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Almost a month
Mar. 28th, 2005 09:13 amSo I've been trying to get together a livejournal entry for the past few days and failing because of one thing or another. However, I doubt anyone cares to read about my difficulties journaling nor do I care to write about them, so we'll just accept as a given that it's been a long time and move on.
I'll post a second entry all about Katherine, but for now let me just say that most new things at this point are slow, incremental improvements and not milestone events like walking on her own. (though she has shown that she can climb the stairs on her own) I'm sure that there are a bunch of cute kid stories going on, but I don't know what they are - for transcribable stories, it really helps to have a child who can talk, and we're not quite there yet.
Work has been a bit busy and frantic lately - I get the impression that my immediate manager and my uber-boss are trying to highlight our group as doing good work to the rest of the company because of changes at work. (Currently on the front page of finance.yahoo.com - one version of the article for people looking at it after it disappears from the front page) So there's that.
And while work has been interesting, there haven't been huge technical challenges that would be worth journaling about (and even if there were, I might have to keep quiet about them). The technologies I've been working with aren't particularly sexy - after all, my main job involves shoveling data from one place to another - though I'm now shoving it into an Oracle database in addition to shoving it into our proprietary time-series database. (And soon into MySQL)
However, work has recently involved some "interesting" social challenges which I have heard about before but not experienced quite so intensely. The basic story is that our group was asked to provide something that was somewhat poorly spec'ed, delivered it, and then everything went to heck. The people we were sending this to were saying "this wasn't what we asked for", when in fact what they'd asked for wasn't spec.ed, they were complaining that we hadn't read their internal documentation on how the internals of their system worked - which is true, because we really didn't care. (At least, I didn't) We thought our job was simply to move data from point A to point B. Well, it's actually to move from point A to point B and along the way twist the data model sideways a bit and add some unique identifiers and obey a bizarre naming convention.
So now basically the entire project is getting done during the cleanup phase, and it's all highly ugly. Maybe, just maybe, we'll get this wrapped up soon. Then we get to do the next iteration of this project, which hopefully will go better. We'll see. I also at this point am stuck in the "document, package, and cleanup" phase. I hate this part of a project.
I'll post a second entry all about Katherine, but for now let me just say that most new things at this point are slow, incremental improvements and not milestone events like walking on her own. (though she has shown that she can climb the stairs on her own) I'm sure that there are a bunch of cute kid stories going on, but I don't know what they are - for transcribable stories, it really helps to have a child who can talk, and we're not quite there yet.
Work has been a bit busy and frantic lately - I get the impression that my immediate manager and my uber-boss are trying to highlight our group as doing good work to the rest of the company because of changes at work. (Currently on the front page of finance.yahoo.com - one version of the article for people looking at it after it disappears from the front page) So there's that.
And while work has been interesting, there haven't been huge technical challenges that would be worth journaling about (and even if there were, I might have to keep quiet about them). The technologies I've been working with aren't particularly sexy - after all, my main job involves shoveling data from one place to another - though I'm now shoving it into an Oracle database in addition to shoving it into our proprietary time-series database. (And soon into MySQL)
However, work has recently involved some "interesting" social challenges which I have heard about before but not experienced quite so intensely. The basic story is that our group was asked to provide something that was somewhat poorly spec'ed, delivered it, and then everything went to heck. The people we were sending this to were saying "this wasn't what we asked for", when in fact what they'd asked for wasn't spec.ed, they were complaining that we hadn't read their internal documentation on how the internals of their system worked - which is true, because we really didn't care. (At least, I didn't) We thought our job was simply to move data from point A to point B. Well, it's actually to move from point A to point B and along the way twist the data model sideways a bit and add some unique identifiers and obey a bizarre naming convention.
So now basically the entire project is getting done during the cleanup phase, and it's all highly ugly. Maybe, just maybe, we'll get this wrapped up soon. Then we get to do the next iteration of this project, which hopefully will go better. We'll see. I also at this point am stuck in the "document, package, and cleanup" phase. I hate this part of a project.