Unhappy

This is not going to be a very exciting, nor fun to read post. I just needed to write it anyways.

My drive to work this morning was plauged by this overwhelming sense of disapointment. I suddenly had this horrible realisation that I'm not anywhere near where I wanted to be 5 years ago. True, I'm married and have a beautiful little boy, but still... There's something not quite right about it all. This especially applies to my job. I went to uni for 4 years and became a qualified computer scientist, specialising in software development. And yet, I haven't developed a piece of software since I graduated. If I was a legitimate Systems Admin at a company that (for starters) recognised it's need for one, maybe I'd feel better about doing this instead of writing the next killer OS or madly popular MMORPG, but unfortunatley I work at a school where IT is relegated to a support service at best. {begin sarcasm}Everyone needs it to do their job, but why on earth would people be employed JUST to do I.T.? I mean, they don't TEACH?!? What are they doing here? {end sarcasm}
And that, my friends, is the question. What on earth am I doing here? I feel rather trapped by it all now. My job offers me the most awesome of conditions: I start at 8am at earliest, and finish around 4pm most days. I can take days off to look after my family, or go home if my wife is having a hard time with our little boy and my boss and his boss are cool with it. It's 20mins from home. I get free hardware if it's not needed anymore, and I have access to a host of benifits like Microsoft software with no cost to me and a Technet Plus subscription.
So what's so bad about it? I think I've mentioned this previously, but EVERYONE acts like they're my boss. All 180 odd staff. And there is very little I can do about it. My boss acts like he's in control and that he's got plans upon plans to get I.T. to a position of prominance in the school, but so far all he's done is make us more work, and fold to people's demands. One of his current suggestions is to sub-contract me and my workmate out to other companies/schools who could use our expertise. But why would I contract under the banner of my work, when it has no reputation for contract work, and I'd be in just as good of a place if I just went out on my own? If you've read my previous posts, you'll know that it's kind of panned out that way anyways, and so I can't see that ever coming about. Aside from the fact, I have no desire to do contract work. It destroys the above-mentioned conditions (ie: I have to travel further, will need to work for longer hours, etc.) with very little payoff, other then the suggestion I may recieve a pay increase at some future stage. My boss makes a lot of promises you know, and very rarely follows through on any of them. Example? He promised me and my workmate an $100 gift voucher for Christmas, and then just never delivered. Also promised a staff Christmas lunch, and also never delivered. There's a lot of non-delivery here. Pretty morale destroying if you ask me.
But see, there's just one more thing... I don't WANT to do this stuff. For starters, I want to be the boss of at least my own little world. Presently, I'm the boss of very little. I kind of control the server infrastructure and if I put my foot down heavily enough, I can stop my boss or coworkers from destroying the Active Directory schema while attempting to reconfigure Exchange because someone didn't recieve an email. For the most part however, I get very little sway.

{NOTE: Now 8pm, finishing this at home. Otherwise, you may wonder why I'm complaining when I appear to get to play Playstation at work... I don't. I'm at home, silly.}
Also, I want to work with stuff I love, or if not, be allowed to do stuff I love while at work and share it with others. What do I mean? Well, I LOVE games and anime. Not just a little, but a heck of a lot. I now have close to 200 anime DVDs and also have 5 RPG-style games on backlog for me to play through. I own EVERY Final Fantasy game ever released. Currently, I have the intro movie for Star Ocean: Till The End Of Time playing in the background, as I intend to play it after I'm finished this blog entry. I get absorbed into anime and games. I only like games with good stories and that's what I love about anime - the story. It's what it's all about for me.
And that's why I wanted first and most unrealistically, to be a game writer/producer/director. I have a couple of stories and ideas I've thought up over the past 8 odd years for different games, parts of games, stories... Just stuff that I think would be really awesome to do. I have some code background, so I think I'd be able to interface really well with the programmers, and being a gamer myself, I think I have a pretty darn good idea about what cuts it and what doesn't.
I've thought of a couple of other jobs I could be happy doing, but most of them are pretty limited fields, and really, without experience in that field I won't get a job in the field, and then can't get experience, and so won't get a job. So yeah, not fun.
However, the other thing is that I think I could be happy in a job like the one I'm in if there were a couple of other people who were just a bit like me. Who liked anime, or games, or both. Even different games... Like, I like RPGs mostly, but I can always go a good game of Quake III, or Warcraft or something.. However, my boss likes woodwork and tennis, and my coworker likes pirating kids DVDs (he has kids who watch them) and watching TV on his computer. Both of them have said they don't really get the whole game thing, so the anime thing would be completely out of the question.

I'm going to stop now, because I want to get in some gaming this evening while my wife is away and I can monopolise on the living room. Basically, I don't like my job, because nothing about it in any way reflects who I am and what I want to accomplish. It's not me. It's some other guy who is boring and is only in computers for the money, and has a TAFE certifictate in something vaguely computer related. Not me.

On a completely different note, Nobuo Uematsu has resigned from Square-Enix, along with the guy who (I believe) wrote all the good Final Fantasy games, Hironobu Sakaguchi. Sakaguchi-san has started his own company, and has signed to develop for the next-gen Xbox. Uematsu-san is proberbly going to start his own company as well, and hasn't ruled out composing for future Square-Enix games. OK, this all sucks. Why, you might ask? I think it might spell the end of the greatest game series and company of all time.

EDIT: You know what? I jump to too many negative conclusions. It appears, according to this Wikipedia page, that Nobuo Uematsu left Square Enix and started his own company, "Smile Please", and will compose for both Square Enix and Hironobu Sakaguchi's new company. Looks to me like he was avoiding a Sony/Microsoft conflict of intrests. Clever man. THE MUSIC IS NOT DEAD!!!

