I finally did my laundry last night. That is, almost everything I brought. I also bought some more pants at Sears. Sigh. I'm just not really a 32" waist anymore. 34" does the trick, though. I'll probably have to buy some new shoes while I'm back in Marlborough.
While I was doing my laundry, I met some friendly neighbors named Suzanne and Emily. Suzanne is working on her PhD in Ecology at the University of Houston. She studies ants. She was kind enough to offer me a tag-along opportunity to go to Walmart or Target some time. I can't find everything I need at the supermarket or Sears. If all I want to do is food shopping and some light housewares or household appliances, then I can do it all on foot. If not, then I'm dependent on other people for transportation right now. I'm just not ready to get a car at this time, so I'll have to beg for favors.
It took me three hot hours and $5 in quarters to do my laundry. I started later than I had planned, so by the time I was done, it was about midnight. Then I just took a cold shower and went to bed.
I don't have much to do at work this week. I did the first pass of all the easy things I knew about, and now the next step is into the big tangle of historical moving parts. I can always analyze things, trying to figure out what they do, but it is not very efficient way to prepare myself to do anything. I'd rather just set to work on a project with a well-defined goal. This "review" of code and scripts is very slow when there is no specific analysis to apply to what I'm looking at. We're going to have a conference call tomorrow about what our next immediate goals are. Meantime, I'll just pester with the tools I've built already and try to be helpful with whatever comes up.
I gave up caffeine over the weekend, since I was getting no pep for more than 10-15 mins. from it. Time to back off for a while, and recover from over-caffeination over the last month. I need to finally have a nice collapse from all the changes over the past month.
I bought a cheap guitar over the weekend, which is a great relief. I finished reading the book I've been chewing on lately, and now I don't have any regular reading material. Since I have cut back severely on going out to eat, and there is no Internet at my apartment, boredom can be an issue. Now I can play guitar, which can be either goal-oriented (composing) or not (playing old stuff or noodling), as my mood dictates.
I'm waiting for my first pay check to go through before I buy anything really expensive, like a new computer. The amount of time it takes to get paid has me going nuts. Yes, it's on the way, over the next few days, but I want to normalize my credit cards and bank accounts NOW. Every time I think of the money situation, I get a little panicked, since I've had to make so many painful adjustments this year. I'm desperate to undo all those adjustments, because they are costing me that much more money.
I'm flying back to MA on Wednesday night. I'm looking forward to being back home as a gainfully employed "head of a household", rather than an unemployed one. I'll probably be a bit more relaxed. I'll be flying back on Sunday night, mostly due to bad flight times being the only ones available on Priceline. It makes it easier to make sure I catch my flight, rather than trying to make a 7 AM flight on Monday morning. It's not so fun trying to wake up and make sure you have everything in order when you are basically asleep.
I'll have to line up some more reading material for myself when I'm back. This "exile" from the comforts of home is really a great chance to read and write, which I've been trying to do for a long time, without much success. It's just hard to write unless you have all your material in front of you, or unless you make the time for it regularly.
I've started to get a routine down that is better timed to my normal day now. I figured out that the morning bus I take comes at about 8:15, and it gets me to work at about 8:30. Not bad at all. The evening busses are still a bit of a mystery, but I'll figure that out too.
Not that I have lots to do when I get home. I have succeeded in making myself dinner two nights in a row. After my last big shopping trip, I had bought a frying pan and a small pot. So I've made myself a hamburger and some salad, and last night I also made some brown rice, which I'll have plenty of leftovers from. Now I just need a salad bowl.
I also got some of those new cheap plastic containers for lunch, whenever I get around to remembering it. It is still kind of odd for me to bring lunch to work. It isn't just because I've never done it in the past, but also because it interrupts the routine of walking away from whatever I'm doing to eat lunch.
I feel like I'm still working while I sit at my desk, eating lunch. The idea of taking an entire hour off while I sit here seems impossible. Maybe a half hour, but how long does it take to eat a sandwich? I guess I might have to take my packed lunch outside to really feel like I'm "on lunch break."
Things at work are starting to heat up a bit. One of the big managers hosted a "town hall" meeting (otherwise known as a big conference call). Lots of people dialed in. I only wish that some people had already learned the etiquette of MUTING THEIR PHONES. Someone was futzing with their phone, constantly creating that crackle and slipping noise as they held the phone. I'm sure that the amplification of the different phones is very different, some calling in from the UK, but by the end of it I could barely think straight for a while, after constantly trying to hear the speaker's voice in amongst all the incidental noise.
I'm finally starting to get a feel for the scope of the work that is being planned here at JPMC. It looks like there is as much emphasis on improving process as there is actual development work itself. This is good, because it allows me to see the key issues involved in an organization as it tries to move into better process. I find the metrics they use to indicate progress rather interesting. Currently, they include stuff like minutes of system downtime, and more typical progress of projects according to their specifications, development, testing, and eventual demise. There are at least 3 systems that are scheduled for "retirement".
