🏷️ work

I got his email this morning. Am I really supposed to be afraid to walk home everyday. The last three are the worst. What about @tinypliny, how do you feel?

As we approach the holiday season, the following habits and practices can help to make our work environment safe and secure.

1. Avoid bringing large sums of cash or other valuables to work.
2. Try to keep items of value and wallets or purses with you or in a secure, locked location.
3. When leaving your office or work area unoccupied, lock the doors.
4. Keep track of keys. Be careful not to leave keys unattended and in view of anyone who passes by.
5. Contact the Safety and Security Department, ext. 3069, if you or a colleague sees a suspicious individual or anyone you do not recognize or does not have an identification badge.
6. Use caution when traveling outside.
7. Be aware of your surroundings and individuals in close proximity.
8. Use Roswell Park designated parking areas and the shuttle, whenever possible.
9. Use indoor routes through the campus when traveling alone.
10. Travel in groups.
11. Avoid walking outside alone, particularly on the perimeter of the campus, if at all possible. If that is not possible, then contact Security at ext. 3069 for an escort.

When we practice these common sense habits, we not only create a secure environment for ourselves, but also for our patients and their families.

Working At Roswell Park For Two Years
And frankly, I still love it. Today was my two year anniversary at Roswell. I probably would have quit 2 years ago if I had to go in at 8:30 every morning like the ad for the job had said. It almost made me not apply. Besides the fact that it is doing what I enjoy doing most, that it is extremely challenging, that it pays well and that the people are great - I think the flexible schedule is still the most important part for me.

I just don't function as well at 8:00am as I do at 10:00am no matter what time I go to bed. Maybe if we lived in a sunnier climate but getting up in the cold winter dark kills me. Check out this journal from my first day @paul #32382 and this day last year @paul #32845. On a side note I noticed I was complaining about my migraines here and had five in one month @paul #32844. Look how cell phone image shave changed - check out this journal from 12/05/04 @paul #31479

Here, I would like to thank Del Reid @mrdeadlier for choosing me as an employee and letting me come in later.

My only regret so far was not be able to convince @jim that it was worth staying ;(

Insuring my health
I would much rather buy health assurance but its better than nothing. I got a doctor's appointment for tomorrow at 3:45PM!!

Community Blue!
I also went to the health benefits fair for my union today and I changed @matthew and I's health insurance to Community Blue so we could just cut out all this referral crap. Did you know that you didn't need a referral with community blue in order to see a doctor.

Back To Talking about Work
Below are some of the web things I created and/or worked on during my time at roswell. In additional I did about 100 million other things which can't be shown as a pictures, such as fixing other code, setting up and administering servers, creating tons of reusable code for the team through surebert toolkit and framework, integrating with other systems and even creating multimedia CDs.

Surebert javascript toolkit which you guys know about - I designed this and coded the toolkit/site


An online signature program for captures users signatures on the web for extra security and verification.


Yroswell, a blogging site for generation Y kids who want to be in medicine or science when they grow up? This site took up a lot of time. It is similar to estrip but they made it difficult by consistently changing their mind about what it should do and how it should look. In its short life span they have already had me do two major redesigns of look and feature sets.

My only regret is that I couldn't have been in charge of the design and feature set of this. I think I could have done so much more by making a functional design that fed off of more live data and was more engaging, less reliant on images, no drop downs, better, more functional chat, more social networking fun, etc.

This is the front page. I seriously can't stand the top right area or the drop downs. I think the rest of it could work. But the chat and blog-a-thon buttons are so blah and the drops are not very useful.


And here is a look at the blogging part which I think was much better designed. @enknot where are my users icons!


gather which you guys have seen was for sharing file. The new version will be part of the intranet which I am in charge of re-designing and programming as my next big task.


The employee evaluation system for all the employees in there million positions and unions. I did design this and program it.


A PHP backend Framework that uses a presentation gateway to communicate between front end surebert javascript and backend surebert php


A code sharing site for us to never use. designed and programmed


A dermatology skin viewer that lets you upload, manipulate (contrast, brightness, saturation) and notate right from the site. This is still on hold for some reason. Designed and programmed


I built a CMS that replaced a whole bunch of our hand coded satellite sites. Note - I did not design the look for some of these. - like Ride For Roswell and Carly's Club.

Looks like @jim is testing harnesses at work.

I cannot believe at Roswell, they still make employees carry those stupid 16 lb, chunky 1980s, green screen text pagers. Looks like Kaleida uses them too as @jenks was carrying one today too. How is it that the device can only text page when a cell phone that big is capable of video chat. Seriously, it is so backwards. I feel like it shouldn't have to be any bigger than an ipod shuffle clip. Its like that company make them way back when and just never upgraded technology as everything else got more advanced and smaller.



The new vendor system they bought for the phones is supposed to let you forward your pages to another user when you are out, but after of a bunch of terrible ( in my opinion) decisions and huge amounts of resource and time waste, no one knows about the new vendor system or how to use it, it doesn't properly integrate with our in house systems (that people actually use and @enknot created). The escalation feature that it has could have been implemented much more efficiently in house. I wish that was my project.

I know for a fact that some people just don't get pages from our directory and no one seems to care, hm. Seems important to me.

