Plans for the Future

I think that my plans are a little more firm now than they were two days ago. At least one thing is now certain: I'm going back to school. In the short term this means NOVA. I already have a number of credits with them so I think I might be able to get my associates over the summer. After that George Mason seems like a good bet.

What should I do while taking classes? I'm not positive. I have enough money to live at least through the summer without working, but if I can find a way to supplement my income I think it will be for the best. Finding another job as a software developer would be good, but I'd probably not have enough time to study if it was full time. My folks have a whole list of ideas from substitute teacher to administrator that they thing that I could get and would be good at. If they're sufficiently part-time, they could be good work. Personally, I'd like to pass myself off as a independent developer, and if I'm not planning on trying to live off the money I make, this might work. I'd also like to work more on my startup project, but that might have to take a backseat projects with more immediate promise. We'll see.

cult

Corporate training in bullshit. Today I wrote my 'values' down on a sheet of paper and symbolically thrown it away in favor of the company's values. I did a lot of other crap like that as well; it felt like I was in public middle school. After all, who cares about how many things three stupid letters could stand for?

The older, mean more senior, individuals seemed to take to it very naturally. They've either already been brainwashed or they've just become cynical enough to just play along. I can't decide which. I was hoping for some genuine information about how deal with the bureaucracy, how to enhance my prospects, and how to adapt to the corporate culture.
I found out about the last one all right. I'll be glad to get back into my little cube in a couple days. Doing actual work will be a nice change.

Update:
I've finished my second day of class now, and after a messy trip home (later post,) I'm still of the same opinion. I'm finding that being part of this larger corporation mean actually believing its propaganda and ad campaign. Lord knows that had to watch it. I think that the most alarming part is that it all felt like kindergarten. We've played games, stood in circles, voted with stickers, drawn with our left hand, all of which insulting our (or at least my,) intelligence. If people are dumb enough to seriously fall in with this, how do thy expect them to do the work that they are expected to do? I don't know. Maybe I just need to look into another job.

Working at a Three Letter Firm

So I had been working as an intern at local consulting company for almost two years when it got acquired by certain three letter firm this past winter. My boss went through a hell of a lot of effort to help me maintain my job and I greatly appreciate his effort. I'm now an employee of a big three letter firm with job security to spare. Still, I'm beginning to wonder if he should have bothered.

When we first started transitioning to the larger institution it seemed like it might a little 'fun.' We would have access to better equipment and billions of dollars of resources from some of the most advanced technological department around the world. This much proved true. My new Thinkpad T61p is top of the line and beats the hell out of that fie year old Dell POS I had been using previously. We also now get free downloads of advanced new software that would cost us thousands to purchase otherwise, a free on-line repository of technical books and direct contact via email to some of the most brilliant minds in the industry. It's really quite spectacular to work for a company that makes over three billion a year on patent claims.

However, there is a dark side and this dark side can be summed up in one word: "bureaucracy." That's right, this place is unbearably bureaucratic. I don't just mean that you have to wait in lines. I mean that EVERYTHING is bureaucratic, from HR to IT, even the software is bureaucratic. To give you an idea of how this works, I'll give you an example:

This firm, of course, suffers greatly from the 'not-invented-here' mentality. This, of course, I expected, licensing issues can be a problem and anyway, you have more control over that which you produce yourself. So, naturally, any non-internal solution (read software) that you want included in your project, must be approved by a central committee. This committee likes to take its time, no surprise. This is easy to deal with, just use as little external software as possible. This shouldn't be a problem, being a huge international firm, we have homegrown versions of everything. We rarely ever need to use the foreign version.

Unfortunately, there is a little snag. The homegrown versions don't work. Or they do, but they work poorly, or they just don't work in the want we want them to. Non of this is surprising, though perhaps it should be. Really, since the solutions don't work, all we have to do is submit bug reports and let the projects fix themselves. This is where it begins to get hairy.

Instead of a traditional bug reporting system, we, the this three letter firm, are required to fill out a PMR. Thats right, a paid maintenance request. Every sub organization in this firm is required to pay every other sub-organization for internal support. Again, this is not surprising, clearly it helps management and finance get a clearer picture of how resources are being allocated. What is the problem is the sheer number of steps required to submit this PMR. Let me recount them:

1. Naively send an email asking the other department for help in using their software after reading their intranet page which clearly requested that you email them for support.

2. Receive a curt reply three days later asking that you fill out a PMR anyway.

3. Research for two days in the company intranet how to do this.

4. Dial a number based on the information you find and find out that you need a special internal customer number. The guy on the phone gives you an address to request the number from.

5. Send a request for an internal customer number to the address given to you.

6. Receive a reply telling you that in fact, this was not the correct method for requesting a number. Instead, you are supposed to download a special application, which gives you a sheet to fill out with information about your line of business and sends itself to a guy in South America is isn't actually an employee of the three letter firm.

