Now I'm a Developer (Again)

So I stayed late last night to tidy up the last pieces of work I was doing on my testing, and commit the changes to the tests to the repository. (I also spent 45 minutes chatting with Genevieve. I'd earlier sent her e-mail saying that working under her was one of the things I'd miss most about leaving QA - she's a great boss - and she said that I'd done a great job for her during this year since she'd hired on as the QA manager.) I finally finished up around 9 pm (allowing for the hour or so that I spent at dinner with John).

So today I became a developer. Which at first is slightly less impressive than it sounds, since I spent the first half of the morning tidying up other loose ends: Writing e-mails to pass off various long-term QA responsibilities to others, and trying to make sure I didn't miss anything.

I spent most of the rest of the day switching my G3 Power Mac from Mac OS X Server to Mac OS X, which I'd installed a recent build of on Friday. The company is working towards releasing the public beta of the operating system, and management is asking more and more developers to start doing their day-to-day work - including the majority of their e-mail - on the platform.

In truth, I've been waiting for many months to be able to move to Mac OS X, but WebObjects has been a little behind actually moving our code to the platform, simply because our schedule has only recently started to align with the OS X schedule. So I haven't been able to move because our code base wasn't there. But what I'll be working on now involves actually making our product better integrated with the new platform, so I am able to move there.

It's a platform which is still under development, and its apps are still under development, but so far I'm reasonably impressed with it.

Anyway, I spent a chunk of the afternoon getting everything set up on it, and learning about the Mail program we're shipping on it. I had a bunch of fun with it, actually. Tomorrow I'll hopefully be able to actually get some work done on it!

Sunday I finished reading Sheri S. Tepper's novel The Gate to Women's Country, which I was fairly unimpressed with. We had the Kepler's book discussion about it that night, and others also seemed not particularly impressed with it.

A big problem with the book is its black-and-white portrayal of the men: Some are scum, others are saints, and the latter aren't given a lot of screen time, so the book really comes off as portraying men as a group in a very harsh light. Even if I tell myself that Tepper's just portraying a certain kind of men, it still makes it very difficult to get through. Especially since I've read two other books by her, and Gate is actually the best of the three. It really comes off as, well, a little paranoid of her.

The book overall is glum, and though the writing is pretty good, the plotting suffers from certain conveniences (sudden threats appearing out of nowhere; the elders of the village being not quite smart or observant enough to prevent the tragedy that happens, etc.), and the story overall is just relentlessly glum. It does have an intriguing premise which is revealed at the end, but it's just not a very rewarding book. I don't recommend it (and I don't plan to read any more Tepper anytime soon, either).

Now I'm reading, as Dave Barry called it, Harry Potter and the Giant Royalty Check, which so far (40% of the way through) is just as good as its predecessors.

Also Sunday I received a phone call from Adrienne, which in my clod-like manner I ended up brushing off. (I actually don't think it was quite as bad as that, but I suspect that she did.) I'm not sure if she was hoping to work things out and get back together; I've been too... something (timid?) to call her back.

I've gotten a lot of advice about our parting, some of which has been good advice. Some of which seems like good advice, but... not quite what I feel comfortable with. I think the observation which hit me closest to home was from Karen, who said that I tend to say what I mean, and moreover that I tend to take what people say at face value, i.e. that they also say what they mean, and that many other people don't take this approach to interacting with people. I told John about this, and he rephrased it that I'm not very aware of the "emotional context" of conversations, which I guess is true if he means that I don't pay a lot of attention to particular subtexts. Especially when it comes to emotional conversations, I feel it's important to have things out in the open, explicitly stated, and not to say things that aren't really what you mean.

Anyway, I'm starting to suspect that I perceive relationships differently from many people, and it may be that what I want in a relationship is impossible (or at least highly unlikely). If that's the case, then so be it. But I don't really know yet.