We get up at 6:00 am every day, grab breakfast or a shower, get in the car by 7:00 and drive to the office of WonkaTech who are located in the South valley.

The working environment is horribly similar to that depicted on the BBC program “The Office”. I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, but it’s a dead-pan satire of life in an office, almost excruciatingly accurate at times… I remember working at Telcom New Zealand. Supressed memories…

We have our own office, which sounds good until you realise that we’re both squeezed into this tiny room with two desks, with what is apparently the only airconditioning vent for the whole floor. We haven’t found the thermostat yet, all we know is that periodically blasts of cold air will freeze us while the rest of the office walk around saying how hot and muggy it is.

The noise from the rest of the floor is distracting.

As for the work that we’re doing: We’re maintaining and enhancing a Sales Order application written in FoxPro for Windows 2.6, apparently authored by a large succession of monkeys. Shakespeare it ain’t.

It’s fragility and tendancy to crash is a textbook case of why people go around bad-mouthing FoxPro. I get annoyed because they really should be bad-mouthing FoxPro programmers. Do you know why there isn’t a “FoxPro for Dummies” book? It’s because no-one would have bought it – FoxPro has a fairly gentle learning curve, allowing the afore-mentioned monkeys to pass themselves off as database application developers.

We have yet to prove that we can knock this thing into shape. I’m hoping we’ll do that next week.

We’ve got dentist appointments today, so we’re not going in to work. This was all arranged a while ago, so no-one was surprised or anything. If WonkaTech & BrokerInc pulled their act together, we would have been working for a week or so before having to skip out today, but delays happen I guess.

Today is also the first day of our week as a Neilsen Family. We’ll be keeping a diary of our TV viewing habits. Here’s to boosting Farscape’s ratings by a whole point!

*

OK, so my teeth are in pretty good shape. I have a cracked filling, apparently, although I’m not feeling anything bad from that area, and the tooth I thought might be a problem turns out to be fine. None the less, it has been temperature sensitive for the last month and I guess that was just a transient thing. It seems better now.

The Dentist Office, located in the rapidly growing Centennial Center area, was a bit of a factory floor production line, which made for an uncomfortable visit. Not my favorite environment.

PetCo was just across the road, so we picked up vital pet supplies (litter, canned food, and anti-flea) and drove home.

Our 8th anniversary was yesterday, but we celebrated this evening with a meal at Sushi Ko for Teppan Yaki. Very enjoyable, very yummy! Some left over for lunch the next day.

Our first day at work is more like the BBC program “The Office” than we would have liked. Bottom line: the IT infrastructure at WonkaTech is a mess, and we will have plenty of work to do, providing there’s a budget to do it.

It was a 40 minute commute from our home in the North-West, which is not bad at all. Of course, we didn’t hit a single patch of bad traffic. I did make a couple of wrong turnings though, all the time watching the petrol gauge drop below 1/4 full. Should have topped up the tank before today. It would not do to arrive late on our first day at work!

Hooray – we got confirmation that we start working at WonkaTech tomorrow at 9:00am! Rock on.

We took the car round to Discount Tyres on Rancho Drive, and got four new shiny Michelin Destiny tyres. (When we brought our car in for a service last week, they did say the tyres would need replacing soon, within the next couple of months.)

We also paid for a spare wheel, and asked them to put the best of the original tyres on it for a “real” spare, (as opposed to the rinky-dink training wheel we currently have in our spare wheel bay in the trunk).

The new tyres are cool… our car has that “new tyre” feeling. Grippy grippy.

Of course I immediately wanted to run over something soft so that we could leave a nice tread print, but then I realised that cleaning the wheel afterwards didn’t appeal.

Tomorrow will also be our 8th wedding anniversary. As Lisa put it, looking at the spare tire in the trunk and the four new shiny ones, “We exchanged rings!”

Argh.

 http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/shuttle/

We were restoring Jeanne’s data and mail settings on her new box in our kitchen when I saw the news on ActiveWin.com. I thought it was a crank post, but then I kept going to other sites and they said the same things… I couldn’t believe it. CNN had the footage looping behind talking heads.

Many people are likening this to the Challenger in ’86, but for me, it’s different. First because I don’t remember what I was doing back then – it wasn’t a memory-crystallizing moment, although I remember the front-page news and pictures.

And in Columbia’s case, at least they got to be in Space. Humankind in space – it’s not a manifest destiny, despite what some people say, and it’s not inevitable.

The International Space Station was created to give the Shuttles something to do. It’s a waste, especially now the funding has been cut back so that there is basically no scientific justification for it. Now, with three humans on board, it seems important to keep the shuttles flying.

I’m encouraged by some polls published the other day that seem to indicate that 75% of the population want to see space exploration continue and funding increased. Increased funding is good providing it doesn’t go from NASA to the pockets of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin who procure premium shuttle components.

What is needed is a whole new space administration…

  Dan Rather: Many of us have been hoping to see men on Mars in our lifetimes - will this be a setback?
  Nasa Suit: Mars has never been a NASA project... Mars may never happen in our lifetimes.
  Dan Rather: well some of us will continue to dream.

Well, we still don’t have a confirmed start date for next week at WonkaTech, but everyone seems cheerful and on the up-and-up about it. Looking forward to WORK!

In other news, Greystone Homes have commenced construction on the the house over our back fence – the frame is up, we’ve lost one particular view of the mountains, but the roof isn’t on yet so it’s not settled how much of our sky we’re going to lose. Not much, I think.

For some reason I woke up at 6:30 this morning, very unusual for me. So I padded outside and watched the old crescent moon play Piggy-in-the-middle with Venus and Mars. Mercury was too close to the horizon to be seen, and Mars was very faint in the advance glow of dawn, which was still about half an hour away.

Then it was back to bed for me, in process disturbing both cats who had in the meantime rearranged themselves to get nearer the warm spot I’d left, yet somehow maintaining their distance from each other.

Next time I woke up, it was 9:30 and definitely time to shake a leg.

*

Some good news today.

We were going to be meeting with VB at the WonkaTech office but this morning we were informed that he was still out of town and therefore we’d be meeting at the broker’s offices and having a teleconference with him instead. It went well, I think – the result of which we signed up for a work schedule of 2 – 3 months, working at WonkaTech as “brokered contractors” on behalf of the broker.

We’ll be doing some FoxPro work – can you believe it?

UPS comes and takes away the 7 boxes of Acme gear.

We have our exit interview, and sign our separation agreements. Because our job termination was “involuntary”, they have no interest in any feedback we might wish to give them. Feh again.

*

There was another good episode of Farscape on TV tonight. I hope our Nielsen Media Research Ratings pack arrives soon so we can do our bit to raise Farscape’s ratings…

We continue packing up the Acme gear and sealing and labelling the boxes. I reformatted the FileServer hard drive – actually I ran a Wiper program on it and then deleted the partition, they’ll have to boot on a floppy to recomission it.

The laptops got similar treatment, deleting the HPFS partitions and creating a new FAT32 one, with Windows 98 installed from the disks that they came with 4 years ago. Heh.

Officially, this is so if they go missing during shipment, there’s no chance of Acme secrets being stolen.

Meanwhile, we tried to get Acme’s redeployment/recruitment representative Marty to come out and admit that there were no chances of either of us getting a new position within Acme. This took some coaxing, he was reluctant to be the bearer of bad news.

We have discovered from other people in Acme that we are not the only ones being “redeployed”. By any other name, Acme would be announcing layoffs, but of course they can’t do that, because it would damage their stock performance. Feh.