(Trying to work my way to 100+, baby! I want that userpic caption!).

Every week or so, I get one or two e-mails or calls from various IT recruiting agencies, either with HR/recruiter people with specific jobs that matched my Monster profile or who say "your resume looked really interesting, we should talk."

Up to this point, I haven't considered any of their offers. I felt that I should put in at least a year in my current job, so I'll get some more experience that future employers may find acceptable. Yeah, I know I probably know a lot more about developing software than the kid just out of college, but as far as an HR office is concerned, if you haven't gotten paid for it, and especially if you haven't gone to school for it, you obviously don't know it.

Before I took the job up here, I had doors repeatedly slammed in my face for hundreds of tech positions in NC, though it's not so much of a slamming as it is a "we'll call you back" and they never do. To paraphrase Woody Allen, I've found the computer job world "worse than dog eat dog, it's dog doesn't return another dog's phone calls." And that's before considering all the competition I'd have from all the people who make Raleigh-Durham one of the top ten info tech places in the country. In addition to local folks, I'd also get the stray e-mail or call from across the country about some job opening, and I pursued it will no better luck (till I got the one for up here).

What also goes against me is that I also tend to be a very honest person, or at least I try to be. And honesty really doesn't go over to well with HR people. I could lie about or overinflate my skillset, probably get hired, and quickly learn enough about the technology to do the job at hand (one of my superpowers) and the HR folks and boss would never be the wiser. But I'd rather get a job honestly, and that is a massive strike against me.

The final thing about these HR people that really screws me is that they don't understand anything about the technical stuff I've done or the challenges I faced and surpassed. It's very rare that I've ever been asked "what was a really difficult programming problem and how did you solve it?" or "How would you come up with a solution for this hypothetical situation?" These people want buzzword-compliant people, not innovative people who can actually solve problems.

And don't even get me started on the recruiters who look for five years of experience in a technology that has only existed for two years.

If issues directly related to employment weren't difficult enough, I also had to deal with some personal issues with the way that some people I was close to back in NC dealt with my employment situation. These people didn't understand anything about the computer job arena, and they said I was "too picky" despite the fact that I submitted dozens of resumes a day for virtually any programming job out there. These same people then called me "selfish" for going to job interviews instead of driving them to various errands they were not able to drive to for stupid reasons of their very own making. Then these same people busted on me for being a 30-year old man who didn't have a decent job (now they're undoubtedly complaining about me leaving them and coming up here, and asking me when I'm coming back). I still really miss those people, but dammit, they were a pain in the ass.

To summarize the last five paragraph of useless memoirs, my attempts to acquire employement in the computer field tend to suck in general, and they sucked especially in North Carolina. And I found the whole situation when I was down there very upsetting.

So back to the present, I'm trying to consider other options than the place I'm currently working. Some people in the company where I work prevent me from doing the best job I can, yet they don't balance their expectations in light of that fact. While I don't intend to leave anytime soon, I do want to know what my options are.

So for the first time since coming up here seven months ago, I call a technical recruiter who left a voicemail a day or two earlier. And dammit, the whole experience on the phone was just the same as it was 7 months ago in NC. I was honest about what I had done (big mistake), I explained the database technology I was currently working on (PostgreSQL, which he had never heard of), I said a lot of the programming I've been doing recently is for Apple stuff (which he must have interpreted as the only stuff I could do), and I told him that the stuff I'm currently being paid to do is a very small subset of the entire skillset I have (which he basically ignored). He ended with a variation on "we'll call you back"--"you're entered into our database. Go to our site and we'll keep in touch". That went really well--not!

I guess I need to look for the positives here. Firstly, it's been months since I last talked to a recruiter, so this exchange was a good refresher. Second, he also asked about why I wanted to leave my current job, which I was a little unprepared for; I've now formulated better answers for the next time around. Third, as my dad would put it, talking with this fellow is a step towards realizing that I'm not trapped in my current job by a contract, and that I can leave at any time. And finally, this experience has reminded me that my situation could be worse; some people don't have a job at all and they'd probably kill to be earning what I do (which is still not a lot, but it pays the bills okay).

Now to fill in the blank of my second blessing for (e:carolinian,30) that I totally forgot include. For the last year or so, I've really started liking Neil Diamond, who in my younger days I considered to be "music for old people." So several weeks ago, I finally broke down and bought a Neil Diamond box set from Barnes and Noble. I really like it, and it's one of the best things I've bought in quite a while.