7. Spend two days downloading and installing the application and figuring out how it works and what information to input.

8. Accidentally send you're application to some guy in corporate who has absolutely no connection with your line of business.

9. Send the application to the correct guy and wait three days to approve your request and send you a number which you can use.

10. Fill out a request form for internal customer support.

11. I don't know, I haven't gotten this far yet. Step 10 was last week.

Seriously, it took me two weeks for me to get my department a number so that we could purchase internal support. Seriously, this is something that should have happened before transfer of trade ever occurred and should have been handled by individuals much further up the tree that myself. This is ridiculous. It should not be so complicated to just get basic work done. We've literally had to delay key features to later releases because of fiasco. With kind of inefficiency, it's amazing that they stay in business. I am seriously considering just dropping out and starting a competing firm based. With just three other guys, I could probably provide a more efficient service that this three letter firm. Or, maybe I'm just naive, or disgruntled, or something. Not that it really matters. I have a meeting with my boss today about my prospects here at the three letter firm. They had better be good.

Edit: I have since gotten through to the engineers on the other side. It seems that during the time I spent attempting to get through, the engineers managed to fix the problem. After about two minutes of back and forth with the tech, I managed to resolve the issue by simply downloading the latest build.

Riding through an Ocean

Riding a bicycle on a warm, humid day is like pedaling through a warm ocean. The breeze, which should cool you, slows you down and it becomes difficult to breath as the water droplets, suspended invisibly in the air, threaten to asphyxiate you. Sweat beads upon your skin like warm glue and attaches your clothing, especially those clothes closest to you, to yourself in uncomfortable and awkward positions. In addition, you begin to smell like something someone left out for a long time and your presence becomes intolerable. Worse yet, adding water to your forehead and 'keeping yourself hydrated' are of little avail as lack of water isn't the problem. It's the opposite.

It's not merely the heat that's the problem. If it were merely hot, then sweat would evaporate and cool you off, as would the breeze, and drinking water would be far more beneficial. However, sweat works by evaporation. The heat on your arms and forehead are absorbed into the drops of sweat which then expand into water vapor and life into the air around you, taking the heat with it, leaving you cool, dry, and devoid of stickiness and stench. But, with the humidity, and water already floating through the air, the sweat can't evaporate and merely beads on the skin, useless, sticky and smelly. With humidity, even a little warmth can seem like heat wave as you're body's natural cooling ceases to function.

When I lived in Albuquerque the weather was nice. It was dry and sunny almost every day. It was hot, very hot, but you didn't feel it because there was no humidity. So long as you drank lots of water, you would be fine the whole day long. When it did get humid it was more like a nice change: it was cooler than usual (typically due to clouds) and your hair was a little nicer than normal.

Now I live in Virginia and it seems like we pick of a warm breeze from the sea on semi-weekly basis. Most of the day's are okay, but enough of them are just miserable. I ride an hour to work and an hour back again and I'm soaking wet within the first ten minutes of either. The change of clothes at work isn't even enough to keep me from smelling bad the whole day through. It's a nasty experience and I honestly hate it.

Could be worse though. I could live in Florida. That is a miserable state.

God Bless.

Home again, Home again jiggidy jog

Back from school. My best semester yet with respect to grades, at lease one A and two A- course grades so far. I don't know about the other three, but I don't think I did worse than a B in any of them.

In other news, I'm already back at work again doing the exact same thing I did last year. Except this summer, I get credits. 6 of them and a near guaranteed A. I feel good. It's been fun so far and I've been productive. We might migrate our entire build structure from Ant to Maven in the near future. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. It's a little technical.

I'll be building myself a new computer over the summer. It's be an AMD Am2 socket with an NVidia nForce SLI chipset. A 2.1 GHz AMD64 X2 will be the processor and and graphics card is a GeForce 8600GT with 256mg of memory. It should be pretty nice with lots of room to improve and wasn't all that expensive. The entire system was under $800, which is only two weeks of work for me and it should remain current with only minor upgrades years to come.

I'm going to try to resume conversation with Mr. Powell soon, I've been posting pieces of our conversation at a slow pace, but the last actual email I sent him was over two months ago. I had to stop because of school, but now I should have some more free time.

Also, a note to anyone who reads this, It's been a long while since I've received a comment. I know my friends read this, I've seen you. I'd still write even if nobody read or commented but it's nice to know that somebodies listening. Even more, I like reviews on my ideas and opinions. If you agree, say so; if I'm an idiot, inform me so I can mend my ways. Even if you have no opinion, some partial thoughts would help.

And finally, I want one of these. An eight core processor with 32 simultaneous threads seems to be about the coolest thing ever. The hardware JVM seems kind of fun as well, even if it's only really good for servlets.