I haven't done much with this blog for awhile, as I haven't been asked any questions that I felt made sense to put here. However there was one I can do...

Q: How's it going?
A: Eh. It's going weird, actually. My day job is being a serious pain. Microsoft is a strange place many days, especially in areas I work in. I'm a database guy in IT attached to an internal business group, so I don't deal with outside customers. There's this bizarre attitude coming down from upper management that 'Everyone has to be Strategic' meaning planning, scheduling, arranging things... *everyone*. So who's supposed to be doing the actual work? Contractors and Vendors apparently. I'm actually getting dinged on my reviews because I'm concentrated on doing work rather than passing it off to other people. It's insane. Not everyone in a company can be Management. Someone has to actually do work, and many people *want* to be that person. And there's pressure to move to a product group and be a development manager there. I was a developer, I didn't like it. The politics in that was incredibly stupid and I refused to put up with it. That's why I moved to a support position. I'm good at support. But Microsoft devalues support much the same way they seem to devalue work in general. *bleh*

My non-day job working on the farm is going great. We've got two new sheep, tiny little black Shetlands, who are very snugly and want attention all the time. I just finished rewiring the barn so all the light switches actually *do* something, and there's light fixtures in all the work areas. (It kinda makes sense what the previous people did, as the barn is actually three buildings built separately and then joined together later with a covered storage area, but they made no effort to make sense of the lighting situation after they did that.) There's still one power outlet that isn't working, but in order to fix it I have to rip the wall apart to figure out where the wire for that is actually coming from, as it's not immediately obvious and without power in the line I can't trace it back, and if it's a short in the middle of the wire run... that's potentially very bad. The last of the big faire shows where I go sit in the middle of a field in a tent and try to sell handspun yarn to people in funny outfits is over. There's more shows coming, but those are ones my wife can handle without me. I got a new computer as my cat managed to break my old laptop to the point it was cheaper to buy a desktop than replace it (she knocked it off my desk, shattering the screen and breaking parts off.) Because I like to mess around with 3D rendering and whatnot I got a relatively mid-range gaming rig for the graphics card. It's as ugly as sin in my opinion, as most gaming rigs are set up with weird-shaped colored cases and pointless blinky lights all over them. I'd build my own machine, I've done it before, but I can't be arsed about it. I've got enough going on, I don't really want to spend all that time shopping for compatible parts.

And then there's my non-job here. Which pretty much everyone knows how *that's* going. Yeah, I'm on this Board everyone's complaining about. Sorta. Until the Poniverse staffers vote for it, I'm 'interm' Board. And to be honest, I've done the job I wanted to do so I'm fine with not being confirmed by the voting staffers. I agreed to join the Board to get it transitioned to a Non-Profit so that all the various sites would keep going after Feld0 officially stepped down, which he had been talking about doing for awhile now. I just don't want MLPF, Pony.fm, PArc, Eq.tv, and the rest to be shut down because Feld0 has to move on with his life. And that's 95% done now, with all that's left being the voting thing (though that might be more like 80% if we have to go through the effort of putting together another potential Board if enough of the current interm one doesn't get confirmed.) In my mind, the point of Poniverse is that the various sites can share resources to make things easier for everyone. If a site is having problems, people from the other sites can help out. If another site needs a feature for an event that they don't normally have, likely one of the others does and they can set up something. And the point of the Board is to co-ordinate that sharing of resources so that any one site doesn't get short-shifted or wither away because nobody is paying attention. But that's not what's happening. *bleh again*

So that's how it's going for me.