I hope my friends are all having a decent start to 2011. I would say that I am, but I guess I can't report that a whole lot changed as a result of the Earth returning to the same orbital position [relative to the Sun] that it was at 365 revolutions ago.
Work has returned to a semi-steady pace, hovering around 4,000 orders a day. In spite of all the talk of being light on work, most everyone is working the standard eight hour day (or reasonably close). Of course, as is customary around the beginning of the year, the company is making sweeping reforms leaving many of us in the dark as to what the rules are on various subjects at any given moment...
For instance, on Thursday we were informed of a new policy regarding paid time off (vacation/sick time). In fact, we no longer have specific “vacation” or “sick” time, but it is all simply called PTO and we can use it for whatever reason we want. Of course, they haven't told us what attendance penalties we will be subject to for unscheduled call-offs, but they have said that that policy is changing too – We have been told to expect a new Employee Handbook in the first couple weeks of the year. I guess no one else seems to think it is terribly odd that these policies weren't all approved at the same time, but I don't see the logic in having a policy on paid time off while having no policy (or one that doesn't apply) on attendance...
At least I can take some satisfaction in the fact that on Monday I was asked to operate the turret truck for the first time in nearly six months – and that I actually remember how to do it. Was a nice change in the routine.
In other news, last week I posted about the NERF guns we have been playing with since Christmas. I left out the fact that I'm starting to see some improvement in my Civilization V game, especially since I have broken down and installed it through Steam, the only legitimate way to properly patch/update the game. Aside from my frustration with that, the patching seemed to help [a little] with my system resource problems, but the game still occasionally crashes in the end-game. I believe this has more to do with my graphics adapter than system memory, but until I get a new PC I think I'm kinda stuck with what I have.
You see, I have one of these “thin” towers, and very few graphics cards even fit in the thing. The one I have is not properly installed, actually, as a result of it being too tall, but it works. Further, the card pretty much maxes out the capacity on the power supply, and nearly everything else is even more power hungry. Lets just say that I'll spend the money on a new PC before I'll replace the graphics card [again] AND the power supply.
But I digress... as for Civ V, I've gotten to the point where I'm playing on Warlord level consistently and winning about half the time – and even managed a culture victory in my latest game. While the culture victory doesn't sound terribly difficult, it does seem quite taxing to keep the other civs from killing you while you build up culture for 400 turns. I did have the good fortune to have an abundance of gems to trade – I think that helped, but I have to wonder how this would have gone down on a higher difficulty level.
Alright... I've rambled on long enough for today I suppose.
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