I graduated from the University of California, Riverside on June 18, 1994. At the time I graduated, I was doing computer work for the dorm cafeteria, automating their budgets in Excel, developing reports, that kind of thing. I continued to do that work through much of the summer. Sometime in August 1994 I applied for…
I’ve worked at my day job now for nearly 17 years. (Indeed, less than three weeks and I’ll have been there for exactly 17 years.) I started at this company 3 months after graduating from the University of California, Riverside back in 1994. I work for a public policy “think tank” and that means there…
I was in the office at 7am this morning (yes, a Saturday) and began working through my 7-page checklist to get this long-awaited server consolidation rolled out. It took 8 hours (minus one hour for lunch) to get the whole thing done, but so far, it looks to be successful. There were no major gotchas…
Much of the last several months at the day job have been spent working on a project to consolidate an abstract a fairly large group of servers and applications. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but it has been a challenging project and a fun one to work on. But as the rollout…
Another mostly crappy night’s sleep last night with strange dreams that I can’t remember but which kept waking me up every few hours. I finally gave up around 4:50am and headed into the office around 5:30 to try to get some extra work done. My right sneaker has been rubbing at my heel in an…
I’m in crunch time for the day job, as I might have mentioned. I’ve been working toward a fairly major rollout of a new server environment and that was targeted to happen April 30/May 1. Then I found out that I needed to go back to L. A. to attend some training right about the…
I had thought that my trip to L.A. at the beginning of March was the last trip I’d take to L.A. for about a year. But it turns out I’ll be back there again–and in less than two weeks. I have to be in Santa Monica for 2 days of work meetings, Thursday and Friday…
Yesterday was the first day of my day job retreat and it was interesting, especially the stuff we covered on Scrum and Agile development. I got to have lunch with Beth, who grew up with me at the company these last 16 years and is like my work-sister. And around 3pm, we had a “team-building”…
Tomorrow I fly to Los Angeles for my day job team’s annual planning retreat. I usually enjoy this trip because I get to see coworkers I only see once a year (I’m the only one on my team who works in the Washington office). I also get to see old friends that I don’t see…
Once a year, in my day job, my team gathers in our Santa Monica, CA office for an annual planning retreat. I look forward to it with mixed emotions. One the one hand, I get to see people I don’t normally see (I’m the only one on my team who works in our Arlington, VA…
I have a business trip at the end of the month. I’m heading to Santa Monica for 4 days for my team’s annual planning retreat. I’ll be staying at my usual digs in Santa Monica and I just wanted to let folks know that I will be there in case any friends or family that…
I’ve heard rumors that from time-to-time, science fiction writers are interviewed on various venues. It has not yet happened to me (there is no reason that it should have, I suppose), but a few months ago, in my day-job, I had an interesting twist on the science fiction writer/interview phenomenon. I was tasked with screening…