It’s been one rollercoaster of a week in the office. Let me start at the beginning.

Monday
We have our usual morning meeting, until someone brings up the question of our workstations. For those of you who don’t know, we ordered brand new workstations with the end of our FY05 money. Brand new Dell‘s, dual-proc dual-core Xeon’s, 8Gig of ram, 4 RAID5+1 (Mirrored & striped). Very sweet machines. Ordered over the summer, and arrived in December. Needless to say, it’s not December anymore and we’re getting a bit antsy. We’ve placed the blame squarely on the desktop support group, since they have the PC’s and they’re required to set them up. Unfortunately, they’ve been inundated with other work related to recent security audits and such, and our machines have fallen in priority.

Talking about this stirred up a huge hornet’s nest, as the message makes it’s way through management and gets progressively distorted with each retelling.  The desktop group takes personal offense to the implication that they aren’t doing their job. Right as it’s almost smoothed over, someone else chimes in and it gets even worse with the (now legendary) statement “I just want my computer to WORK”.

Tuesday
My boss takes a day off, leaving me to give a demo to a tour to a group from the “249th”. Unfortunately, every secretary and PR person in the building will be attending a meeting at that time, so I’m left completely up to myself to figure all this out. The demo goes well, although a bit klunkly in my opinion. On a good note, the vortex tube code I was working on long ago, I have finally gotten to work nearly perfectly. I wound up having to reverse-engineer the math the original researcher was using to generate his grid, which involved some pretty bizarre trig and calculus. But it’s done, and nearly perfect.

Wednesday
Boss is back, things are cooling down from Monday. I spend the day working on the vortex tube code, and get the last few kinks ironed out. So now I get to start the arduous task of writing up a paper on it for the UGC and IEEE Viz06 . (Yes, you read those pages correctly.. FInished papers by March 21) I have to go to bed early tonight, because tomorrow I have an 8am meeting in the HPC2 in Starkville, which means I have to leave here at 5:30am. Right when we think the events of Monday are smoothed other, tho, round 2 starts at 3pm. Luckily it remains civil this time, but I doubt we’ve heard the last of it.

So tomorrow I’ll be revisiting the old stomping grounds in Starkville, and hopefully I can schedule a quick trip by Little Dooey’s while I’m there. Then on Friday, who knows what cards fate will deal. I doubt a new desktop is in my near future, and expect I’m going to be getting very friendly with Microsoft Word.
[tag:work][tag:support][tag:papers]

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