New programmer, new training

Our department hired another programmer. Finally! But guess what that means for me--more training...

At first, it was going to be the first two weeks of September. He lives in Costa Rica; even though we have some really cool electronic tools for collaboration remotely, sometimes there's nothing better than in-person training. He came up for a couple of weeks; a couple of weeks I knew would be kinda crazy: I wouldn't get to telecommute my one day a week; I'd spend evenings and weekends doing entertaining I wouldn't otherwise. Well, while he was here, and based on some circumstances that worked out well, we decided that he'd stay another week. Really, really good for the work progress; but...not so good for getting back to my normal routine.

Training other programmers

Both work and home were both busy for half of a year. At work, starting in April 2008 and running through the end of October, I was training new teams on a few of the computer business applications I support. Applications I inherited, and therefore knew, well, nothing.

A couple years ago, our Information Technology group--the department in which I work--went through a round of employee cuts, and then less than a year later, it happened again. During each of those events, some of the other programmers in my department survived, but then after the round of cuts were done, they decided that the company morale was too low and left anyway. After two rounds of that, I ended up as the only programmer out of five who previously were in our department. And so I ended up supporting all the systems that everyone had supported.

Yes, I was doing the job of five programmers.

Well, some changes in April allowed me to start transitioning those inherited applications to other teams. Located in India. Half a planet (and a bizarre time zome change--12 and a *half* hours--away). The teams taking over the applications--they need to know how they work. Well, the only folks who knew that don't work for our company anymore! So, it was an insane six months during which we tore those apps apart line by line, figured them out, and trained the others folks. Oh yeah, and documented them so that the next poor sap who inherits them doesn't have the same problems!

Ya know, I'm really pretty good at figuring things out and organizing that info in a way others can use. I think I've found one of my niches. I figured out a way to map all the various parts of the system together into a structured outline, and each step of the outline contains a link to the piece of the system that does the work. This way we can capture multiple different things and different kinds of things working together, but see how they all interact, and explained in a plain English way (for the non-programmers, too)!

Too many high school clubs!?

My oldest daughter has really gotten into the "high school" thing--she is into not just a couple, but *four* different clubs! It stems from a strange couple of details of the logistics of getting to and from school each day.

She has a friend who lives just a couple of houses away in her mom's neighborhood. Each day, either her mom or I drive her and her friend Natella to school, and Natella's mom picks them up in the afternoons. However, because of the time at which Natella's mom can do that, the two of them have some extra time every afternoon. So, she joined Spanish club, Art club, Stand (which supports environmental initiatives, I think), and GSA (Gay Straight Alliance). She's big into helping out other people and supporting people's rights.

I feel great that she is getting socialization time and gets to particpate in things outside school in which she has fun.

She started out the session struggling again. It's been a few years, but unfortunately it's back to checking her work every day again. Sigh.

Why I've been so out of touch

First, it was the project. Then, support calls--an insane amount.

We finally implemented the project! I posted before about the trips I took (here and here). In the last half of 2007 we defined a cross-industry, world wide standard for the exchange of quality data. After getting back from the holiday vacation, we implemented the coding changes in all our companies. We went from idea of a standard to the production implementation across three companies in nine months; we matched the number one record pace for the creation of the standard, and my agile project management style was a large contribution to the success. :)

It was some long working hours at the end. I'd hoped things would calm down some, but another application I support started getting a lot of support calls coming in. The work load hasn't really subsided, so it's still some long work hours and not really staying in touch with folks much. Sigh.

Well, as they say, if the work was easy, they'd hire anyone to do it.

It's good to be the lead drummer

There's a lady who teaches belly dance at a few of the recreation centers in the cities around here, and who also hosts belly dance parties at her house about twice a year. I've been doing middle eastern drumming for so long, teaching it weekly for the last five years, and running drum circles so often that she asks me to lead the drumming for her parties; I've done that for at least two years now.

At the November 2007 party, I became entranced by one of the dancers from the moment she hit the dance floor for her solo. It's been years since a dancer has thrown off my rhythm, but later that night she did. We really connected at the party, but it took until the end of the night before I could work up the courage to even ask for her phone number.

Our first date was just a couple days later, and we've really connected since then. Besides the obvious shared hobby of middle eastern drum and dance, we have very similar styles about the way we go about life.

It's grown so much that on Valentine's Day 2008 I asked; after a brief, stunned silence she excitedly said yes, and we're engaged to be married! We are going for a long engagement and haven't set a date, but we're thinking mid to late 2009.

I guess there shouldn't have been a doubt

Wahoo--I still have a job! My boss's line was "Was there ever a doubt?".

The guy who used to run the company wrote a book about how only the paranoid survive. I haven't read the book, but the the title says most of it. I take it like this--when you're paranoid, you are attentive, careful, diligent, and cautious. Those things are the make sure you don't slip up, and thus you are always okay.

It's when you get comfortable, stop worrying, and settle into a routine that you can make mistakes, miss little clues, and make mistakes (some little, some perhaps large). *That's* when you things come back to bite you.

So, in my perspective, it *was* the worrying that kept me okay. It might be a mental mind trick, but it's worked for me for the 14 years I've been at there. :)

Fall break

I'm back today from a short vacation. The kids were on fall break, so I took some time off to hang out with them. I wanted to take the entire break off, but I didn't think I could pull off the work project implementation on time by taking the whole thing, so I started last Thursday, instead. I had originally planned to take them on some big trip (maybe Philadelphia, Washington D.C?), but with the possibly redeployment coming up, I decided not to spend a major chunk of money.

So instead we hung out, picked up their friends to hang out, went to movies ("The Game Plan"--cute, worth a matinee price), they had sleepovers, shopping at the malls with them.

My schnauzer of 16 years passed away a few weeks back. He had had fleas and ticks; so I spent some of the vacation time doing some serious deep cleaning to try to purge the place. (I got good arm and shoulder exercises doing it; I'm so sore that I'm glad to be back to a desk job!)