm going to definitely have to focus. Last quarter, the assignments were of things I had done before - write a cover letter, functional description, etc. - all things I had done before. Not so this time.
The second class I'm taking is a Humanities class. It started on Monday and with any luck, I'll stay on top of the reading and do well this time round. Thank God we don't have to read "The Things They Carried" this quarter ... we are required to read "The Kite Runner" instead. Infinitely better.
Work has been ok. I was brainstorming this past week about how to make things better and proposed an idea to my boss. He totally shot it down. I think the idea had value and I think I'm going to just go ahead and do parts of what I said on my own. Basically, there are large parts of the phone that I feel need to be extensively tested and there are no test cases for them. So I'm going to take it upon myself and maybe spend an extra 5 - 10 hours a week developing test cases for the rest of the phone. I'll do it first for my part - Planner ... and then start carving off the rest. It's a huge task but I think it needs to be done.
Other than that... life is about the same. Not too exciting - just keep on keeping on.