Smidgens of random bits of potpourri of this week's happenings:

- I managed to get Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur tickets, so that's one less thing for me to worry about. I'd like to join the shul in question, but I'm not too sure how easily I could afford the dues. If I pay 1000+ for the year and something wrecks my work situation in a month or two, and I have to move and need money to move, that'll be a problem. But for right now, I won't have to worry that up here I'll be missing out on something I enjoyed doing every year back home.


- Still a little embarrassed about whatever went on at the party last weekend. I honestly don't remember anything past the point at which the guy with the nosering and hat came up to the porch and entered the scene. It's like I remember walking around the house around 2AM, and then somehow, I materialized on pmt's couch in the morning (actually more comfy than some futons I've crashed on). There's an entire blank chunk of time missing. I hope I didn't say or do anything too stupid other than stare at inanimate stuff for hours on end. If I did do something stupid or offensive, I hope that I'm forgiven for it.

- In work news, yesterday I got confirmation from a previous programmer who worked for my company that my latest guess at what was wrong with the system is correct: the former programmers made an assumption about the limits of how their stuff would be used, and since my fellow non-programmer employees had unknowingly started breaking that assumption since I started the job, they had starting breaking the software as a result of it. One one hand, I'm really pleased with myself that I was able to figure out that the problem was the damn software was never designed then to do the things it people want it to do now. On the other hand, I feel really frustrated for having spent months chasing down phantom bugs in the software that were not bugs, but in fact limits of how the software was supposed to work, and that I couldn't find this out because no one in the organization knew how the software was supposed to work.

- My latest project at work is something I really haven't mentioned much to the higher-ups, largely because they'd probably write it off as "getting sidetracked"; kinda like I got "sidetracked" with another project that I started that has automated the business workflow and saved me hundrds of hours of work at the cost of a few tens of hours spent programming it. This new project is a little bit different than the others, because I'm making it run in a web browser using PHP instead of as a regular mac application using Obje ctive-C* like I would otherwise do. My web programming skills have gotten a little rusty and I need to sharpen them up for the sake of my career--this project is also a good excuse to do this. It will also save me man-weeks and make my job a lot easier in the long run, and the higher-ups will be able to view it from the comfort of their own web browser.

- I'm very happy that I got my latest hobby project, a Co coa Postg reSQL framework, to run. As I spend nine hours a day working on someone else's stuff that I think is put together badly, it's nice for me to be able to make something that I feel is put together well.

I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.

Dammit, where's the advil?

If there were any doubts as to my lack of sanity, I now lay them to rest with this wonderful example of how my warped mind works.

Two days ago, I was up at an hour I really shouldn't have been up at watching a public access TV channel documentary on the history of Buffalo. I found it quite fascinating, as I tend to find a lot of Buffalo history.

They got to the Pan American Expo of 1901, and that really picqued my interest. I knew that there was some massive world's fair type thing 100 years ago in Buffalo, but I never knew quite where it was. I also knew that President McKinley was assinated at the Temple of Music, a building that was considered one of the crown jewels of the expo. Having finished watching the documentary, I now not only wanted to find where the expo took place, but I especially wanted to find the location where the Temple of Music stood. I knew that if I could find the marker that marked the area where McKinley was assasinated, I'd find the former location of the Temple of Music.

After some searching, I managed to score a really decent map of the expo.
I also found out that the expo happened in the area north of Delaware Park. So I now knew the location of the Temple Of Music in relation to the rest of the expo (from looking at the map), and I also knew the location of the expo in relation to the city as it is today, but I still didn't know where the TOM (I'll abbreviate it now) stood in relation to the streets of today, and that piece of knowledge I was searching for would lead me to the place I needed to travel to visit the former site of the TOM.

While I had a map of the modern city (courtesy of Google Earth) and a map of the expo from a hundred years ago, it was an enormously large pain in the ass trying to mentally navigate between the two maps, each in its own separate window on my computer. "What I really need", I said to myself, "is a way of making one of the windows transparent, or some way of overlaying the two images on top of one another." I was getting really frustrated, because I didn't own any software that could do this and I wasn't in the mood to write a one-off program on my mac that would let me do this that I'd probably never use again. Then, out of the blue, it hit me: Google maps lets you overlay transparent images! I could use that.

At this point, I had already found out through other sources that the McKinley monument was on east Fordham Dr. But since I had already done all this work, I might as well confirm the results for myself. So I pursued this perverse idea of laying the image of expo map over the current satellite imagery in Google Earth. Using the Buffalo historical society building (the only building remaining from the expo), the bodies of water near Delaware part, and the train tracks cutting across Elmwood Delaware all as reference points to help me accurately place the overlay over the current city, I was able to confirm that east Fordham Dr. was indeed the site of the TOM where McKinley was shot.

