California Here I Come, car getting fixed

Its official. The first two weeks in December will be the beginning of my time on a new project for work which will take me to California off and on for the next few months.

Crazy

I will be part of an ongoing project to provide Agile mentoring and coaching to a large health care company's software development teams. I will be traveling back and forth between STL and the greater San Francisco Bay area for the next several months into the spring. Its going to be pretty crazy around here adapting to the traveling and a new kind of work that I haven't done before, but I am completely excited.

** I also have to commend my wife for being SUPER supportive of me taking on this project. I wouldn't be able to handle the travel let alone the stress if it wasn't for her :-) **

At the same time that I am very excited about the project, the work, California in the winter vs. St. Louis weather, the people, and the opportunity ... I have to admit I am a fair bit nervous. While I have worked on agile teams before (one consulting client doing a very simple version of Scrum and XP here at Asynchrony) and feel comfortable doing it on a daily basis ... this work is going to be something different. My purpose will be to work with one or more existing development teams, helping them identify areas where they are missing the mark when it comes to agile adoption and good development practices, and to guide them to better work practices, better communication, better productivity and better moral. This isn't something I have ever done officially before and its left me a fair bit anxious.

Luckily, I have 3 weeks to prepare. My last project is inbetween SOWs so we have been doing some maintenance and cleanup work which should leave me with time to study up on my agile processes, remember the differences between Scrum and XP, and talk things over with various people at work.

Wish me luck.

On the car front ... its currently being fixed. The estimate came back at > $4k which was actually lower than what I expected. It won't be fixed until the 19th, so, thanks to my rental coverage on my insurance, I have a rental for the next week or so. Initially they gave me a Kia Sorento, but it was very dirty so I returned it. Good and bad for me, the only thing they had to replace it with was a '07 Chrysler 300M. Its a very nice car, what with the leather and hugeness, but I would never buy one. I feel like I am driving a bus!

In regards to who was "officially" at fault ... thats in a holding pattern. I have given recorded statements to both mine and the other driver's insurance companies ... but since there were no witnesses we now have to wait for the police report to see who can blame who for the accident. Stupid, but what can you do. :-/

HIT!

On my way home tonight I got in an accident.

Well, it might be more appropriate to say that an accident got me.

OR, it might be more accurate to say that a college student ran a red light and smacked the front drivers side of my car with the back passenger side of his car.

yeah, that one is the best (and worst).

Don't worry, I appear to be as healthy and crazy a I always was ... but poor Sigmund the Sonata has seen better days. He is currently at the body shop associated with a local Hyundai dealer and I am waiting until tomorrow to hear from my insurance company and to contact theirs.

Fun stuff. And by "fun stuff", I mean Crappy Mc'Crappy (Koozism alert)

The longer you wait

The more you need to post, and the more you have to post, but the less you want to sit down and post. :-/ ;-)

Here is a long needed update going back to the beginning of October:

Josh's Wedding

From josh-wedding

Since most everyone who reads this was there, I will leave out the details and mainly say that Em and I both had a blast. Its always great seeing the old gang together and we will definitely need to find an excuse to do it again real soon. The wedding and reception were great (gotta appreciate all of the hard work Josh and Amanda did). Both Em and I were honored to be in the wedding and be able to celebrate with you guys. You guys are going to do well for eachother.

Regarding the decorating of Josh's car. I think, overall, it went over very well. However, it was over-engineered and under-delivered. I blame myself. Despite our best laid plans (much of which can be found here, and in numerous emails) as well as a random Yahoo Answers post by yours truly ... it didn't quite live up to what I had in my head. Still, as Josh agreed, we get points for using helium (thanks Kevin) and for being different than years past.

From josh-wedding

Oh and thanks to Kevin and Sarah for having us over to their new house and Chaz for driving us around.







Em's Cousin's Wedding

From stl

From stl

This wedding, while not nearly as fun for me, was a good time and by FAR the most over-the-top wedding I have ever been to. Being a family afair rather than a college roomate's lends itself a different dynamic, but they made up for it by far in extravagance.

The wedding took place at the St. Louis Cathedral Bascillica, the largest church in town which is insanely gorgeous. To go along with the beautifully huge church, the wedding party was equally huge and the music was excelent (violinist from the STL Symphony, pro singers, organ, harp).

