Rants and Revelations

Start this off with a look back at last years, because for once I did a pretty fair job.

Here are my resolutions from last year:

break 20 minutes in the Baycreek time trial

I actually broke 19 minutes, so chalk that one up as a win.

finish the Long Lake Long Boat Regatta long race (9 miles)

I didn’t just finish, I came in 5 seconds behind Mike Finear, after dragging him in my wake for several miles. Another win.

figure out if I want to continue flying or not.

Gave up flying, didn’t really miss it. Found myself obsessing over every mistake I ever made in the air and about how blasé I was about the danger at the time. Trying to tell myself that’s because I was on my game back then so I could handle it, and now I’m out of practice I wouldn’t handle it so easily if it happened now. Can’t tell if that means I should never go back, or if I need to really practice a lot if I go back.

develop an ajax web site, using either GWT or jquery or ruby on rails or something

I started an iPhone app, but hit a snag and put it aside. Realized that the GWT web site would be a better help with my job search, and made some half decent progress on this before I actually got a job.

diet

That went pretty well. Between February and June I lost 40 pounds and then hit a plateau. Unfortunately it’s the same plateau I hit every time I go on a diet. Spend most of the fall still within spitting distance of being on the diet (it’s hard to be strict when you’re home all day) but not losing any weight. However, I think I was building some muscle mass in my arms and core, so maybe it wasn’t all that bad. Managed to gain 10 pounds of it back between Thanksgiving and now. Still a win, I think.

exercise

Yeah, pretty much. I started out the year being barely able to paddle 2 miles, and now a 10 mile workout holds no terror for me. Still trying to figure out how to keep that fitness over the off season. (Yeah, I know, “Off season? What’s that?” – getting out to paddle once in a blue moon is no substitute for paddling three or four times a week)

get a better job

Well, it took until a week before Christmas, but I got a decent contract job. Hopefully it will lead to more decent jobs.

once more subject myself to the psychological torture of trying to get more treatment for my pain

I didn’t actually do anything about this one. But between not having to sit at a desk, not having to drive much, losing weight and exercising more, my knees weren’t that bad. Of course after a week of driving 3 hours a day to my new job, my knees are now the worst they’ve been since back when I used to drive to Ottawa twice a month. Hopefully that will recover now that I’m working more from home.

1600×1200

How about 1920×1080 on the left, and 1920×1200 on the right. Now *that* is resolution, baby!

That was the year that was. This is my list for this year:

• Break 17:30 in the Baycreek Time Trial. I’d like to break 17, but I think 17:30 is more attainable.
• Join NYMCRA and start competing for points. I’d like to do at least 5 of the points races this year, but they haven’t put out the 2010 calendar yet so I don’t know which ones those will be. Last year I did Tupper Lake, Armond Bassett, and Long Lake, and I could easily extend that to 5 by doing Round The Mountain or Bear Mountain and the long course at the Rochester Open Water Challenge. I probably won’t get a lot of points, because unlike the other guys I don’t get any handicap points because I’m not over 50 and my Thunderbolt is Unlimited Class. If I’m reading the points system right, at Long Lake I would have gotten 85 points because although I was only 5 seconds behind Mike F, he got handicap time for being in an EFT, a Touring Class boat and time for being over 50, so his adjusted time is 3:34 ahead of me. Competing for points might add a new twist to races, but mostly I see it as a reason to go to more races.
• Start building up my training volume. This year my GPS recorded 670 miles of kayaking, and that’s not including the early part of the season before I bought it, and the few times I forgot to charge the damn thing. I’d like to increase both the number of paddles and the length of them. If I can manage a few 20 mile plus days, I’d be slowly working towards doing the “90 Miler”, maybe in 2011 as a 50th birthday thing.
• Get the diet back on track and try to break through this plateau I was stuck at this fall.
• Finish revamping my navaid.com site into GWT so it doesn’t look like something designed in 1992, which it probably was.
• Figure out the GRIB thing that Laurie wants me to do.
• Hold onto this job, or find another one quickly when it ends.
• And that’s about it for the public ones.

Hopefully I’ll do as well this year as I did last.