I've been starting to use some of the new tools to document parts of our new team's responsibilities and process, and it looks like it's going to be pretty good so far. The new system we have will also deliver notifications of new documentation as new items to an RSS news aggregator (MikeW - interesting, no? We're using phpWiki).
Anyone interested in news aggregators, just email me. It's a nice way to be informed instead of using just web sites.
After I got home from Borders yesterday, I had a nice talk with my parents. Apparently Paul (oldest brother) has been having technical issues to the ones I am having at work. Ah, that is the life of the "technical craftsman". We all come to know about a series of problems that are the result of poor planning and poor communication. My dad and I discussed some of the details of the so-called "Agile Development" process. It is like a breath of fresh of air to those that have experienced the "Big Lie" - otherwise known as the "Waterfall Process". Those who follow the waterfall process do design, development, and testing in such a way that time and cost overruns are almost inevitable. Agile development is at least more realistic, and helps everyone converge on something that either fails quickly or meets the business users' needs quite well. I might post some links eventually that can help inform those interested more completely.
It looks like the stress of everything that I've been doing over the past three weeks has finally come down to the physical level. The first week I was in Houston, I did quite a bit of walking, but I didn't get particularly exhausted, or even sore. Today I am really feeling it, though. I went on a fairly long walk yesterday. While walking, I got a terrific cramp in my right calf, and suddenly felt very tired. Not sleepy, mind you, just exhausted. I had a huge dinner and walked back home very slowly. I'm at borders right now.
I'm also taking some other things into account the past few days, like how I haven't seen large numbers of people all at once for the last 4 1/2 years much at all. Working at Portalvision (my previous Internet startup job), I rarely went into Manhattan. Living in Marlborough, I went to a few networking meetings, but that was maybe only as manyh as 50 people. When I go to the Houston Center to eat lunch while at work, I see the milling hundreds, more like going out to lunch in midtown Manhattan. It does have a strange disorienting effect on me.
This is striking me as rather odd, since I used to live in Manhattan and see large numbers of people regularly. I guess you find out how you react in situations by getting dumped in feet first to them. ;-)
This week felt like about a month long. I'm getting comfortable with the new apartment, getting comfortable with the work environment, taking care of my day-to-day. Now I just need to get in the habit of shopping regularly and bringing in my own lunch. I'm picking up my futon today. Michael is helping me with his truck. It will make me feel much more homey. I think my laptop power supply may arrive today too.
We're finally getting more of a "team" feel now. The people in Houston, New York, and London are starting to do things together and coordinating. We're even setting up a Wiki (my apologies to the uninitiated) for the team, which will help us with sharing documentation and ideas. I sent a summary of my efforts so far to my manager, in the spirit of a weekly "what I did and what I'll do" report. It feels good to see some real accomplishments this early in the project.
I hope that I can get the ball rolling on a broadband connection this weekend. And I also need to buy sheets and blanket(s), pillows and cases, and a desk or table for the living room.
I was working on my project today, trying to solve a small mystery. I was going merrily along, and what happens? I accidentally deleted all the code I've been working on for the last few days. The reason why it happened is due to a "misunderstanding" about the commands to make the working program from the code. One command, "clean", is supposed to remove the results of the build, leaving only the code to be built again from scratch. Those "names" bit me again, and it started removing *everything*, but fortunately failed before it could erradicate everything I had done.
I almost had another meltdown, but I realized that I could get most of it back by reverse-engineering it from a dump of the code I already compiled. I've gotten most of it back now, but it is downright embarassing. See what happens when you don't backup your work in a safe place before you start "tinkering"? I should just know better, that is the problem. At least I remember what I did yesterday because it was very recent.
It is just hard to follow through all the way to recover everything when you hear yourself saying "if only I had just..." It was just unexpected, which why it was rather unnerving.
<Sigh>.
Back for more where that came from.
Communications can be so hard when you want them to be so simple. I was asking for help, and my victim was earnestly going about doing just that, but in the process decided I needed to exit a live edit session, losing some of my latest changes. Fortunately, not much was lost, but sadly, it made me blow my cool. Then we got involved in a convoluted discussion of just about everything except the precise thing I was asking about. It was a bit rough on my nerves. I'll recover, but it made me see how hard it sometimes can be to explain what you want to know when nobody thinks about the subject the same way.
Otherwise, I've made some good progress on my current project. I found ways to put off the need for the answer to my original question, and I'm almost ready to actually find out myself anyhow.
For those of you who don't know this, programming is made up of thousands of almost arbitrary sequences of letters and numbers, known as names. If you don't understand what a name refers to, or what general relevance it has, it is often nigh impossible to get a straight answer to "what does this name mean?"
