Random Stuff

Over the last couple of weekends, I’ve spent some time catching up with an old friend of mine. We ran around together quite a bit in high school but then lost touch. Through that wonder that is classmates.com we got back in touch.

A lot of things have changed, but strangely in a similar way for the both of us. Some things don’t change, like the toys we buy. Except they are a lot more shiny now than they were 20 years ago.

At left is a (somewhat) artistic shot of our motorcycles. Instead of our motorcycles being the old beat up and abused Honda dirt bikes, our rides are now state of the art machines, a lot faster, and cost about fifteen times more than our old ones and look a heck of a lot better. These were our dream machines when we had the Honda’s. Click on the picture for more photos.

Surprisingly we both left our hometown for similar reasons and neither of us has any desire to return. We both followed similar paths to our current relationship status, though I will admit, that I am happy in the present and he seems a little hung up on the past. We’ve both grown quite a bit older, though whether we are more mature is very debatable. We are both at a place in our career that we never thought we would be. Even the though of having a career back then didn’t really occur to us.

It’s been good. We’ll see if we continue to catch up or go our separate ways from here. I really don’t know. But it would be cool if he did stick around.

There is one comment I heard my father say a number of years ago that made quite an impact on me. I think about it often.

Someone: “It’s a long life.”

My father looked at this person with a bit of astonishment and said “No! It’s Not!”

As I sit here at my desk waiting for some process to finish, my thoughts keep drifting off to other parts of the world. It’s only been three months since I’ve been out of the country. It will be at least 6 more until I can go again.

“It’s just like connect the dots! But with Europe!!” is what my friend said in email today.

The idea is to fly into Frankfurt, Germany. Then catch the equivalent of commuter flights from there to just about any country in Europe. Less than 2 hours on a plane and 50 euros each way. With a two week vacation you could see quite a lot.

I have a new appreciation for connect the dots.

“Shipping software is a lot like being constipated. It takes a lot of effort to get it out, and feels good when you are done, but it’s still shit.” –Me referring to shipping…well, every one of the products I’ve worked on for the last ten years.

Windows NT Terminal Server 4.0
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Detto Intellimover
Exchange Server
Windows CE 4.2, 5.0, 5.1, 6.0

I’m sure I’ll say it again. Hearing the choices and compromises that are made, seeing what developers do to make something work, and knowing just how unstable the software that runs our everyday life really is can be a bit disturbing.

To be perfectly honest, I’m amazed that any commercial development project actually ever works.

Yesterday when I left to get lunch, I noticed there were a few snowflakes in the air but didn’t think about it a lot. “Eh, a few snow flakes, but nothing to worry about. What are the odds of us having two snowstorms in one winter?”

But at about 1:30 reports from people leaving the office started coming in as they heard that it was snowing heavily up north. I thought to myself, that’s OK, because when it snows up north, it usually doesn’t come down my way.

At 4:45 I sent an email, then walked out of my office to talk to someone and noticed no one was around. They had all bailed. My girlfriend called me about that time and while on the phone with her, I looked out one of my co-workers windows to see about two inches of snow and it was coming down hard. By 4:55 I was in my car and driving out of the parking lot…At 5:45, I was exactly one block away from work. I didn’t get home until 8:50pm. A total commute time of almost four hours.

When I got home, there was at least six inches of snow. I tried to take the side (side, side, back)roads once I got near my house, but was blocked by either stuck cars, stuck buses, accidents, or downright impassable hills. On the last possible road to get to my house, I made it up fine, but passed about 50 abandoned cars on that hill.

This morning, however messy the roads were, was an absolutely gorgeous sight of everything covered in white with a blue sky.

Traffic wasn’t bad either. 15 minutes to get here when it normally takes me 45.

“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” –Socrates.

About an hour after my last post, the power went out in my building. Turns out there was a fire just down the street that took out the power to the area where I work. Heck of a way to get the afternoon off.

It feels like there is something wrong but I just can’t put my finger on it.

I think I need to start making a portal just for the stuff I want to play with.

I’ll add this one to my list of resolutions. How about if I work on my fun projects at least one day a week? I have so many ideas that I want to work on that I lose track of them. I’ve started a list of things that I want to do, but I manage to do very little with them, when I know I could do much more.

I’ve written some tools that download all of the pictures of cars posted to three different usenet news groups, put them all in a database, and do full text indexing on the filenames and the subject of the posting. So you can search for things like “mustang” and get a bunch of pictures of mustangs. It’s not perfect, far from complete, doesn’t handle duplicates well, but can be fun. It’s got around 40k pictures in it and climbing.

Go ahead and take a peek.

http://rdsd.com/cars

I spent some time looking over past financial data for the company I now work for. Lots of lost money. Millions. I think it’s something like $26 million over the last few years. Every year the loss seems to get larger.

The CEO of the company is also someone I would question. Glenda Dorchak was hired from Intel. That’s all I was told and didn’t think a lot about it until I started doing a bit of digging. Turns out there is enough controversy about here prior to her working for intel, that she is named in a book about the fall of a company. The book is “In the Company of Good and Evil.” which is about the fall of Value America. Specificly she is called the “Wicked Witch”.

Those two things don’t bode well to me.

There are other things that also make me nervous. But because non disclosure agreements signed by me with both Microsoft and Intrinsyc, I cannot talk about them.  I just wish I had been shown the product before I was hired. I was going on what I was being told by the friend who recomended I work there.
Make no mistake, they do pay me well, and the workload is significantly better than what I had at MS. But stability plays a large part in where I select to work. Since financials are about to be announced, I’ll be keeping a close eye on things.