My office

A few short impressions from 2.5 days of work:

• The drive sucks. It’s about an hour and forty minutes each way, and today it was snowing so it was a bit longer. I’m going through a tank full of gas every two days, which even with a Prius seems expensive. They told me in the interview I’ll be able to start working from home soon, so I’ve got to get that set up.
• The construction trailer I work in sucks. I sit next to the door, and it’s cold and drafty, even when people remember to close it behind them. Right behind me is a meeting room with paper thin walls where everybody uses the speaker phone. Worse still, the heater outlet is there so most times when the meeting is on, people turn off the heater. If we’re lucky, they remember to turn it back on afterwards, but yesterday we didn’t discover that nobody had turned on the heater until my toes were about to drop off.
• My computer has two screens. I had two big screens when I was at Kodak, and I’d forgotten how useful that is when you’re programming to be able to devote an entire screen to Eclipse while you used the other window for running the app, as well as other web browsing and the like. As soon as I have my first paycheck, I think I’m going to buy a cheap LCD panel for my home office.
• The pace is hectic. My supervisor never has time to show me anything, but he’s expecting results immediately. That can be frustrating. On the other hand, it’s good to have something to do and a project where things actually happen.
• They wrote their own web framework. As if the world doesn’t have enough Java web frameworks, they wrote their own. And it has its good points and bad points. Each page starts with an XML page description document and an XSLT document. But it’s not what you think – the XSLT document doesn’t process that page description document. Instead, the page description document specifies the Java beans that either produce or consume nodes in a different XML document, which the XSLT document then processes into an HTML page. The forward and back buttons on the browser don’t work on many of their pages, for reasons I don’t entirely understand yet. They use Javascript a lot. I’m going to come out of here with a lot of experience in XSLT and JQuery, I hope.
• The company seems equally split between people who are friendly and helpful, and people who refuse to look up when you speak to them. Fortunately it appears I’m mostly going to be working with people in the first category.
• I’m genuinely getting a good feeling about working here. It’s such a refreshing change from the place I worked last winter.

Spoiler alert: I’ve got a new job. Woo hoo! I start on Monday.

When I got my citizenship, they took away my high security Permanent Resident Card (“green card”) and gave me this fancy paper “Certificate of Naturalization”. At the ceremony, they told us that we should apply for passports immediately because the “Certificate of Naturalization” isn’t good for travel, but you had to send in the “Certificate of Naturalization” with the passport application as proof of citizenship and identity. Well, I had to travel to Ottawa for a kayak race the very next day, and so I kept it. And it worked for a couple of trips to Canada. I was expecting to get a new job any day now, so I kept the document so I’d have proof of citizenship when the time came.

Well, it wasn’t “any day now”, but I eventually got a job, and I had to fill out the I-9, which is your proof of eligibility for employment in the US. And that’s when I discovered that the list of documents that you’re allowed to use for proof of citizenship and/or identity doesn’t include the “Certificate of Naturalization”. I even downloaded the M-274, which is the guide for employers for filling out the I-9, hoping to find they just omitted it for brevity on the I-9 itself. No dice. And searching the Citizenship and Immigration Services web site shows that in 2007 they purposely disqualified this document because it wasn’t secure enough. For some strange reason, older citizenship documents, that unlike mine don’t even include photos and look like they were banged out on a crappy typewriter, are still valid. The document also said that you can use your Social Security card as proof of eligibility, but mine dates back from when I was here on a TN-1 temporary non-resident visa, and so it’s stamped on the front “Not Valid For Work Without INS Authorization”, so I figured it was not valid, and so I thought I was screwed.

After worrying about it all night, I had a meeting with the HR person at the company that placed me, and she basically said that the Social Security card would be valid, because the condition on it was no longer in force. So we filled out the I-9 and she thinks everything will be fine. But just in case, I sent off my passport application the very same day so I’ll have that if any questions are raised.

But here’s the thing that I think is really stupid: the Certificate of Naturalization isn’t a valid document for proving your citizenship to work even in conjunction with other documents, but it is valid for proving your citizenship and identity to get a passport, and a passport is a valid document for proving your citizenship and identity to work. Hopefully the reason is that the passport people do some sort of verification or validation that the people who process I-9s do not or cannot. Otherwise it’s just stupid. Coupled with the fact that a fairly fancy document like the Certificate of Naturalization has been disqualified because it’s not secure enough, while primitive documents like the Social Security card and older citizenship cards are still accepted, smacks of “Security Theatre”.

After updating my resume on Monster the other day, I got an email today:

We found your resume and are very impressed! We believe you have the qualifications we’re looking for to fill our open insurance agent position.

Somehow I think they stopped reading my resume after they found my email address and postal address (because they did say they were representing the Rochester branch). Other than those two items, I can’t think of a single thing in that resume that would make some think I’d be willing to be an insurance agent. I think I’d rather live under a bridge.

