The hunt is on....

Ok, so a few things have happened in the last couple of weeks.

I'm tired of working at Netilla. This isn't new, but Dan finally talked me into putting my resume on monster.com. Kyle hooked me up with a friend from Google who I sent my resume.

I have been emailing Bill for the last few months since he left Netilla and I mentioned to him last week that I had started the search and if he knew anybody. Turns up the company he now works for (Gridapp) is looking for engineers and that "I would fit right in". So now I have my first interview tomorrow afternoon.

It's another startup and it's in midtown Manhattan. It's a Linux based platform, so I think it could be right up my alley. I guess I'll find out tomorrow if the skillset is a match. www.gridapp.com

On the Memvidia front, the project is starting to actually take shape. We bypassed the acquisition problems (interlacing issues, etc) by using a COTS DVD recorder, so I think this will be good enough for the proof of concept phase. I don't know how this whole thing will work out if I take the new job. I guess it's good to have options.

Don't know what I will do about the living situation if I take a job in Manhattan. Guess I shouldn't get too far ahead of myself.

Kyle and Pete have been in Hawaii for the last week. Would have like to have gotten her advice before tomorrow's interview. Such is life.

Fourth of July went well. On Sunday Naomi and I met up at Rick's house for a barbeque with the rest of the family. Was lots of fun. Later that night, we went with Lauren and Kevin to the fireworks in Bradley Beach.

On Monday we went and did a barbeque at her family's house. Again lots of fun. I really need to work on my strategy for Rook, since I keep getting crushed. Better yet, I should find a group that I can play card games with regularly so I can get better in general.

Ok, off to read this week's book, "The Art of Unix Programming" by Eric S. Raymond.

Aloha from Hawaii

Spent the last week in Hawaii with Naomi. Here's a brief synopsis:

Fresh brewed Hawaiian coffee every morning
Chinatown in Honolulu
Walking on the beach in Waikiki
Snorkeling in Hamauna Bay
Mai Tais at the Pink Hawaiian
Visited the Arizona Memorial, Missouri Memorial, and Bowfin submarine museum
Iolani Palace, State Capitol building
The Bishop Museum
Lounging by the pool and working on my tan
Shaved ice at the North Shore
The view from the top of Diamond Head
Oceanfront Luau
A headache one night, a back covered in sunburn the next, sunscreen in my left eye that blinded me for hours on the third day.

Lots of fun. It is good to be home though and back in my own bed. Back to work tomorrow.

Pictures should be up on the website in a few days.

Reflections on Graduation Week

So I've had two graduations in the last two weeks:

Naomi had her graduation from Bryn Mawr a week and a half ago. They made a big deal out of it by turning it into an all-weekend thing. All her family came out from Michigan and I had a suite at a hotel nearby the college. Saturday was the convocation and garden party. The weather was absolutely beautiful. Sunday was the convocation. Again the weather was good, although it started to drizzle after the ceremony. The whole thing seemed a little familiar, like I had been there before. Oh yeah, I had been there before seven years earlier.

Spent quite a bit of time with her family. They seem pretty nice. Took her aunt and uncle to King of Prussia. Ah, consumerism. As I'm standing in "Organized Living" I'm thinking to myself, "Wow, an entire store dedicated to shelving and boxes to organize all the unnecessary crap you would buy in a mall."

Last Saturday we had a joint party at Jen's house for Lauren's graduation from Monmouth University and my birthday. Good fun was had by all. Barbeque, vollyball, lots of just sitting around on the patio socializing. We had about 25 people there in total. And can I just say, Jen rocks? Sure, I got nice clothes from Mom and Lauren, but Jen takes the cake. She got me my own "Darth Tater" (Mr. Potato head that looks like Darth Vader), as well as the first season of MacGyver on DVD. Very cool.

So I guess I should get to the "reflections" since that was the subject of this post. Graduations are fun. I think I've been to my last one at Bryn Mawr. On one hand, I can really feel the deja vu, and yet I recognized that this was my last time I would be setting foot on the Bryn Mawr campus.

Speaking of Bryn Mawr women, Carter called me out of the blue last night. I had not spoken to her since May Day. She's a strange one. Seems a bit depressed about not having broken into acting yet even though she's been in New York City for two years now. She was also sharing a bit of the trials and tribulations of online dating, which gave me some entertainment. Looking forward to it getting a little warmer so I can get into the city after work. Can't wait until they start doing the movies in Bryant Park.

Naomi is going to take the job in Baltimore. She accepted the position today. I have some mixed feelings on the matter, but I guess that's the subject for another post.

Panic attack

I don't know what happened. I felt sick to my stomach. I was feeling frustrated because I was asked to help Jim debug a problem and he was doing it all wrong and I had to sit there and watch rather than just fix it myself. Gamid had just dropped a bunch of code on me and it was all screwed up. And Dave hasn't figured out how to have a conversation with Paul at a humanlike tone. He was practically shouting.

I just had to get out of there. I went outside for a few minutes to cool off.

I left work at 6:30. Haven't gotten anything done tonight. I feel like crap in general.

Haven't talked to Naomi yet tonight. Didn't talk to her last night either. I called earlier and left a message.

Going to go to bed early tonight.