Here is a screenshot of the overlay of the 1901 Expo map over satellite imagery of the city as it currently is, for the people who may not have Google Earth installed on their machines.



The Google Earth file can also be found on Gather, tracking number is 0537094001156306145

The coolest thing to do with Google Earth and my map file is to adjust the transparency of the overlay, which takes you from past to present and vice-versa. You see the most striking similarities/differences around the ponds of Delaware park; adjust the transparency of the layer from opaque to transparent and you start seeing interesting things like part of the pond being filled in, while some stuff like trails and treelines have remained virtually the same for a century. It's also kind of interesting how some features of the exposition grounds (e.g. paths and roads) sometimes perfectly fit over the outline of today's buildings, especially the long and narrow ones. Very curious, indeed.

Anyhow, the next day after I watched the documentary and after an arduous day at work that I needed to unwind from, I was able to go to the former site of the TOM and snap a few photos. I'd have to say that of all the monuments to presidents I've ever seen, the McKinley boulder is the most low-key; it's basically a rock with a plaque and two flags in your run of the mill residential neighborhood. Which in a way is kind of cool, as marble is sort of cliche and it's probably neighborhood people (as opposed to government employees) maintaining the monument.





In the coming months, I'll try to think up other unusual expo things I can do with this map.

For some reason, I've lately had some inhibition against posting. I'm not exactly sure what I'd call it, but it runs along the line of the duality of fear and laziness I tend to feel sometimes--like I'm afraid of the consequences of doing anything at all. But then I get tortured by the reality of doing nothing at all, so the thought of either choice bothers the hell out of me.

Okay, I'm starting to feel better about this now, having gone one paragraph into my post and shaving spent the effort to start typing stuff.

First, the curses of this week.

1st Curse. Work has been extremely stressful, because the database whose work I'm trying to repair (done by the other programmers before me) is just so f*cked up. For the past month of so, we've had this "phantom problem" as it were, where parts manufactured on certain work orders wouldn't go through the system. I tried and tried and tried to figure out what the problem was in the software client that talked to the database, but no dice. Two weeks ago, I finally found out what the problem was: the problem wasn't the client software at all, the problem was the server software the client software talked to. I had assumed that the problem wasn't the server at all, as I would have thought that the programmers would have made sure that above all else, the server code would have worked flawlessly.

In a way, the system did work flawlessly, and that was the problem. The entire system was never *designed* to deal with manufactured parts where the same manufacturing operation was done twice. If you record in the database that you stamp the metal and weld the metal, it's all good. But if you stamp the metal again after that, the entire process gets stuck in its tracks. I'm oversimplying a little bit, but that's the just of it. What getting me so darned stressed now is how deep the roots of this problem run, that almost everything in the existing program will have to be changed or thrown out; it's not going to be the quick, simple fix that the CEO thinks it'll be.

2nd curse: my issues with someone I'm close to back home. I've made the visit down to see them early this summer, but they're not reciprocating and visiting me up here. I've even offered to pay for their plane ticket, but still this person finds every excuse not to come up. This in itself is merely annoying, but it starts getting infuriating when they lay on the guilt trips real thick about me not visiting and asking when I'm going to come down and visit again. I'm feeling that in my interpersonal relations with this person, I'm not getting any due consideration at all. I end up feeling really bad.

3rd curse: My own inertia I suck at overcoming. There's just so much more I could be doing with my weekends if I didn't sleep till 2PM.

4th curse: Missing folks back home, and missing them a lot. Tends to happen when I have family come up and visit.


Now the blessings

1st Blessing. My father came up to visit me. It was wonderful having another human being besides myself in my apartment. I was really nice to see at least one member of my family again. Over the five days we spent together, we had several good meals, he helped me tremendously with work around the house, and the high point of his visit was seeing Shakespeare In Delaware Park. He really liked the "12th Night", and is still raving about it a week later.

2nd Blessing. I know I forgot something that was good. This is a placeholder until I remember it.

3rd Blessing. The blinds my father helped me put up. I now officially have the choice to walk my apartment end-to-end in whatever clothes or lack-thereof and no one will be the wiser. My dream of privacy has finally been realized.

4th Blessing. I finally got around to adding basic exporting of data on the bar-mapping data-entry program. Since I can now export the existing buffalo establishments I've added (+140) into a XML PList file as backup, I'm now less concerned about screwing up the rest of the program. My next goal will be adding parsing of the Yahoo geocoding format, as Yahoo seems to provide more descriptive and useful geocoding XML than Google.

