And I thought I didn't like new REM

I finally decided to go off and rip the rest of my non-classical CDs. This included, among other things, the junky self-titled Alice In Chains CD, Moxy Fruvous' Live Noise, and two newer-than-Automatic REM albums, Monster and New Adventures in Hi-Fi. I had convinced myself pretty thoroughly that I didn't like anything newer than Out of Time. Adventures certainly fits the pattern; I seem to like one song on it ("Leave") but could skip the rest. But I've found myself actually liking Monster; "Star 69" entertains me a lot now that I've figured out what it is they're singing, and there's a better proportion of songs I like on it than on, say, Green. I suspect that I'd be happy if a copy of Dead Letter Office were to appear, given that I seem to like old REM, and that I wouldn't like anything more recent they've done, but these are just trends.

Point and Drool

Secretary, to me: "Can you help me? One of the professors in our group told me to read a text file in his Unix home directory, and I have absolutely no idea how to do that." Sigh.

Less cranky now

This was not the greatest of days. My priorities at work seem to be (a) support everyone else (including fixing broken parts of code, if it's mine), (b) try to make a particular program run through our compiler, and (c) work on a release of our software. This is all fine, except that my boss doesn't seem to really acknowledge (a) and there's nothing I can do directly on (b). So I'm working on (c) when I'm not doing (a), but this leads to some tension between my boss and I because I'm not actively putting effort into (b).

I tried hanging out in SIPB after work. It was dark, and I by and large wasn't thrilled about the company; a little too much sketchiness for my own comfort. I didn't feel like going to dinner with the group I usually do, but at least I was able to go to dinner with someone and vent, a lot, about sketchiness and work and people complaining and general grumpiness in the world. It seemed to help; I feel at least passable now. That, and I did a somewhat neutral brain-dump in my occasional progress-report email so at least hopefully my boss understands what's going on now, even if he's usually in California.