What set this off. Seeing @imk2 in the hall carrying two stupid pagers around. She said sometime she ends up with four. That just blows my mind. It must weigh more than a laptop.



I wonder how anything really gets done in big organizations.

On another note, for the first time ever I saw Wegmans parking lot nearly deserted on Halloween night. i guess it is the kind of holiday that no one is really cooking a meal for. Why is that? Isn't there some special Halloween fare besides candy? Next year I am just going to make it up and eat a halloween goat - that sounds like the appropriate animal for such a Holiday.

I would really like to become something bigger in the organization I work for. I realize I haven't been there very long but I have this feeling I could really help organize and analyze systems on a much larger scale. I don't just mean for web development. There seems to be so much reliance on software vendors but I think there isn't necessarily an understanding for what they do. I wonder if I will ever attain a larger role in making decisions on a more comprehensive level.

One guy was telling me the other day he planned on spending $90,000 on a systems that prevented insecurities in web applications. That is utterly ridiculous. First of all because such a solution could not possibly exist among the multitude of web based systems we run. I guarantee that whatever it does cannot be worth $90,000.

There are so many diverse groups that don't seem to know enough about each other.

Oh my freakin' god. Today was such a great work and programming day. First, we had our man shower for @enknot. At least that is what my co-worker called it.

@enknot and I hooked up our new fancy user server program to our new programs, @jim presented some fun MVC stuff at our team meeting and I did some crazy ass javascripting with surebert.

Work is just fun recently as we are all kind of vibing off each other.

Getting Old In Fractions
Then when @enknot and I were testing serving users off the user server I was examining the packets and realized that I was 30.6202 years old! That is closer to 31.00 years old. Oh how time flies. It seems like only yesterday I turned 30.00 years old. We should set retirement timers.

I got a call at work today asking me if I was interested in a job at Yahoo. @twisted seems to be sold on me taking it, but I find it hard to imagine I could live as fancy a life as I do here even if I was making a lot more money. Like I only have to get up twenty minutes before work here and there is a ~5min commute not to mention I live in a freakin' mansion.

They found me via my online resume

The ideal candidate will have a strong command of web standards and developing applications, CSS-driven/table-less HTML layouts, DHTML (JavaScript 1.0-1.5, CSS1 & CSS2, DOM Levels 0-2), PHP, Unix, HTTP (get/post, headers), Apache, cross-browser compatibility & browser degradation strategies, optimization techniques (both in file weight and perceived/actual rendering speed), object-oriented design, unit testing & debugging techniques, dynamic content retrieval, state management, accessibility techniques, and internationalization issues.

The candidate will be taking static mocks and flash prototypes from the designer and working with the team to produce a working prototype.

The environment is fast-paced with numerous user-centered iterative design & development cycles. You'll be responsible for building everything from proof-of-concepts and usability prototypes to deployment-quality code viewed by tens of millions of users.
If you're interested, please provide URLs and code samples of your work.
Location: Sunnyvale, CA

I guess it is something to think about. I mean it would be tremendously exciting to work on code that is used by millions of people and to work with people on the cutting edge of the industry and with the resources to make really exciting stuff happen. But what if Yahoo tanks and Microsoft bought it ;(

On Sunday we hosted my friend Dave Doyle's surprise retirement party at our house. His ex-wife and daughters planned it all and thought that by having it at our house he would have no idea. We told him we were having a barbeque. Needless to say he was totally freakin' surprised when all his friends and family jumped out and yelled surprise! from behind our garage.

I invited my co-workers @jim and @enknot and their signfy-os - sorry everyone else but this was a family affair and not an estrip party - sorry @leetee

This video says it all. In Dave's his daughter Erin gives a speech about his commitment to their family and what an awesome dad, dave is. It might make you cry if you are the emotional type.



Dave Doyle and his daughters Erin and Crescent


Dave Doyle's daughters and wife Lynn - who organized the party


Dave Doyle and his retirement cake


The cake gave everyone smurf tongues


Dave got a GPS navigation system - so now we won't get lost on trips anymore. I guess @terry is out of a job.


Everyone looking for basra


@enknot and megan and the almost ready baby ?


@enknot and @matthew


@jim and @james


We got our chiminea going and burned the rest of october surprise debris


Making Faces

My favorite kind of things to do are fixing computer emergencies I am totally not familiar with. Okay, really my favorite thing to do is build big systems but sometimes, it is fun to test your skills out being thrown into a problem you didn't really know anything about.

@enknot was out sick today ;( and he normally controls the online directory but the SMTP server that handles the critical online messaging system was down.

I had to hijack the messages being sent and switch it from using the old smtp system to a escalating new communication system that Roswell purchased. It required connecting to an oracle database through odbc and then sending the hijacked messages as an XML service. I wrote a little logger to keep track of the lost messages while the old system was down.

Solving these kind of problems on the fly is kind of like solving those story with holes game you would play as a kid. Sometimes I wish I was just a contractor - I would be so much richer.

I have made all these board sweeping changes to the site code as I have been adapting it for another major project in the last week. There is still a lot more old clutter I want to get rid of, but it is very scary working on it a few days before I will have no computer for a week. I just hope that my device will be able to save me in a pinch.

I mean I think it is all good but there is only so much testing one human can do in a day.