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I ventured out into Asian cooking once again, as I’ve been apt to do here recently. This time, though, the recipe came from someone definitely American: Emeril Lagasse. I cooked up some sweet and sour pork and I have to say it turned out quite nice. I substituted white cooking wine for the sherry in the cornstarch rue, but otherwise I used all the ingredients in the recipe. Nice stuff. See my moblog for a picture of the final dish. I served it over white rice, and vegetable fried rice on the side. Yumm-o!

Expect a nice rant in the coming days. I’ve had a very interesting week and I’d like to tell the world about it, although most of the 3 people that read this already know.

If you’ve seen the movie Office Space then you’ve seen a lot of the junk that really goes on in a company with a sizable IT department. The movie, as funny as it may be, is not too far from the truth. There really are jobs out there with tangled messes of bosses, “efficiency experts”, long unexpected hours, and a mountain of inane reports to create/analyze/etc.

My optometrist told me to lay off the caffeine, but he hasn’t worked in the IT field apparently.

The stress can get to you if you let it, especially when the leadership redirects THEIR stress back onto you. I’ve determined that managing stress effectively is an art form that very few have mastered. Personally I take the “caffeine and blogging” approach to blend the buzz of a chemical reaction in my brain with the joy of letting off steam in a public forum such as this one.

So what keeps me going? Why do I stick by Information Technology if the stress is so high and sometimes unbearable? Well, it is the simple joy of working with computers. When I work on a computer, be it programming or software configuration or hardware maintenance, I get the same sort of buzz and artist gets as he masterfully slings paint onto his easel. It is a feeling of creation and of doing something important.

Programming is a form of magic. As a programmer you get to create things out of seemingly nothing. People use your creation and a lot of the times they have no idea how it could be possible to create such a program and that is just plain cool. So it is that sort of feeling that keeps me going in spite of all the stress.

Well, the holidays have come and gone and now it is back to the normal swing of things. I had quite a blast over the holidays, although they came and went too quickly for my tastes. If I could take the entire month off to celebrate with friends and family I definitely would.

Christmas was really wonderful this year, although because of work I didn’t get to take off much time. We left on Christmas Eve for Oklahoma and had to come back so I could go to work again on Monday. But while we were in Oklahoma I had a blast hanging out with our families. I especially enjoyed meeting my 2-month old niece Kaylee Cox for the first time. She’s adorable!

New Years was really fun too. Again, I didn’t get any time off of work, but I more than made up for it. Heathe and Laura came up to visit us on New Year’s Eve and we had a blast. I made a lot of appetizer and we bought plenty of bubbly stuff to drink to ring in the new year properly. I also realized that with Heathe and Laura around, I don’t stand a chance at winning ANY video game AT ALL. Laura is too freaking awesome. I’d like to see her and my brother AJ go at it in Halo 2 and see who could win.

Saturday the four of us went Geocaching and found two pretty decent caches. The second one was at a scenic waterfall in Bella Vista on Lock Lomond (how original a name that is!). You can see a few pictures of that on my moblog off to the left.

I always enjoy it when people come to visit, but as anyone I knows can attest, I’m starting to get a little homesick for Oklahoma. I miss being able to spend time with my family and friends on a daily basis, and the stress of traveling for holidays is starting to get to me. Only time will tell where the future will lead me, though.

Oh, I updated my developer weblog, dev.slaggle.com. Check it out if you are of the IT persuasion.