Sharks, only with resumes, not remoras
While this wasn’t a three-day weekend, it was a four-day workweek. Sometimes that’s just as important. It’s rather depressing to see a round of lay-offs go by with some of those affected lacking any immediate prospects while you’re getting three unneeded calls from recruiters within a matter of hours.
Also this past week, I (hopefully) finished the rigmarole of putting the now-canceled project to bed. Like weeds on a tarmac, all the brain cells devoted to the minutiae, processes, and holistic knowledge of the ecosystem that is a large project will now succumb to entropy. All the arcane lore will be forgotten, and considering how much of my mind it occupied for the past eighteen months, this process too is a bit depressing.
As an aside, one of the biggest lessons learned working with the custom development tools for that project was that you can’t really live without Filemon. Robust error handling is rarely a feature of internal development software. Sometimes, when you run into say, a silent failure, you really need to be able to know that a file open for write failed on a temporary file that some artist inadvertently checked into source control.
I was searching technical blogs for motivational inspiration when I stumbled across Randsinrepose. I’m really not sure how I missed it. At any rate, I did get a good chuckle out of N.A.D.D. Surrounded by no fewer than five screens at this precise moment in time, I am most certainly afflicted.
As a space geek afflicted with N.A.D.D., I found a sweet sweet firehose of aerospace information crack recently: NASASpaceFlight.com and most specifically, it’s paid L2 section. How long does it take me to decide to download an 892 page PDF on the Shuttle EGIL (Electrical Generation and Integrated Lighing) systems? About 0.01 seconds, ka-leech! This actually came in handy when the news about the issues with fuel cell 1 broke.
Now if I can just get myself out of this indeterminate hold at T-minus 9 minutes.
Also this past week, I (hopefully) finished the rigmarole of putting the now-canceled project to bed. Like weeds on a tarmac, all the brain cells devoted to the minutiae, processes, and holistic knowledge of the ecosystem that is a large project will now succumb to entropy. All the arcane lore will be forgotten, and considering how much of my mind it occupied for the past eighteen months, this process too is a bit depressing.
As an aside, one of the biggest lessons learned working with the custom development tools for that project was that you can’t really live without Filemon. Robust error handling is rarely a feature of internal development software. Sometimes, when you run into say, a silent failure, you really need to be able to know that a file open for write failed on a temporary file that some artist inadvertently checked into source control.
I was searching technical blogs for motivational inspiration when I stumbled across Randsinrepose. I’m really not sure how I missed it. At any rate, I did get a good chuckle out of N.A.D.D. Surrounded by no fewer than five screens at this precise moment in time, I am most certainly afflicted.
As a space geek afflicted with N.A.D.D., I found a sweet sweet firehose of aerospace information crack recently: NASASpaceFlight.com and most specifically, it’s paid L2 section. How long does it take me to decide to download an 892 page PDF on the Shuttle EGIL (Electrical Generation and Integrated Lighing) systems? About 0.01 seconds, ka-leech! This actually came in handy when the news about the issues with fuel cell 1 broke.
Now if I can just get myself out of this indeterminate hold at T-minus 9 minutes.
Posted by Nathaniel Trost on
Sunday September 10, 2006 at 5:45pm