Sunday, April 30, 2006

Sunday

Got off to a late start today. Didn't get to the office until noon. Worked until 4:00. Think I pretty much wrapped up the Perl library work. Still have to do some packaging for the library code.

Met up with Vikki after work. Spent the remainder of the afternoon relaxing in Union Square Park. Went to French Roast for dinner.

Came home, watched West Wing and Grey's Anatomy.

A fun article on how Richard Stallman (the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the author of Emacs) almost got himself arrested:

Protest against ATI nearly led to the arrest of RMS

Noticed that the front page of CNN.com was covering yesterday's anti-war protest in NYC. Funny, since Vikki and I were coming out of the subway station just as it was ending. I am always kind of amazed when I see New York make national headlines. It was such a rare thing when I lived in New Jersey to look at the front page of CNN and be able to say, "that's right next door to my office".

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Saturday and celebrity sightings

Had a pretty good day today. Went to Central Park, took a couple of pictures:



So Vikki and I are having lunch at Gobe (vegetarian place in the Village), and we're happily eating, and the waiter seats two people at the table next to us, a middle aged man and an older woman (his mother?). Vikki kept motioning with her eyes for me to look at the man sitting directly next to me. I looked at him and didn't notice anything out the ordinary. I thought perhaps Vikki wanted me to notice how he was dressed or something. So later in the meal I get a text message. The message is from Vikki (who is sitting directly across from me), saying "You know who is next to you, right?" And I looked at her and shook my head. And so she whips out her phone and I get another text message a minute later that says "Mulder. xfiles." Then I look to my left and realize that yes, I have been sitting side by side with David Duchovny for my entire lunch.

My first celebrity sighting in New York. Or perhaps there have been others I just didn't notice in the past, because I'm so oblivious to my surroundings that I didn't notice a mainstream actor sitting twelve inches to my left.

Met up with Carter tonight. Crushed her in Scrabble by over a hundred points.

Friday, April 28, 2006

New hire and stresses

I think I may have found a new developer. He seems really good. Our kind of people.

Was looking forward to having the weekend off. Found out Friday afternoon that I have stuff due first thing Monday morning. Ick. Hopefully will only kill half a day there.

Just about finished with the Perl infrastructure libraries I have been working on for the past couple of days.

Got caught up on a bit of TV yesterday. West Wing, House, etc.

Haven't figured out what yet, but will hopefully do something fun with Vikki tomorrow when there is daylight.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Early start

Vikki had to get to work by 8 this morning, so I got off to an early start. We had bagels at Murray's on 6th Avenue. Arrived at the office and found that the computer room was at 80 degrees, which is bad since it is supposed to be 69. Those of you not in computers may not appreciate that this means the air conditioning is broken and it will be over 100 degrees in a couple of hours (which is not very good for computers). The AC people are coming in this morning, so this isn't the end of the world.

Going to try to finish the crypto routines I was working on last night. Almost done. Wohoo.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Tuesday

Sign that you're working too hard:

Not being able to sleep because you keep thinking about how to properly apply autoconf rules to your codebase.

Work went really well today. Got most of my encoder project done. Successfully loaded a zip file from a memory buffer and extracted a file to memory. Encryption routines almost complete. Now just have to convert it into an XS module.

Met up with Vikki after work. Spared her an evening of watching bad network televison, and instead engaged in "conversation".

Have more planning to do tomorrow for my project. Have to do resource allocation and scheduling of outstanding work items. Also need to write a Perl style guide (remember to bring Perl Best Practices book into the office tomorrow so I can plagiarize).

I'm so addicted to fruit and granola and yogurt.

Monday, April 24, 2006

Monday

Got to work on time for the first time in a couple of weeks. Of course, nobody else was there except Ben to notice. Did more project planning. Had a couple of meetings with various people about the upcoming work items. Matt gave a demo of Gridcontrol, which was interesting to see how it compared/contrasted with our own solution.

Managed to overload the dynamic loader in Perl. Should be pretty straightforward to write an XS module that uses OpenSSL and libzip to package my modules. It will be nice too, since all the Perl libraries will be in a single atomic file. Almost like a real compiled language.

Left work at 8:30. Met up with Vikki in Union Square, and had dinner at the Coffee Shop.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Weekend

Met up with Vikki at the Guggenheim. Didn't stay too long though because I had a splitting headache.

We came back here, had dinner, watched Schindler's List.

Lauren emailed with pictures of the baby:

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Feelings of control

So I have pretty much wrapped up the project I have been working on for the last two months. Begs the question, "Now what?" So I put together a list of all the upcoming work items for the next three projects, and had lunch with Shamoun to go over them.

Vikki and I went out for dinner on 1st Avenue at a pretty good vegetarian place. Then we went and saw "Look Both Ways" at the Angelika. Just getting home now and am quite tired.

