Things that might be decidedly odd…

Whew

I’ve been off the wagon with blogging lately, what with STP, San Francisco, Guerneville and starting a new job!

Anyhow, things are well. In summary:

1. STP was great. Even though I was sore and tired afterwards, I was definitely less sore and probably less exhausted than last year. I was sort of dreading riding it again this year, but I’m glad I went through with it afterall.

2. The trip to California was a lot of fun. It was nice to get away from Seattle, work and all of that for a week and a half. The drive back took about 15 hours. That sucked, but overall a good trip.

3. I started the new job on Friday (right before doing STP). Because I was on vacation Monday (to get back from Portland without rushing), today was only my third day at work. I’ve unpacked my moving boxes and gotten all my computers set up. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and just trying to wrap my brain around the new project, but generally things have been going swimmingly.

New Job

Since right after Memorial Day, I’ve been in the process of interviewing for another position at Microsoft. After all the interviews, I got an offer (yeah!). After talking to various people on the new team and doing some soul searching, I decided to accept the job late last week. I’ll be working on something that hasn’t been publicly (or probably even internally) announced yet, so I can’t give any specifics. The work seems exciting and the people on the team seem interesting, smart and passionate. I’ll be working in Seattle now instead of Redmond which will definitely be nice. I’ve got several weeks to tie up loose ends in my current position, but I’m definitely looking forward to the new position.

Late

It’s late and I should be sleeping, but I thought I’d do a quick update before heading off to bed.

The past few days have been really busy. Here’s a brief run-down:

1. Work’s been getting busier this week. I won’t go into details, but gears are predictably shifting once again with regard to what I’m doing on a day to day basis at work. The interesting thing about 2-3 year product cycles is that there are so many stages to go through, stretched over that time. It sort of keeps things fresh.
2. I’ve been finishing up the transition to the new OutVentures website. This is a volunteer project I’ve been working on since around September or October, so it’s nice that it’s mostly finished at this point.
3. On Saturday, Marc and I went “pan and hat shopping”. I didn’t buy any hats, although I did try a few on. I did buy a new set of pots and pans though. My existing ones go back to 1999 at the latest.
4. Today I had lunch with a friend from the swim team. He works in the fancy new Building 37. Lots of glass, impromptu lounges, fashionable design and a giant atrium. The building I work in doesn’t have any of that, but I guess I can’t complain too much.
5. Last week, I made plans to go to Puerto Vallarta for the week of MLK Jr’s birthday next year. I’ve already bought the plane tickets and put a 50% deposit down on the condo. Yikes, that’s some serious advanced planning but I guess it’s taken care of now and out of the way.

Updates

It’s been a few days since I’ve last posted, so I figured I’d do a quick update before going to bed.

I’m now officially all moved into my new place. I got everything out of the old place and finished up the cleaning on Sunday. Now, I can focus on getting all unpacked. I’ve made a lot of progress so far, but there’s still a decent amount to be done.

Health-wise, my stomach is doing better than it has in a long time. The diet must be working and that’s definitely good news. The bad news is that this evening I started coming down with a sore throat. No other symptoms, at least not yet. Unfortunately, I think I may have picked it up from kissing on the date I had yesterday. Doh. He told me he’d had a sore throat this weekend but that it had passed. He must have still been contagious I guess

Without going into too much detail, I broke the build at work the other day. It’s been a painful 24 hours of figuring out the fix and getting everything taken care of. Lessons were definitely learned by me. I did get some planned work done too, which makes me not feel like a total clod at least.

On Work and Ennui

I don’t talk much about work here because once I posted a little bit too much information and had to retract it later.

Without getting into too much detail, I’ve felt less motivated than usual at work as of late. Combined with the commute (which I already hate quite a lot), it’s made work less pleasant than normal. I rarely work on the weekend, but something out of the ordinary came up on Friday afternoon that I needed to take care of by midnight this morning. After putting in a couple hours of coding last night to take care of this issue, I realized something important–my job satisfaction seems directly correlated to how much time I spend writing code. Boring meetings in particular kill my productivity, motivation and general satisfaction. Not all meetings are boring, but a lot of them lately have been and I don’t have a laptop I can use to occupy myself with other tasks when meetings get boring. Unlike a lot of developers, I enjoy interacting with others at work socially and when a useful interchange of information is occurring. In most cases, I’d much rather walk over to somebody’s office to talk than call or email. There is a line though where a meeting starts to resemble an uninteresting lecture I have to listen to. I was never able to stay awake in class in college for this very reason.

Basically, last night was the first time I’d written code in a while as opposed to writing documentation or sitting through meetings. Thankfully, in the next couple of weeks, I should be spending the lion’s share of my time writing code again. In the end, I need to keep in mind that all of this is cyclical. Dissatisfaction at any given point in time isn’t an indicator of my overall satisfaction when averaged out over an entire ship cycle.

Vacations

Today I was looking at the Excel spreadsheet I made up to keep track of my vacation over the next 10 months or so. I realized that for the first time in a while that I actually have more vacation time than I know what to do with. That even includes days for 4th of July weekend this summer, the Monday after STP for recovery, Europe in November, an extra day for Christmas, and a cruise next year. Whew!

