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Saturday, March 27, 2004

Supervisor

Stardate 57032.7 (03-27-2004)

April got the supervisor job. So at the end of April (the month) she starts working days. I will start working 4 ten hour days.  That way we can cut out one more day of daycare. We had planned to do something like this when Thomas went to school, but the opportunity came up now, so she grabbed it. Thomas goes into pre-kindergarten next fall anyway.

It looks like Patrick has the chicken pox. Little red blisters are slowly spreading over his body. He was vaccinated against it, but that only works in 80% of the kids. So he gets to sit in our bed and play video games and watch TV. My thumbs are aching from playing Jedi Power Battles so much.

The warm weather seems to have clued people in that spring is on its way, therefore I have quite a few more soccer registrations. The games start next Saturday.

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Tuesday, March 23, 2004

The right tool

Stardate 57032.3 (03-23-2004)

Finding the right tool is important to productivity. I know this already, but it is good to remind myself of it from time to time. I wrote a program in C# about five months ago to replace an existing one that runs monthly testing. The old one was taking about ten hours to run. I wrote the new one to divide up the tasks into threads. It ran, but the threads all died one by one after a short time due to Oracle throwing an exception. The transaction object would get lost. I don't have Visual Studio .NET yet, so I have been using SharpDevelop. It's a nice IDE, but there is no debugger. I found one distributed as part of the .NET SDK. It works similar to the VS IDE, so it was easy to use. What I discovered is that Oracle does not like the isolation level on the transaction object to be anything other than unspecified. It doesn't make sense, but it works. With this, I was able to cut the testing time to one hour. Since the tasks can be divided into threads, it scales very easily. One hour should make everyone involved very happy.

I found out Monday I am part of a new team. The team was formed to upgrade the utility programs we and our clients use to move data in and out of the system. I should not have been surprised. I wrote a lot of the originals and the library code in 1995, and I have been vocal that they need some serious overhaul. These are the same ones I mentioned had been turned over to the Indians about a month ago. The model I came up with was used by subsequent developers, and was never modified much. As I look at it now, it was ok, but there were holes. Of course, there are also new technologies that were not available then.

The executives have shifted again. I find it interesting that most of them do not stay in one position more than six months or so. Another note I need to make. I have done some complaining about my supervisor, but there are good things to say about him. April applied for a supervisor job at the hospital. If she gets it, it will be a daytime position. This means daycare for Thomas, and about a hours worth of daycare for the other two. To cut down on this, I asked if I could work four ten hour days, which would limit the daycare and the costs to two days a week. Without hesitation he said yes. Other times I have asked to work from home, or for some time off, and he has agreed. He stays away unless there is something I need from him, trusting that I can do what is needed without micromanagement (I have been doing it long before he came along, which he is well aware of).

Today there were a couple of interesting driving incidents. On the way to work, near the north I-15 to I-215 interchange, I watched as two cars tried to move into the same lane at the same time. They did see each other, and both backed off. This happens quite a bit, but a few hundred feet down the road they did the same thing. On the way home, I saw a tow truck dragging a car out of the large pond at Bangeter and highway 201. The car had to have driven off the road and down a bank about 50 feet or so. I hope no one was hurt, but it was unusual.

End of Entry

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Hokey

Stardate 57031.8 (03-18-2004)

Reading through the last entry, I realized I didn’t finish some of it. I stopped at one point to check on what I was talking about, and never came back to it. Too many other things came up, and I just posted it as is. Well, it wasn’t that important

Bruce Eckel posted a long diatribe about generics in Java. Most of which I would have to agree with. Sun’s approach does not make things much easier. Of course, I view this from a C++ background, and I found generics and the Standard Template Library very useful.

Tuesday was the division quarterly meeting. The new head has changed the format to look less at the financial details. The rest took on the same arrangement. Moving to new technology, yada, yada, yada. Not that I mind change, but I’d like to participate in the change. Something the new head mentioned did strike me. She told everyone that communication was fine; the problem is understanding what is communicated. Thinking about it, I concur. I don’t understand my place in all the changes, and I hate not understanding. One thing missing was the recognition awards. I have a bad attitude about them anyway, so I don’t care.

So Wednesday I played hokey from work, and did more in the yard. I’ve almost got the entire garden area cleared of grass. I talked to the next-door neighbor about her delivery of a new washer and dryer. I mentioned that ours was getting noisy and taking 3 hours to dry a load of clothes. She offered to switch her old one with us. It works much better. I contacted all the U-6 soccer coaches, and started updating the roster. Last weekend I was working on a Windows program, and I found buttons and labels kept disappearing from the design. I updated SharpDevelop from version .95 to .99b, and this fixed that problem.  Patrick came home from school excited that he had received an award for 1-20 numbers (I was not sure what that was, but it was still great). All in all it was a productive day.

