Category: Revelation

Impressions after a few days at work

My office
Woo hoo, I have a job!

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.

Still paddling

Last year, my last paddle of the season was on November 30th, and it was extremely cold. Today exactly the same group of people as that time met at Black Creek, which is a few miles upstream from GWC. It was a lot nicer this time – it was in the low to middle 50s instead of the high 30s like that time and the sun was shining, and while there was a slight breeze, I was comfortable with my wet suit and long sleeve shirt. No long underwear, no toque, no pogies.

We did long intervals – 1 mile at about 80% effort, with 8 minutes rest each time. We did four sets at about 8:15 per mile. I rode wash most of the time. Jim was paddling this down river racing boat that threw off a really good wake, and it was easier to ride than Dan’s sprint boat.

Unfortunately there isn’t going to be any more video this year – I dropped my camera in the canal on Sunday and it sunk like a stone. Next year I’m probably going to buy a Flip Ultra HD and a replacement for the mount and the waterproof bag, although I’m going to be a lot more careful about making sure the camera is attached to the boat with a rope in the future.

Update It’s not often I get to update a 13 year old blog post, but somebody wrote me to say that the link to the Flip Ultra HD was dead because Flip went out of business. He sent me a link to his guide talking about what happened to Flip.

So long, Kodak

I found out yesterday that Kodak has shut down the Digital Cinema group that I belonged to for over 6 years, a victim of a Kodak’s inability to keep up with an incredibly rapidly changing marketplace. Some years before that, I’d had the pleasure to work with many of the same people on a product called “Cineon”, a very high end post production and digital editing program for movies. Alas, technology marched on faster than we did and today people are doing on their Macintoshes and PCs what we were doing on 16 processor million dollar SGI Onyx computers.

But in both cases, I was working with the finest group of programmers, QA people, applications specialists and sysadmins it’s ever been my pleasure to work with (with the possible exception of GeoVision, which was also exceptional). And although I might be cutting my own throat because I’m still in the job market and many of them will be entering the job market very shortly, I sent out this message to the Peernet Rochester Yahoo Group.

I just found out that my old colleagues on the Digital Cinema team at Kodak all got their notices today. And while I’m probably going to be competing with them for some of the same jobs, I’d just like to put a shout out to any hiring managers here to let them know that if you see a software developer or tester with experience in the Kodak Theatre Management System on their resume, you could not do better than to hire them. They are positively the best group of people I’ve worked with in my 25 years of working all over the world.

Ok, if there was some way to put these things on a scale and see how it balances, I’d probably put the team at GeoVision (not the Albany group, the original ones) and the Cineon team as tied for first best, and the Digital Cinema group as a fairly close second, and a couple of the people at SunGard right up there.

Man, I hope we all end up employed again soon. And I hope we all end up working together some time.

Oh, and if you’re one of my former colleagues from Kodak, give me a shout off-line and I’ll hook you up with the Peernet group – it’s really been helpful.

Long paddle yesterday

I’ve been suffering from a sort of mild stuffiness for several weeks now. I don’t know if it’s an allergy or what, but it’s really sapped my endurance. I haven’t been paddling much, and when I do I seem to conk out after five or six miles. Yesterday, Dan and I tried to push that a bit. Well, a lot really. We ended up going 11.47 miles. We kept it slow with our heart rates down in zone 2. Or at least Dan did – my heart rate monitor didn’t work – I think the battery is dead.

[youtube _OqbS8Jhz7g]
Along the way we did some technique video. My Thunderbolt isn’t as good a camera platform as the Looksha, for many of the same reasons why it’s a much better boat to paddle – it rocks more from side to side, and the cockpit is so long that the camera isn’t near me and I keep banging it with my paddle. But in spite of that, I think we both look pretty good, except for the tendency to drop our chins.

On the way back, I felt a bit cold, and the tape was coming of one of my paddle grips, which was uncomfortable. I put on one of my pogies to warm up a bit – I didn’t put on both of them because I’m too clumsy to get the second one on once one hand is covered in pogie. It did help a bit. But I wish I had a proper paddling jacket.

I did fade a bit, but by riding in Dans wake I managed to finish with a pretty steady 6mph for the last three miles. So all in all, a pretty good day out. Except it’s now 18 hours later and my muscles are still sore.