Note to self: Call Jen tomorrow.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

First date

So Vikki and I went on our first date last night. She arrived at the office at 7:30 to pick me up, and she brought me flowers. I've never had a woman give me flowers on a first date -- admittedly a bit strange. Introduced her to the folks at work. She was all dressed up (whereas I was just in dockers and a sweater). Went out to a nice restaurant by Union Square. Candles and dimmed lighting. Good food.

Have the evening to myself tonight. Got caught up on a bit of TV. Working on finally getting my desktop computer working.

Sunday, April 16, 2006

2 day weekend!

So because Jen was nice enough to deliver a kid, I got the weekend off from work to go visit her. Was good to see her and Jon and the baby. Also gave me a chance to catch up with some other people: Marc and Bonnie, Lauren and Kevin, Greg and Lisa, Aunt Aggie, Uncle Richie, Grandma, Crissy, Aunt Cindy, Uncle Frank, Huber, Austin, etc.

Also got to watch a couple of movies: Shaun of the Dead and the Corpse bride. Do we see a theme here? Death? Or perhaps just four hours of my life that I will never get back?

Also rebuilt Mom's computer today, so now she has a clean OS build and the digital camera works.

Dinner with Vikki at French Roast. Where she set her cloth napkin on fire by dropping it on the candle.

Vikki and I are now dating.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

It's a Boy!

Jen delivered a boy last night. Jaden. Going down there this morning to see the family, etc. Will probably do some Easter-ish thing with Grandma. Very exciting.

Work continues to be a pain, but I think I finished pretty much all my work items, so the pressure is off. In fact, I am taking a two day weekend for the second week in a row. Go me!

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Plugging along...

Talked to Mom last night. Jen and Jon checked into the hospital. They are expecting to have the baby before thee weekend. Jaden if it's a boy and Isabella if it's a girl.

I think I have pretty much finished up the manager command set (largely with Dan's help). It's in test now, so I figure some debugging will be required. Now I'm trying to assess the situation with the GUI, since we are going to need to scale it and Shamoun has concerns about the current design. PHP code, oh boy!

Anybody know how to get gdb to dump the stack trace of a 32 bit process on 64 bit Suse? All I get is a corrupt stack. Tried the 32 bit version of gdb, compiled the HEAD of gdb from CVS, called Novell. So far nothing has helped. This is going to nail me because I cannot debug any of the manager or agent code on the target (thus far I have been doing it all on RHEL4-32 bit). I'm not even talking about a complicated multithreaded process. I can't even dump the stack to int main(){ printf("hello world\n"); sleep(1000);return 0;}

Ok, off to work now. I have to go to the customer site today to see if I can make some sense of what is going wrong with the agent...

Monday, April 10, 2006

Monday

Worked from 10:30 to 10:30. Feeling like the project is starting to converge. Almost all of the manager commands are done, except for deactivation of databases and removal of databases. Still also a bit of debugging in the add instance routine. Definitely a good sign though.

Went to Museum of Natural History with Vikki yesterday. Then spent some time in Central Park. Had a really good dinner at La Bonne Soupe. The weather couldn't have been better.

Was reading up a bit on the .EU Landrush. I find a particular bit of humor in the whole thing because I was sitting in the office at 4:00am when the .EU sunrise occurred a few months ago.

My Tivo screwed up and apparently didn't tape West Wing or Grey's Anatomy last night. Fuck. Guess it's time to finally start paying for Internet access.

Should also get my desktop computer unpacked and setup. Just have been distracted lately and haven't had any time to spend on it. Not that I don't like my Mac laptop, but I just miss having a real UNIX workstation at my disposal.

Sunday, April 9, 2006

Fallen off the face of the Earth...

So I've been busier than usual, as my lack of journal updates would seem to suggest.

I have today off. We've been working really hard on the project, and Shamoun seemed to have noticed that the entire team is pretty dead. So nobody is working today. On the upside, things are continuing to converge, so I can perhaps even see the light at the end of the tunnel (assuming it is not an oncoming train of course).

Talked to Mom last night. Joe is out of the hospital. Jen is due to deliver in a week and a half. Suzy is screwing up her education, pissed away her spring tuition grant, and yet wants to get the family to send her to Germany this summer. Also talked to Lauren briefly on Friday, but want to call her back this weekend since I really didn't have time to talk. I would like to get down to Jersey, but don't think I will until Jen delivers.

Been hanging out with Vikki a good bit lately. We're supposed to check out Museum of Natural History this afternoon (and perhaps Central Park if it warms up).

My Safari browser has crashed twice since I started this post. Perhaps it is time to switch to FireFox?

And for those interested, looks like Jon's livejournal has picture of Jen at 38 weeks. Link here

Wednesday, April 5, 2006

Back to work...

Went back to work today. Got tons done. Feeling like I have energy again and am making good progress.

Had dinner with Shamoun. Got home by 10:00. Did some reading. Talked to Vikki.

Not really tired. Will do some more reading, then eventually off to bed.

