August 9, 2008: Visiting Grandview-on-Hudson

We got to sleep in a little this morning.  That was nice.  Oreo definitely enjoyed that.

My friend Clare pointed me to Microsoft’s Research on Six Degrees of Separation.  The topic came up when we realized that even though we live about 2,500 miles from each other on different continents that we had both stayed at the same hotel in another city several thousand miles away from either of us.  I would like to see Google, AOL and Yahoo! perform some silimar research using their own resources on an even larger scale.  Could be very interesting.  FaceBook and MySpace should get involved as well.  Using the conglomeration of these social networking tools might prove that the number of degrees is actually lower when they are used in conjunction with one another.

I got to working as soon as I got out of bed this morning.  My original day included an incredible about of work for the office but a lot of that work was canceled either Thursday or late yesterday evening so my day isn’t nearly as hectic as it might have been.

Most of the day was spent supporting the Surfing IT Wizard, John Stephens, as he did some work in Ithaca.  I also did some work for the office.  It was a mixed work day.

Dominica spent most of the day shopping for diaper stuff.  She is completely enthralled with diapers which I don’t understand at all.

My day was pretty long.  I worked a full ten hour day from nine until seven without even enough of a break to go to get food.  Around noon Dominica ran down to the deli downstairs and grabbed some French toast and scrambled eggs for me.  Other than that my only break all day was to walk Oreo once.

When I wrapped up around seven, I jumped into the shower as quickly as possible and we hit the road up to Katie’s summer place in Grandview-on-Hudson for her river party.  Our trip didn’t go too smoothly.  First the GPS took us on an insane route using i280 and the NJ Turnpike which didn’t make any sense at all.  Then, as we entered the turnpike, the person in front of us went through the EZPass lane pulling a trailer.  The trailer, of course, tripped the EZPass system for us so that when we went through it had already registered “Go, No Tag Read” – meaning that the Turnpike intended to charge us the full length of the turnpike because of someone else breaking the rules!

When we got off of the turnpike we stopped at the toll booth, not the EZPass booth, and explained what had happened and they had no resolution whatsoever and they, as well, charged us, in cash, the entire length of the Turnpike!  So, in the end, the punishment for coming to New Jersey and using the EZPass system correctly is to get double fined the max fine!  And, of course, since EZPass is based in Newark, their 800 number was down for the night so we couldn’t even speak to anyone.  There is apparently no recourse for people using EZPass – you are simply taking your chances.  Now we will probably have to deal with opening fraud charges against them through the credit card company.

It ended up taking us an hour and a half to go the forty-five minutes to Katie’s house.  Dealing with the Turnpike issue cost us over twenty minutes sitting in completely stopped traffic – an additional punishment over the double fine.  It was around nine when we finally arrived in Grandview-on-Hudson.

The party had been going on for quite some time by the time that we had arrived.  There were some portabello mushrooms on the grill for us still although everyone else had eaten long ago.  It was very dark but the view of the Hudson was awesome.  The glittering lights of the Tappen Zee Bridge and Irvington and Hastings-on-Hudson on the other side of the river were really spectacular.

We stayed at the party until around one thirty.  It was pretty late for those of us used to going to bed long before midnight and we had to drive back to Newark yet.  It was a little after two when we got home and got to bed.

Tonight might be the first time that I have actually hung out in Rockland County since Phil Ayers and I stayed in Rockland for the New York State Math Competition circa 1993.

August 8, 2008: 080808

I’m thankful for days like today because one of my biggest challenges in life is coming up with a cool title for the daily post and today it is so obvious that I didn’t even need to think about it.  One less thing to come up with on a busy Friday.

Once again I am backed up on email.  One busy day and everything falls apart.  It took me days last time to get caught up on all of the mail.  It comes in so quickly and so much of it is something that I need to keep for one reason or another.  I find the constant flow of it to be pretty frustrating.  Even with all of the diligence that I put in attempting to read everything that pertains to me the levels of SPAM that we have – internal SPAM that is, not external – completely overwhelms us and forces us to automate huge swaths of email reception so it is extremely easy to miss something.  I must spend two hours per day just managing the email.

I had a very busy morning with tons of requests coming in even before my morning started and while I was on the train in to Manhattan.  My entire morning was spent just completing incoming requests as quickly as I could.  Very draining.  I am going to be doing a lot of catch-up work tomorrow – if just to get my mailbox back to a state in which I can manage to take care of people without missing critical things!

