Category: Work Life

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A True Dream Job—Becoming a Master Builder at LegoLand, California

Co-worker Ted Trela sent me this droolworthy, Lego-related link from Wired news. [Editor’s note: December 15, 2005—It appears the link earlier in this paragraph is not working, try this related story this link instead.]

Of course, I don’t get to build with Lego as a profession, but building software is almost as much fun, so my job is just about as close to being a LegoLand, Californi as the winners of Lego’s nationwide search.

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This is Really Amusing: Our Lights Have Gone Crazy

Today I am over at 297 Billerica Road, Kronos’ main building in Chelmsford (I normally work 2 buildings away at 2 Omni Way). We’re in a meeting with Rick Hightower, our Struts trainer who we’re keeping an extra day for consultation, and the lights have gone crazy. Imagine strobing Christmas lights on a building-wide scale. Very, very amusing. Apparenlty, this smart buiding is having a case of dimentia.

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Jakarta Struts Training

Today through Wednesday (and possibly Thurdsday) Kronos is locking me (along with several others) up in training. This is my first official training since starting with Kronos, and I'm a little nervous, given I'm not very well trained in Java. We shall see.

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Coming Soon to Country [Not] Near You—Your Job

My yaar Pankaj Verma sent me a link to this article this morning, which predicts that by 2015, 348,028 U.S. computer jobs will move “offshore.” This is a rather frightening prospect for those of us who have been burned by the dot-bomb crises of the past few years, although this report includes the comforting statistic that approximately 1,761,000 new jobs will open up in these areas by 2010.

While I’m on it, I still have two former co-workers who are looking for work after the big corporate “treatment” a year ago by [fomer employer’s name deleted]. These are both hard-working, highly-skilled, dedicated people, who, frankly, don’t deserve to have been unemployed as long as they have. Grrrrrrrrr.

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Traffic

[doug]It took me 2 hours and 15 minutes to get to work today. I didn't get past second gear until I had already passed Needham. Yesterday it was an hour and 45 minutes. Last week as another 1:45 trip. I guess I should be glad the ride home is only taking 1:15 to 1:30, typically, but even there the traffic has been unusually heavy. :: sigh :: It will be nice to live closer to work.

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Family News Update

Well, it’s about time I updated a few family items; Nichelle can add her 2¢ later.

  • Isaac’s last day of school (second grade) was yesterday. He cried because it was over. He does much better in elementary school than I did.
  • Work at Kronos has been great, and a wonderful opportunity to daily improve my Java skills. One colleague pointed out that our team seems to have “the right amount of fun.”
  • My father’s health has actually improved (this was not expected)! He was able to walk into and out of church a couple of weeks ago, and the congregation appauded when he came in. This is a big difference from how he was doing at Christmas.
  • Nichelle’s pregnancy is halfway through, and she finally has another ultrasound scheduled for June 16, which should be the gender-determining one. (If this child is a boy, I’ll post a link to the e-bay auction soon.) If it’s a girl, we still need to pick a middle name. I’ll probably create an online submission form for suggestions. (Kherna Yoyo continues to insist the middle name should be Kherna.)
  • We are still working on our move to Nashua. The cosmetics on our current house are nearly done. I have a minor plumbing problem to correct, but the greenboard for the new bathroom ceiling is up. Nichelle is (as usual) doing her masterful job of spackling, patching, and painting. We do not yet have a house picked out in Nashua or Hudson, but we find reasonable listings every day. We continue to pray for God’s guidance in this.
  • The Mexico missions trip is back on after a one-year absence. I am going alone (sniff), but am looking forward to continuing to help with the church and children’s home in Constitución, as well as reimmersing myself in the culture. (I will be keeping The Missions Trip Site updated starting in a week or two, and will be porting the BLOG software to it, so I can do live updates from the trip. I read an excellent biography on Benito Juarez, the orphan-who-became-president. His story rivals that of Lincoln in some ways. I’d like to re-read the book before we leave, and take some notes.
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Thank you, Mr. Greene!

Mark Greene (a master of all things related to databases) was kind enough to diagnose our ailing SQL string that was preventing certain numbers from being found. Thanks, Mark!

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Back Home and Charged Up About .NET

I just got back from Kronos’ first-ever Technology Summit. It was a great event, filled with very useful mini-seminars, and mostly free of the “fluff” that seems to plague most corporations’ attempts at such an event.

At any rate, the last seminar I attended was run by a Microsoft consultant, and opened my eyes to just how cool .NET is, and how radically different it is from other Microsoft our-way-or-the-highway approaches to technology.

I’m going to give the ASP .NET Web Matrix Tool (a free product, although the full Visual InterDev .NET is available as trialware) a whirl, if I have time.