Work-Shmerk

I took off yesterday (slept like crud, plus 16 vacations days burning a whole in my ... ok so I just wanted the day off). What did I do instead of go to work? Watched a TON of Bones ... probably my new favorite show, and worked on getting all of Em's and my financial and other important documents all scanned into the computer and the old ones shredded. I can say I am almost done and completely sick of the process. The "in theory" process of scanning all new stuff once ever week or so and shredding old stuff is great "in theory". In practice I am prone to fits of laziness which cancel out most good intentions.

All well, moving is a good motivator (now way I was packing up all that stuff and taking it with us).

Nothing is really new other than I was back at work today where I ran into several problems which thoroughly pissed me off at the time. Poorly written APIs may yet be the death of me. Other than that I am just sitting at home tonight, catching up on a lot of email, updating some profiles, scanning some documents and thinking about reading more of my current book. Which reminds me ... I really want to write about it, and my thoughts on some of its suggestions. So far I am really liking it and would definitely suggest it to anyone who wants to be better at the craft of programming and developing software. Most of the suggestions seem like common sense, but are more often than not the things I see myself wishing I had spent the time on in hindsite when new problems pop up. If anyone has or intends to read it, let me know.

Finally, I would like to post here my LinkedIn pofile link. Yes, I am a convert and yes as Emily puts it, its just like Facebook. I contend that its different on some small level and therefore my denial of ever being on Facebook or MySpace-esque sites still stands ... but all joking aside its a pretty cool site. I say that mainly b/c I have already reaped the benefits of it and have gotten back in touch with several ex-coworkers who left the company or work in other areas of the country. Check it out.

12 free contact cases, and a Mesh-tacular evening

Mesh - Last night Em and I had a wonderful dinner out at a local restaurant called Mesh. Its owners and head chefs are a couple of famous local chefs and restaurateurs. The place is fairly non-descript outside but very modern and chic inside. Both Em's and my first thoughts were that we weren't quite cool enough to be in here ... but we were ;). Great atmosphere, lively crowd but not too loud and great service. The prices were up there (its a very nice restaurant with equivalent prices) but luckily at our Sark Christmas party I won a $100 gift certificate so we ended up having by far the best $20-$30 meal ever! ;)

We started the meal with a couple drinks. Em had a delicious Mango Mojito Martini while I had my staple, a Manhattan. We thought about getting an appetizer but decided that we would save room for their famous deserts. While waiting for our entrees, we each received these little hor'dourve like things (the waiter had some fancy name for what they were) that were fancy spoons on a small plate with a shrimp salad-esque thing topped with small fried wantons on top and a something-oil. Mmm Mmm. Very Top-Chef.

For our entrees, Em had the Diver scallops (pan seared scallops set on top of spinach risotto and tomato bruele). I can only assume that Em loved them since there wasn't anything (even any sauce) left on the plate ;). For my dinner, Em forced me to go all out. The special of the night was Copper River Salmon pan seared over ribboned zucchini, squash and carrots, topped with a snow pea and artichoke garnish and a red currant and truffle vinaigrette. It was amazing! According to our waiter, and Google (here, and here) ... Copper River Salmon are supposed to be some of the best in the world and can only be caught and found a few weeks of the year. Well, it was by far the best Salmon I had ever had. Soooo good.

Finally, for desert Em and I split the chocolate Bailey's cheesecake cake. It was so rich ... no wonder it was voted "Best Restaurant Dessert" in America by USA today. :) The perfect way to end a great meal.

Dodgeball / Darts - Back to back dodgeball games yesterday. We lost the first and won the second but both were good games. My arm is actually ok this time which was a nice change. Darts on Thursday was the last for the season (and probably my last for a while). Unfortunately we ended up losing, but played well throughout. I actually had one of my more consistent matches ever. The real problem was the fact that we started late, our opponents seemingly constant smoke breaks and a lot of talking combined to make our match last till almost midnight. Getting up for the bus the next day was very hard.

