7 May 1999: Not A Good Feeling

Friday, 7 May 1999:

Not A Good Feeling

By the way, in case it wasn't clear from yesterday's entry, you should update your bookmarks to my new journal page, since who knows how long the Fullfeed one will be around?

It was a pretty mixed day at work.

The good news is that I finally got a G3 Mac on my desk, which will replace the close-to-useless (i.e., highly obsolete) PowerMac 5300 (16 Mb of RAM! Woo-hoo!) which I've been using to read my mail. It will also give me a good environment for playing around with internal releases of WebObjects for my testing.

Okay, I did need to run around for about 45 minutes (maybe more) trying to find a monitor for it. I think that Apple never throws anything away unless they're physically out of space; you wouldn't believe the ancient monitors and old NeXT hardware lying around there. But after a few tries I did find a 20" monitor which should do the trick. I'll probably go into the office on Sunday (maybe I'll bike!) to configure it. Which basically means reformatting the hard drive into several partitions, and installing Mac OS X Server on it.

Should be fun!

The less thrilling part of the day was that I was involved in the interview process for a programming candidate for the team. I was a little surprised to be included in the list of people interviewing him, since I've only been with the group for two months, but I figured they (the powers that be) just wanted me to get some exposure to the process and add one more voice to the mix.

My session was supposed to be me and one other guy with the candidate, but we actually ended up with four employees in the room with him at once. And, I ended up mostly clamming up during the interview. I just didn't feel comfortable with it: There seemed to be too many people to comfortably work together in that environment, and I was keenly (although perhaps inaccurately) aware that the first thing out of my mouth could be something unutterably dumb. It just felt like a very high-pressure situation to me, especially since it wasn't what I'd been expecting.

We had a meeting after the whole process was done to talk about the candidate, and I had a few things to say, but I wasn't sure how they were taken. I felt like I rather rambled on.

I didn't feel this was a failure of the process (the other dozen or so people involved seemed to come up with fairly coincident opinions, after all), but rather my own failure to adapt to the process. I got too uptight about it and feel like I just froze. I feel like I've been doing that a lot in my life lately, and I'm finding it difficult to overcome. And it seems like something in my attitude has changed over the last several years, and it's very frustrating.

I think a lot of it is fear of failure. It feels like there's a lot of pressure to be perfect, and it's harder and harder to remain laid-back. And when people reassure me that it's okay to make mistakes, I'm not sure I believe that; I feel like I have this amazing ability to put my foot in my mouth, since I can really display an alarming lack of tact when I let myself relax. And dealing with things in my own methodical, careful manner is the only way to avoid that. The only way I know, anyway. And yeah, that gets me wound up pretty tight over things.

So, I don't feel good about how this thing went. I guess I didn't make a complete idiot of myself in it, but I don't feel like I was exactly value added.

Check out the web site on dumb laws around the country.

So slugger Mo Vaughn returned to Fenway Park to face the Red Sox for the first time since he left them to sign with the Angels. And, happily enough, Pedro Martinez dominated the Angels in a 6-0 victory.

I got tired of Vaughn's whining about how he wasn't being 'respected' (i.e., paid enough) years ago, and I can't say I was sorry to see him go. He really did nothing to make me as a fan feel that he was any more special than any other random first baseman the Sox could sign. He just bitched about the management ad nauseum. Here's hoping he flails weakly at lots more pitches this weekend.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)