For the last several days, I was going to write another screed about how stupid my work/boss/whatever is.

But I've decided not to. And that's because I'd be bringing work into my after-5PM life, and I don't want to do that because my dad has been visiting since Friday. I miss my family back in North Carolina, so much so that I don't want to give one damn about work once I clock out. Making the most of every second of the limited amount of time I get to see them is of chief proriority, and I won't let anyone else (including myself) tell me otherwise.

There's actually no point to the post. But then again, this is like a diary and all, and since when has personal reflection needed to have a point?

It was wonderful to get the posts of encouragement on my last journal. It's been kind of stressful for me to deal with this situation, and it's good to hear that I'm not alone in it. I'm sure that many people have endured far worse, and that I should probably be more thick-skinned about the whole boss thing.

I missed the violent femmes tonight. I'm bummed about that, but I'm trying to meet an unofficial deadline at work to get some progress made on the database software. While I don't think they'd let me go if I missed it (they are at least somewhat realistic about the large amount of stuff I have to do), missing it would bring in a different piece of software along with its corresponding consultant software company, who I am not very fond of.

I got out of work at 11:00. I need to get this project finished so I can start having a life again.

Wow, this is going to probably be a really long post. There's just so much that's happened, and plus I've let a day or two lapse.

The Good:

This weekend was probably one of the more social I've had in quite a while. I had a lot of fun spontaneously meeting up with all those peeps I hadn't met before (plus the existing ones I had) at spot on Friday. And I had a good, slightly freaky time going with (e:vincent) to Diablo last friday--lots of interesting 'angsty' people. Kinda like me. Sunday meeting more (un)known peeps at spot also rocked.

I also picked up a copy of O'reilly's "Google Map Hacks", and found what I needed to calculate distance from latitude and longitude (plus other useful stuff).

The Bad:

As wonderful as the weekend is, Monday really sucked. Most of it was work-related. (And here, folks, is why I don't want to be Googled. I won't reveal anything classified or damaging, but I want to be able to write "I had a bad day at work", etc).


As some background (my job deserves a post of its own at some point), I was brought on board this company as the sole programmer to fix the database system that my company has been migrating to. The previous programmers (there used to be several of them) screwed up their stuff (with a lot of help from some of people in the company, so the rumors go), and I was hired to do the herculean job of cleaning up their herculean mess (about 12,000 man hours of stuff); the rough deadline of this was going to be around at least december. The CEO moved the target date to the beginning of this fall, which has greatly increased the pressure on myself.

Many of the problems I run into are people problems and not problems I can solve with my technical abilities; if one person thinks one type of behavior is a bug and the other a "feature", and no one remembers which it should be--I can't really fix the problem when I don't even know what a solution is supposed to look like. There are some technical problems, and these are largely that a lot of the stuff that programmers wrote in undocumented spaghetti code (especially the stored procedures on the server), and there's no clear policy about what layer of code (DB stored procedure, DB views, high level obj-c objects, obj-c database bindings) is responsible for what. This project is really a reverse-engineering project more than anything else.

At this point in time, after six months of me trying to untangle this Gordian knot to save the company, the CEO on Monday tells me that I'm doing it all wrong and that all the lack of progress I've made is due to my lack of documentation and keeping track of the changes I've made. I've been using a code versioning system and bug reporting system, I've been logging the changes I make in the database structure into the version system, and colleagues from my former university used to remark that I'm a sick bastard for writing a line of comment documentation for every line of code. But the CEO pulls this out of his ass and says "now we're going to do this 'my way'". He was at least partially complicit in the mess that was created before I arrived (to what extent is still in question), so I start worrying that our early fall deadline won't be met, and I'll get blamed for not meeting it if I let him do what he wants, and if I disobey him I'll get blamed (and possibly fired).

After work, I drive back to my apartment and call a friend from back in NC to talk about my day. While talking with him, I realize that there are 40-60 baby spiders crawling on my bedroom ceiling. For many years, I've tried to trap spiders inside something like a cup or tupperware and release them outside without killing them. I don't want to take life I don't have to. That day, in fact, I took two such spiders outside to avoid the whole squishing thing. But this was at night, when I had work the next day and couldn't spend the several required days scooping every baby spider into a tupperware bowl. And I knew that if I let all those spiders grow big in my bedroom, which is the worst place for someone who finds spiders creepy to have spiders (bed, clothes, etc are in there) I could never get any sleep. Plus, I would get bitten dozens of times during every night.