Contact Cases / Free Cereal - The good folks over at DealHack.com provide an interesting RSS feed with their daily scoops on good deals from various online and brick and mortar stores. They also, occasionally give links to free offers of samples and the like. Two such links have produced a free box of Kashi brand cereal and 12 free contact lens cases along with the worlds smallest bottle of eye drops from Bausch & Lomb. Yep 12. What will I do with 12 cases? No idea, but I got that part of life covered for the next few years :)

First Unit Meeting - My new company had its first "Quarterly Unit Meeting" since the buyout and boy was it a meeting. Compared to our monthly unit meetings that used to have about 30-40 people ... this was 200+ in a huge banquet room. The meeting was very long, a mixup resulted in them not having enough food, the bar stayed open a bit too long and I ended up getting an award. The award was for a project I worked on (briefly, and did very little work on) at GE in the fall of last year. A coworker of mine was given it to give to me back in February time frame but kept forgetting to bring it to me until now. So, in front of 200+ people I was given the award (not just a piece of paper, but more of a plaque thing) for project I was barely on, from last November. It was fairly bizarre.

Training / Interviewing my replacement - Next week I will be working with my client and our sales team to figure out what all I have worked on since January, how I can transfer my knowledge to other people on the team, what that knowledge needs to be, and how I can help interview possible replacements from the client and Sogeti perspective. Should be interesting.

Big Updates - Big Changes - Big News

It has been a crazy couple weeks. Crazy.

I have been putting in a ton of hours at work trying to get all of my work done for the end of the sprint. The demo was today and I am happy to say that I got 98% of it all done and besides a few minor hiccups right before the demo and during (a last minute redeploy of one of our app's failed b/c the server's logs had filled the virtual HD and the files couldn't be extracted ;) ) everything went really well. All the business people and the really high ups were pleased and I heard that they are taking our team out to a Reds game in a few weeks as a thank you. :)

If there hasn't been enough stress, I also had a rather impromptu meeting last Thursday with a guy from security, my boss, my boss' boss, and his boss. My boss' first words were, "So, Ben, you understand this stuff better than I do and put together the document, why don't you explain it." Needless to say it was unexpected but luckily everything went ok and I knew my stuff.

Finally, to make it all just a bit more exciting ... I took off this past Friday so that Em and I could go back to St. Louis for the weekend. That meant putting in my weeks+ worth of work in 4 days which was a blast let me tell you! Oh, and on Friday, one of our sales staff met with my boss at the client to inform them that I would be transferring in July. Yep, its all official now. I have a 90% sure date in mid July as my end date for my current client. Granted, between now and them I have 2 development sprints worth of work to do, will need to help both the client and my company interview people to fill my position and then train the new person for the last few weeks before I leave. I am stoked. Everything is falling into place.

Why then, did we go back to the good old STL this past weekend? Well for many reasons. Firstly, it was Mother's day and we had some surprises lined up. Em had had the idea to get a new dishwasher for her mom for Mother's day a while back and after finding out that her bro/sis and grandparents wanted to chip in ... we decided to go forward with it. We ended up picking a great Maytag dishwasher for a really good price (Home Depot has WAY better prices on installation than the other major places, plus they had a perfectly timed applicances sale) and had it installed before she got home from work on Friday. We semi-surprised my mom in our coming into town and ended up taking her and my dad out to eat to her favorite restaurant which was super delicious as always.

We also came into town so that I could meet with the VP of the St. Louis office, get some information about the transfer, the climate of the STL office and their clients, etc. The meeting went really well. The VP seems like a great guy who has some good plans on how to grow the office and seemingly the constitution to bring them to fruition. The office (by personnel) is smaller than I was thinking, closer to what the Sark Cinci office was. The VP was especially interested in learning how Sark had done its college recruiting which could be a good opportunity for me. They are primarily a Java shop which is great (I was told most all clients in the area want Java work done, and they just can't find people fast enough). I was impressed with what I heard and he said they were happy to have me whenever I became available ... so that was sweet.

Finally, we were in town to look at apartments. We had done this on our last time out, and had found some decent places and a lot of good info, but nothing perfect yet. Our main problem was finding a good place that was a decent price but as close as possible to the areas of town where most large businesses are (ie our clients). After running around town Friday and Saturday, we actually ended up deciding on a place in a great location for a good price and with some real nice amenities. Its a lot closer to the areas of town where my clients will be than the other places, close to both our families, its actually a fair bit cheaper than our current place (way cheaper than what it was going up to), comes with ceiling fans in all the rooms, new appliances, washer/dryer in the unit, a nice balcony and a nice apt area. We found some other places that were bigger or cheaper but were way far out or a lot older. Very nice.

So yeah ... as of right now, Em will be moving back in the beginning of July and I will be following a few weeks later. Things are happening fast and its pretty crazy, but they are going how we wanted and that is great.

