Three weeks of discussion, negotiation, and planning, leading up to a complete phone system install tomorrow was scuttled at 4pm today. We discovered our new system won't handle incoming calls as well as our ten year old system. I grant that our particular use of the phones may be unorthodox, but it never occurred to me that it would simply be ( Read more... )

I spent a lovely day today at a virus remediation seminar. It really was a lovely day -- I just spent it indoors, learning about malware vectors and registry exploits, rootkit scanners and encryption extortion ( Read more... )

We got a really great report back from one of our clients this week, and it's one of those things that make us feel that all the work we put into what we do really makes a difference.

For those who aren't aware, or may have forgotten, I work at a vet allergy lab where we test and treat allergies in dogs, cats, and horses. Periodically, we get ( Read more... )

Because of the kind of work I do, there is a particular danger of which I must always remain aware. I've seen it happen too many times to discount, and I live in fear of someday finding myself in such a position. The gravest danger I can face is discovering that the technologies I've built my career around are obsolete ( Read more... )

 My company sent me to a tech conference at the Convention Center. It's nice that I got something out of the experience beyond a free lunch and a sack full of marketing flyers ( Read more... )

I'm coming up on the second anniversary of my job and everything has been going exceedingly well. Ninety percent of my days consist of developing new features and improving existing features in an application so specialized that only 20 people ever use it. While I know many developers who would be despondent at having such a small audience, for me ( Read more... )

( Excessive acronym warning. Highly geekified content within. Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! )

It's uncharacteristic for me to write about work when things are going well. This may have something to do with a need to vent anxieties and frustrations, or it may have something to do with having so much extra time on my hands. I haven't had so much extra time on my hands of late, so the latter seems realistic.

( Cheesesteak sandwich with sweet peppers, no onions, and a Shiner Bock )

I moved the unused markerboard into my office. Yay! I celebrated by creating a three-color data map of my current most vexing problem. I used to use markerboards all the time, but just realized that I had the space for one now.

I'm looking forward to working at the Democratic state convention tomorrow. I hope I can get some sleep. I'll be posting ( Read more... )

This week, I experiment with Open Source. The idea is to wean myself off the Redmond teat and eventually move my entire office to Linux. I've been using an Open Source programming environment, Eclipse, for nearly two years now, and it's the bees knees. Firefox has become much more than my browser: it is my sharp sword to slice away layers of CSS to ( Read more... )