ace’s blog

Today, I resigned from my current company. I’ve known this day was coming for about 26 days now. The decision to leave my current position was one of the easiest I’ve had to make in my young career.

I did learn a lot from my time here and have worked with two of the finest consultants from LANSA.

I am looking forward to my wife being able to work or not work, based solely on what she wants to do, not because we need affordable benefits for the family. Meri will now be able to stay home with our new baby for as long as she wants, which is the ultimate benefit. I would like for this baby to have the same advantages Aaron had when Meri was able to stay home with him.

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I left yesterday at my normal time (around 4pm).  Yesterday was a bit odd for me in that I actually filled out a form so that I could use some vacation time!  I also asked our HR person how much sick and vacation time I would have left after I took the four days I just asked for.  Big deal, huh?

Big deal indeed!

The owner of our company came up here and had a conversation with my project manager, with whom I share an office:

Owner: Is Pete quitting?  I heard he quit!

PM: No, he just put in for vacation time, that doesn’t sound like he’s quitting to me.

PM: Who told you he was quitting?

Owner: Our HR person.

I’m laughing, a lot….

So apparently, when I asked to use vacation time and then asked how much do I have left, that means to our HR person, that you’re quitting.

This place gets more and more ridiculous everyday.

Meri had another doctors appointment this morning.  She got to hear the heartbeat again.  It was a bit faster than Aaron’s was when Meri was pregnant with him.

We are going to have an ultra-sound on Monday, the 22nd.  We will be able to find out the sex of the baby.  The 22nd is supposed to be the start date of my new job…I’ll have to talk to them about that.

In other “new job” news, I spoke with the project manager Friday and he indicated the company wanted to send me another job offer letter.  They want to update the official start date on the next letter.  On the job offer letter that I have now, the start date is October 18th.  I’ve been waiting to hear back since Friday and I’m driving myself crazy waiting!

If that isn’t the cutest picture of a kid in a green baker’s suit, then you know some really cute kids!

I’m also considering a new position! This means major changes for the family I think. After speaking with the recruiter, this sounds like a great opportunity. Meri and I will have to talk about it.

Meri and I were in bed, getting ready to fall asleep and then she started talking about work and how she didn’t want to go back tomorrow. That got me talking (and thinking) about my job. Then I started bitching…and bitching and bitching and bitching. So now, about 2 hours later (yeah, we go to bed early here), I’m online. I feel like I should redo my once-proud website.

Revisiting development on that site got me thinking about Barry‘s site: FeedBang.com. Dammit man! I was once at peace with not continuing development on PeopleArray.com and someone alright with letting my PHP skills get rusty. Now that I saw that you’ve done work to FeedBang.com, I feel like I need to get off my ass and update that site! Good work on FeedBang.com Barry; it looks pretty cool and I really like that you’ve added the ability to login with openid.

I remember my days at Terminix when I had all kinds of time to develop a site like PeopleArray.com. I once went three weeks doing absolutely nothing, besides asking my manager for something to do. Yeah, that’s right, 3 weeks…in a row!

I loved working for Terminix (both because of the people and the company) but I hated Memphis. I’m glad to be gone but I’m not happy where I ended up. I love being back in Florida but dislike my job. I have learned a lot. I’m proud to say that I know a LOT about LANSA Web! I’m just hoping that I can find a job where I can continue doing either LANSA Web or get back to some Visual LANSA.

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Ok, so insomnia is not letting go of it’s grip and I just visited Digg.com and Reddit.com. I haven’t been to those sites in a really long time. Normally I just read them through Google Reader.

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Is it weird to laugh at something I blogged about a long time ago? I remember writing this and even the details of the circumstances surrounding the issue. Stupid financial month reports. Anyway, I laughed about this blog entry: http://www.acedanger.com/2006/06/08/808008704-megabytes/.

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Good night (I hope).

I’m utterly disgusted by how my shop deploys software!  We (frequently) have a need to do a rush job on a project, be it an update or completely new functionality that a customer “needs…like yesterday”.

Short version of this bitchy-rant is every software shop needs QA!  If you don’t care to read the rest, thanks for reading so far.  Bye…

Now if your still here: WTF is wrong with this company that about 90% of the stuff that I do is a rush job?!?  When I worked at Terminix, about 1% of the stuff that was developed was put into a production environment the same day it was developed; at this company, that percentage jumps drastically to about 30%.   That is way too high.

No wonder we have so many bugs!  No wonder I’m becoming so good at SQL and data fix functions!  I’m a fucking data cleaning machine.

This is bullshit.  I’ve jumped up and down on the “we need QA people” soapbox so many times this week that it’s not even amusing anymore.  I’ve become the person in the office who talks about how things were done at their old company.