For lunch, Katie and I went out to Financier Patisserie on Stone.  It’s Friday so that sandwich of the day is the hot smoked salmon and Gruyeres which is amazing along with their crap quiche which I have not had an opportunity to try before.  Lunch was excellent although it is always so crowded down on that part of Stone – it can be rather uncomfortable to attempt to eat there.

My real shock of the day came in the early afternoon when my consulting firm called me to tell me that not only was I going to receive an “out of the blue” paycut but that it was going to be 15.27% and that it was effective immediately – starting Monday morning (today is Friday.)  I was originally told, by my consulting firm, some month or two ago that there was a cut but that I exempt from it and not to worry.  This news, apparently, is actually the news that caused this disaster to happen.

So my day went from busy to insanely stressful in a moment.  No warning at all that something like this was going to happen.  Blissfully going through my day thinking that everything was great and then “blam”, humongous paycut and a hearty muhahahaha!

Most of my afternoon, somewhat obviously, was spent panicking about what was happening with my pay and my job and my consulting firm.  What a mess.  I finally reached my boss out on Long Island and was able to talk to him and then administration and the staffing department.  The company for which I work was not happy to find out that I was getting  a massive paycut, without warning and for no reason.  Their recommendation to me, that I had also come up with on my own, was simply to not accept the new offer.  On Monday morning, in theory, there will be some serious renegotiations and very likely a change of consulting firms.  We are going to see.

So, somewhat nerve-wracking, I am officially unemployed this weekend.  Monday morning is going to be interesting.  The company at which I work is thinking that things will be okay – but it is still stressful as there are so many variables and changes and potentially bad things that can happen.  For example, this could really impact the 401K that I have been investing into as I am not completely vested yet.  I hate that companies can take away your vestment simply by lowering your rate or firing you to protect themselves.

I was at work until seven this evening.  This is going to be a long weekend as we wait to see what will happen come Monday.  I hate that so much of my career involves major disasters in the eleventh hour and then having to wait while no one is available to see what is happening.  Completely inappropriately, my manager at the consulting firm is both on vacation all next week and decided to just leave in the middle of the afternoon so that I had no one to reach.  I reached out to her backup manager to whom important things are supposed to go when she is not available and that person’s out of office email message said that they were on vacation and that people who needed them needed to speak to the person that I tried the first time!  Circular out of office hand-offs.  How professional.  Argh.

This has been an ongoing situation for me over the years.  I cannot count anymore how many times I have been given incomplete information or have received major changes in plans or have gotten disasterous news on a Friday afternoon (I seriously believe now that this is planned so that people don’t have to “deal with it”) and then absolutely anyone who could be involved leaves the office early and hides.  This has often occurred when work scheduled for a Monday morning gets cancelled and no one wants to admit that they never had a contract for the work.  It is very common.  A consulting firm should never have a circumstance where people are not available over the weekend.  I even left a voicemail for the entire consulting office, before five o’clock which is well before the end of the working day, for just anyone to call me back as it was an emergency and not one person bothered to contact me knowing that I had an emergency and that both of my managers decided to stop working today.

Something that “non-contractors” seem to forget is that in “business time”, a Friday night and a Monday morning touch each other.  There is no work over the weekend.  Not real work anyway.  There is no HR, staffing, managers, etc.  If something is left unresolved on a Friday night that means that it is unresolved over the weekend and on Monday morning.  Did my consulting firm really forget that when they said that Monday morning I had a new rate that that meant that it had to be completely dealt with before I left the office today or else we had no resolution and no contract on Monday morning?  It isn’t like they can get into the office (or will bother to go into the office) early on Monday, contact me before I am supposed to start work and make a deal with the company at which I work and coordinate with the “pass-through” consulting firm all before I start needing to work around seven in the morning!  They aren’t prepared to deal with this situation in any way.  They just run home, stick their collective fingers into their proverbial ears and go “la la la la – I can’t hear you” and hope that the situation resolves itself, magically, without their intervention.

Why does every company find it so important to make going to work everyday and doing a good job incredibly stressful?  It takes real effort to make things have this much stress.  This doesn’t happen naturally.  It took a minimum of four or five people at my lowest level consulting firm alone completely failing to do their jobs to get us into this situation and they aren’t even the company that initiated the whole problem!  It took a lot of screwing up to get here.  How come all of those people aren’t getting major paycuts?  I put in a lot of effort this afternoon trying to find a way to keep my job.  Apparently neither of the consulting firms cares whatsoever if they lose me as a consultant (and, as we approach the end of day – perhaps lose the company at which I work as a customer.)