Comments?

Hey, I know I haven't posted in a while, but you reckon a comment wouldn't go astray? You don't even have to be a member anymore... It's just nice to know who's reading.

Workin workin workin...

I'm at work at the moment. Not coping too well either. I'm not very useful when I'm sick, and I'm in the office on my own. My coworkers have conveniently found other work to do that involves them being completely uncontactable and me having no idea of what they are doing or where exactly they are. They are too clever. I should have thought of that.
More later...

{the next day - 11:22am}
You know what I love? Drugs. Not the illegal variety, mind you. Just over-the-counter, pharmacy or perscription. Oh, and a bit of herbal never goes astray either. They are just plain cool. Mind you, I only like stuff that I know goes in, does it's job, and gets the heck outta there. Immunisation and stuff like that I think is a bit scary... Goes in, makes some major change, and hangs around for the rest of your life. Not quite so pleasent.

Here's where I am at the moment:

This is my office. Well, actually, it's the server room too, and the office of at least 2 other people, and more often then not, there's 3 others. My computer(s) are the ones on the left, and that's where I spend the vast majority of my life. Sad, yeah? I think so. I mean, there's a couple of problems here. One is that the organisation I work for will employ 3 people and shove them in a room that's proberbly about right for 1.5 people. And then they'll put 7 odd servers in there, which makes it about right for 0 people, because the noise drives you crazy. So how much value do they place in their IT department? Hmm, not much.

Here's me today:


w00t for my iPaq camera. I'm feeling like someone's filled my head with melted cheese today, so please excuse the not-goodness of my appearence. I just thought it was time for a photo or two.

The Science Of Things

"I don't know what they're gonna think of next
genetic engineers are the most high tech..."
~ Switchfoot, "Adding to the Noise"

The above lyric, I can relate to. I find it a little disconcerting that the most valued scientists on the "cutting edge" at this point in time are working on ways to modify the very building blocks of life. As a Christian, the idea that someone would desire to mess with something that God set up to create and maintain life is scary. What's worse, is when society as a whole holds up those people as those with the most to offer society. I mean, 15 years ago it was rocket scientists and astronauts who held this position of status, but once we realised that space wasn't going to offer us the elixir of eternal life any time soon, we quickly moved them onto the bench. Now, I saw geneticists starting to do things that I could see might begin to encroach on the lives of individuals, and I started to feel a bit like "What gives them the right to mess with someone's life?!?" I mean, to create a clone for example? That person will be a new individual, in someone else's body. It's just not right, and I think human cloning is generally regarded as not a good idea, but as scientists slowly push the envelope, I'm sure eventually society will "come around".

However, here's the thing. Taking liberties with an individuals life is one thing, but here's something that blew me away. I got an email from a friend that had a link to this wonderfully humorous and yet slightly disturbing website about ways to destroy the earth. The thing about the site is that all the ways listed are completely plausible, even though the time and resources involved might be (well, are) beyond a lifetime's work, or the skills/attributes of a human being. So anyways, one of the options is to "create a stable strangelet", using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider(RHIC) at the Brookhaven National laboratory. Now the question is, what is a strangelet? It's a particular form of quark matter, that if a negatively charged instance formed, would devour all matter in the universe. There is no known theory that could cause it to stop.
That scares me.

Now, people have put forward the notion that this RHIC thing is dangerous. That there's the possibility, however remote, that it could form a mini-black hole, or a change in the vacuum state of the universe, along with this strangelet business. So they did a study and wrote a paper arguing that it won't happen. Here's my problem with this:

Science is, in essence, a group of ideas that remain true until proven false. So people do experiments over and over to see that they get the same result; whilever the result is the same, the theory remains true. You get a failure, suddenly it's not true. This has happened time and time again, and scientists constantly are reassessing the details of what they hold to be true.

So the above mentioned paper, talks about how the scientists feel the chance of this stuff happening is so remote, it's impossible. Check this quote:

The hypothetical chain of events that might lead to a catastrophe at RHIC requires several independent, robust theoretical arguments to be wrong simultaneously.

Right. So you've got 4 iron struts supporting a 1Kg weight, but if the weight falls to the ground, the universe is destroyed. I have to say, I wouldn't be putting the weight up there. Even if the chance is one in a googolplex that it'll happen, you could fluke it and have it happen in the first 10 minutes. And then no more universe...

Here's another fun one:

Such rough calculations cannot answer the delicate question of whether or not strange matter is bound at zero external pressure reliably. Stability seems unlikely, but not impossible.

"...unlikely, but not impossible"?? Once again with the scary.

Now, if you bothered to read the paper, you'll know that they basically ruled out black holes, and vacuum disruption, and said that the chance of a strangelet forming are close to nil. Mind you, again, science is by definition theories that remain true until proven false. If any of the theories these arguments are based on gets proved wrong at the RHIC, we're not going to know about it for long.

My question in all of this is simple: If someone suggests that maybe there is the rarest of chances that something you're doing could destroy the universe, why would you continue? This isn't science fiction here... there's a plausible (however unlikely) argument that we could all be transformed into quark plasma by a rampaging negatively charged strangelet. So I say yay for science. Yay for people taking chances with life, and now, the universe. And what for? So we can look at ourselves and say "Aren't we good? Look what we found out!" Hrm. I'm not convinced.

There's nothing worse...

I hate being sick. Like, I truely dispise it. Having a day off when you're sick is the most depressing thing ever. You have time, but you have no strength to use it for anything fun or productive. Bleh...

I have a mad entry brewing about my views on ion coliders. "What you say?", I hear you cry. You'll have to wait until I'm well again, I'm afraid...