James's Weblog

Late the other night as I was returning alone to my car after watching Batman Begins, I noticed that the car parked next to mine had its lights left on. One of the doors was unlocked, and there was no one around, so I let myself in to turn the lights off.

Almost everyone thinks I’m nuts for doing so. Well, at least I didn’t get myself arrested or shot.

Sigh.

I bought a Treo 650 this week, and it’s awesome. It’s even inspiring me to do some programming for Palm OS again. Unfortunately, getting back into that groove is really hard.

I wrote a lot of great code while I was at Sony, but of course all that code is Sony-owned and outside of my grasp. To do any Palm OS development work again, I’d need to rewrite everything from scratch, which is demotivating because I’d be redoing work that I had done already and—since I’m now rusty at this—work that I had done better. It makes me feel like my life is progressing backwards.

>_<

I am completely inept.

I guess that’s what I deserve for deluding myself into being hopeful about something.

A few days ago I had my first swig of an alcoholic drink. My coworkers and I all went to a bar to celebrate someone’s birthday. One of them ordered some mango drink, couldn’t finish it, and not wanting to see it go to waste, I drank a bit of it. It wasn’t much, but it’s probably the most alcohol I’ve ever had in my life.

Sigh. Did I sell out my (admittedly useless) principles?

This has been a landmark week of firsts for me. I wonder if I’m going through some kind of mild identity crisis due to some impending doom I’m expecting.

I went to San Francisco with a few friends last night and went to a club for the first time. I think I have too many inhibitions for clubbing to be an enjoyable experience. The rod up my butt must have a rod up its butt.

Maybe I should start drinking.

I got my performance evaluation a few weeks ago.

VMware’s employee rating system has the following choices:

• Exceptional
• Outstanding
• Great
• Needs Improvement
• Unsatisfactory

Supposedly I’m doing “great”, but I’m not sure if that means I’m actually doing great or if that means I don’t need improvement. The lack of a “mediocre”/“adequate”/“satisfactory” rating throws things off.

One of my coworkers had a birthday last week, and to honor the occasion, the rest of us decided to surprise her by vandalizing her office with chinsy birthday decorations. I unexpectedly was given the task of writing “Happy Birthday” in big block letters across her whiteboard. Naturally my lettering came out awful, and what’s more, I didn’t even use a good style. (For some reason it didn’t occur to me to use the lopsided, cartoony letters that seem to permeate everything I do. Instead I used a quick, harried, angular, and totally unreadable, undisciplined mess that I rightfully abandoned many years ago.)

Anyhow, at this point I realized just how out of practice I am (which is all the worse since I was never very good to begin with). I hadn’t done anything remotely creative or artistic in months. (The last time was when I made the ambigrams.)

So last weekend I started getting back into the groove of fiddling with Photoshop, and now I’m once again my wanna-be artsy mood. I wonder how long it’ll last (and more importantly, if I’ll get anything accomplished).

… but can you blame it?

Well, I’ve been at VMware for four months now. Things seem to be going okay. I easily am the stupidest person there, but I’ve heard that it’s better than being the smartest person. I’m still a bit stressed with deadline pressure, and I continually worry that I’m more of a liability than an asset, but I like it there.

Definitely much better than my last job.