...though I have never been there.  One could say that it could just as well remind me of Seattle... and sometimes it does.  However, I've been conversing with Brits quite a bit lately, so that probably skews my thoughts. 

I don't want to go to work.  I spent the past three days in an offsite meeting at the Embassy Suites hotel in St Paul, in a close, warm, stuffy room with the 'leadership' people on my project team.  The idea was that we would be determining the process for our project... with is refreshing since usually we are the bitches to the process, not the other way around.  In truth, though, none of what we discussed really matters.  Robert (my project manager) would disagree on principle... mostly because he has to herd this abortion... but he knows where I'm coming from.  Whatever process we can conceive of that would effectively get this product done is secondary to the ponderous and conflicting mandates of our managerial organization.  Not to mention we've been inflicted with that all-pervasive and productivity-sucking disease that is Six Sigma. 

I'm ostensibly the 'product engineer lead' for this project.  It's refreshing, since I was the only project engineer on the last version of the software... but the two guys I have 'under' me are not... well, they don't have near my background in the familiarity with our controls, how they work, what needs to be done to get them to work, etc.  At least Matt has past experience with his area of 'expertise', but Dan was just assigned a huge bucket of shit and told 'you're the expert'.  That's the way things go around here a lot... it happened to me, too... but you either dig into it and learn it or you founder.  IMHO, Dan's been foundering. 

It doesn't help that my real 'boss' considers Dan to be the product engineer lead for the project... since he was technically work in on it for the past year and a half, while I was testing and writing defects on the steaming piles of shit-code that we got from Mumbai every couple of months.  So we have the guy in charge of my raise and career path thinking that Dan should be the lead contact, rather than me who knows what the fuck is going on. 

The idiocy is arm-gnawingly infuriating.  This Indian company has NEVER delivered to us what we expected or what we were promised... but we're still using them.  Why?  WHY???  There is no realistic reason for it... I suspect that our engineering manager was delivered a mandate from our lords in Piscataway that we SHALL outsource our development.  Fuck that.  We're to the point where our 'architects' here stateside have to review every line of code that we get from offshore anyway... simply because we don't trust them.  We can't.

I was in a netmeeting chat with two of my buddies in the meeting... I said 'FUCK' at least fifteen times.  Occasionally I would try to inject something to the 'process' that was being laid out that would... oh, I don't know... HELP.  But it fell mostly on deaf ears, it seems.  If I heard the term 'self-describing metadata' one more time I was going to turn around and choke Eero right then and there. 

So I busied myself with downloading 3DBlender and trying to work through the tutorial.  Faith excites me... my 9-5 frustrates the hell out of me. 

And today it's raining.  It's been raining since yesterday afternoon... the air has the damp chill of autumn and all I want to do is make another pot of coffee, play around with 3DBlender and make a building and a Giovanelli handgun. 

I have a meeting in 12 minutes.  I guess I should shower.