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Other than the above crazy happenings, Em and I have been trying to spend time together the best we can (lots of work, meetings, class, etc is hurting that), I am trying to find time to work out but its not happening, the Kroger that used to be right next to our apt complex is no longer and they are working 7 days a week (loudly) to get the new one setup, now that I am riding the bus I have lots more time to read so I have finished a book on JUnit testing and one on Hibernate. Next up is the Pragmatic Programmer (one I have always heard is a must read) and a few on design patterns and design issues. Other than that, just more work, darts Thursday, big unit meeting tomorrow, dodge ball this weekend and hopefully riding our bikes at some point.

....pics are from our Mother's day dinner,
flowers from my parent's house, the Kroger parking lot,
and a flower at the park a few weekend ago,
in no particular order, other pics can be seen here....

News

I have news, pics, etc ... just not the time to post it.
Its been a very busy couple weeks.
I will try and post and update tonight.

Crappy Day

Had a crappy day today. Basically it boils down to someone's fireable actions at my client. Yesterday, someone accidentally initiated a push from the Windows Management Server at work to a strange subset of the people in the various offices downtown. This push wasn't your normal patch, update, etc. Around 2pm a popup came up that said a new Operating System was going to be installed in 240 minutes and had only one choice (Install). Yep, OS. Obviously I didn't click OK and after a while a flood of emails were running around telling people not to and to just turn off their machines until tomorrow. I waited until I had finished what I was doing and pushed my code to CVS to turn it off and headed home.

When I got in today most machines on the floor had small OK post-it notes on them ... mine didn't. Instead mine was sitting at some pre-windows, post-bios screen saying an INF file was missing and to hit any key to continue. Pressing the any key meant a reboot and the same message.

So, I spent all of today without a computer at the client site, trying to justify my billing ~ $70 an hour. Let me tell you, as a software consultant, thats not easy nor fun. When I left today I believe I completed about an hour worth of work (thats being generous), my PC was still looking the same and I am not 8 hours more behind on my tasks for the sprint. Fun! Oh and I quickly remembered a number of things that weren't in CVS or backed up that I had on my PC, prob all gone ;)

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I had a longer post in mind, one that may have been more meaningful for people and may have actually elicited a few comments, but I am not in the mood now. So here are some other tid-bits from the past week in no real order:

• Sunday I grilled some great boneless rib-steaks, made Wane Beans and had sweet potatoes. It was really good.
• Saturday night we went to The Original Pancake House for dinner and I finally got a chance to get the Apple Pancake. We went to the one in West Chester b/c its open in the evenings. Previously I haven't gotten that pancake b/c its a special that takes 15-20 minutes to make and the place is normally WAY packed. Well it was worth the wait. It looked exactly like the picture, tasted more like a crazy baked bread pudding covered in apples and cinnamon sugar glaze and left me stuffed.
• A coworker turned me on to this SF.net project - TVshows. Its a great little Mac app that checks TV and torrent site RSS feeds and lets you select the shows you want to watch and it will automatically download the torrent when its available. Pretty nice and works well.
• This weekend Em and I cleaned a bit trying to get ready for pre-packing. We have TONS of stuff. :( We also turned in our 60 day notice to the apt. complex, so its official that we won't be living here in July :)
• I found a link to this Photo contest sometime last week. Hopefully I will find some tme to go through my pics and find one to submit. My guess is that the more "pro" people will win it easily but its pretty cool and I would LOVE one of those cameras!
• Today I rode the bus to work for the first time. With gas prices still going up, and the miles rolling by on our new car, I figured I would give it a shot. I was happy to find the bus clean, the people nice, the routes on time and pretty close to our apt. It will take about 10-15 minutes more to get downtown on the bus, but I don't have to pay for gas (~2 tanks a month), won't have to put the miles on the car (~600 a month) and can read or listen to podcasts instead of driving. I bought my monthly pass before coming home so thats what I will be doing for May.
  
• One thing I am going to miss when we move back to St. Louis is the smoking ban for public places that Ohio has (kinda, how its being enforced or the lack there-of is another whole post).
• I have a new set of goals for the spring/summer/fall months. My goals are to bike & hike at least 300 miles and work out at least 80 times between mid April and Mid October. Working out can including playing dodgball, broomball, biking, hiking, or just working out. So far I have 26 miles recorded and 5 workout-sessions. So I am on my way :) Wish me luck. Working on this past Saturday and biking the little Miami trail helped.

Thats it for now. I have some pics I want to put up from this past week and a map with our hiking and biking but that will have to wait till later. Em, as always, was kind enough to make dinner and its smelling good. Mmmm soup.