I just finished grading all of the final projects for the Kendall class. Everyone passed. An equal number of “a”s and “d”s, with a fairly balanced distribution of everything in between.

Work is getting busy again, and the first free afternoon I had, after the end of the semester, I stayed at the studio until after 7pm. Same exact thing happened at the end of last semester: “John has free time again. Let’s load him up with long hours and uncompensated irritation.”

Seems like that happened at the end of last year, too. Now that I have been out of retail for a few years, and have stopped hating the holidays to the core of my being, projects at work seem to fall into a pattern of mad scrambling to complete projects by the end of the year. A deadline, I might add, which is completely arbitrary and has no bearing on the actual needs of the clients; just some sense of finishing out the year with a clean slate.

Now I have four weeks of free Monday and Wednesday evenings. Winter Semester 2005 starts on Monday, January 13, In celebration I stayed in bed until eleven this morning, then lounged around my apartment in my pyjamas, reading a science fiction novel. Almost five hours in a row just sitting in a Comfy Chair. My back is quite sore, but I wouldn’t trade that time for all the [=commodity] in [=location]

One of the bright lights of the past couple of weeks has been the constant news updates regarding the crash-and-burn of CyberNet Engineering. While working there I was quite vocal with my criticizing, and now just about everyone I know will, at some point in a conversation, say So: Wow! CyberNet! . That kind of thing is still funny.

A month or so before I quit CyberNet I asked for a raise. I was just coming off of a couple of 80 hour weeks and my sense of humor had pretty much bottomed out. The head of the web development department told me No, because it wouldn’t be appropriate . So I went over his head. Sent an email to Krista Kotlarz, the wife of the now-dearly-departed Barton Watson.

She called me into a meeting, and, while sitting behind a desk which was worth more than I had made in six months of employment at CNE, called me a prima donna for asking for a raise.

When I finally quit, though I was the only front-end developer on staff, they didn’t try to keep me because I had been branded a “troublemaker”.

Thus the continued sense of schadenfreude. In another couple of days I will post an aggregation of all of the links I can find related to the CyberNet scandal, in as close to chronological order as I can make them.

Bearing in mind the fact that days and months and years are arbitrarily assigned divisions of the 24-hour planetary rotation cycle, I will be glad when this year is over.