I got a call from a recruiter asking if I had experience with “ETL”. I’d never heard of it, so I truthfully said no, I had no idea what it was, and she went away.

After the call, I looked it up. Evidently it stands for “Extract, Transfer and Load”. Isn’t that what 90% of computer programs do? Isn’t that what the programs I’ve written and maintained for the last god-knows-how-long to extract aviation data from various sources in various formats, transfer it into my own format (combining data from several different places into one semi-coherent whole, throwing away the data that doesn’t interest me), and load it into my database for future use does? Or when I took data from Island and RediQuote and massaged it so that it looked like what SunGard’s trading system was expecting so that SunGard UMA users could trade stocks on them? Or when I converted data from the SMPTE ShowPlayList schema and stored it into our database so we could schedule movies and disassemble and re-assemble our own concept of what a show schedule was?

So yeah, I think I understand the concepts behind “ETL”. But because I was honest to a recruiter, I’ll probably never get a job doing it when it’s called that. The problem with the whole job market is that it’s full of cases like that, where recruiters and HR departments have a checklist and are just looking for people with the right keywords on their resume. That’s why I hope that careers.stackoverflow.com and jobs.stackoverflow.com catch on with Rochester companies, or companies who understand that off-site doesn’t necessarily mean the sort of idiots you see on Rentacoder who think they can solve the Halting Problem for $500.

http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/107267/pay-cut-cities.html

“Higher-wage people are likely being laid off to a greater degree than lower-wage people, or moderately high-wage workers are being replaced by temps or contractors who are paid less,” says Wial.

The picture is even worse in upstate New York, where average wages fell 2.3% in Rochester and 2.2% in Syracuse.

Shit, I’m never going to get a job that pays what I’m worth, am I?

It’s freezing here at work. I’m not sure if it’s everywhere or just at my desk – there is a bit of a cold breeze here. My feet have been freezing since I got here and my fingers are clumsy. I actually warmed up a bit when I went to Wegmans for lunch. People are looking at me funny because I’m wearing a toque, but at least my fingers are working again. Still no joy with my feet though. I wonder what they’d think if I put on my moon boots?

My employer forces me to use Windows XP and Internet Explorer on my desktop at work. This is more than just “our internal apps are only supported on IE”, they’ve somehow locked things down. I tried to install Google Chrome, but it complains about a missing DLL when I fire it up. And Safari, which got dragged in when I installed QuickTime, can’t seem to handle our automatic proxy configuration. One of my cow orkers says he has Firefox installed, so I guess I’ll have to try that next.

This came to a head today because yesterday StackOverflow rolled out some awesome new functionality for tracking your reputation, responses to questions and comments. Yesterday it worked great, both at work with IE and at home with Safari. This morning there was a date rollover that Safari had no problems with, but going to any of the new tracking pages in IE crashes the browser. It’s completely consistent – it happens everytime in exactly the same way.

Ok the plus side, they’ve moved the bug reporting and feature requesting site from stackoverflow.uservoice.com to uservoice.stackoverflow.com, which means it isn’t blocked by the web filters at work anymore. Which means I can see that I’m not the only one having this problem.

So now it’s time to do battle with the corporate filters to see of I can get Firefox installed and working.

Thanks to the reading I’ve been doing, and the source code that fellow pilot-geek Kris Johnson sent me, I think I’m starting to get my head around Objective C, if not the iPhone development environment. I answered my first Objective C question on Stack Overflow, and got over 12 upvotes and an accepted answer. Too bad I hit my daily reputation cap. But Kris saw my post almost immediately and commented on my new-found knowledge of Objective C.

The iPhone part is coming along nicely. I’m about halfway through the iPhone Application Programming Guide, and after that there are a couple more papers on the iPhone developer site to read. It might soon be time to start writing some test apps.

After work, I went to the gym and did Dan’s recommended light weights but more sets workout on the machines. The gym is a lot more crowded than it was in December – I wonder if this is just the New Years Resolution crowd, or just that there weren’t a lot of students around in December because of exams and end of quarter work-loads?

And in between, work sucked less than it had been. I got assigned a bug from the “BAU” (which I’m told stands for “Business As Usual”) group, which unlike the “Maintenance group”, actually seems to have some standing in the company.

