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Posts Tagged ‘job’

EFG

Today in the bus I learned something extra-special :

is gone. I don’t really want to be more precise. But it made the end of the day a little special.

Goodbye powweb…

A good 2-3 months ago, I went out and canceled my account at powweb because I’d joined  The Geek Cartel and didn’t have any other hosting needs. I thought to myself “Hey, better not get late before the renewal date and cancel it right away so there’s nothing to pay!” and I went and searched deep into the customer interface until I thought I’d hit the Holy grail Handgrenade of Antioch aptly named “Cancel Server” and I clicked on it.

Well now, as you’re reading this you must realize something went wrong or I wouldn’t bring it up. Well I canceled my domain but not my account. So today I got my credit card invoice online and gah! what’s this big gunk of cash on that credit card I no longer use? powwebdamnit!

So there go tonight I used their LiveChat (exactly the same one as the one at my job, so ironic) and talked with some Albert Who Never Misspells (and I’m not convinced he wasn’t a robot) who told me that I had to pay some fee if I wanted them to cancel my account and refund me. Great.  I tried explaining that I went on their help documentation to find how to cancel my account. That I hadn’t logged in for 2 months. Alas. I asked him how I should have done it and he gave me a link. Which I’m going to give to you because I know some of you use powweb. They’ve been good to me in the past, it’s just joining the cartel was too cool to pass. But anyway, if you ever want to cancel your account I suggest you go to http://www.powweb.com/controlpanel/BillingCentral/AccountRenewal.bml and take care of canceling it there, and then open a livechat to confirm that it will be canceled for real.

I’m going to keep this experience foremost in my mind when I will work on the customer hub 2.0 at work. Oh and also that one time I deleted all the databases because they were linked to a domain name that I was deleting on some Plesk interface. Interfaces can suck majorly, but they don’t have to. One more bad experience on the web convinces me that I can do good work to help people… so it’s at least that.

Damnit

Now my credit card is RUINED. All because someone sent me a link on Jabber to see if the site was down for me. Now I’ve learned of the existence of The Escapist store

At least it was a link to a pretty good comic. I’m going to forgive him.

April’s fools

Out of all the april’s fools I saw or heard of today I’m totally hooked by The Leaky Cauldron’s take on Twitter! It’s so much fun to watch it update in real time and read the sillyness

Although the trick at work that led one of the guys in marketing to email google about their lack of security on any website that uses AdWords was spectacular!

Betas

At work I’ve discovered the Scrum management technique. ( If you have no idea what it is, go read the article right away.) I personally find it pretty awesome. At first everything looks so obvious because it’s based on common sense, and yet if you read a lot about it you realize how drastically different it is from traditional “project manager” philosophy. I’m mentioning it because Scrum is used to work applications in incrementations of valid working code. So that after each version, everything that is there works. You simply don’t have all the features yet. And so you could say that each release is a final release as opposed to an alpha -> beta ->final chain of releases. 

At the same time the two web applications I use the most, gMail and Ravelry, have both been open to the public and in beta for a while now, and they don’t look like they will ever get out of beta. It looks like it’s become the “in” thing to do… 

< insane philosphical analysis >

Maybe it’s a symptom of society where nothing is ever good enough and 15 years old girls want to get plastic surgery!

< / insane philosophical analysis >

More job-iness

I’ve been at my new job a month now, and last week I finally hit a moment where I felt I was really at ease with everything. There are always new things but I finally “home” and at my place.  Of course that meant that something horrible or terrifying was in the works. Today I met my new coworker and his first impression wasn’t the best. He said 2 things that really sounded really wrong and sexist to my ear and I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s his first day : he’s allowed to be stressed and stupid and open his mouth without thinking. 

Also related to the new job is the upcoming move to my own place. I’m going to be roomate with Lorien and it’s really exciting and daunting to think that this summer I will leave the nest. If I chose to, I can not clean the dishes until there is no plates left, or wait until the dust has formed rock formations before cleaning or eat ice cream for supper for a week! (Lorien, I won’t. I’m just saing I *could* if I wanted to)

Apart from that I guess the most ridiculous thing that happened is that I went yarn shopping saturday afternoon and my parents had bets about how much I’d buy  (Mom said 5 balls, dad said 50$) and both failed miserably (9 balls, 80$). I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. Although technically, according to my new budget, everything but one ball fell into “gifts” since I will use those to make gifts. AH!

Shiny! New blogity

Well, I’m finally a member of thegeekcartel.com My old blog collapsed after a year long hiatus, and upon my return suffered a sort of bug with closed off comments and unresponsive code. I decided to take the opportunity to start off fresh, I’ll slowly be integrating my archives.  I can’t wait to chose a new theme and looking through plugins. 

I guess you know what I’ll be doing all day tommorow if I still have a too high fever to go to work… It really bugs me majorly that I only worked Monday of this week on my second week of work, but I can’t really bring a pneumonia to work and infect everyone either. I only wish it had happened (if at all! ) later so I would feel less totally hopeless.

Wow! I remembered my password!

I have to admit that it has been a rather long time since I updated… and I also had to try 4 times to get my password right. But big news required a blog entry, especially big news I don’t feel like retelling to everyone separately while I have no voice.

I started my new job today! Booya! I have a shiny new cool access card with a swishy line to it so I can open doors and go to the bathroom. It makes me feel pretty hot-shot. So does my 24 inch iMac, more shiny than the neon lighting.

All in all, I still have no clue what exactly I’ll be working on there. I met my supervisor, who showed me around and then disapeared after telling me to explore the intranet and read this book of the Scrum method. Well 8 hours later, I had finished the book, still had no email or password and it was time to head home.

All I know is that I’m a Web Integrator in a new (one woman team so far) of User eXperience… it sounds like a lot of potential but so far it was a pretty easy day. I like the idea of being paid to read a book. Too bad it wasn’t fiction.