You know, ClickTV used to tell you if a show was a repeat, but they stopped doing that some time ago. If people know a show is a repeat they're less likely to see it, so I guess the tv stations got ClickTV to stop doing that. And maybe I'm getting way too cynical and paranoid.

Lots of repeats this week and next week. Christmas time I guess. At least Christmas week I can concentrate on work and not have to watch all the programs that I usually tape. I think I'm down to a hard deadline of Jan 4th to get the Rockwell implementation done. And I don't know if I'll be able to; transfer and conference are tricky and I goofed off for three days last week. May not see my parents New Year's weekend so I can work instead.

Then after I'm done with Rockwell I'm supposed to go to Boston for a week, probably at the end of January. I have to get the Cisco-Nortel implementation done, which has a big bug on Nortel Meridian Option 11c switches. Cisco uses an Option 51 switch at their Development Lab and their software works with that. So since their developers can't seem to fix the bug on the Option 11c and we're running out of time to get Cisco-Nortel certified, it looks like I'm going to go there and test against their Development Lab switch and mostly certify the Cisco-Nortel implementation. Option 51 is more full-featured and can handle more phones than the Option 11c, and it's the switch that most of our target customers use (of the two switches). Like I've said, Oracle doesn't target companies that can't afford a multi-million dollar implementation.

Still, I don't like travelling and going away for a week will really mess up my tv taping. Which reminds me, I should check to see if Ricochet covers Boston... nope, it's a future coverage area. Oh well, dial-up connection it is then. If everything goes right, I should be there one day and done, with two days of travel. If not then it'll be a hectic week as I try to fix our bugs. Either way I'll be there five days, and the optimistic outlook is two days of boredom with not much to do. Maybe I should ask Billy for a couple of recommendations of places I should go see. It'll probably be snowing.

When you're at work there's no time to play long games, arguably you shouldn't be playing any games at all. But it's nice to take a break every now and then and take a few minutes to play a quick game of something. Usually card games or arcade games are quick and fast. The only game on my computer that is that quick and easy is Eric's Solitaire Sampler which comes with the system software. It has Klondike, which is a very hard game to actually win. It's not a hard game, just a hard game to win, even if you go through the deck once and memorize the cards. There's still all the hidden cards. But the other card game in the Sampler is Eight Off, which is pretty easy. I already have 201 consecutive wins so the challenge for me is to get the per game average time down to 2 and a half minutes. Usually I can finish a game in less than 2.5 minutes, though not much less. Occassionally I get stuck and have to think a bit or restart the game and end up with a four minute game. But it's as I've said, a nice diversion that doesn't pull me away from work for too long.

So what do I do at work that keeps me from working? Surf the web. Not random sites, but the morning round up of Mac news sites and a few other sites can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 90 minutes, depending on if there are articles worth reading more about. Then there's also reading: JavaWorld and technical books plus the many other books that I need to read someday. There's this journal, which I frequently get quite behind on. I can take a day of no work and do about five journal entries, giving you a clue on how slowly I write. And occassionally I have to work on my campaign or do stuff on the web (mostly involving shopping for some thing or another) or chat/email people. Sometimes there's not enough time to get any work done.