Blog Purpose

I’m finding myself shy on things to write about these days. Historically that’s only happened when I had a girlfriend, someone to listen to all of my stories. I’m single now. It’s been a pretty long dry spell since I dated anyone, and a really long time since I’ve been in a relationship that involved the “L” word.I think a big part of my lack of blog motivation is that I feel like I finally understand who I am ever since I realized that I need to be needed. I’ve known where I want to go for a really long time.

I’ve always blogged so that people reading what I write won’t feel as alone in the way they see things.Now, I’m not sure I have any further insight to offer. I don’t proclaim to have figured out everything, but I feel like I’ve got a really good handle on myself. I look back at my posts and I see that the things I find myself wanting to write about are really just repeats of things I’ve already said. Maybe it’s time to take a break from this too?

For Not Fencing

I sure seem to be “involved” a lot more with fencing than I thought I’d be lately. I have fencers asking for references to be refs at club nationals, fencers asking me what events to go to, I’m redirecting requests for me to ref in Inidana, I’m wearing fencing shoes as my street shoes, I even had a fencing shirt on today.

Wine Wedneday

Tonight I had the unique opportunity to bring together many parts of my SF life into one room. I invited Lara, from my old job at Jobvite, and Rosey, who I met at Microsoft Bay.NET meetings, and Sarah, who is part of my Euchre group. Rosey also brought Dave, Shaun, and her roomie Fiona.We went ot a wine bar on Grant St. that I’ve been wanting to go to ever since I first got to San Fran, called Rouge & Blanc.

Conversation ranged from work to Europe, to hip-hop in the Republican party. Everyone had a chance to talk and listen. Sometimes the whole group would listen to one person’s story, and sometimes there were three conversations going on between six people. I loved it because everyone, despite not knowing each other before hand, got along very well. By the end of the night we were talking about where to go the next week! So we’re heading to the Press Club, where they have the wines of several wineries, and it’s really a wine-tasting place. I feel really good about having a small group that wants to get together on an ongoing basis.

Impatient

Yesterday, it was pointed out to me that I need to be patient (in the context of work). But I think the concept probably applies to more [all?] areas of my life.I kinda disagree that I’m impatient, because my spin on it is that I “have a low tolerance for inefficiency”.  It’s inefficient for me to wait till I’m 16 to drive if I posses the needed qualities and knowledge at 15. It’s inefficient to have to have three people sign a document, when only one of those signatures really matters. It’s inefficient for me to write code when you can buy a polished product for less money than my time would cost. I don’t think it is efficient for me to go to a bar and wade through the girls who are dating already, and the girls who are not what I want, just to get to the one in the room who will go on a few dates with me and then tell me I’m “nice”.

OK, I need to stop because I’m getting complainy. But seriously, a lot of things should work better, and they don’t and it’s dumb. And so that view makes me impatient.

Protected: A Break

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Today

I spent the better part of today in a non-work meeting. I’ve been having more of these lately than… well more than the none I had before, so it’s infinitely more. Today’s was tied to a group of people who are interested in doing agile software development for non-profits. This becomes even more interesting when you understand that the group is comprised of people from the BayAPLN (which I attend). The acronym stands for Agile Project Leadership Network. The translation is that I’m usually one of two or three developers/engineers, and everyone else is a project manager or a program manger, or is somehow removed from the coding part of the development process.

What threw me for a loop in the chartering meeting today was that overwhelingly, this group of nineish project leaders and one engineer (me) said it wanted this new organization to offer development as it’s primary service.  Going in, I had expected this group to say that its primary service was to help non-profits develop a better process for delivering value through the use of Agile and occasionally using software as a vehicle for that goal.

So now I feel very cautious. I still think that this can work out to be the volunteer opportunity I wanted, but, it is going to take some additional effort on my part to ensure that the worker to manager ratio is balanced. Which translates to me going in to work and asking people to volunteer. Which means I have to do some growing before Monday.

Protected: Having Cake

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Job Day 3 (and 2)

This will probably be the end of my daily blog posting about work, just FYI. So far days two and three have been challenging and rewarding. On day 2 I played my first game of Pivotal ping pong on the company table and managed to get wounded (just a blister from a small collision). They take their ping pong seriously and I had never really played doubles before with actual “rules”.

