The world as I see it

Well, I finally got some recognition at the office for one of my more interesting talents. I have been working on the project for the better part of 2 years, one with ENA and the second with the company I am working at now. Some of my other posts have indicated how minor miracles have occured in the coding. Well the last two rush projects that have taken time away from the main tasks have earned me a new title. I am now, drum roll please.... The Lead Rabbit Puller (LRP for short). Because I seem to be able to pull a rabbit out of my ... well ... hat when we need a fast solution to a major problem. So when I finished the second project I coined the acronym YARP. (Yet Another Rabbit Pulled) It stuck and I got the title. All and all it was a good break in the crush of year end programming. More later....

Have you ever had a project where most of it is straight forward, but there is that one step that just doesn't seem possible.  That is a 'magic happens here' task.  I just finished writing one of those for the system I am developing at work. For a week we have been slogging through the design and prototyping of this subsystem.  Every time we got to this one spot we would say, "There is where it all comes together."  Last night, that was the only spot of code not done. It is nice to know I still have the magic.  For the magic happens there now and it works every time.

I haven't found that many idle moments here.  Work is busy, very busy.  As is the norm for my life there is enough  work for 3 or 4 of me and I only have one assistant.  He's good, but I need more. I feel like I am building a cardboard box from the inside by glueing little scraps of paper together while someone is out there spraying the whole construct with water.  I'll get done, but it will all be mush. Time to get back to work.

Well, the sea of boxes is still here. I don't know when I will ever have the time to go through them and filter out what's good from what's trash. Some people would say it's all trash, but I know better. Work is eyeball deep. I'm doing the work of three developers, but then how is that different from any good job I have had. I have help now, we (the company) picked up a programmer straight out of college and he is working out just fine. A contracter came on board yesterday and I have high hopes for him too. Our biggest problem is the performance of our application. The back end is an Oracle database and I will be the first to say I have no knowledge or understanding of tuning that beast, but it needs it bad. More later, got to get back to work.

For all you who care and those who don't I have relocated. While I haven't been blogging for some time, a lot has happened. The company I worked for, Enterprise Network Applications has collapsed. I have followed the software I wrote there to a client. This required a move from Sunny Atlanta to Charleston West Virginia. A quiet little town in the western mountains of West Virginia. The new job is nice, but the apartment is a sea of boxes. A friend of mine from the old Learning Company days now has a blog and here is his link: The Cursed Juggler and boy is he. Give him a read if you want. Back to work.