NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

KDOT has added gaming sites to it's list of blocked sites. PennyArcade and Kotaku are blocked. Reading Kotaku usually can occupy at least an hour of my day. Luckily FFXIclopedia isn't blocked. I haven't tried any other sites, mostly out of fear. Usually if you look at a blocked site, you get flagged and eventually your supervisor will talk to you about it. Since it would be my second offense, it's possible that my internet privileges could be taken away. Luckily not all the incidents have been logged in the past. Though today I did try to go to three blocked sites. It's bad enough that the sites are blocked, they should have to punish you more for not looking at them. My spirit was temporarily crushed, but now maybe I can focus more and read more books. Got 4 books and 80 volumes of manga to read

Today was apparently the birthday of our soon to be retiring ET. So our engineer baked him a cake. She really enjoys baking, generally bringing in cookies and other treats. The barrels are made from gumdrops, the silt fence appears to be fruit-by-foot with pretzel posts, there's rock candy and m&m for the rocks, and coconut shaving on the parts that required heavier snow. Luckily the whole cake didn't have coconut shaving, because I don't like it. I like coconut flavor, just don't like the shavings.

In-between classes

Had two classes last week and one two-day this week. In between them I do nothing. Only new thing is that brought a pair of slippers to wear around the office.

The classes themselves were very simple. Usually 6 hours of material with a 10 minute break every hour with a 2 hour set at the end. The longest it has taken me to complete a test was 40 minutes. Since this is my first year, they have me in all the basic classes. The strange thing is that me and the other engineer has only take one of the same class. You'd figure we'd be taking all the same classes. Well I still got 16 more days of classes until April, so I'll see how similar our schooling will be.

Brains...

Decided to update, because I'm bored and these last 2 hours have been dragging on. I originally brought some work from Topeka to do, but I actually had some paperwork to do here. So after a couple days, Topeka called and asked if I had gotten around to working on it. I told them no, and I probably wouldn't have time either. Which was ok, because it wasn't really my responsibility and they had someone else up there that could do it. That afternoon, I ran out of work to do. Been keeping myself occupied the normal way. I started watching Eureka and reading The Color of Magic. I'm enjoying both quite a bit.

Our Administrative assistant has been on vacation since xmas. Hope she comes back next week, because I need to setup lodging for my classes in Salina. My first class is Statistics on Jan 17th. Followed on the next day with QC/QA (Quality Control/Quality Assurance). I'm looking forward to these classes because it gets me out of the city. I get a per diem, and it's closer to K-State so I can go to practice.

Empty

Back from bridge design. I left on a Thursday, because I had to be back for the office Xmas dinner on Friday. It was a fattening week. Wednesday, bridge design had a potluck, where we just grazed from squad to squad sampling food. Then on Thursday, our squad leader took everyone out to lunch. Had some delicious BBQ. Then Xmas dinner was more BBQ, but it was tastier, because it was homemade. Our engineer made the best baked beans I've ever had. After a filling meal, everyone was feeling sluggish, The Area Engineer was kind enough to give us the rest of the day off. I promptly went home and took a nap.

Today, Half the office is taking vacation. Only 5 people showed up, and two of them left at lunch. The other left at 3:30pm, their normal quitting time. Being the only one left, I have to stay until 5pm. Guess it's good that stayed, because someone just came in to check their mail box. I am actually in charge today and tomorrow. Funny, because I always think of myself as the bottom, in fact there's only two people above me in this office. I actually have some work left over from bridge design, but I'm completely unmotivated to do anything. I spent the playing FFTA and watching TV shows. The people that showed up are ones I get along with, except for one snitch. If he wasn't here, I would have dismissed everyone at noon, because there's no point for all of us to be here. Our construction engineer won't be back until Jan 3, so I think I'll marathon my TV shows.

Bridge

This is day 3 in bridge design. The guys here are very lively and entertaining. There's a giant purple monkey sitting on my cube wall. There was a picture of a design leader's face tape to it's butt. Thankfully the face is gone, a little disturbing having it watch me. The guys here seam to be more computer literate, and they play Black Hawk Down. It's not a very fun game in my opinion. They only play flag ball, and they like to snipe a lot. It's slower paced and half the time I don't know where I'm being shot from. This computer has Call of Duty and Unreal Tournament installed on it, but I haven't seen any games up on the network. They gave me temp login so I'll have access to the bridge files and admin rights, but it doesn't have
internet access. Luckily I've haven't need access to the bridge files so my normal login has suuficed.

They're apparently pretty busy right now. On the first day the design leader gave me an assignment to check over some false work designs. I stared at it for the first two days trying to figure it out, because it's structures. Structures was my worst subject. In fact this check looks like some homework that I did in my structural analysis and Concrete structures class. It's even having the same effect of putting me to sleep. It took me an hour to write like 10 lines, because I'd close my eyes after writing one line and fall asleep. The squad finally wasn't busy, and he offered me some help. I found out I was missing some information to complete this check.

The cubicle arrangement is a little annoying. My back is to the entrance, while the squad leader's oriented facing instead my cube. So he can see my desktop clearly, and watch me pass out several times a day. Overall the group here is nicer, but I don't care so much about the work. I always like transportation and traffic better.

Productive

I've spent the past couple days working the finalization of a project. I'd spend a lot time on one line item, only to discover that I had to make up a conversion factor to balance the equation. It doesn't make sense at all, but it's acceptable. I'd go looking through all the supporting documents to make sense of it all, but it was pointless. My partner take care of the majority of the work.

Since my partner is taking the next two days off, I figured I should try to get as much work done as possible. But it's snowing hard, so all the technician were put on snow plow duty along with maintenance. There isn't that many people left in the office, so I'm severely lacking in motivation. I've basically been renaming and organizing my mp3 collection. This is something I've been wanting to do for a while, but haven't been able to without admin access to rewrite files on my external HD. I would use wikipedia for track listing, then I'll go on tangents to fill my head with trivia.

Besides labeling, I helped decorate the office xmas tree. Our administrative assistant and senior was decorating the whole office. I'm personally not a fan of decorations, mainly because I'm lazy. This is probably the first time I've decorated a xmas tree in 10 years

Admin

I finally got admin rights on my own computer. I finally found a problem that required me to have access. It took forever for our computer to realize what the problem. I knew immediately what it was, but he always ignores what I say. It took several calls to the district office for them to finally tell them that I need to be added to the admin list. I'm guessing that my explanations were all gibberish to him. There's a java-based database program that we use, and it requires write access to a text file. The program won't run if it can't log the time and date to this text file. I actually found a way around it by making a copy of the whole folder, but I didn't tell them that because I wanted access. Because of my limited access, I couldn't even write to my external drive. Now I can start installing things and I can bring this laptop with me instead of my desktop when I go to rotation.