Where I want to be and who I want to be

This post was “written” almost a year ago. I was experimenting with using dictation tools to write a post on my morning walk, and the end result was pretty scattered and required a lot of editing. I got about half way done, had to move on to other things, and promptly forgot about it. This morning I stumbled across that draft in progress and decided to finish it up. Honestly, it was rough. I had to remember what was on my mind a year ago, and I went off on some completely unrelated side rant that was about a thousand words long and needed to be edited out. I think the end result here is worth posting, though, so here it is.

The company I work for recently went through a major reorganization. A new department was created for our business unit and our team was moved into a new vertical under a different executive. A VP position was created to head up the new department, and another senior leader was given that position to help align all of our Agile/Lean/Project/Strategic activities.

It’s a lot of change. I was, admittedly, quite shaken when it happened. I’ve had my cheese moved more than once at my current job, but this one felt overwhelming at first. I don’t feel that way any more, and in fact I’m really excited about all the changes, but that initial jolt was pretty big.

One of the reasons it was such a shock to my system is because I was moved into what we are calling the “process” vertical in our organization. As someone who believes in and supports Agile, being in a group that seems to be on the “processes and tools” side of the “Individuals and Interactions” equation wasn’t a look I was happy with. I’m still not entirely keen on the optics around it, if I’m being honest, but I do believe that in our current structure we landed in the right place.

In any case, I was meeting with my new boss on Monday (the above mentioned Vice President of our newly formed department), and we were having one of many “getting to know you” style conversations we’ve had since the change. While we’ve worked together for many years at this point and have a perfectly amiable working relationship, we don’t really know each other all that well so we’re spending some time working on that. In our conversation on Monday, he asked me where I wanted to be in five to ten years.

Now I need to go ahead and state for the record that he knows about my cancer and said right up front that he realized his prepared topic for the day probably wasn’t something that was top of mind for me at the moment. I concurred and stated that “alive” was really my top-of-mind goal, but since I intended to achieve that one it was totally cool to talk about what else I’d like to be doing and we did so. In the time that has passed I’ve thought about it some more, and that was the path I took to starting this post.

When I reflect on my early days in software development, I see a perfect example of how my mind works. My first job was with a company that sold ColdFusion based auction software. The original person who wrote the code did so in a way that was most efficient at the time he wrote it. The internet was slow, and any extra white space in the background of a page could cause longer load times, so he removed any characters that were “extraneous” from his code.

The result, while readable to a visitor of the site, was a solid mass of text that was nearly impossible to decipher on the back end.

As my responsibilities there grew I eventually got access to that code base and was charged with helping to fix/improve the software. Every time I had to access a page, I would poke around in it and make it better. I would add comments where none existed. I would explicitly name variables from x or y. I would tab-delimit nested code. I would update deprecated functions or replace code blocks that were inefficient. What I was doing was removing technical debt, but I had no concept of what that was at the time. I just wanted to understand how the code worked, and I wanted to help make it better.

Which is a perfect example of how I look at the world. I want to understand how it works, and I want to make it better. So when I think about where I want to be in five or ten years, my answer is really just as simple as that – I want to have made the world a little bit better. To do so I need to keep learning. To do so I need to look for ways I can improve the code of the world around me, whether that is in my personal life or professional one. I want to take my experience, my influence, and my knowledge and apply it in little ways to make incremental improvements for as many people as I can.

But, ultimately? I still want to be here.

Meetings suck

Forget fire and brimstone. Convince me that Hell looks like this and I'll be at church every week. Photo courtesy of the International Monetary Fund via Flickr.

As much as I may not like to admit it, I work in Corporate America. My company is a not-for-profit credit union, but regardless of that there are certain aspects of the organization that are no different than any other small to mid-sized corporation. We have a “culture,” we have a dress code, we have rules about what exits you can use to leave the building and what kind of decorations you can have in your cubicle. We make five-year plans and talk about improving efficiency. We have department rivalries, rumor mills, and the occasional scandal. Like I said, in a lot of ways we’re pretty much your average every day organization. The big difference, of course, is that we’re not bending our members over for billions of dollars in profits that are being paid out to shareholders or overpaid executives.

So we have that going for us anyway.

We also have meetings. Lots and lots of meetings.

I hate meetings.

A lot.

I do not, however, hate alot of meetings. The presence of an alot at a meeting would make it infinitely more interesting.

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Yup. Still alive.

Yeah, August was insane.  This is the first weekend in a long time that I’ve been able to pretty much just chill out at home and not do much of anything.  Unfortunately, for some reason, I had a monkey wrench thrown in that last night with a bout of nausea that turned into vomiting.  I have NO idea what happened there.  The only thing I can think is that I ate a few Weight Watchers quesadilla’s after doing a 50 minute workout with EA SPORTS Active.  Regardless of why I got ill, a few hours after I was sick I felt fine and seem to be peachy keen again today.