I'll spare you all the details, because those who know will be nodding and those who don't will be thinking "hmmm...rather existential."
All you Holy Grail fans will probably have a similar question cross your minds.
p.s. I'll be transcribing all those old entries from paper soon! Really, I promise!
Making progress on several fronts. I finally started to overcome the environment on my first project at work, and got an adminitrator to set up a place for my team to drop web pages. I haven't gotten into writing much documentation about anything, but that will change shortly. I finally have to gut my example code and do a real re-write the application I'm writing. I almost have all the examples I need to put all these utterly undocumented applications and libraries together in a totally new way. The infrastructure is all wrapped up in these "convenience" libraries that don't explain how anything is really done, particularly when writing applications that test the performance of the infrastructure.
I bought a futon and a frame for it today. I'll be able to pick it up Thursday. The air mattress that Michael lent me is fine, but it has a slow leak that makes it mushy by morning. I'll be happy on a futon again. The frame is also a couch, so I'll be able to lounge a bit when I feel like it.
I left the dang power supply for my laptop at the Waldorf last Saturday, so I can't even play FreeCell, since the battery is long dead and won't even charge anymore.
I just got back from shopping at Sears. I bought bath towels, a bath rug, and a shower curtain & hooks. I then took a much-awaited shower. I guess something got mixed up with Michael. He said that he'd drop off a folding chair this morning, but he never showed up. He was going someplace with his wife and grandson today; I guess he ran out of time and had to hit the road. I can bear to wait another day for a chair.
I spent most of the day reading until I went off to Sears. It's about a half mile from my apartment, so I am keeping up my walking exercise, which I also need desperately. I feel so fat and tired compared to when I moved to Marlborough. I was working like a demon to clear out my house in New York, and then all over again to move my stuff into the house in Marlborough. The job search slowly demotivated me to do a whole lot of heavy lifting and get incidental exercise. This winter was also light on snow, so I didn't get much shovelling exercise. I got only one or two days of yardwork in before I flew out to Houston.
I might just need to give Helen and Ian a digital camera so they can email me pictures of stuff around the house I need to see.
[Later] Michael and I apparently missed each other by just a minute this morning. He just dropped off the chairs, and they are just what I need. Whew. His generosity has been so timely. I just finished reading a book that I got for my birthday. It was nice to be finally reading something besides non-fiction. I talked to my mom yesterday; she got the flowers we sent and was happy. :-)
Now I'm completely trashed. But rest is in sight. My friend here in Houston, Michael, was a real life-saver. He was the one who found the apartment in the first place and recommended it to me. Now I'm in place at the apartment. I got back from NYC about 1:30 this afternoon. I caught a bus, trasferred in downtown, and got to the apartment office 4-4:30. I signed the lease and got my key, and dropped my bags. Then I want on my first shopping trip, getting paper products and some silver and disposable cups, and stuff for sandwiches. Then i went out for dinner at a local spot call "Cafe Artiste", which seemed full of students. It has an Internet hot spot, so everyone had laptops. Sadly, they permit smoking inside the place. Too bad. I sat ouside and had chicken fajitas. Then I got back to the apartment, and Michael came over lend me an inflatable mattress and some sheets, blankets, towels, and pillows. So I won't have to sleep on the floor tonight! Yahoo! Tomorrow he'll drop me off a folding chair. There is a built-in desk in the bedroom, so I already have that; having a chair will make the whole thing look pretty good. I'm still going to look for a futon, and Michael tells me that a futon store is pretty close. Tomorrow I'll down to Sears and see if I can buy some towels, a shower curtain, and a few other domestic things. I can't believe that I have tomorrow "off". I'll probably have to wait until I can get to the Internet at work to really start researching DSL vs. Cable for the apartment.
I'm sitting down here in one of the several patios in the apartment complex. There is a bench and a table and it is fairly quiet. There are palm trees and some ornamental bushes and it is very nice here. I just might start to relax soon.
Ok, now I'm really tired. Last night I got together with my manager Mark and lots of folks from the New York "Plan" and "Operate" teams. Good to meet a bunch of them and at least have a bit of name-face recognition. I also ate, for some unknown reason, some bread that had nuts in it at dinner. The discomfort came on pretty strong, but when I took a hit of primatene inhaler I carry, it all levelled off pretty quickly. I guess the adrenaline was just the thing to dampen the reaction. Now my digestion is still feeling a little complicated.
