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.

It's so like me to think "ah-ha, I will save some money on eating out by making this at home" and then end up spending the rough equivalent of four big whopper value meals buying all of the ingrediants at Tops.

It is also like me to be easily deceived into believing that such things as totally fat free ricotta and mozzerella cheese, which I didn't find at Tops, could actually exist in this universe, and that such concoctions if they do exist could plausibly not taste like cardboard. At least I did have the common sense not to try to make the thing for dinner at 9:45PM tonight, as I'd probably still be making it now; it probably means that I'm getting better with sense of time (which is not like me at all).

And all these coffee-related posts by (e:theecarey) during the last several days finally pushed me and my craving over the edge--I took my percolator out of storage, the really nice one with the long snout for pouring, and fired it up with a Starbucks dark roast. I'm probably like that anime cliche of the good guy who carries around a low-tech revolver--drip makers just don't do it for me, I don't care how fucking programmable they are and yes I really do recognize a difference in taste. I'd take a cheap percolator or french press over these latest thing from brookstone any day of the week; at least I know I'm always going to have a reliablly good cup of coffee.

After two days, still waiting for the chalk to dry...