no updates for many moons

No updates. Been mostly venting on twitter / facebook recently.

In horrible movie reviews:

• Tucker & Dale vs. Evil : OMG. Great, funny, gory, awesome.
• Battle: Las Angeles  : WTF. This movie felt like it was 6 hours long. Meh.

TV reviews:

• Downton Abbey:  Where is the queue for the freaky threeway with Lady Sybil and Mr. Bates?
• The League : Best. Comedy. On. TV.
• Archer: Pretty freakin' great.

Books reviews:

• Books? What are books? 
• Also, how do I reconcile my desire for a Kindle with the fact that I've read ... 2 books this year?

Podcasts reviews:

• My Brother, My Brother And Me: I LOVE THE BROTHERS MCELROY SOOOO MUCH. Seriously. It may be unhealthy. Where should I turn for help?

movies

Stayed up waaaay too late last night watching movies...

• Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach. Bizarre. Funny. If you enjoy Sean William Scott acting goofy, you might like this movie.
• Boondock Saints. Meh. Not sure if I can say I watched this since really I fast-forwarded through most of it... especially parts with Willem Dafoe chewing up the scenery.
• No Country For Old Men. Tense. Exciting. Good
• The Reader. Good thing I saved this feel-good hit for last... OMG. Downer. But very good.

won't you please help... provide a MILF-related punchline

We got the following notice at work today

Subject: Mountain Lion Warning

The following warning has been issued for the Research Park area:

Building management has recently noticed unusual wildlife activities around the Williams Building property. Specifically several mountain lions have been sighted in and around the parking deck. Building management is working with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources with regard to this activity however we want to make you aware of the following guidelines from Wildlife Resources should you encounter a mountain lion when entering or leaving the facility:

• Do not panic. Most lions will try to avoid confrontation.
• Raise your arms to make yourself appear as large as possible. Lions prefer smaller prey.
• Slowly back away. Never run and never turn your back toward the cougar. Yell at the lion and wave your arms as you back away.
• Do not make direct eye contact. Lions perceive eye contact as aggressive behavior.
• If you are attacked, fight back. Try to prevent the lion from getting behind you.
  

Please let us know if you notice any unusual wildlife activity in & around our parking lot.

dust of dreams

Feels like I've spent the last 2 months catching up on all the plot threads by reading the last handful of books in the Malazan series, all in preparation for book 9.

Finished said book #9 last night. Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson last night. Very good. A few huge cliff hangers for the final book. And a very exciting ending.

It's going to be a long wait for the next book.

quit stealing my bits

The new job is going well. Working closely with a couple other developers to design and implement some functionality for our new system.

The bad part is... we all have very similar personalities and development styles. All of us are tending to get caught up in the 'big picture' and losing sight of the functionality we need to implement in the near-term. Looooooong conversations about the N number of ways we could do X, Y, or Z.

We need the big picture view to plan the total functionality we need, and to schedule the resources we'll need. But, none of us are being very decisive about limiting the options we have to choose from.

Scarily, I'm probably the least introverted of us -- and, since I'm the 'new guy' I have fewer responsibilities -- so I'm the one writing documents, drawing diagrams, and giving presentations.

In many good ways, I've had to leave my comfort zone. But, today in particular it became clear I'm going to have to be the one to keep us on task and moving forward.

Stupid shoes on other feets.

argh

I was playing around with some python code a couple months ago. Nothing that special, just a few hours work figuring out how to parse some text files. Nothing too elaborate, but I remember being particularly pleased with one or two pieces of it.

Finally getting back to it tonight and it's nowhere to be found... I've found tons of unrelated crap I saved off and will never use again. The time I'm not anal about putting some experiments into version control is also the time I deleted it without realizing it.

I think it must have also been when I was fiddling with eclipse+pydev+IronPython, and I hadn't bothered to change the project's path from the default place in the default Eclipse workspace. Normally I always change one or both of those...

Sometime in the last few weeks I must have done my usual iteration of "eclipse is acting a little wonky, time to delete it and re-install it and all my usual plugins. Oh, and this workspace directory I never use."

Argh.

I also distinctly remember thinking that I should make a blog post of some of the code. Didn't happen.