Catching up.... Pat and Bill's departure...

Haven't updated the journal in a while. The week has been pretty busy, yet uneventful. Been continuing work on MemVidia. Bought Macromedia Flash on Saturday. It was $699, so this is the first case where I've put more than my time into this thing. It had better work out or else I'm out some real money.

Today was Patrick and Bill's last day at Netilla. We all went out to a bar for drinks and food after work. While they are both quite capable of being a pain in the ass, I have to admit that I will miss them. Of course, I should be able to find Patrick any night at Basil T's if I'm willing to drive down to Red Bank.

At dinner tonight, I was enlightened to the ongoing theory that for some reason Ken is always in the best mood on Thursday morning. It had everybody at the table wondering what happens to him on Wednesday night, and there was some suggestion of that being when he gets a weekly conjugal visit. I have to acknowledge that he has his good days and his bad, but I'm not sure it's so predictable.

Saw Kyle last night, and she was joking about keeping a little calendar to track Pete's mood. Each day she would draw a smiley face or sad face, etc. Perhaps I should start doing that with Ken so I can see if there is any trend. I wonder how that would look plotted out on an Excel spreadsheet.

Going to see Naomi this weekend. She's pretty busy, so I won't get out there until Saturday afternoon. She has a renaissance choir performance on Sunday, so I'm going to try to stay long enough to see it.

Ok, off to bed soon.

Sleepless in Somerset

Can't sleep.

I was thinking about the work I did today. I spent most of the evening trying to get a third-party's code to work, hassling with the C++ that I never really took the time to learn. Got me thinking about college, and how I used to spend nights in the computer lab trying to get my assignments to work. The whole thing reminded me of the fact that I've had a C compiler since I was fourteen years old and I didn't really start to take advantage of it until I was in college. How much smarter I would be now if I had started a few years earlier.

And that got me thinking about the man who gave me the compiler.

Most kids ask their parents for a skateboard or the latest video game. My Dad gave me a commercial C compiler. Most computer geeks take compilers for granted nowadays - since open source Operating Systems like Linux came around every distribution comes with one for free. But back in the early 1990's they were expensive and only professional software developers had them.

I was thinking about how I looked at my father back when I was at Lucent and 3Com. By that point he had stopped doing development, and was doing Quality Assurance at 3Com. Part of me saw him as a dinosaur, a relic of the mainframe era whose skills were useless in the modern world. I was the "young whipper snapper" who was familiar with all the new technology. I guess at the time I really didn't know what he had been working on all those years at Concurrent, but I figured that since it was all old technology that it wasn't very advanced compared to the technology of the nineties. I figured it must be easy compared to the latest and greatest stuff I was working on.

In the last couple of years though I have come to realize that the opposite is true. Modern computing provides so many facilities that I take for granted that I don't really appreciate how hard it was to get there or what the machine is really doing. It's like kids today who use calculators and as a result don't know how to do long division.

Bert designed hard drive controllers. He designed logic analyzer microcode. He coded in assembly. This is the hardcore shit. I think about it now, and realize that there are a million Visual Basic programmers. There are hundreds of thousands of C and Java programmers. Even firmware design has a fairly large workforce - any C programmer with a little motivation can learn it. But only a handful of people can do microcode -- the lowest level above the hardware.

I wish I had learned more from him.

I found several boxes of code he wrote for various projects at Concurrent. Wide-carriage greenbar printouts of work that clearly he had been proud of. When I look at the code, I see beauty in a way that only engineers can appreciate. I see genius.

I sometimes wonder whether the work I do for Netilla begins to compare. Sure the people who run Netilla think it's the best thing since sliced bread, but am I really getting out of it the most that I can? Has my growth stagnated? Will the MemVidia project be an opportunity for growth, or just another few years spent doing integration work of various components?

Is it innovation or just integration?

I think about the drive controllers he designed, and wonder what I have done that even comes close. The stuff he did had never been done before. He took the field in new directions. He did soft sectoring of the disk while everybody else was jumping to the outer track to map around defects.

Anyway, I guess I've rambled enough for the moment. Guess I will try to get some sleep. Tomorrow is Friday and Naomi is coming over after work.

Tuesday morning

Weekend went well. Marc came out Friday night, locked his keys in his car, so the Friday night adventure was to drive down to South Jersey and get his keys. Met up with him, Richie, and Aggie the following morning for 7:30 breakfast. Then met up with Mom for coffee.

Spent the rest of Saturday in Pennsylvania with Naomi. We did a double date with Heather and her new significant other. Bertucci's, Cold Stone, movie.

Came back Sunday and worked on MemVidia. Slowly making progress.

Work is ok. Plugging along. Last night got the scrolling code to work for MemVidia, which is a big deal since I've been struggling with it for about a week. Should be able to get a prototype cleaned up this week for Paul to see.

Woke up from an odd dream this morning where I was in Germany with Mrs. Allgeyer, the German teacher from high school. The odd thing of course if that I never took German. In the dream I got lost, couldn't remember which bus I needed to take, what part of Berlin I was staying in, and which hotel I was staying in. Oh yeah, in my dream like in life, I didn't speak a word of German.

Ok, should probably get showered and off to work....