The Online Rant

The problem some of us have when it comes to leaving work at the office.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work on my house in preparation for my soon to be wife. Basically I’m trying to fix it it up and make it special for her. To that end, I’m doing a lot of repainting and even some remodeling.

One of the things I did, was combine two bedrooms into one to make a master bedroom. Now, initially I wasn’t all that excited about the project. Mainly because it was going to be a lot of work. I had to rip out the wall between the two bedrooms, put in a new door to the bathroom that would be accessible from the bedroom, and build a new wall for the closet. All a rather large quantity of work. And on top of that, I also was replacing all the trim in the rooms. So I had to put up new crown molding, new baseboard, and a chair rail.

Furthermore, that work had to be done after my normal work day in the evenings. That meant I was working late into the night. And I was also using up my weekends on this project. I’m sure that for a professional the whole project would have been done in just a few weekends, but for me a few weekends wasn’t enough time. Hence the long hours.

But now that I’m finally done with the remodeling (still some other projects I want to do before July), I am actually pretty satisfied with the result. And even though the remodeling wasn’t something I was very excited about doing initially, I am very happy I did it now.

The following is a gallery of pictures of the new room. Now you can see what I’ve been doing for the past few months and see why I haven’t been posting here as much.

I know I’ve been a bit remiss in my posting lately, but I have a good reason. Apart from being engaged(which takes up a lot of my free time. lol), I’ve also recently changed my place of employment again.

Yes, I know it wasn’t all that long ago that I changed jobs, but this job is a bit more suited to me than the last job.

In the first place, it doesn’t involve any travel. Which will be a good thing when it comes to getting married. Travel is fine when you are single, but not so great when you are married.

Second, it gets me back into programming full time. Which is something I really missed at my last job. Don’t get me wrong, my last job was pretty exciting. Doing avionics work on aircraft was pretty cool. The only problem was that I wasn’t really trained for that type of work. Plus, I really like programming.

So as of last Monday(the 10th of November), I started a new job working at Columbia Southern University.

At my current job, I work with a pretty good group of guys. Most of them are easy to get along with, and all of them work pretty hard. One guy in particular is an extremely hard worker. He does his job without being told, and will even go out of his way to find work to do when his normal duties are completed.

You’re probably thinking that this guy sounds like a model employee. Someone who works without supervision. An employee that goes above and beyond what is required. The thing is that he has one big glaring fault. A fault that negates most of the good qualities I mentioned above. He literally can’t work with anyone.

The reason he can’t work with anyone is that he always assumes the worst about his fellow employees. By that, I don’t mean that he thinks all of his fellow employees are evil. What I mean is that whenever something comes up (good or bad), he assumes the worst possible motives of those involved.

So advice or critiques of his work (which is actually pretty good) is taken as a personal attack by the person giving the advice. And praise for his work is taken as an attempt to suck up to him for some future gain. If one of us is falling behind, he automatically assumes that the person falling behind was slacking off and not working. Any mistakes other employees make are taken as evidence that that person is stupid or doesn’t listen to instructions. Even in normal conversation, he assumes attacks on him whenever something is said that offends him.

With an attitude like that, you can understand why he can’t work with anyone. He claims that everyone he has ever worked with has “stabbed him in the back” at some time. If you always assume the worst of everyone around you, then it has to seem that way. You end up angry at everyone around you all the time. Which can’t be fun or even healthy.

The thing is, that most of the time he is completely wrong about people’s motives. But because he always assumes the worst, he always feels let down. Wouldn’t it be better to assume the best of someone? At least until the person has proved you wrong several times.

There are plenty of bad people in the world, who do have bad motives for what they do. But there are plenty of people out there who are just normal and don’t have an ulterior motive. If you just give them the benefit of the doubt sometimes, you will be surprised at how often you are right. And in the end you’ll be a lot happier and have more friends.