Today I noticed Mike Gibby put a link to this site. His blog entry “Most Illogical” was fun to read. I remember practicing the same Vulcan attitude throughout high school. I was never harassed much, mostly ignored. A large part of the time I felt as though I did not exist. I did go to my 10-year reunion, and was surprised that people remembered me. I skipped my 20 because I had already planned on being out of town.

End Of Entry

Monday, March 15, 2004

Off shore

Stardate 57031.5 (03-15-2004)

Thursday the developers were called to a meeting. The gist of it was that we were required to off shore at least some work to keep up with everyone else. The manager did a financial analysis that showed it cost more to off shore than to keep stuff here. She was told that she did not add in the saving for cubicles, computers, phones, and space. Since we are supposedly not getting rid of the current staff, how do they figure we are saving that? I guess that they are counting new FTE’s. She was also told it didn’t matter what it cost they were doing it. Anyway, I was told once again that the engine would not be off shored. I was kind of hoping it would.

April was sick Friday, so I worked from home. It’s interesting having a conference call from the grocery store where I was picking up her prescriptions.

Rory Blythe posted an entry in his blog about how a large percentage of aliens look like humans. The examples given were Romulans, . The comments included some of the exceptions, such as Species 8472 and the Shadows of Babylon 5. No one mentioned the most common non-humanoid alien in TOS, the cloud of sparkles. I was surprised by the number of Trekkers that read his blogs. They responded, and my final response was that we love to argue with mundanes.

It was nice Saturday to not have to worry about getting to basketball. Soccer is on its way, though. There was a letter asking for volunteers to help run the organization. April thought it was to wishy-washy, and that it should have stated outright that if we don’t get help, the league will cease to exist.

Yay! I’m Lt. (j.g.) now. It took longer than I thought. I have to work harder on Lt.

Sunday was a chance to clean up the backyard. Rachel helped, but it was hard work. It was nice to get out and exercise, though, even though I’m a little stiff today. I’m not done yet, not by a long shot. I meant to do some computer work as well, but I was just too tired.

Almost done reading “The Da Vinci Code”. It’s a good book, and I recommend reading it. One little snort of amusement was that Nicholas Flamel was listed as a former head of a secret order. The name also shows up in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”, where I thought it was the authors invention. I’ve only read one other Dan Brown book, “Digital Fortress”. It was even better, probably because it was more technology oriented. Those are hard to find.

Thomas told me tonight that he was holding "Star Trek meetings" with his friends because they want to build a spaceship.

End of Entry

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Spring

tardate 57031.0 (03-10-2004)

We’ve had some discipline problems with Patrick, so Monday he was confined to his room. It was one of the first nice days, and every kid in the neighborhood was out playing. He screamed in frustration the whole afternoon. I think he got the point that we were serious.

Spring is coming. I took some pictures Tuesday.

   





Thomas came down to me about 9:30 that night, complaining his ear hurt. Having been through this one before, I took him to Wee Care (April had come home early because she was not feeling well). When nurse put the thermometer in his ear, he told her that it was the other ear that hurt. It was an infection, so I asked that the antibiotics be done with an injection. He screamed when the needle went in, of course, but after he told me, “Dad, that REALLY hurt”. On the way out he gave the doctor his meanest look and said, “I HATE doctors”. He was feeling much better this morning.

Someone at MS had an interesting idea: an FAQ as a blog. I need to get a technical blog going. I had a couple of odd crashes to diagnose. New knowledge this week includes:

64 bit applications are a little more sensitive to exceptions and setjmp/longjmp. I need to be careful about static local variables.
Pay closer attention to compiler flags. The engine was using optimized libraries, but the main routines were not being passed the same flags. The library utility ar does not support ELF format files needed for 64 bit, so the library code was linked directly with the main code. The mix of flags caused things to be slow. Changing the flags to be consistent solved this. Level 3 optimization pegs a couple of the server processors at %100 utilization, so compiling a couple of versions for release should be fun.
A couple of clients ran some large amounts of claim data through the engine. I found that the UNIX kernel parameter maxdsiz that constrains the amount of dynamic memory each process can have was too low to handle it (it defaults to 64 MB).
I been mucking around with Flash. I have some nice new interfaces to use, but I can’t seem to get the page to load the animation. Weird. I might have to break down and read the documentation.