It’s no wonder people go out drinking so often!

It was after eight when I finally got home to Newark.  When there is this much stress, though, it isn’t fun going home.  You want to stay in the office and get things fixed.  You want resolution.  That’s what makes me the most upset.  That so many people can just knock off for the weekend because it doesn’t directly affect them is outrageous.

So I got home but it is pretty hard to relax on weekends like this.  Ryan came up from downstairs and we ordered in Brazilian Pizza from a place the Dominica and I had never heard of before.  The pizza was amazing.  Min and I got a corn and cheese pizza which was delicious and we all shared a chocolate and cheese pizza for dessert which, sounds awful, but was amazingly good.  Mozzarella, chocolate, cherries and cinnamon!  We will be ordering from this place a lot.  They have like fifty different pizzas.

It was around midnight before we actually got to bed.  Busy day tomorrow.  Working all day and then going to Katie’s house on the Hudson for a riverfront party in the evening.

August 7, 2008: No New Job For Me

Check out the slow motion lightning on Today’s Big Thing.  This is truly awesome.  Thanks to Vikas for the link.

I was pretty tired when I pulled myself out of bed at six thirty this morning considering the fact that I did not fall asleep until sometime after one in the morning.  I am covering the early morning shift today for someone at work so it is just this one day this week.  It fit perfectly into my schedule to cover this shift today except that I had not planned on working so late last night.  So today I am very tired, but that really isn’t anything new.

Tomorrow is 08-08-08.  Just interesting.  In just over three years we will have 11-11-11 which is the coolest.  That is, if a date can every be cool based on the recurrence of numerals within it.  It is on the boundary of cool at the very best, I think.

My morning was incredibly busy as I worked on the same project that had kept me up so late last night.  I have been determined to get to the root cause of this major issue that we have had at the office.  It has been going on for two or three months and has caused countless issues and I would be so happy to have it resolved.  Not just for the sake of getting it resolved but also for the opportunity to show up the “escalation” people who are supposed to have been able to fix this for us quite easily but have been unable to even grasp the core of the issue after two months with it.  This is my first serious bought with the problem but it is a tough one indeed.

By mid morning I actually had the solution to the issue and was quite gleeful indeed.  What a relief if was to figure that mystery out, and quite a rush as well.  This has been plaguing all of us for quite some time.  It is quite the feather in our administration team’s caps as well as the engineering team who claim to be our next level of escalation have been completely lost in this issue and unable to come up with a single clue.

Not one hour after completely embarrassing the engineering team, again (first time was two months ago, then someone else on my team showed them up pretty bad yesterday, then again this morning) their manager called me to tell me that they had decided not to offer me a position on their team.  Ha ha.  Talk about being a soar loser.

It is sad, of course, to not be offered a position for which you interview.  In this case, though, it is a bit embarrassing to be turned down by a team that so conspicuously can’t do their own jobs and need me to do it for them as it is!  The issues of the last few days were nothing compared to the issue that I resolved for them a few months back and that issue did not involve a “problem” that they could not solve but a massive architectural disaster that they had caused.

Oh well.  After this morning it would have been embarrassing to have gone to work there anyway.  People that I work with, that I really respect, have no respect for this team and would not be at all impressed if I was to switch over there.  In hindsight (with the wine of sour grapes, of course) staying exactly where I am seems like the far better decision anyway.  I am thankful, in some ways, that the decision was not really mine to make as I was far more likely to make a poor one.

Most of my evening was spent supporting Jeremy remotely as he worked to install a dozen computers at dad’s house with OpenSUSE 11 Linux.  It is actually a rather challenging project because the computers are so old with the slowest being a Celeron 433 and the fastest being a few Pentium III 1GHz and several different speeds in between.  Anything without a PC133 memory interface is being considered “obsolete” and will not be used for installation at the school.  Even a PIII 667 will do the trick – it is amazing how much performance one can eek from a Pentium 3 with enough PC133 memory.  But fall back to the older memory systems and the performance is just too slow, in my opinion, for desktop use.  The PIII 667/133 has been my “drop dead line” for desktops for six years at least.  That machine had just enough performance to make it the longest lived useful desktop platform of which I know.  These days, having the 1GHz machine is quite noticably better, however, and we are trying to get as many of those installed as possible.