Ok, yeah.  I started this post talking about puke.  Where the hell do I go from here?

We’ve wrapped up another Dragon*Con, and all told I think it was a pretty smashing success.  We have some thing we want to improve on for next year for sure, but considering the monumental task we attempted to achieve I feel good about the work we did.  On my day off I hit the dealer rooms and picked up some new snarky shirts.  I also got my kilt belt re-sized (That was a nice ego boost in and of itself.  The leather worker took a big chunk off of the belt to make it fit properly).  I saw some good friends, had a chance to see the William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy panel, and I got to hang out for a few minutes with Felicia Day backstage before her panel on Monday morning (and yes, if you’re wondering, she’s just as nice and funny as you’d expect her to be).

On the weight front I had the satisfaction of knowing that when I left for the convention I was two pounds less than I was when I went to my first one back in 2002.   I noticed a few ladies giving me the once over, and had one woman make what was (to Krystalle) a very obvious pass at me.  Me?  I continue my long-standing tradition of being fairly clueless in that regard and thought she was just being funny when she told me I should find someone to cover for my shift so I could come over to the Marriott at midnight to “get blown.”  She was referring to Jennie Breeden’s annual kilt-blowing get together, but the directness and the way she said it apparently meant more.

I have to be told these things, you see.

Speaking of kilts – I wore my utilikilt the entire weekend, mostly because a) it makes me look good and b) it is probably going to be the last year I’m able to wear this particular kilt.  It’s getting very loose at this point.  Before I had my belt re-sized on Friday I thought it might actually fall off.  Mind you, I’m not complaining about the fact that I’m losing weight at all.  Utilikilts are expensive, though!

In other health related news I have purchased a shiny new pair of running shoes with gift cards I got through the Virgin Healthmiles program and tomorrow I’m going to start training to run a 5k.  Like pull ups, running is something that my weight has always thrown up a barrier to, and it is time I knocked that barrier down.  The 5k I have picked out takes place about 2 weeks after my 37th birthday, and I think that would be a delightful way to ring in the start of my next trip around the sun.

Can’t really say I have much more interesting to say at the moment.  Alex and I have started rehearsals for Night of the Living Dead.  I’m playing the free to play Dungeons and Dragons Online as well as Kingdom of Loathing.  Now that convention season is done sticking our heads back in the sand financially and working on paying down some more debt.  I still have my job, and while our company is doing everything they can to cut costs we’re still not cutting benefits or employees.  All in all, life is still pretty good on my end.

Exciting?  Maybe not.  But adventure?  Excitement?  A Jedi seeks not these things.

And on that extremely nerdy note I bid you adieu.

Summer Agenda

May 16th – 19th : St. Augustine with

 

June 5th – 9th : Denver with netgoth for Scott and Donna’s wedding.

June 20th – 27th : My sister Karen and her family will be visiting from Missouri.

August 8th – 10th : Convergence 14 in Tampa

August 13th – 17th : Gen Con Indy with Alex and

 . Will get to meet

  and hopefully see John and Random.

August 23rd : See Embedded

August 27th – September 2nd : Dragon*Con in Atlanta with

 ,

  and possibly

 . Hooking up with many of the Children ofMidian guild mates.

TBA : A trip to the Magic Kingdom with the family, compliments of my pay from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

I cannot even express how excited I am about all of this, or about how I’m finally able to afford doing this kind of stuff without putting myself in the poor house.

  and I have both suffered through a lot and worked very hard to get where we are. Hell, she’s been homeless and if it weren’t for Karen I would have lost this house after my divorce. It’s been really rough for a long time, and it’s nice to have finally gotten to a point where things aren’t quite so hard in the financial department. They aren’t perfect – I still don’t have any savings to speak of and pretty much live paycheck to paycheck, but I’m doing that because I’m putting lots of money on to credit cards and paying down certain ones to 0 every time I run them up again.

Progress is being made, and despite the downturn in the economy recently we’re in a pretty good place.

So…Yay. 🙂

What a week I'm having!

I’m going to start this post with a quick, one line statement for those of you who may have caught wind of some of the events of the last few days through my various other social networking tools. 

Alex is fine and he is coming home from the hospital today.

For those of you who aren’t in the loop as of yet, that should give you a pretty good indicator of how my week was.

Last weekend I completed moved our intranet at work from an old, seriously outdated server to a shiny new one with updated and/or different versions of all of the major software used to support it.  The machine the intranet was on was a Windows 2000 box with ColdFusion 5, MySQL 3, and Visnetic Website as the web server software.  The new machine is a Windows 2003 box with ColdFusion 8, MySQL 5, and Internet Information Service 6 as the web server software.  The move itself went fairly well (despite the fact that I originally moved the wrong database files over…but I corrected that on Sunday night). 