Double argh.

fall 2009 status

• dog still good. Other than chomping on the neighbor's cat.
• new job still good. Fixed a long-outstanding bug in the code. Waiting to get more bugs to work on, and in the meantime working on a new tool to help ease our transition from ClearCase to Subversion. Getting to play in python most of the day, good times.
• Best book I've read lately: Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman.
• Best audiobook I've listened to lately: How to Succeed in Evil, by Patrick McLean

Odd that both the book and the audiobook are superhero satire/homage.

Currently reading: Matter, by Iain M. Banks

further adventures in wasting time

The 2 days I'd never get back eventually turned into around 4-5 days total of developing, creating unit tests, system testing, and correcting various bugs the tests didn't find.

And now 1 more day. Backing the changes out.

Released ~2 weeks ago; customers and internal support are finally installing the new version and KABOOM! Unknown references in the C Runtime library.

Superfantastic news! Turns out our development / production testing environment isn't at the same HP-UX patch level as most customers' systems. Thanks, Oracle 11g! Thanks, budget constraints that made someone decide they had to stick it on the same server we use for support!

'tis the season

For zombies. Sweet, sweet zombies.


http://iamnotinfected.com/

and

http://survivetheoutbreak.com/

great ringtone, or greatest ringtone?

don't gamble

I should learn not to bet for or against the weather.

I'd let the leaves in the yard get away from me -- decided to take a few days off leaf duty until the maples dropped more of their leaves.

I wasn't able to do the raking Saturday, due to a bunch of errands that couldn't wait till Sunday. Decided the weekend was a waste raking-wise due to the predicted weekend rain.

Woke up Sunday to see that it hadn't rained. Decided I didn't want to get started on the leaves since the clouds looked ominous, and instead started on the rain gutters. Ick. No rain by the time I'd finished, and I was filthy anyway, so I started in on the leaves. Promised myself I'd go until the rain started.

No rain. For the four hours it took me to get the leaves off the front and side yard. Lame. Stupid rain, you were supposed to give me an excuse to go inside and watch bad TV.

16 new bags o' leaves to add to the 10+ from previous weekends. Still have the backyard to do, and about a quarter of the leaves from the maples in the front yard.

worst. impression. ever.

Dear Autoflush Toilet,

You ain't foolin' me! You're not a bidet!

Why does your sensor think my back is transparent?

You're horrible.

Love,
Steve



P.S. Now that you're thinking about me pooping, I'd like to point out that I deftly avoided use of any onomatopoeia.

P.P.S. Mostly because I couldn't connect the dots between this post and the punchline using the consignment store named "Grunts & Postures" near the first apartments of my wife and I.

P.P.P.S. First one to comment with a "full of shit" joke gets 15 demerits.

P.P.P.P.S. Yes, despite the demerits, it is still worth it.

what can make me watch an infomercial?

MR T

ready. set. go?

I'm coming to the realization that I was so focused on leaving the previous employer that I didn't think critically enough before accepting the offer at current employer. Beyond the many dead horses I've already beaten, there were plenty of hints to which I should have paid attention prior to accepting the offer.

More mixed feelings today after a meeting discussing our project's migration from usage under the current application framework to its replacement over the next 2-3 years. Felt good that our hard work to stabilize the crumbling infrastructure is recognized by the business people. Felt worse when I realized that 2+ years into a multi-million dollar project, they're finally discussing the actual mechanics and workflow of how both systems are going to be developed and maintained together. "Oh yeah... we want to release in October. We need to figure that out."

Nearly all the positives about the new job have been snuffed out. There is the potential for it to get better, but it's hard to hold on to the glimmer of hope. Other than feeling like I'm giving up, it's getting harder to find reasons to stay.

Friends at 4 different employers are looking for people... positions with varying levels of awesomeness. Or, I could strike out on my own and find something different.

But, what do I want? That's the million dollar question.

Someplace more engineer-y than my most recent work in content publishing or healthcare. Some of the work was great and challenging... other parts have been mind-numbing or downright eeeeeeeeviiiiiil. Not that the previous work in simulation was fluffy kittens.