In the Maintenance group, if you wanted help from somebody in charge of a design document, you had to preface your request with an explanation that you were only Maintenance, so they didn’t have to interrupt anything important to answer you. 50% of the bugs assigned to me are unreproducible, either because they were fixed under different report numbers, or I don’t know enough about some areas of the product to figure out how to reproduce the bug and can’t bother people who do know because I’m just “Maintenance”. Another 25% get put on hold after I figure out the fix because the fix involves a view change, which requires a review from the DBA group, and the DBA group aren’t going to give any priority to reviewing it because I’m just “Maintenance”. And have I mentioned that the bugs I fixed in the first two weeks are finally getting code reviewed on Thursday, 2.5 months after they were fixed? With any luck, they might even get checked into the code for the April release. (And no, I’m not kidding – that’s where I’m told they’re going to go if I can get them approved by code freeze in March.)

Now compare that to my first BAU bug. The bug report had some conflicting information, so I did some research in the design documents. That also had conflicting information, so I was able to have a meeting with one of the designers, and exchange some email with the “owner” of some other part of the functionality. From that, I was able to resolve some of the ambiguity, and decide on a plan of action. There are both GUI and back-end issues in this bug, and I’ve told them I want to fix both sets of issues instead of just the actual “headline” issue, and they agreed. And I get the feeling that there will be more help if I run into other obstacles. I feel positively giddy.

I discovered the secret to getting Eclipse debugging to not be painfully slow. The secret is to reboot (or possibly just log off and on again) and then make sure you don’t start IE or Outlook or anything else except Oracle, jboss and the app. At that point I’m using just a hair over 2Gb of memory and it’s hardly swapping at all.

I’m sure it would be a huge violation of their security policies, but I’d love to bring in my laptop to see how of does at this. Not only does it have a faster processor and twice as much ram, but it also would allow me to have only Oracle, jboss and the app running on the desktop box while Eclipse ran on the laptop, freeing up half a gig of ram on the desktop.

I’ve had a very frustrating day so far, and it’s far from done. I’ve been trying to trace through the execution under two different conditions, one of which works and one of which doesn’t. It’s been extremely slow going. Even with everything that could consume memory exited (including IE and the client app after it fires off the report request), my machine is swapping like mad.

Clicking the next instruction arrow in Eclipse takes roughly 30 seconds (I timed a few at 22 and 24 seconds, and a few at 36 and 38 seconds, so average it). Waiting for it to then actually show you the current value of a variable in the Variables window seems to average about 1 minute, although I’ve seen it as short as 30 seconds and as long as 2:30.

If I had a decently fast machine, I would have been finished this tracing (and likely found the bug) before lunchtime.

I have to just keep reminding myself that I’m being paid the same if I fix one bug a week or if I fix 10 a week. If this is the equipment they’re going to give me, then they’d better be prepared to accept the pace that equipment forces on me.

It wouldn’t be so painful if I could spend those 30 second pauses reading Stack Overflow, but until I fired it up to post this rant, I’ve been keeping IE closed.

Update Just to top it all off, about 4:30 today I accidentally clicked the “step return” which returned me out of the method I was painfully stepping through, meaning that most of my afternoon’s work was for naught.

I’ve been yelled at by English teachers, co-op work term report markers, and Microsoft Word for overuse of passive voice. Mostly I look at the sentence or paragraph they’re yelling about and say “what? I don’t see what’s wrong with it”. But even I recognize this as too much.

From a job ad on Monster.com:

System design, based on the requirements and the development of diagrams along with implementation of the computer language will be part of this Software Development position. Determining testing requirements followed by unit and regression testing will be performed in this role.

The culture here is in most ways much more stolid and constrained that at any other place I’ve worked at. The dress code is strict, the hours you can work are tightly controlled, etc. Maybe it’s the lack of other outlets, but one thing that’s curious here are how it seems like every day there is some excuse to have a pot-luck pile of food at somebody’s cubicle. Usually it’s a birthday, today it’s some student finishing his work-term and going back to school. It’s very odd. And fattening.

For reasons I probably can’t go into in public, I’ve decided to take the Paychex offer after all. Oh well, at least I’ll get to learn about Hibernate and JBoss.

A guy moved into a nearby cube a few weeks ago. Just now I had to go over to tell him to “keep the humming down a bit”, because it was getting increasingly loud and atonal. So now he’s started drumming.

How long do you think it will be before he starts using his speaker phone to talk to somebody two cubes over?

I’m getting flashbacks to Blue Lobster and Global Crossing.