OMFG: Comssa are so going to be the cause of our diabetes, and subsequent death:

Am I broken? Am I somehow defective? Look, I know I hate everybody as much as the next person (okay, well maybe a lot more), but I'm not one of those annoying team dynamics that they warn people about in Management 100, am I? The reason I ask is that am finding it increasingly difficult to make any effective change at work. And then I think about it, and it was the same at my old job.

Leaving aside the questions of method for a moment, I question myself and ask if the problems I see are real problems, or if I just don't get it. I do know that in general I look at things from a different perspective from most people (which makes life hard enough as it is), but when it comes to problems within the workplace, I just don't know. I would like to think that the problems that I see are real problems, and I do, but when I try to enact any sort of change I hit brick walls. Constantly.

It's frustrating, to say the least.

More and more I'm doubting my effectiveness in the workplace. I can't pin it down. Perhaps I'm just unsuited to dealing with situations such as those presented by the type of workplace that I'm in. Perhaps I'm better suited to other things. Perhaps I just have deeper people issues than I thought I had. Perhaps I just plain suck. Who knows.

But, in the short term at least, I'm stuck where I am, and I'll have to learn to deal and cope with the situations. The problem is, do I just roll over and play dead, sacrificing whatever morals/ethics I may have, or do I persue problems and try to rectify them. Is there a middle ground? I don't think there's a middle ground - I've tried to find one before and it either ends up one extreme or the other, as you persue it until it's resolved or until people decide to start ignoring the issue and you don't. Is it perhaps because I'm too passionate about what I believe in? Am I full of myself?

I don't think so (but then, I'm doubt my own judgement on these matters, aren't I?) I think I'm right. I think the problems I see are real problems and they need to be addressed. I think that life could be better and I know what needs to be changed. So then what's stopping me?

Certainly the attitude of the people I work with doesn't help. The defeatist attitude that I constantly have to fight against is draining. The battle against change that they fight, "It's good enough, it's been fine up to now, why isn't it anymore?" People not willing to entertain the fact that things could be better. People that climb some way up a hill and look down and say "Look how high I am!" without turning around to see where they go. After all, they already have a pretty good view, why go to the extra effort? I am constantly battling to try and convince people that even some of the tiny, trivial things that could make life better are worth the effort of doing it. I am constantly battling to show that any change is not for changes sake, that there are reasons and rationalisations.

These people see change as a direct affront on their status quo. They are the center of their little universe, and I don't even think they understand the purpose of their job.

Am I painting a picture of a one right man war against a nation of wrongs? Maybe just a bit, and I'm probably a little guilty of doing it myself, but day after day of beating my head against the table (sometimes litterally) to enact some simple, trivial change to make life easier, for our clients and for us, is wearing thin. Don't even get me started on the 'big' change issues.

No, I'm pretty sure that this unit is not defective. Or rather, it's not deffective in the same way that the other units are.

I think I've blown my load over that week long project. A lot of good code came out of that, including a semi-decent framework, plus I learnt a few things. It's still not entirely finished (request tracker and search functionality to go), but I'll give it a break for now, and let it live or die as nature dictates.

Next on the agenda is to consolidate some of the code used by the main site. I can reuse a lot of the code from the torrent project, which is good. The next step after that would be to extend the code and abstract it further so I can run two or more sites out of the same code/configuration. That would be nice. Whether or not I actually get around to doing it is another story.

Well it's up - the new torrent site. What started off as a tinker with the bittorrent tracker to see how it worked escalated into a small project to get a small closed community peering network up and running. Fleshing out the site will probably take a while, but it will be fun to build and develop a site for something like this. If it actually gets off the ground, that is.

After a few weeks, I think I'm used to adsl. Yeah, it just feels good, you know? Except ...

Imagine a window pane, in a tired dreary house, overlooking a rich green field. Now imagine a house fly, trapped inside, battering itself on the pane in a vain attempt to escape into the fields. Battering against that pane of glass forever, fruitlessly, hopelessly. Now imagine that the house is a telemarketing firm, the fly a tele-drone, the fields my life and my house, and my constantly engaged phone line as the pane of glass. Now imagine that I got adsl, installed a phone, disconnected the permanent dialup connection. The pane of glass is shattered and the telemarketers are free to invade. God damn it, why won't they leave me alone? I'd unplug the phone, but I've already given the number out as a contact number.

Woe

One thing that is hard to get used to is the fact that I don't have a download quota anymore. Well, I do, but I don't have to pay $0.15 per megabyte over 250MB. For 4 years or so, I've had to watch my downloads. That meant foregoing any sort of large downloads that would put me over quota. I'd got soo good at it, that no sooner would I think "Yeah, I'd like to download that" would I'd have forgotten all about it in an effort to not be tempted. If only I could do that with my spending.