CNet News.com: Developers fast to fix open-source bugs

Running late for work, but came across this and thought the computer folk who read the blog fould find it interesting:

Developers fast to fix open-source bugs

This is pretty awesome. I've always been a fan of the Coverity product, the only downside is its price ($50k for up to a million lines of code).

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Day off

For those at work who saw yesterday's Livejournal post, I didn't have a nervous breakdown. I just took a day off. Will be back tomorrow (Wed).

Vikki came out to Queens last night after work. Dinner at the Astoria Diner. I really need to find some more places to eat (which will become easier as it gets warmer and stays light later).

Ran into Patrick outside Blockbuster last night while I was waiting for Vikki. Always astounds when I run into someone I know in New York, even though he only lives about six blocks from me.

Did some vegging in front of the TV today. Got caught up on Grey's Anatomy. Haven't watched last night's 24 yet but will probably watch it tonight. Had some food from Cosi for lunch.

It's strange -- I haven't thought about work all day. Kind of a nice feeling. I should try to do that more often (once a week would be great).

Thinking of taking a walk down Steinway Street. Will perhaps get some Hot Chocolate from Starbucks.

For those of you who have been thinking about getting a Tivo, Best Buy has forty hour units for $19.95 after a $160.00 rebate. The only catch is you have to sign up for a year's subscription.

Monday, April 3, 2006

Cracked?

I think I may have finally cracked from the pressure.

I was up and down all night, worrying about work. Stupid shit like how the database creation commands are going to affect state management. And I was/am too exhausted to actually write the code (so it's not like I could have just stayed awake and done the work). I don't know how much I really slept last night.

Yesterday afternoon I sat at a teminal for two hours, and I think I wrote twenty lines of code.

I don't know what to do. One one hand I was unproductive most of the weekend, so I need to get my ass in gear and push through the remaining week of work. On the other hand I'm completely burned out and not sure even being at work is worth it.

I think I have to talk to Shamoun, but I don't know what to say. How could I ask for time off in the middle of this critical phase of the project? How much time do I need if I did ask? How can I turn and run when others are staying to fight?

Kyle called this morning. She is REALLY sick (whereas in my case it's all in my head). I feel a little bad since the last time I got food poisioning she came to my rescue and I obviously can't return the favor.

Need to shower and go to work.

Vikki called last night. She seems to have had a good time out with her friends for her birthday.

Ok, get up Devin. Get out of bed. Still laying here typing when I need to get up and shower. Get up!

Sunday, April 2, 2006

Sunday night

So I failed today to really get any real work done (which is even worse since I was in the office for four hours). Left the office and went to Madison Square Park for a while. Did a Sudoku puzzle and some peoplewatching.

Carter came out to Queens tonight. Got some dinner at the diner. Watched Cinderella Man on DVD.

I can only imagine the conversation I'm going to have with Shamoun tomorrow about where my work items are at. Not looking forward to it at all. I just feel like I have run out of steam.

Motivational problems

So I've been here in the office for a couple of hours now. Seem to be having some trouble getting up the motivation to dig into work though. I suppose part of it is because I'm the only person here and I have my doubts anybody else is getting any work done (making me wonder what the hell I am doing here). Part of it is just because it's absolutely beautiful outside and I want to go out and play instead of working. Clear skies, sunny and 58 degrees in Central Park, with highs expected in the mid 60's. Doesn't that sound better than sitting here working?

Saturday, April 1, 2006

Tired but awake.

Can't sleep, but entirely too tired to be functional.

Parcheesi anyone?

Sunny day

It was a sunny spring day today (except for a bit of rain in the early afternoon). Was a mistake to leave the house wearing my coat and a sweater.

Got together with Vikki for lunch. Went back to her place and watched The Triplets of Belleville on DVD.

Slacked off a bit on work today. Only did about five hours. Home now.

Got a couple of questions about the previous post. It was an April Fools joke. I'm not quitting my job anytime soon.

Something really nice happened today. I don't really know what to make of it or what it means. Will have to ponder on it a bit.

For the record, I really need to work on my social skills.

I Quit!

So, after seven months and three days, I've decided to quit my job.

I just can't take the pressure any more and feel burned out. I guess all the twelve hour days just got to me.

I told Shamoun that I would be in the office at 10:00 today (Saturday), but since I'm quitting first thing Monday, I say Fuck Him!

On one hand, I feel like I have alot of time and energy invested in this job. I've only not gone to work 1 day in the last 26. On the other hand, I have made some valuable contacts through some of the clients I have been introduced to. I think I can definitely make a ton more money and work less hours by jumping ship and going to work in the financial district.

Hey, things worked out pretty much how I wanted. This job introduced me to all sorts of people in NYC willing to pay me a ton of money, and the salary covered my expenses relating to relocating to the city.

Maybe I'll use that line from Half Baked, "Fuck you! Fuck you! You're cool. Fuck you! I'm out!"