Author: Paul Tomblin

Working Again!

I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I’ve held back because

  1. It doesn’t feel completely real in some ways and
  2. I’m under NDA and don’t want to say too much

It’s a Java job, working with Nutch, Lucene and Solr. It’s a one person start-up, and the owner has expectations that she’ll need a Chief Technical Officer soon, so this contract I’m doing is sort of an audition for the CTO job. She has an existing code base that she paid a consulting company to write, but she has a long list of things she needs done to it, and I’m making my own list as I go along. (Unit tests and fixing the things FindBugs finds tops my list, but so is fixing the horribly manual deployment process.) The current contract is fixed price, but I should be able to do it quickly enough to make it a decent hourly wage. I’m currently working on my own at home, but she’s going to have a two person office in a week or so at a local technology incubator. I told her that as long as it has wifi, a big whiteboard and access to a fridge, I’d be happy. As an added bonus, the technology incubator is pretty close to where Vicki works, so we’ll be able to meet for lunch or go to the gym together.

Because I’m working on my own, but expecting to work with others in the future, the first thing I did with her existing source code was to put it into “git”. (Maybe it’s because git isn’t as obtrusive as something like ClearCase where you have to check things out, I haven’t found any decent Eclipse plug-ins for git.) As well as learning git, nutch, lucene and solr (not to mention the technologies they depend on, like Hadoop), I’m also learning a bit about making a build environment in ant.

All in all, it’s fun and interesting work, and whether the company fizzles out or grows to a hundred employees, it’s going to be a great learning and growth opportunity for me. And hell, even if it sucked as much as my last job (which it doesn’t) it would be better than unemployment.

Team Practice last night

Last night the team went out on the lake to do a light interval workout. Dan called it his “pre-race” workout. Last week, Jason Quagliata told me that he didn’t think I was getting my paddle in enough at the catch, so I brought my video camera along. I also wanted to try out my new bright green paddle tape job, and my new little doo-dad for the camelbak hose to keep it where I can reach it without pausing in my paddling.

As you can see from this video, the bright green looks good (and it feels good too), my doo-dad was pretty much a failure, and I aimed the camera too high for me to really see my catch. Oh well.
[youtube YbzNN5G3mTM Training on Lake Ontario]
Oh, and I’m still not opening my left hand very well on the forward push. And is it just my imagination, or am I paddling at a lower angle during the fast parts?

Wednesday Night TT

Kind of late posting this. Oh well.
Wednesday Night TTThe air felt like soup. A thunderstorm had swept through a few hours earlier, but it must have been an air-mass thunderstorm rather than a frontal storm because we had neither cool air nor winds afterwards. The rain kept the number of participants down, but on the plus side the bay was flat and the creek was high. Still, I wasn’t expecting a personal best because of the humidity.

I started out pretty fast, maintaining a speed better than 6.5 mph for the first two minutes. My split time was 9.33 minutes, which is my fastest yet. I was worried that a fast split would mean a big fade for the second half, but it wasn’t bad. I kept my speed up well to the turn, but had a lousy turn – I’m not sure what I did wrong, but the flat spot on the speed graph is longer and lower than usual. Downstream was really fast. I even managed to put in a bit of a sprint at the finish. My second half was 9.57, which isn’t my slowest or my fastest, leading to a total time of 18.90, a new personal record by 0.05 minutes. Nothing too mind blowing, but unexpected and satisfying. Paul D, who claims that he doesn’t care about our “rivalry” but always seems to be checking up on my time, had a bad night and finished behind me for the first time in a number of weeks, at 18.93. However he has the perfect excuse because he participated in a killer race the weekend before.

How not to drum up business

There is a business here in Rochester that needs a lesson how to do business. I’m not going to give them the exposure (or Google rank) of putting their name here, but their name sounds a little like “Cock fire”. The business they are in is something that is actually of interest to me, something I currently use, and something that I recently solicited quotes from numerous companies in the business by going to a site that collects your requirements and sends them to registered providers. It’s also a business that members of a Linux Users Group, such as our own Linux Users Group of Rochester (LUGOR) might be more likely than the general public to want to do business with.

But “Cock fire”, instead of waiting for requests for quotes, or introducing themselves to the LUGOR group as a peer or contributor, instead decided to somehow mine our mailing list for email addresses, and then individually spammed the members of the list. When I got mine, I actually thought it was somehow related to my earlier request for quotes, until I realized that they’d sent it to both of the email addresses I’ve subscribed to the mailing list, not just the one I’d used in the RFQ. And then somebody else on the list mentioned that they’d gotten this spam to an address that they *only* use for the LUGOR list, and several other members piped up that they’d also gotten spammed, so we figured out what they’d done.

So well done, “Cock fire”. In spite of the fact that your product is actually $10 a month cheaper than what I currently pay your competitor, I’m not going to switch my existing use over, and neither am I going to recommend you to my current employer. Reap what you sow, assholes.

Update: I got a response from the email I sent them.

On behalf of [Cock fire] I would like to formally apologize for the e-mail marketing to your group. I was given 2 lists of e-mails from a Rochester Linux guru that said their group would be interested in Rochester based services. From the number of negative responses I have gotten back this was a mistake.

We have deleted all LUGOR e-mails and will not be in future communication. Please convey our apology to the group.

So it wasn’t his fault that they decided to spam, it was the fault of somebody who tempted him into it by giving him a list of email addresses. Oh, then that makes it all ok then? I don’t think so.