Recently I’ve been overseas working at my new job. (By the way, the new job is for a governent contractor doing IT work) I’ve been over here for about a month now, and I have about two months to go before I get back home.
For the most part I haven’t minded being over here. There isn’t all that much to do, but while I’m here I work 12-14 hour days 7 days a week. So I really don’t have time to get bored or homesick. Even better is that I don’t have time to spend any of the money I’m making. And with my living expenses paid for by the company, I can save all the money I make.
About the only thing I really miss is regular church attendance. You wouldn’t think that church attendance would be the one thing that I would miss the most. After all I’m missing almost everything else that I have made a regular part of my life. But other than my church, most of the other stuff I hardly think about.
I tried to find a church around here, but I couldn’t really find anything except a Catholic Mass. There was a Protestant service, but it was basically a Unitarian service. So since I’m not Catholic, and Unitarian services are really nothing more than feel good clubs, I’m stuck with nothing in terms of church.
So anyway, when I get home I’ll be pretty excited to be back at my church.

(My church does have a podcast of it’s messages, but the Internet access here is pretty slow and blocks downloads. So I wasn’t able to download any of the messages. I’ll be sure to catch up on them when I get back though)

Well, yesterday was my last day at Silver Bullet Technology. I would have posted this yesterday, but I was so busy trying to wrap things up on my projects, that I just didn’t have time. I ended up working pretty late Friday trying to leave projects in a state where other programmers can pick them up, and writing emails to those same coworkers describing last minute things that I had forgotten to tell them.

When you work for a small company for any length of time, you end up becoming the expert at way too many different systems and projects. So when you leave, it becomes a huge effort to pass on that knowledge to others. Especially if you don’t have a replacement to train. So my last two weeks at Silver Bullet involved a lot of documentation and process writing, as well as a lot of coding to wrap up projects.

I’m sorry to go, but it really was time for a change in my life. So I’m moving on. I still stay in contact with everyone at Silver Bullet, and I’ll still be available to them all via email or phone. But they won’t see me already there early in the morning, with the coffee already brewed. And I’ll miss having those first of the day discussions with each of my coworkers as they walk past my office.

I said last week that I was dealing with some changes. The changes are actually a shift in jobs.
I currently work for a company that writes banking software for check scanners. Mostly for remote deposit applications. My job consists of programming interfaces for the many different scanners on the market.
I’ve been doing it for almost three years, and I’ve really enjoyed working for the company and I’ve enjoyed the relationships that I’ve established with my coworkers and with the clients I deal with. But it’s time for a change.
So starting the 10th of March, I’ll be working for a new company. I can’t say a lot about the new job yet, but I can say it will involve a lot of travel and a lot less programming. So it will be a nice change from what I currently do.

When I saw this pic, I just had to post it. It was too much like my real life. I spend all day at work at my computer and then come home andv spend more time on a computer

Yesterday my sister in law got in a car accident. She was only a few miles from home when her car spun out of control and smashed into a guard rail. Thankfully she came away from it with only a gash in her forehead and a mild concussion. The gash required a trip to the emergency room for some stitches, but that is minimal compared to how bad it could have been.

All of that just reminded me how fragile life is. Every day we get up and take our trains, buses, and cars to work. And each time could be our last time. We get so caught up in our daily lives that we forget how quickly it could all be taken away. I know I don’t think about it until something like this happens.

I’ve been reading a programmers blog called Coding Horror recently. It can get pretty technical in some of it’s articles, so if you aren’t into programming I wouldn’t recommend it. If you are into programming, it really is a great blog and one you should start reading. Despite the programming focus, the latest article I think is one that applies to a lot of different industries. Not just IT based ones. So I thought I would post about it here.

The article is called, No Matter What They Tell You, It’s a People Problem. The gist of the article is that the main reason why software projects fail is a lack of a cohesive team. It’s not the only reason, but it is a big one. And it’s a reason that is hardly ever looked at or considered. No one wants to think that the reason their project isn’t going well, is because they don’t like or can’t get along with their coworkers.

Here is a quick excerpt from the article that I thought was really telling.

“Do you like the company of your teammates on a personal level? Do you respect your teammates professionally? If you were starting at another company, would you invite your coworkers along? Do you have spirited team discussions or knock-down, drag-out, last man standing filibuster team arguments? Are there any people on your team you’d ‘vote off the island’ if you could?”

So who would you vote off the team in your office?