Day 3 of training is done.

Remember the climactic scene in The Wizard of Oz, when Toto pulls the curtain back and you see that the Wizard isn't the huge, terrifying, steam-spouting marvel everyone thought he was?  Well, imagine an alternate version, where the curtain is pulled back, and the Wizard turns out to be even bigger, scarier, and more ( Read more... )

Today is my last day at my current employer; on Monday I report for indoctrination at my new one.

I never know how to deal with the ends of things.  Part of my wants to dwell on the last-ness of every little event -- "This is the last time I'll ride Culver City Line 1 to work!  This is my last dev-team meeting!  This is the last cup of coffee I'll ( Read more... )

All arrangements are in place for my upcoming job change.  Today is the last Friday I'll ever work at the current gig.  My second-in-command took over running the dev team meeting today, as part of his transition into assuming my position once I'm gone.

All of a sudden, this has gone from being an abstract idea to really happening.  And I thought I ( Read more... )

An errant spy satellite is due to re-enter soon; it's big enough and has components tough enough for parts of it to hit the surface, and contains toxic chemicals. So apparently the Navy is planning to blow it up with a missile.  I find it amusing that the story's headline says that the satellite will be "shot down".  No, it's already coming down, ( Read more... )

At my job, I get cold calls from technical recruiters about once a day.  We don't use outside recruiters at the moment, and I always make this clear immediately.  Some then get rude or pushy, giving me an excellent excuse to hang up on them quickly.  Others are polite and friendly, and start angling for future business.  I'm willing to talk for a ( Read more... )

I just received, at my day-job address, a small padded envelope from a company I had never heard of. Inside, I found exactly two things ( Read more... )

My office's Exchange/Outlook calendaring system is melting down thanks to a mixture of people with DST-patched and unpatched computers trying to coordinate appointments. I've wasted half an hour just this afternoon disentangling the resulting collisions, both real and illusory ( Read more... )

As part of a project for my day job, I'm writing Java code that manipulates Excel spreadsheets. I have a third-party library that handles the gritty details; I can tell it to load a sheet, then ask it for cell contents by row and column. It uses 1-origin coordinates for the rows (so that they match Excel's idea of row numbers) and 0-origin ( Read more... )

It's a slow day at work; a lot of people are gone for one reason or another, and (so far) no crises have popped up. Of course, on Fridays the crises usually wait until 4:45pm to explode, in accordance with Murphy's Law. Until then, I'm taking care of a number of backburnered items that have been annoying me, including making all our dynamic web ( Read more... )

I've worked at my present job, sitting in the same office, for almost four years. I sit next to a west-facing window with a spectacular view of Marina Del Rey, which is cool. But I've only ever really enjoyed it on very cloudy days, or after sunset; during the day it's nearly always so bright that I have to keep the blinds closed, and usually ( Read more... )