[Later] I'm on the train to Mount Kisco to visit Jeanie. It will be odd to again be a tourist in a place that I'm very familiar with. We had a video conference this morning about development process from London. I'm starting to envision the daily process I'll have in Houston. We'll be trying to move to what is called an "agile" process, which which manages the more troublesome aspects of software development in a much better way that is typical. It doesn't solve everything, but it does improve the way people on different teams with different skill sets share both information and best practices over the life of the project. It will be challenge to engage people on the business side of things so that they have a vested interest in using this process to enhance the way development solves their business problems and enhances the business process.
I'll have to wrap up the evening relatively early tonight, so I can catch my flight out to Houston at 10:30am tomorrow. Im checking out aroung 7:30am, then Sethu and I will go catch breakfast on the way. I'm starting to gear up for setting up my first trip back to MA. Now that I know where I'll be living, I can settle in a bit more and start administratin things again. i have such a pile of just to take care of for the apartment, like a bed, desk, chair, linens and blankets, etc., etc.
I am so tired today. I even went to bed early and slept straight through. Maybe the exercise I got last week and this week has caught up with me. I'll try to go tho the Met tonight, assuming that Thursday is the late night. Time for a quick trip to the temple of Dendur, and the India/Tibet halls.
[ Later] Darn! The late night is Friday, not today! I'm meeting a friend up in Westchester tomorrow night, so the Met will have to wait.
Happy Cinco de Mayo! Last night I met up with Mike at Grand Central. They really have modernized and revived the place immensely. So we went out to eat near Union Square and went into Barnes and Noble to look up some books we were recommending to each other. It was good to catch up with each other. He's been living in CT for less than a year, since he had to leave Brooklyn after running out of cash while on his own job search. He is thinking about selling his computer programming services on eBay, and he's been writing up various kinds of price schedules and deliverables structures. Sounds like he's angling towards something very entrepeneurial. If the advertisement works on eBay, it could actually be a way to get work. We are both on a business networking site called Ryze. It is a bit complicated using a business network to try to get work, since you are talking to both potential allies and potential competitors. The motivation to be on eBay may turn things enough to get a more earnest response.
[ Later ] I just got back from lunch, a Sethu and I did a quick spin around Rockafeller Center. I showed him Atlas, Prometheus, and a few places that nice artwork and good architecture.
[ Later ] I had a little allergy incident, so crashed a little early.
I got into the hotel at about 8 pm. Not a bad flight, except for the guy with the mammoth elbow next to me, and the shrieking, bouncing child in front of me. I popped on my trusty headphones and listened to the canned music, which wasn't too bad. I also wrote a whole bunch of stuff that I may post eventually.
I've been reading a bunch of stuff about how the brain works and how emotion and intellect interact in a few books lately. Very interesting stuff. I'll post a bibliography some time. Particularly interesting stuff about how a sense of "self" emerges from the basic biological survival matrix.
The Waldorf is indeed very nice. I was sitting in the lobby after my team member (Sethu) and I had dinner, and writing a bit more. As I sit there, Val Kilmer strolls through. Well, it is New York, and a posh hotel, so what should I expect. That is what happens, because that is where such people tend to stay when in town.
I figured out that I must have walked about 5+ miles yesterday, so today is when I am feeling it. Tomorrow I expect to be good and sore. I needed the exercise, and I will not be complaining about it, since it actually is the "good" kind of sore.
I'm ready to pack it all up again. Nothing complicated, really.
I just have to pull my stuff out of drawers and the closet.
I went on a long walk today. I had lunch at a nice italian
place, and then walked from there to my new apartment
just to see what was in the neighborhood. I ate dinner
at a sorta low-end mexican take-out place that turned out
to be pretty good anyhow. I walked back to the hotel on
a street that is between the streets the bus lines I've
taken so far run on. I found a Borders that is mercifully
not too close to my new apartment. I found a grocery
store that is quite close, which is a relief.
Now I just have to find a place to get some simple
furniture and get a futon to sleep on.
I'll be staying at the Waldorf while I'm in Manhattan,
which is nothing to moan about.
My friend Mike will be coming down perhaps on
Tuesday to visit. We'll come up with something
to do in town. Thursday is late night at the Met,
if I remember correctly.
Tomorrow I'm going to fly out to New York, which
will be interesting enough. I finally got an internet
connection worked out here, just dial-up of course.
I'll be hopping on the local bus, switching in downtown,
and ending up on the airport express to Bush International.
I met with my manager, Mark, yesterday. We went out to
lunch and had a good chat about what we are going to be
doing and how he wants to go about it. I am just stunned
how much my ideas about this are lined up with his.
This is, of course, a good thing. Yesterday was an exercise
in frustration over a technical matter, and I'll be working to
clean our work and build environment up a bit. These are as
usual new details for me, but I'm coming up to speed fairly
quickly. I was given an initial assignment to create a testing
application, just to acquaint me with the systems.
It is raining very heavily today and was last night. Lots of
lightning and thunder. I have to go get something to eat,
and it looks like the rain has abated for now.