All in all, it’s about 4 days extra, more if my vacation plans for more distant trips like Europe or the cruise change. Maybe I’ll treat myself to a three day weekend or two this summer to sop up some of those extra days. Or of course I could just sit on them even though they are burning a hole in my pocket.

Day by Day

When I first started my blog, I wrote a lot more about my daily life than I do now. Part of that came from the novelty of having a public diary–a novelty which is now largely gone. Part of it was that my life used to be a lot more mundane and uninteresting. Part of it is that before much of my life was easily made public without a need for consideration of others. Since moving to Seattle and improving my dating and sex life, I find myself holding back a lot more. I don’t do this because I’m worried about what people might think of me so much as I don’t want to expose guys I’m involved with in such a public manner. In a certain sense this is sort of tragic because humanity seems to on the whole enjoy reading about such topics.

I’d like to return to writing mundane, daily postings more frequently because I know many of my friends do in fact enjoy reading about what I’m doing in general.

After I went swimming on Monday night, I picked up my swim pass at the front desk of the gym (you hand it to them when you arrive and pick it up when you leave) only to lose it between then and now. I searched all through my backpack, called the gym to see if somebody found it on the ground, searched my car and searched the pockets on the clothes I wore that day, yet I still can’t find it. It had 9 of the 10 swims left, giving it a value of $36. I suppose I’ll order a new one and if the old turns up it’s still good until the end of the year.

Yesterday after work, I met up again with Kade. We had dinner at Peso’s on Queen Anne near his apartment. I never realized how walkable Lower Queen Anne Hill is! There’s tons of restaurants, a Safeway, a Bartell’s and more right near by. It’s really not that far from Capitol Hill either. If I was looking for an apartment today, I think I’d consider broadening my search to that neighborhood if it weren’t for the fact that living there would extend my bus commute by a good 10-15 minutes each day. After dinner, we watched V for Vendetta. I hadn’t seen it before, but I’d been meaning to see it since it came out in theaters a couple years ago. I was really impressed by the film to say the least! Kade fell asleep since he was tired and has seen in several times (I imagine), but I was glued to the set for the 2+ hours.

Lately, I’ve been on this kick of getting up at a decent hour and getting into work around 9am. Since I started my job, it’s been rare that I get in before 11am. When things got busy, I would just work until 8pm or so. Unfortunately, in the past several lighter than average months of work, I’ve expanded my social life quite a bit. It was no problem to leave around 5 or 6 every day because the number of hours I was working was lower than before. Now that things are picking back up again, I’ve found it too hard to stay late because I have stuff scheduled. Amazingly, I’ve just been forcing myself to go to bed earlier, get up earlier and get to work earlier. Best of all, I feel like I’m more productive at work and find it really nice to be going home while it’s still light outside. A standard schedule–who’d have thunk it? Traffic is crappier, but on the bus it’s not too bad. If anything, it gives me more of a reason to ride the bus instead of driving which means less spent on gas, less stress and more exercise from walking between the bus stop and home/work.

After work today, I took my bike over to Velo to get it tuned up. In the process of moving here over a year ago, the gears and brakes on my bike got all tweaked. Since then, the tires have also gone flat from disuse. For the STP I’m thinking about buying an actual road bike to ride instead of this hybrid that I have now. The hybrid was great when I bought in North Carolina because I did a good mix of trail (mainly Duke Forest) and street riding there. For a 200 mile ride and just general riding in the future in Seattle, it seems like it would be a lot better to have some sort of street bike though. Still, I don’t feel like spending a bunch of money on a new bike right now and this one really needs to be fixed up anyways. It’s supposed to be ready tomorrow, which means I should be able to do my first training ride this Saturday!

Anniversary

Today marks the one year anniversary of me starting my current job. Yesterday would be the anniversary of my official move to Seattle. Before that I was staying in a hotel while looking for an apartment then driving all my crap up from California. Reflecting back, I’m still very satisfied with my decision to move out here and take this job. I do miss my old friends, but I don’t miss the miserable grad student lifestyle I felt like I was leading.

Anyhow, just taking a moment to reflect I guess.

Stupid, Stupid Me

This morning I missed a meeting with my boss’s boss. When will I learn to not schedule meetings on Monday when I always forget about upcoming meetings due to the weekend? Everything got smoothed over though and I’ve added the new appointment to my personal calendar. Plus, the stress and guilt of it all seemed to motivate me to get a lot of work done today.

In the parking lot at work today, I saw something for which I wish I’d had a camera: a Hummer H2 parked across two compact spaces. I would have so been tempted to post said shameful pictures on this site.

Edit: Fixed broken Hummer link reported by Eric.

Happy Birthday to Me

It’s my birthday! Well, at least on the east coast where I’m currently located. Technically, I wasn’t born until around 8:30am PDT. I won’t say how old, but less than 30 and more than 25. Those who need to know, know I guess.

I’m planning to grab dinner and drinks with my NC peeps tonight. Should be fun, especially after a long day of talking to prospective employees for 6 hours. The career fair tonight went well (as did my talk earlier in the day), but of course people are nice to you when you hold the prospect of a job, a free xbox and other random giveaways.