Trees on the Beach, a Blog

Roughly 1 year, 1 month left. It's November 1, still very early in the morning.  Roughly five full months since my last post, and a lot has changed.  I transferred from my shitty old organization.  The new place is decent.  Low requirements, low reward.  But low reward is the standard for Kentucky state government, so this is actually a step up.  COVID means I'm still working from home.  That's something I never thought I'd see, even though I work in IT.  Something like this had to force Kentucky to allow IT employees to work from home.  Funny.  No idea when or if we're ever going back in the office.  At one time I thought we'd probably be back by now.  Now I'm thinking we won't be back this year, and maybe not next year.  I may be working from home when I retire around December 1, 2021. I've been making plans.  My passport is being renewed now.  I'm headed to Ecuador, probably in January, as an exploratory trip....

So tomorrow I put in my two-week notice for my current agency.  I work next week, which will be short due to the Labor Day holiday, and then the week after that I take my vacation. After 13 years, I will be leaving my current job.  I worked myself up into a management position and did a good job, I think.  I saved the agency money several times, implemented a couple of money-saving programs that are still used today.  I completed my master's degree at this institution.  Got a promotion here.  Introduced modern smartphones into the environment and did away with the old Blackberry devices.  I managed a massive upgrade of server technology, .NET Framework technology, and SQL Server.  I made a lot of friends and then saw some of them terminated, many moved on, and some are still stuck in what has become a terrible place to work.   I work in government.  An election, especially a party change, means everything changes for you on the ...

So after my blog post yesterday, I discovered some things.  Android Studio must be run with administrator rights.  That fixed the project creation issue. I am not Chip.  Just an fyi. So I found some sample code online and bam, Android Studio just mostly worked.  But after this little sample project, I feel deflated.  I went to work today and wrote a brief on Preservica, an archival storage system.  My day typically consists of nonsense like that.  We already have a great storage system that would cost nothing to use, but due to centralized IT and another agency charging us for the storage space, our system is "too expensive" to actually use. I go to these "CPMS meetings."  I spend at least 4 hours of my life every week in there pretending to pay attention, or sometimes not even pretending.  Sometimes I play with my phone.  I hate them with a passion. I get up and go to work every day.  Every morning I tell myself "I can'...

So I have a job possibility... it is very exciting stuff.  I could learn Flutter, Google's attempt at cross-platform mobile development.  It would be imperative that I finish my first project within the first year.  I've spent the last 1.5 hours or so fooling around with Android Studio, and the prior 2 hours messing with Visual Studio Code.  Both are IDEs that can be used to develop Flutter applications.   While it sounded exciting 6 hours ago, the reality seems to be a lot less fun.  I've got a command line window open, another with PowerShell, another window with the IDE, and various Chrome tabs open, where I am researching and trying to make this thing work.  Android Studio seems to be locked up while creating my first (empty!) Flutter project.  It's been sitting like this forever: What the hell is it doing?  Is an empty project that intensive to create? I'm concerned if I can't get a lousy "Hello World" project going, the...