I have been working on the Pivots project, which is an internal project that supplies all the content to http://pivotallabs.com. While it may not get as much love as it deserves since it is internal, it is kinda super important because it’s our face to the world. BTW Jon, I don’t know when they’ll take my picture, probably when I least expect it. I’ve been working with Benny and we’ve learned to do things like install new versions of IDEs, and upgrade the unit test engine the project uses (which created some nastiness because things were suddenly not done in the right order). We hunted down some old user data. And we even did some performance monitoring because the page loads are a little poky right now.

Tuesday night I chimed in on an email thread (they use the corporate version of GMail FTW) about the difference between defects and bugs and which ones should be assigned costs to them. The pair programming has been great because it is so easy to stay focused and feel productive. I saw pairs giving each other high fives all over the office every day. Any former coworker of mine can tell you that I’d fit right in on that alone.

The work day goes from 9-6 so the last two days have been long because i went straight from work to outside meetings and haven’t really been home before 10:30pm. I’m thinking that’s a sign I need to cut back on what I do so I can get some R&R built into the schedule. But the food there is still amazing. This morning I had a huge sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich that was like eating many bites of breakfast heaven. My friend, Davis, is also back in the office, so I feel extra at home.

At the end of the work day today I was introduced to my new team. I think it’ll be 6 people total and we’ll be adding in some search functionality, and some polish along with some other things to get it ready for a private beta the week after. I don’t know how much else I can say here, so I’ll leave it at that. I was also kind of excited today to find out Pivotal had a hand in building Urban Dictionary, so if I have the approved opportunity to share some pre-release user accounts, I’ll be sure to let you know!

P.S. On day one I got a Pivotal hoodie, pull over, and t-shirt. Tomorrow is gonna be a t-shirt day I think.

Work: Day One

Work was great today, even though my pair, Benny, may have worried about it. It was kind of different than most products because we’re working on something internal, so it is just us and there wasn’t a hand-off process. Our product owner was out of the office too. And Benny is a contractor, so using a Mac is just as new to him as it is to me.

But Benny does know Rails, so I learned a bit about RoR from him today. We also kind of had to bother our environment to make it cooperate. We’re using RubyMine, which looks to be a great product, but it’s still in alpha, so you get all the funess that goes with non-stable software with features in flux.

High notes for the day: We did complete a story. That’s good work for a first day I think. I got all my account info and everything seems to work so far. Lunch involved going to King of Thai and a really good conversation about government subsidies on things like telephones and internet to rural areas where the demand is too low to make it profitable. When I described it to Kevin he said “sounds like people are really good friends there”, which is really the truth, they can disagree productively. The food supply is AMAZING. And, #1 point of the day, Rob, my boss, and head of the entire company’s workings, came over after Benny told him of our woes, and Rob made sure I was ok in a way that gave me the sense that he actually cared. It was huge. I <3 Pivotal Labs.

Delicious Drinkage

I was feeling celebratory and the Dickersons treated me to a meal that I had planned to pay for, so I decided to extend the celebration, that we should try making Skittles infused vodka that I saw in my Google Reader.

From Valentine’s Day 2009

So we grabbed the ingredients from the store and we were on our way to a weekend long project. The jist of the process is combine roughly 10 skittles per 1oz of vodka, shake, let the candy dissolve overnight, filter through a coffee filter, drink. The details can be found in the link above.

Results:

1. It was way fun to make and just the right amount of monkey business. I wonder if there’s a kids drink you could do this to?
2. The mason jars worked well for shaking. The tutorial also suggested old water bottles, but Lauren loves glass jars, so this worked out.
3. Just filtering once seemed ok by me. Some were a little thick by vodka standards, but none were like a slurry.
4. I want to invest in the flasks that they suggested from The Container Store. The mason jars just don’t pour very well. I also kinda wanted a hip flask just to carry with me to the various events this weekend, or perhaps on the train ride home.
5. The red vodka alone tasted like cough medicine, not great for shots. The purple tasted like Dimeatap when combined with Sprite. NONE were very good when combined with regular Coke (and resulted in a beverage that looked like granny poo). Lemon (Yellow) and Lime (Green) went excellently with Sprite. I suspect Orange would go well with a citrus juice.
6. 2oz of infused vodka with 6oz of sprite (8oz glasses) was just about perfect. You couldn’t taste the vodka, but you could sustain an entertaining level of intoxication for a solid evening without being wrecked the next day.

All in all it was a fun project and a great way to spend time with friends. I also got suggestions to try this with Jolly Ranchers, which I suspect would not require the filter step. other suggestions from places I’ve beenand the internet include things that don’t sound great, like peppers and pickles. If this continues to be fun I may start making gifts out of this.