Someplace that views R&D as a vital part of their business plan, rather than whining by engineers for 'fun' work. Maintenance can be fun -- debugging an issue, finding the cause of the crazy and esoteric problems is like unlocking a puzzle and can be very rewarding. But, it's not something that you look forward to doing as your sole activity for the next 3+ years.

Something more back-end rather than UI or web-applications. I'm pretty sure that new fangled interwebernet thing will never work. It's all TUBES! TUBES I TELLS YA!

It'd also be nice to land someplace where I could use Python for more than just throw-away utilities, and not be viewed as a rabble-rouser.

pink eye!

Liz's brother's family visited us for a couple days while they were in town for a funeral. Bart turned us on to one of our new favorite shows, Corner Gas.

Good silly fun. Needs more explosions.

waaaaaah?

I was feeling good this morning. Ran the regression suite overnight through Purify, and it had found some problems. Uninitialized memory references. Who would have thought that hundreds of 5-50 field structs in a 300 kloc code base with no standard initialization routines would have this problem. Bizarre.

So far I've resisted the urge to go fix all the potential instances of the problems, and only fixed the problems exposed by the regression suite. Maybe for next month's release.

Then I spent about 4 hours in conference calls. At about the third hour in I realize the crick in my neck that I'd blamed on sleeping oddly was more in fact from the previous day's conference calls. Jeff helpfully points out over IM, "Yes, this meeting is a pain in the neck."

Then I finally get a response from technical support on 2 of my tickets, after they'd spent ~3 weeks in a black hole.
"Due to ... blahblahlbha... we cannot install open source applications on any servers."

The offending applications? Zip. Unzip. GNU Make.

I can't decide to laugh or cry. The HP-UX server in question already has the GCC toolchain, GNU tar, ant, CVS, CruiseControl and the list goes on. Not to mention widespread use of Hibernate, Spring, ehcache, and tons of Apache and Jakarta projects throughout our Java and .Net products. WTF?

I've learned my lesson. Attempts at following procedure will only be made as a last resort. I need anti-action-item-Wonder-Woman-bracelets to deflect IT-related action items onto my coworkers.

Speaking of playing dress up...

I have to keep reminding myself I have better things to do than spend $250 on t-shirts.

adrift

Not sure why I feel more adrift now that I've not only made the decision to leave my current employer, I've done a bunch of job hunting, interviewed and accepted an offer.

I thought once I'd made my decision, things would have solidified in my mind. Maybe I'm realizing how much I'll miss my co-workers. Nothing like them being laid off, and conspiring with them against 'the man,' to bring you closer together. Their last day is Friday the 29th. My last day is the following Friday, and I'll start the new job the next Monday.

It was difficult to choose where to go. I could go someplace unknown, or I could go back to the ex-employer, or I could follow some friends that left current-employer last year. Doors #2 and #3 seem fairly recession proof; military work for the former, health for the latter.

All the reasons I had for picking door #2 were comfort-based -- very close to the new house, great friends, and interesting work. Door #3 is more of an unknown and a ton more responsibility, but with a safety net of other good friends. Ultimately picked door #3, the riskier job that could be huge career-wise.

who knew?

Finally added labels to the blog posts. Who'd have guessed? Tied for the most frequent label:

• computers
• i am lame

where's the suggestion box?

The employer frequently elicits employee ideas for additional revenue streams. I have decided on one that beats my previous "Nominal fees for helping minors purchase alcohol" stream.

1. Form Hannah Montana tribute band, 'Amanda Bandana'
2. Prey on gullible parents thinking they're purchasing Hannah Montana tickets.
3. Profit

However, brief googling suggests 'Amanda Bandana' is already taken for a teen's myspace/livejournal/etc.

This is as disappointing a googling as when I found that 'Hell Toupee' was already taken. Back to the lame-cover-band-name drawing board.

blog comment spam

I had to enable moderation on the comments due to the spam getting added. Moderating seemed like a better solution than going in and deleting the comments after-the-fact.

The first thing that clued me in to their spaminess:

These articles are fantastic; the information you show us is interesting for everybody and is really good written. It’s just great!! [more sales pitch and spammy URLs here...]

Anyone who actually read my blog would know that it has never been, and never will be any of those things.