Friday State of the Bill

[mapsedge]

Facebook

Less and less useful with every passing day. Lots of drum-beating, outrage, and self-promotion, less and less personal content. It's like a giant dinner party of acquaintances, rather than a conversation among friends. I know the world is fucked up. I know there's a dog half a continent away that needs a home. I know you sell Amway products. How was your day? No, thanks, I don't want to buy non-stick cookware. How was your day?? Yes, Missouri is on the fast track to Worst State in America, how was your day???

That's why I'm gravitating back here, I think. People seem to talk, here, not just chatter. I need talk right now. I've got things of my own to work out - nothing bad, this isn't a vague-post^(TM), think of it more as a mental and emotional daily to-do list. I need to write, I need to be able to express what I'm thinking and feeling; I've gotten out of the habit and I daresay that's not healthy.

Autumn

Not official yet, I know. Don't care. I wish very much I was working from home today so I could open the window next to my desk and listen to the wind in the maple tree. I'm watching the hillsides on the drive home for color. There isn't any yet, of course. Soon.

Day Job

There's hope. In the last several months I've gotten a 15-20% bump in pay which means the company is trending in the right direction after, what, ten years?, since paychecks are indirectly tied to revenue. We (the Morrises) have given up on all of our installment debt and are pretty much on a cash/debit basis for everything, and that has freed up an amount of funds every month that, while not exactly allowing us to  live like royalty, has taken some of the pressure off. One gets used to the collections phone calls, and my credit rating wasn't good in any case.

We (the day job) are now the defacto IT department for a financing company in Omaha. Our contract is written such that we get a percentage of all the business they do, and it's been relatively lucrative. As their business grows, so do we, and their business is indeed growing (though not as fast as their boasts earlier this year might have suggested, which is good; we don't have the infrastructure or knowledge to keep up with anything more.) I hope that our own technical issues don't spoil the relationship. The database is our big bottleneck. DataGuy really isn't qualified to do what he does, and we really should hire a DBA and let him get on with...well, since we're not really in the website business anymore, there are no sales to speak of and working the database is really his only function; he's just not terrifically good at it. His code is extremely inefficient and error-prone. We keep throwing band-aids at gushers.

Comments

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

> help recharge our mutual friends' pages.

That would be awesome :)