I worked the early evening with Jeremy on the installs and then spent the late evening writing a script that can be run against the machines to take them from the raw install state to a finished product.  I am used to using RPM and YUM on Linux but now I am automating with Zypper which is similar to YUM but a little different.

I got to bed at a reasonable hour and listened to a little more of “Shadow fo the Silk Road.”  I am now halfway through the book.

If you need more cool stuff, check out the face on this girl after performing a pretty incredible landing into a pond.

August 6, 2008: Lack of Sleep

I was pretty tired when the alarm went off this morning.  My Wednesday are so early!  I got up and got ready pretty quickly today.  Had to wait for Dominica to get ready.  She gets up about forty minutes after I do.  I fed Oreo his breakfast and got him ready to go.  He was bouncing off of the walls yesterday so he definitely needs to spend the day at daycare today.  He needs to burn off some energy before tomorrow.

Tomorrow I am working the early morning shift so I will be up at six thirty to start my day.  After work I am heading out to Jersey City to meet a colleague for drinks.

Dominica managed to drop me off in time to catch the early train which was nice.  I got to Summit  and the shuttle was not there and I had to wait for about half an hour before it arrived.  I was a bit worried that they were not running anymore and that I was stuck just standing around in Summit.

Today is Dominica’s one year anniversary with her consulting firm.  No cake at work for her today.

My day was actually very busy.  My “average” day consists of software deployments, paperwork and some general technology guidance.  Nothing overly strenuous.  Today was very different and was almost an entire day of really deep troubleshooting.

For lunch, four of us went out to a nice Mexican place to which I have not been before.  The food was really excellent.  I ordered bean enchilladas.  Yummy.

This afternoon, Jeremy was at dad’s house doing OpenSUSE 11 Linux installations.  He has about a dozen computers over there that he is trying to get ready for Castile Christian Academy that he will be installing over there very soon.  Most of the machines are in the Pentium III 667MHz to 1GHz range.  Nothing new at all but it is surprising how well a nice 1GHz PIII with 512MB or PC133 memory will perform with a nice, conservative Linux installation even with a really nice, gorgeous desktop.  We are using KDE 4.0.3 for the school this year.  It is a bit aggressive for their needs but so far we haven’t seen any problems with it and we are looking to move them towards more modern technologies sooner than later.

My afternoon was very busy and I ended up getting stuck in Warren later than usual.  I caught the five thirty shuttle which put me on the regular Hoboken train rather than the express.  It was around seven, I believe, when I got back to Eleven80 in Newark.

Dominica and I were both really tired and neither of us felt like going out for dinner or ordering anything in.  So we opted for peanut butter and honey on English muffins.  It is called taking the easy way out.

I worked, for the office, until half past midnight.  Chris was online working with me the entire time.  What a long night it was.  I was completely exhausted by the time that I finally went to bed.  And tomorrow I start my shift at six thirty in the morning.  Ugh.

August 5, 2008: It’s Cooking for Oreo Day

I was up right at seven today.  Up and moving.  Today turned out to be pretty busy so I am glad that I got up when I did and logged right in.  My entire day ended up being very busy.  I didn’t really get any time to myself.

Tonight is Dominica’s night to cook for Oreo.  Cooking his healthy stew is an all evening activity.  It also requires Dominica to go grocery shopping during the day.

My day was pretty long.  I worked until around seven in the evening.  Dominica came home and started cooking for Oreo right away.  It takes roughly three hours for his stew to be ready – then she has to blend it and put it into the containers to freeze.

I had a rough end of the day.  Just as the day was ending I found out that there is a very distinct possibility that my pay has been dramatically cut without any warning.  We were told that cuts were happening but I had assurance that I was not affected.  Tonight a new PO arrived and the rate was cut even after the assurances.  We don’t have any details and it might just be a mistake, but as it is the end of the day no one knows anything.  So now we have all kinds of stress caused by this potential issue.  🙁

In happy news, the Roku Netflix device is hitting the market.  Now you can enjoy the Netflix online service without having to use a computer – just plug in to a television or monitor.  Only $99 for the player.  A very good deal.  We are definitely planning to get one for ourselves.  We love our Netflix service.

We watched a little of the third season of Frasier tonight.  Then off to bed a little on the early side – although Oreo needed to be walked before going to bed.  That always makes it hard to fall asleep.