From stl

The reception that followed that evening was at the StarLight room at the Chase Park Plaza overlooking downtown STL and Forest park. Cocktails and hore-devers were servered prior out on the balcony including a featured drink of the night (mojito) and monogramed napkins. Dinner was high-end (although I actually think I liked Josh's better food wise), great cake, some interesting toasts and a great live band (2 main singers, backup, real DJ, 1/2 guitarists and a drummer). All in all it was pretty crazy and a good time.








Apple Butter

Last weekend we made Apple Butter in our backyard as part of a continuing tradition in Em's family. You can read more about it and see pictures at my food blog.

From stl

From AppleButter2008

Semi-related ... Em and I went to Eckerts the other weekend to pick fresh apples (Fuji) and got ourselves two nice pumpkins from the field.

Jolie

From stl

Jolie is doing well. She was "sick" for a week or two in there but is fine once again. Since we had gotten her, she had developed a bad tendency to pull on our walks (still doing 3-ish miles a day) which we weren't helping. In an attempt to reduce this we considered buying a stronger "harness" collar for her so that she wouldn't hurt herself but on the great advice of one of her friends, didn't. She said that a harness would just allow her to pull harder without knowing it and suggested we get the Gentle Leader instead. Basically its a type of collar that fits a different way, moving the point of attachement to the front under the nose. This means that when she goes too far forward, her head is pulled around. While its not perfect it has made a HUGE difference and I would recommend one to everyone who is having a similar problem.

Attic Insulation

Our house inspector warned us that the insulation in our attic was a little light and that we might want to add some before winter. So, once the cold started to kick in I finally got around to calling a contractor Em's aunt recommended to get an estimate. After taking a look around he said that while he would love the work, that the cost of blowing in another 6" of insulation wouldn't be worth the amount of time it would take to recoup the costs. He said we were indeed a little low but that it would take 7-10 years to recoup the costs. So, we will wait it out and see if the heating is bad or not and then decide ... either way I really appreciated his honesty.

FYI ... his estimates (which I didn't compare to anyone else) were roughly $1k to blow 6" of cellulose covering an 1200 square foot attice given that we have joists 16" off center and a very low roof line (hard to move around in). Rough estimates done by myself at lowes suggested materials by themselves would cost $400 (30+ bags and free blower rental), plus I would need to borrow a ladder and get safety equipment ... AND there would be no telling if I could have blown it in consistently or how long it would have taken me.

Work

Work has been interesting. I finished my brief stint on a large government enterprise architecture project and have moved back to working on a .Net web application with one of my friends.

Last week we had a production push to move ~3 months of work to the live site which resulted in a very long night. We were set to start at 10:30 pm but didn't until closer to 11:30 b/c the other guy's car was over heating on the way downtown. The actual push took a couple hours b/c of a couple stupid issues that were eventually resolved and then the same coworker had car trouble leaving (borrowed car with what turned out to be a bad battery). Nothing to get upshook about, but it resulted in me not getting home until around 2:30. On a bright note, Jolie sounds like one huge pissed off dog at 2am when you wake her up by coming in the front door. Good Dog!

On an interesting and very cool note ... there is a good chance I will be traveling a good amount for work in the next few months. Our company is going to be starting a new phase of a project with a large health care company in California doing Agile mentoring and coaching. Myself and one other guy are the leading candidates for the last spot on the team. It would be 2 weeks a month ~35 minutes outside San Fransico for 6 months (through the begining of the summer). I would be coaching one or more teams, working with their PMs and Scrum Masters to support their agile adoption, provide guidance, help to identify problem areas and work with their developers to do better agile and solid OO work on a dialy basis without feeling the need to have numerous meetings for every little task.

To be honest, I am a fair bit anxious about the idea of being put into such a "coaching" role and of the large amounts of travel .. but I am lucky enough to have a wife who is nothing but supportive and am super excited about the opportunity.

To go along with my normal work, I also gave a Lunch-n-Learn talk a while back on a Ruby GUI tookit called Shoes and have posted a few articles on my tech blog about the LnL, some misc scripts that helped me at work, user acceptance testing with Selenium, and a new side project of mine (List-It).

Thats all for now....