The Roving Fool

Pain in the Ass

February 7, 2021 by Nic

Last couple of days have been busy, hence my absence. Work is a pain as always, new management is on a change spree. His reasoning is we have a bunch of new hires on the way and he wants to ensure the existing team is able to be self-sufficient. Which makes sense, don’t get me wrong, but I think he’s going about it the wrong way. However, it isn’t my paygrade to argue with him on it. I get paid good money for what I do, but not enough to argue with a new manager on how to run the department. I simply follow direction and clock out. I get paid all the same.

I believe I’ve discussed this in a previous blog post, but I do not remember. I am a freelancer in my spare time because I can, I don’t exactly need the money but I do it anyway. A man by the name of Homer (not his real name.) hired me sometime last year to transcribe his textbook for him. There’s a long story behind that, but it needed to be done. After a few months of transcribing, formatting, and potentially developing carpal tunnel (the textbook was 500 pages long, over 100,000 words if I remember correctly). He recently reached out to me in January requesting my services again. He had a very popular blog in the early 00’s, but it was no longer online. So, he asked if I was able to retrieve all of the old blog posts so they can be posted on his new site.

I have never had such a headache in my life. I have spent the last week on the retrieval and it’s been a blast. The Wayback Machine had archived some of it, but only had two months worth of blog posts and nothing else. This is common as the Wayback Machine doesn’t do deep archives. Bless Homer’s friend, Flanders (also not his real name. Get the pattern?), had an archived XML file from 2010. This made me, and Homer, extremely happy. Then I opened it up. The old XML code was a jumbled mess. After a week, I’ve got her figured out. The next few weeks will be fun as I manually go through everything.

Fun times.

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