Monday, however, the shit hit the fan.

As I referenced in my post earlier this week – there simply is no way to test for every eventuality when doing a move of this kind.  I spent the majority of my time working this week correcting errors that simply did not exist on the old server.  On top of that, one of the biggest changes that happened in this changeover involved moving away from using employee Social Security Numbers as a UUID field and going to a generic 10 digit code.  Many employees did not get crossed over properly and I had to go back and run conversion routines two additional times to get everyone in line (and I still have one more block of them I need to straighten out).

So work pretty much sucked.  The only bright spot in the whole week was that I finally found out what my annual increase was.  It was on my paycheck that I received on Friday, along with all the retroactive pay I was due dating back to the first of the year. 

It was a very nice check.
 
On the homefront, however, it was significantly worse.  Alex got a stomach virus on Monday night, and it kicked his ass.  I have never, ever seen him get this sick.  He didn’t eat for several days and spent most of the time in bed.  So much so that, on Wednesday, I gave in to his tearful begging of me not to check his blood sugar or give him a shot.  This turned out to be a very stupid thing to do.  Wednesday night Krys, Jareth and I came down with the bug and I spent most of the day on Thursday sleeping.  Alex, feeling better that day but seriously dehydrated, got into the gatorade that I had purchased and drank the majority of a 32 ounce bottle.

No insulin + Sickness throwing off his body chemistry + 32 ounces of sugar water = Very bad things for a diabetic.

I went in to check on him at 3:15 on Thursday and he was breathing heavy and seriously incoherent.  He couldn’t move without it hurting and he was barely able to stay conscious.  I checked his blood sugar, and the meter came back as “HI.”  This means over 500.  I gave him a shot with extra insulin and checked his blood sugar again at 3:40.  Still HI.  Gave him another 10 units of insulin and checked it again at 4:30.  Still HI.  Waited until 5:00 and checked again.  Still HI.  Gave him another shot and called his Mother.  At this point panic was starting to set in, as I had to be at the theater by 7 for the evening performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and it was looking like he was going to need to go to the hospital.  I left him in the reluctant care of Krystalle (who, due to not being related to him, cannot authorize medical care in case of an emergency…a situation that I need to have remedied post-haste).  Jody finally got Alex to go to the bathroom and test to see if he had any ketones in his blood, and it came back that there was a moderate level of them.  She called his doctor, and while he was not panicked he did say that Alex needed to go to the hospital.  We were going to wait and do it when I got home that night, but Alex could not even stand up to take a shower on his own.  When I called Jody to tell her that (I was at the theater at this point) she made up her mind to take him then and there and rushed him down to All Children’s Hospital.

Long story short, Alex had entered a state of ketoacidosis.  This is a potentially fatal condition that can happen to diabetics who don’t get insulin.  In Alex’s case it was bad, but not nearly as bad as it could have been.  I got to the hospital around 11:00 and stayed there with him overnight.  Finally went home around 4 yesterday afternoon after his Mother got back and his blood sugars were back to normal levels (he had to be put on an Insulin IV to get his body back in line).  He called me at 8:30 this morning to tell me he was coming home.

Krystalle and I finally feel like we can eat again today, and I got a decent night sleep last night (the first I’ve had since Tuesday).  I ate some soup this morning that Paul gave me last night and am drinking coffee again (the caffeine withdrawal symptoms weren’t helping things either).  All in all, this is has been one of the crappiest weeks I’ve had in a long time.  I’m going to be chewing on the guilt of what happened with Alex for a long time.  I should have insisted that he check his blood sugar on Wednesday and he should have had a shot.  Everything is ok now, but I’m seriously shaken over the situation.  I can tell you this much – he’s going to get seriously annoyed with how anal I’m going to be about this stuff going forward.

So yeah, that was my week.  Sorry if I’ve been out of the loop for the last few days.  If I missed anything important out there let me know. 

Oh those crazy users….

I love how every time a major online game has a patch that doesn’t work out quite as well as planned their user base explodes with a veritable shit storm of how horrible the developers are.

Over the weekend, I upgraded a database that currently serves approximately 500 employees. I had to do it twice, because I copied the wrong one over the first time. Despite the fact that it was tested for over a week before the implementation there were many issues that I simply didn’t foresee, and our intranet was down for approximately two hours during the middle of the workday today. I just now got finished feeling comfortable enough with where things stand that I’ve finished work for the evening.

Again, this intranet server 500 employees.

World of Warcraft has approximately 10 million subscribers.

This is why I chill on patch day.

I believe I’m going to get my ass away from the computer and go sit on our new living room furniture to read for a while before I crash and burn.