So I had to kill just about all of them, apologizing to each one before I squished it. I did manage to let 1-2 spiders out of the house, because I felt that the female spider should at least have a few of her babies survive the terrible things I did. But in the end, almost none of those in my bedroom made it, because I had to make the difficult choice of putting my safety first. To the spider Jaoquin (another subject for a future (e:strip) posting) wherever you are, I have failed you. I am truly sorry.

Back to work.

Today, I start going by the plan the CEO wants. He tells me I should have changed the parts in the live database (that we currently use for some company uses) to match what I've done in the experimental database, and that this should be done by having stuff changed in the original database we're migrating from (we have an import export script I wrote to go from old to new). Yesterday, I thought he wanted me to start this whole process off by us reproducing our original problems, so I didn't change anything, because that's what I that he wanted me to do. Having now gotten chided today for this, I do what I definitely think he wants me to do this time around and I go to a mechanical engineer and ask him to make a change in the old database like he said that I should have done yesterday. The CEO then drags me and my immediate supervisor into the conference room. While storming to the conference room he says to my immediate supervisor "this guy doesn't get it. How stupid can you be?"

Once in the conference room, the CEO screams at me and accuses me of trying to "run a one-man show", of being arrogant and thinking that I know of everything that goes on in the company. He has some valid points about my communication skills not always being the best (I eventually told him about my Asperger's and ADD after he rhetorically asked 'is there anything physically wrong with you'), but other than that, I'm not trying to be any of those things. He accuses me of not listening to his orders to not go talk to anyone in the company about the results of the test program until he comes back with the results himself. My understanding of the situation was that he was going to hand people the test stuff and that every thing else was still up in the air, which I why I made the mistake of asking a coworker about the results before this whole thing began. The CEO then starts telling me to answer all these Yes/No questions, along the lines of "Did I say this or didn't I?" kinds of questions. If you answer "Yes", you're basically saying you knew exactly what he said and you disobeyed him; you answer "No", you're calling him a liar. I ask him if it would make him happy if from now own we used e-mail to communicate exactly what he wants, as doing things this way keeps an irrefutable proof of what was said and documents the process. He tells me he'd be too lazy to write the e-mails.

Eventually, he says that the solution is to get even more draconian and we're going to have a meeting to sort this all out in the afternoon. The afternoon meeting was actually productive and a lot of things got clarified, but for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, I was feeling really sad and really angry. I was sad and I couldn't express it--being a stoic and being male, I didn't cry; but I kind of felt like it on the inside. I was angry and couldn't express it--not wanting to thought clinically insane, I couldn't do something like hit a brick wall with my fists like I ordinarily would given the lack of a convenient punching bag or pillow. I wanted more than anything to tell that a**hole off and point out all the stupid things he had done or allowed in his company that could have contributed to the current situation with the database, but that would be None Too Wise for my career. All I could do that entire morning was just sit in front of the computer try to look like I was doing something while I let the shock of me being ripped a new one wear off. It was impossible to think about anything else.

It did help that some coworkers came by my cubicle and said "Don't worry about it, he does that to everyone. Take the few valid points he has and throw everything else out." I was especially touched by my immediate supervisor doing this, as I had assumed he wouldn't say anything at all. I guess I've completely misjudged my immediate supervisor and I was wrong for doing so. I treated myself to dinner at the Indian Diner in the evening, since I didn't eat lunch all afternoon because I was worrying that if I'd clocked out for lunch I'd be absent for his impromptu meeting whenever it would be, and he'd go back to screaming.

I'm feeling better since I talked to some more people from back home about this, but I'm still worried that in future heated encounters he'll push me past my breaking point and then I'll start speaking my mind about how I really see things in our organization, and how I see him in particular.

For the little remainder of tonight there is, I will try to look for some happiness in the world, some thought of pure beauty or joy that makes me forget the pointlessness of some things.

Had a bit of fun with the sign generator the other day

For some reason, the (e:strip) toolbar in the upper left-hand corner (the one that is used for new post, etc) is missing. I'm using Safari 2.0.3. But if I click my user pic, I get a new compose text box. Weird.

In other news, the electric shortages forced MySpace to close down for a while. In my best Jon Lovitz The Critic voice: "and nothing of value was lost". Any site that gives the error message "sorry, you need to be a member to do that" when you fail to log in as a member is a site that *deserves* to get taken off of the net. "Nielsen twin powers--activate!"

The lasagna recipe I mentioned in a previous post actually turned out pretty decent; definitely worth the money spent on it. The only problem is that I have way too much leftovers, a lot more than I planned for. 6 days of spinach lasagna might just be a bit much.