In short, I love and miss the Crystals/Mistys/Debbies/every other good QA person that I got so used to at Terminix.  You guys rock!

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Writing this post just made me write a ridiculously long email to our HR person asking for QA people.  I copied my manager and the owner of the company.

Long time no post!

Well things have been busy here at work!  The LANSA projects are wrapping up for me: the version 2 of the Gradebook, written in LANSA with heavy use of AJAX (and JavaScript) and CSS, has been handed off to the consultants we have been using since the project began; I re-wrote the Employee portal and just finished that up this morning.  Next on my plate here is Gradebook version 3!

The newest version of the Gradebook will be written in/with WPF.  There aren’t many people writing WPF code right now so for me, this is another ground-breaking moment (coupling LANSA with AJAX was the first).  Learning WPF will be great for me and my career and ultimately for my family.  I’m excited about learning another language and being productive with it.

Other than all that work stuff, there isn’t much to write about.  We have been busy painting and turning our house into a home.  We’ve put in new laminate bamboo floors in the downstairs portion of the house and also put up about half of the lights that we bought a few weeks ago (5 down, 5 to go!).

Here’s hoping I don’t neglect my blog anymore!

I started on this post a few days ago so here goes my attempt to finish it…

We finally closed on our house in Memphis and 3 days (yes…3 days) later, the buyers mortgage company finally cut the check and we got paid so yay for that.

We also closed on our house here in Casselberry (Orlando area). It’s my most favoritest of all the houses we’ve owned (which is three if you’re counting). The kitchen is huge and open (but not as huge as kitchen in the Memphis house) and looks out into the living room. We have two covered porches, one in back and one up front, both of which are pre-wired for fans. Our garage is in the back of the house. We have 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms upstairs and 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom down. There is a formal dining room and a second living room. The dining room will soon have the carpet ripped up and replaced with some sort of wood flooring and then we’re going to put french doors in the entrance (of that room) and turn it into my new office/computer area. The second living room is currently Aaron’s playroom and will stay that way until he doesn’t need a playroom anymore. The bedroom downstairs will become a guestroom that all of our guests that we never have over can stay in and be happy(ier)!

Our homeowners association does all of the lawn maintenance! I don’t have to mow or water (or pay for the water) for as long as we live in this house.

We are going to start trying to have another baby sometime in May! We’re both really hoping to have a little girl but if we have another little even one-billionth as wonderful, smart and happy as Aaron, then we will be very grateful.

I’m kicking around the idea of going back to school for a masters degree again. I’ve been told that my boss would possibly pay for it since she would just love to tell potential clients that the Gradebook developer has all of this wonderiforous education and this and that. I’m going to work that angle sometime soon.

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I think that’s about as much updating regarding the going-ons of my life that there needs to be updating on.

Yay, someone sent us a contract on our house! They are offering $235k, which is only $4,900 less than we are asking. Ok, enough good news, now for the bad.

They have a house to sell…a house that was just put on the market yesterday (1/5/07). This is the third time this couple has looked at our house so I’m confident so say that they are interested. Ready for another kick in the balls? They asked for us to pay ALL closing costs, up to 6% of the selling (which, if we paid all of that, would amount to $14,100). In the contract, it says that we can still market the house like there was not a contract on it and if we did get another offer, they would have 48 hours to give us a firm closing date or get financing or whatever. Interesting huh? We have to counter sometime soon; we’re going to have to figure out how we are going to counter this offer.

In other news, we bought Aaron a 12′ trampoline, with an enclosure off of Craigslist.com for $70! Amazing deal I think! We bought it last night and we’ve been putting it together all morning. We had to got to Home Depot to get some new u-bolts to replace the original ones since they were rusty. Everytime Aaron sees it, he says “JUMP!” in a very excited voice. He is going to love that thing!
My sister-in-law is in town for the next week. She is going to watch Aaron tonight so that Meri and I can go see a movie. I think we’re going to see Eragon.

In work news, we blew through our 12/23 deadline, then through our 1/2 deadline and now we are working getting 90% done by 1/9 and then 99% done by the 1/31. It is a major system re-write and update. We are incorporating all kinds of AJAXy wonderfulness, throwing in a lot of JSON for communication of data, and of course, the base programming language is Lansa for the web. I’m gaining all kinds of great experience and knowledge and I will make a great web consultant someday (soon).

Today is our third anniversary. It doesn’t seem like we’ve been married that long. Aaron still seems new to me too. Maybe it’s being away from them for so long that makes me feel like it’s all still so fresh. I am going home Saturday morning (Nov. 11th) and I’ll be with my family until November 29th! That’s 18 days of family time! I know it’s not much but it’s what drives me now.