Tag: work

Santa Monica, Day 2

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Long day today, and another night filled with crazy and intense dreams. I couldn’t remember the dream I had last night until dinner this evening when something Jim said triggered a memory of what the dream was about.

Today was the first day of the Crystal Reports training class and I think it went very well. We have a great instructor and the comments I’ve been hearing about the class so far are all positive.

In addition to that, other people, not me, were busy at work today because the email server in Washington was down all day. It is still down and from what I understand, will be back online around midnight. I was not fully effected by this because I can still read my email in UNIX (I’ve always been able to do this as a backup) but it was a pretty frantic place today even so.

Had lunch with Jason Allen and Enrique today, and had dinner this evening with Jim and Janet. We ended up at Wolfgang Puck Express on Third Street and afterward, did our ritual of looking at framed art on sale at–the name of the place slips my mind right now–oh, wait, Gallerie. We’ve done this three or four times in the past and it’s become a kind of tradition. Jim and Janet just dropped me off at the hotel and I’m writing this in bed. I’m beat.

I was planning to do some more writing tonight but I don’t think I could keep my eyes open. I was hoping to watch House but, fortunately, it’s not on tonight. The State of the Union address is being broadcast instead. I’m too tired to stay up and watch, and besides, I don’t expect that the President is going to say anything that will surprise me, although I could be wrong here.

Lisa invited me to play in a pickup game of kickball tomorrow after work, so I’m going to do that.

27 push-ups this morning. Still not willing to admit how many sit-ups I’m doing.

This journal entry marks the first full month of blogging for me–so far, so good.

First full day in Santa Monica

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It’s been a long day.

I ended up going into the office at 6:30 AM because I just couldn’t sleep anymore. Had breakfast and lunch at the cafe; the lunch in particular was good, some kind of pasta dish.

I had about 3 meetings today, the first one starting at 8 AM but none of them were overly long. I spent a lot of time today installing software on various people’s laptops in preparation for class tomorrow. Everyone has been done now, except one person.

I was supposed to go to lunch with Beth today but her son was sick and she wasn’t able to make it on time. We’ve rescheduled for Thursday.

Nothing to do tonight, however. I’ll probably read and maybe get a little more writing in, but beyond that I think it’s going to be one of those boring nights in Santa Monica.

Incidentally, I’m feeling better today than I did yesterday. No fever, no headaches (the one last night was a bad one!). Still a little nasally, but otherwise, good.

Warm rain

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I awoke this morning from a night of troubled dreams, to find myself transformed in my bed into a giant sleepyhead.

Fortunately, the sound of rain soon washed away the cobwebs. I headed out to warm up the car (by force of habit) and it felt warm out. It was raining steadily and even the rain felt warm. Maybe that’s just the way things feel after spending a few days at below zero temperatures, but I liked it. It’s still raining out, but the temperature is now up to 52 degrees, which is unseasonably warm for this time of year in the Metro D.C. area.

I’m in the middle of a tough problem, trying to re-map some database records on certain record changes, and I’m finding that it’s a little trickier than I thought. It’s nice to be able to look out my office window and see the rain coming down on the mall skylights and the warm, dark clouds hovering overhead.

One of those non-stop days…

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I realized that it was one of those non-stop days today when it glanced at the time and it was 2 PM and I hadn’t even thought about eating lunch yet. I spent the morning hip-deep in code, trying to make something work with SQL triggers that has no business working, and yet I managed to convince it otherwise. Then I sat through a great 10 minute meeting. Problem is the meeting went on for another twenty minutes.

By the time I got back to my office, I had heard back form a vendor I am working with to schedule some training, and so I then spent several hours trying to obtain conference rooms for 4 days of training at the end of the month. Meetings are out of control. I had to beg and borrow in order to convince people to shift meetings around so that I could get conference rooms for four consecutive days. And not even the same rooms! Do all companies have these problems when it comes to conference rooms? Do we really need all these meetings? I’m reminded of something I once heard on KNX radio in L.A.:

A meeting is a place where minutes are taken and hours are lost.

It just seems as thought there is something wrong with the world when the time it takes to schedule a meeting exceeds the time of the meeting itself.

Somehow, I was then bombarded by email and it seemed like every message demanded an immediate response. I counted (come on, let’s face it, you know me by now) and in a two and a half hour span, I sent or replied to something like forty email messages. Productive work slipped away. I wrote one line of code, answered two email messages, wrote another line of code, answered three more email messages.

But I finally made it out the door. Switching trains on Mount Vernon Square, the Green Line that game by had an “isolated” car (that means that the car was closed, you had to use other). What this really means is that it was a crowded train by Washington Metro standards. In the 3-1/2 years I’ve been taking the metro, I’ve ridden on trains with isolated cars three times; two of those time have been in the last month.

I was finally able to relax when I got home. I finished up Foundation’s Fear and will start on Foundation and Choas tomorrow. Spoke to Mom, Dad and Doug on the phone this evening.

No need to pack a lunch tomorrow; I’m having lunch with A.J.

Best of all: tomorrow is my “Friday”. I’m heading up to Albany this weekend (a 4-day weekend for me) to see Eric and Ryane and so I took Friday off.

Now, going to watch a Sopranos episode and then off to bed.

Success on a tough problem!

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I’ve been working on a tough database problem at work that involves triggers and recursive activity for a software system we’re building. I’ve been in the design phase for a few weeks now and today was the first day that I started on the actual coding. I’ve been “heads-down” in code all day, since getting into work at 7 AM. 8 hours later, the first crucial piece is working correctly. That is incredibly good news because it means the design is solid.

I still have a fair amount of work to do on this thing, but this was the first major hurdle and that it works as well as it does makes my life somewhat less stressful.