Let's start with something simple. Today I got up at 07:00 so I could get to the Orthodontist by 08:00 to see if the root canal I had six months ago (has it been that long?) worked. Apparently, everything is still fine so I don't have to have my tooth pulled out. Have to remember to drink more milk so the bone heals better.

Then I went home and slept. Fitfully. Once you've been awake and about it's hard to get back to sleep, even if you're tired. So after that I went to get my car's oil changed. At the rate that I drive it's about 5 weeks between services. I know so little about cars that I just go with whatever the service guy recommends. He's usually pretty good about not trying to get me to replace something if it still looks good.

I'm hoping my car will last another year. That'll put it at about 170 000 miles. By then I should have stabilized my finances and be ready to buy a new car. Of course, there's always something cropping up that upsets The Master Plan. Curse you, Red Baron!

So after getting my car serviced I stopped by the comic book store and bought this month's comics. Then I went to work and read spent the rest of the day reading those comics. I'm in one of those "I don't want to work" moods, which has afflicted for a week now. I'll do better after Thanksgiving. No, really. You can stop laughing.

I'm such scum. My assignment calls for me to implement a Java way of displaying sort of real-time reports. But I realized that if we just use the standard reports (that displays on a web browser with Javascript support) and just add some Javascript to auto-refresh the page, it'll do the same thing. So I've been trying to find out if it we have enough access to the HTML output to add the code, and it looks like it's doable. Of course, this means that it'll be really hard for me to do it, since I have no experience or skill with our reports tools. Therefore most of the work will have to be done by the other team and I'll get to move back to the core team that much sooner. I'm so evil sometimes, and yet, I hate myself for foisting more work on my compatriots.

It's amazing that I've been in this job for almost two years and the only skills I have are totally Java related. I don't know any of the skills that other 98% of the developers know and use every day. Although we do have a lot of Java projects nowadays, most of our development work is still done on our legacy environment. It just means that I have nowhere to go if I should try to transfer to another group. Not that I'd ever want to, so I guess it's not as big a deal. But sometimes I don't feel as useful because I'm lacking in the traditional skills. Of course, our company tools don't work on the MacOS, which is why I have little incentive or opportunity to learn to use them.

I turned off my NT workstation a couple of weeks ago and I haven't needed to turn it back on. Now that I can run our Java server on my Mac the only thing I'd need it for is to run our company tools, which thankfully I've been able to avoid. Ahhh, freedom from the Microsoft tyranny. Well, to a certain extent. I still use Office, and Outlook Express for one little thing, although I'm working on a replacement for the second and have given up on replacing the first.