🏷️ work

I had to take this ridiculous exam at work about corporate compliance, safety, etc. i understand the purpose, but the questions are so dumb. If you get less than 70% you can take it over till you get it right. I am going to be honest and say I didn't watch all the popwerpoints that com with it, because the questions were so easy.

Here is one of the more serious questions as an example:

Which of the following is statements is true?
a. Compliance with HIPAA is optional
b. Noncompliance with HIPAA is a federal offense.

Without knowing much about it, it seems obvious that choice b. is right. You never would phase anything with compliance as optional.

But then I got this crazy one.

Dirty Bombs, although dangerous, are more of a scare tactic rather than a health hazard.
a. true
b. false

I picked false, and ... I was wrong!



It seems pretty crazy to bother with that question. What is it teaching the workers? If someone calls for radioactive materials and says its only for a dirty bomb, then its not a big deal. it just seems like such a stupid question to ask on this type of exam. The exam took about an hour and I was paid to take it. GLad they carefully thought about the important questions like:

It is acceptable for employees to wrestle with their friends on Roswell property, so long as it is break time?
a. true
b. false

In terms of the working for it part, I am very happy. Lots of stuff going on and its pretty fun right now. I love solving problems and right now I have a million little ones to solve which keeps it exciting.

So I was really into building my new wikimedia extensions when the cleaning guy came to me to say that he and his whole team are being laid off and have only a month left. Its so sad that they lay off the people for Christmas. He seemed so sad.

I overheard the older lady cleaning woman saying how the new jobs she looked at had no benefits. It made me think about what would happen to me if I lost my job and had no health insurance and now I am just sad. Seriously, I kind of feeling like crying and I know thats lame but it must be so devastating.

It also makes me think that the state job world is maybe not so secure after all. It makes me wonder if I should look for a federal job like terry. I mean if the feds go down its really over, right?

To make it even creepier of an evening at like 8:00PM someone came in our office area where I am the only person and shouted "everyone go home." Then they left before I could figure out who it was. I left right after and just finished my editing from home. It probably was just a co-worker but the moment had all the feeling of office shooting.

Speaking of which, the VPN we have is so great. Before I hated it because I didn't have a native mac client but it is so convenient to just be at work from anywhere.

Pictures
I was so busy I forgot to change my iphone so there are no pics to post. But you would have seen.
1. A squirrel's head I found on the street still bleeding. How on earth did that happen.
2. An ambulance on and vacant with the windows open and the keys in the ignition while the drivers smoozed with the gas station owner on Allen.

Well, not ever, but close. I worked so hard all day from the moment I got there at 10:30 till I left 5 minutes ago at 11:30 - a fun 13 hours laters. My brain actually hurts. To make it even more fun I have to be at work at 9:00am to give a presentation I already gave to the same group of people that didn't pay attention the first time. I barely had any time to prepare new material for it because I had lots of other real work to do. I find I have to explain everything like 16 times at work. Even when I use flow charts, graphs, power point presentations, send email, add wiki pages, etc - no one ever goes over it. It is so frustrating.

I also spent a whole bunch more time on IE6 problems again. I hope the programmers of that application die.

The fun sound of my macbook pro santa rosa fan dying. This is really great because I have a ton of work and no way to get to the apple store till friday when I am sure they will be too busy.



Apparently, I am not the only one

I woke up an hour early effortlessly thanks to the time change. Could be a good time to change my work schedule by one hour. Then again, I might just hate it after a week. Maybe I will just go in early today and see.

I programmed a very significant authentication system today on a whim and it worked. It was one of those exciting couple hours - bang - it works things. Not so usual for cross platform, cross server, cross OS solutions. Work has been more and more like that now that I can make some calls of my own and have a better overview of everything that is going on.

On an unrelated note, I am so excited about the party. I think there are going to be a lot of people. I have been inviting people like mad. You should feel free to invite any of your friends. I plan on thoroughly enjoying myself after some endless nights of programming madness.

I am just going to bed now after hours of IE6 testing for the latest surebert toolkit. I hate IE6 so much, I cannot wait for IE8 so that at least the basics of the web can work similarly across browser.

At least my upgrades from the last week are finally done.

This is my repsonse to @jim #46321. I was going to make it a comment but in the interest of reaching 25,000 - its a new post.

I agree with you on most of it. Well, the part that this is what actually happens most of the time, but I don't think it is always the best approach.

As you know at my company, so many of the people hired were based on relationships with other people already working there. You can easily draw a flow chart of how most of the people were related in one way or another before working together at Roswell. I am constantly amazed at the back story for each of the people I work with. Its like watching an episode of Lost when they do the backstories.

Unfortunately, that doesn't always work out so great. We hired a couple related people in the past that used a lot of of available resources and delivered nothing. It actually happend twice in a row.

So during the last round of hires I didn't even think about people I know and went strictly off of interviews and resumes that came from public job postings. The two programmers that I had a hand in hiring turned out to be great. They are both getting stuff done fast and figuring out stuff easily.