Lots o’ plans for the spring. I’d like to build a small deck in front between the door and the corner window. It has always worried me that someone might fall off the small cement stairway, and it would give more room. In the summer, it would be in the shade of the house during the afternoon and evening. I have a general idea about how to do it. The main need is tools. I have to find a power saw somewhere, and replace the rechargeable batteries for the cordless drill/screwdriver. After the deck, there is a need to build a new swing set and play area out back. I also need to get into shape for it. Obesity is fast becoming the number one preventable killer in the U.S., and my pants are getting tight.

We get email every once in a while that someone in the department will be late, or is not coming in. Wednesday morning the manager sent one stating one of the senior developers was on his way. I thought that was an odd way to word it. By noon it was bugging me so much I put this reply together:

RE: Developer is on his way

How long is he able to stay?

And when he is here,
will we have any reason to fear?

At end of day, can he know
how much further there is to go?

Browsing through DevTrack for information to extract,
will this email cause a great distract?

When all manner of data is chipped in Onyx,
could buy a lot of gin and tonics?

Can much use be made of Jabber,
without resorting to mindless blabber?

(bizarre need to emulate Dr. Seuss has faded, returning to work...)

DevTrack is the defect and enhancement management software, Onyx is the customer information tracking software, and Jabber is the approved instant messaging software. It took a few minutes to come up with something that rhymes with onyx. The response evoked much laughter, and I hope some stress relief.

End of Entry

Thursday, March 04, 2004

Driving in Utah

Stardate 57030.4 (03-04-2004)

Driving in Utah is such fun. Wednesday while heading back from lunch, waiting in the left turn lane of 35th and Bangater, a guy pulls into the left lane (the one for traffic headed the other way), and drove down to the corner to turn into the restaurant there. I guess he was brain dead from starvation, and could not wait 15 seconds for the green arrow. He made three cars coming the other way maneuver around him. Wednesday, for the second time this week, an accident slowed traffic to a crawl. Monday, there was a serious accident that shutdown most of the freeway. Fortunately, no one was badly hurt according to the newspaper. The carpool went from one on ramp to the next off ramp, about 3 miles, in an hour. We got off the freeway, turned around, and went home. I worked from home, and my carpool friend took the day off. He liked it so much he asked if he could work 4 ten hours days. He is also worried because a rumor is going around that anyone not working 50 hours a week need to look for another job. I am not close to that. I did work out the math for it. If I worked 50 hours a week, it would add up to 13 extra workweeks a year, based on a 52-week year. This is 6 paychecks I won’t get, but I might get a $1000 bonus. Doesn’t sound fair to me, but it does save the company a lot of money. Again, a Dilbert story, where the ‘extra’ money goes to those who are bad at math.

So Tuesday there was no more carpool. It’s nice to be independent again, but I miss having someone to talk to, and I hate piling up mileage on the car. The discussion ensued at home about whether I could also do the 4/ten deal. Then I could resume the carpool. I’m not sure if I want to do that. It would mean a long time at work, and about 12 hours total time a day away from home and family with the driving commute. I wish sometimes that I worked at the offices down the street. Then I could walk to work, and not be concerned with the weather.

Some of the other issues with driving are the information signs. It’s a great idea, but traffic backs up when people slow down to read them. What really scares me is the intersection of Gordon and Hill Field Road. There have been several accidents there this year already. I avoid it on Saturdays and during the week at the holidays. All the people turning left block the intersection because there is not much room to the next light. I’m not sure what the solution would be there. I have noticed police stationed there during the evenings.

The Girl Scout Cookies are here. Distribution of the orders is a challenge, and it has occupied April for the last few days. The goal is to have everything done by Sunday. We are well on the way. 

Basketball is winding down. The last games are this Saturday. Rachel will miss hers due to having first Confession at the same time. I get the impression the kids are over it. I am getting tired of not being able to sleep more in the morning. Soccer is next. We received a notice from the acting commissioner that a meeting was scheduled with all the parents regarding the lack of volunteers. The options if there are not more volunteers is to merge the region into the South Ogden region, hand it over to the city, or dissolve it altogether. I still think whatever happens I would like the kids to go to the Layton region instead. Maybe Rachel can meet some local friends.

Lord of the Rings won big at the Oscars. I was amused by the opening where a Michael Moore hobbit was shouting that this was a fictitious battle, only to be stepped on by one of the mumakil. A little disappointing but not surprising is that Johnny Depp did not win best actor. April asked me if his Captain Jack Sparrow was an Oscar performance. I replied that I was not the one to ask. I thought many performances over the years deserved at least a nomination, but didn’t get one. This is another of those places where I forget I am not knowledgeable. On the other hand, I know what I like.
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