27 August 1998: Another Day, Another Deadline

Thursday, 27 August 1998:

Another Day, Another Deadline

Gee, I'm bushed tonight. Could it be because I was in the office until after 1 am last night? And because it was nearly 2 am when I got to bed? Could be!

Yep, yesterday was a more-than-full work day, because our deadline was today at 8 am. Of course, we've still got stuff to do even after it; everyone does.

I got into the office this morning around 9:30 am, and the other programmers were mostly leaving around then. Our servers go down at 1 am for backups, and they stuck around to work after they came up. Only rather than being down for an hour the main server was down for nearly three, and when it returned it had spawned off all these nightly background jobs which made it dreadfully slow, so I guess they struggled to get stuff done.

(The server was still having problems when I started working on it after my morning meeting. It apparently got rebooted again at some point.)

We'll see how things shape up tomorrow. I have to finish writing my part of my periodic review by Monday, and I have to start working on preparing for Epic's annual User's Group Meeting, so time is going to be taken away from development in the coming weeks.

Speaking of going away, people seem to be leaving our team in droves lately. One woman moved to Oregon, one moved to Ireland (!), and one installer and two programmers are moving to different teams (including the person I've had working-relations problems with in the past). It's pretty strange. Generally our team is a model of stability, but I've survived nearly two complete turnovers of our R&D staff now.

But work has generally been much better the last couple of weeks. Largely because I've been working on a project that I could just sit down and work on, program all the way through, and not get large amounts of kibbitzing or have to wait around for other peoples' input or decisions constantly. It's been nice. This is what I like to do, and a level of autonomy I enjoy.

Tonight I got together with Karen for dinner. We hadn't seen each other in about a month, since she's been in California, and when she got back she was very busy and was spending a lot of time with her SO. We grilled steaks and made several side dishes (mashed potatoes, string beans and corn-on-the-cob) and talked for quite a while. Walked around her neighborhood, went to Michael's Frozen Custard, etc. etc. Karen's planning to finish her Ph. D. in 1999 and talked a lot about that, and I talked about some of the anxieties in my life (which I've mostly related here). I also lent her a couple of jazz albums (Sonny Rollins' +3 and Joshua Redman's Moodswing).

Speaking of which I received an import copy of The Crusaders' The Second Crusade today from Amazon.com. It's out-of-print in the US. It's a pretty cool instrumental album which I was introduced to back in college and am pretty happy to finally own a copy of.

So, now I'm feeling even more bushed, and I should wrap this up and go to bed. Hopefully things will calm down soon and I can skip fewer days - although there is the wedding thing (no, not mine; go read my archives) on Saturday, which may keep things lively. Or maybe not. We'll see. I'm unsure what to expect from it.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)