While I agree that hiring poeople you know is what happens most of the time, I actually think mixing a little randomness into the selection really helps development.

My own hiring @paul #32326 was like a random mix of randomness and relationship. One of my students found the job posting for Roswell in the Buffalo News and brought it to me so I applied randomly not knowing anyone - or so I thought. It turned out during the interview, that my to be boss's wife was a child hood friend. I like to think I was hired on my portfolio, code samples, resume and education.

Anyhow, I radically changed the way we work and if I was a yet another Buffalo State ASP classic programmer I might have just accepted the status quo.

Wasn't it the same with your new job? Imagine instead that the visual fox pro people hired their visual fox pro friends, are there any of those even around, lol? Anyways, I am sure you get what I mean.

Not that people you know can't be qualified. I just think there are so many qualified programmers out there that its a bad idea to not have public interviews to get an idea about the competition. We actually don't have a choice about this being a government institution so at least we always get resumes from those related and those not to compare.

Universities recognize this too. The reason you traditionally cannot be hired by your Alma Mater is because they figure you ascribe to the same techiques and doctrine as the people who you studied under. If you are hired the ideas never really change and evolve as rapidly as they would with fresh blood.

Moreover, I find it way easier to work with new people that I do not know whatsoever, as I am not as concerned about hurting their feelings or they about mine.

Still I think you are right that most hiring is based on relationships/connections.

Last night I worked till like 11PM to finish up all the projects that had to be converted to the new flash upload. Some of them still have to be launched into production because I can't do that without signoff. At least they are ready to go. I can't believe what a pain in the ass it has been because of this one decision Adobe made. I wonder if they realized so many people were using their system the way it worked in flash player 9. Then I worked on a new AD based security system which seems to work out well.

I also had this serious issue where IE6 was blanking out on cached javascript files. I kept thinking it was some problem witht he scripts themselves but it turned out to be that it really just can't handle javascript gzipped. I set my .htaccess file to stop gzipping the content for IE6 and everything was fine. Honestly, that browser has cost my thousands of hours of wasted time over the years.

By the time I got home I was just ready for bed. So despite having guests over I passed out.

Today, there are like ten million other programming tasks I want to accomplish like adding native querySelectorAll support to the surebert toolkit but I am going to try and take a day off. The native querySelectorAll is pretty neat and it is extremely fast. The browser makers are finally starting to realize that programmer want js dom node selection through css selectors and it could be much more efficient if the browser just did it instead of having to use a js library. Safari 3.1 already has support, so does firefox 3.1 beta and the new IE 8 is going to have it at well. I can't believe something new will have cross browser support.

If only Roswell could move past IE6 which is sadly still our official browser.

Someone sent me this link the other day where you could see the actual paid salaries of all New York State workers for 2007

Its hard not to be jealous, especially when you are talking about the top paid people at Roswell.



I thought Dr. Hohn retired, maybe that was his severance package. According to this , he is administering "the newly-formed Empire State Stem Cell Board." From what I hear everyone loved him and he really turned Roswell around.

Seriously though, can you imagine making that much money in Buffalo. It amounts to about $30,000 a week. Let me repeat the - in Buffalo part. Are there even properties worthy of that salary in this city. He could buy the best properties in the city on one years salary.

In comparison, here is the top paid at Suny Buffalo. How is it that Dr. Linda Brodsky makes so much more than the other execs at Suny Buffalo. Check out that $799,000 salary! I guess being a doctor and an executive is really the way to go, its the same with all the top paid Roswell employees.



I decided to just go ahead and look up the top salaries for all New York state employees regardless of organization and guess what Dr. Hohn is still #1 followed by closely by Linda Brodsky and all the top execs at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.



What's even crazier is when you think of all the money they make on their side companies and discoveries. I am so curious how that all works. It seems to me when I make anything at Roswell they own it, but all the top people have side companies. I really need to work on the side company thing in my 40s.

Back to my Dept
In my department the difference between the different jobs is not too extreme. Not like in the medical depts. It goes from $35k to about $100k. This year I didn't make as much as I could have if I was overtime elligable. Next year I will make more because I moved up a couple pay grades this year. In the end I am satisfied although I sometimes want to kick myself for not going to medical school.

In the short term, I would rather have an office than more money. Two of the guys I work with just moved from cubicles to offices and I was visiting today thinking how nice it would be to have a meeting space/demonstration table built into your work space. I actually live in the shafted cube thats cut back to make room for an isle and don't even have a chair for people to sit at like other the other guys do. Its kind of redic seeing as I have constant meetings with people on how to do stuff as part of my new job and they just stand behind my chair or sit on a chair just outside my cube.

Nope, it's not a nuclear attack duck and cover. It's a study that
needs a presentation and an overly dedicated @imk2. I left my
headphones in her car the other day, when I stopped by she demoed her
office camping gear for me. She tried to convince me it is cozy under
there. It looks way cosier than my nasty cube. Her work space is
like 1000x better than mine. Someday, I hope I can have an office,
let alone a window.