I went to the Dodgers/Giants game last night (the Dodgers won 7-2). The VP of my division decided he wanted to go to a ballgame, so he invited us. We had to pay for our tickets ($11 for nosebleed behind home plate), but one of the managers bought the first round of beer. It wound up being only one other non-manager besides me, so there was more ( Read more... )

Many of my kind coworkers have elected to share with the office. Sadly, they are sharing a cold, which I have now caught (I'm close to the last person in the department to get it ( Read more... )

The night before last, a water pipe broke a couple of floors above the office I work in. The water ran along pipes in the building and wound up dripping off all over the place. The maintenance guys said that it looked like a waterfall down one of the elevator shafts ( Read more... )

You may have been wondering why it is that I've been posting so much the last couple of days. The simple truth is that I've been in migration hell. I'm moving a project from old to new repositories and from VC6 to VC8/VC2005 ( Read more... )

We got a support request from a guy today. That's pretty normal, we get dozens a day. This time, we tracked it down to being in Swedish. Unfortunately, none of us know Swedish and I cannot find an automated translator like Babelfish which will do the translation. My first thought was to send back an email containing only "Bork bork bork." I ( Read more... )

The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requires that signs in offices be posted in braile as well as text. I don't generally have a problem with that. At work, they put up new signs. These signs are in English and have braile beneath the English:

• The restrooms
  
• The stairs
  
• The janitor's closet
  
• The electrical closet
  
• The phone closet
  

Now, I ( Read more... )

We've interviewed a few people at work for C++ programming jobs. One of the requests in our interviews is for the applicant to provide sample code. That's pretty standard and it gives us an idea of the applicant's capabilities.

Something that shocks me is the number of people who cannot answer either of the following questions:

1. If you were ( Read more... )

The owner of the company I work for spent the week covering support for Jason and I while we were in Vegas for the conference. He wound up spending a full 8 hours a day doing it and suddenly has an even greater appreciation for what we go through. It lit an even bigger fire under him to get a full time person in to take care of level 1 to 2 ( Read more... )

I'm having a good time in Vegas. Jason, Nick, and I have been going to talks pretty much wall to wall. I've learned several interesting things ( Read more... )

I'm heading out today for the Dev Connections C++ Conference in Las Vegas. I'm pretty excited. The speakers should be phenomenal, including (but by no means limited to) Andrei Alexandrescu and Bjrne Stroustrup ( Read more... )