This was the week that they made me transition from “stand in the corner and look pretty” to “what are we paying you for?”
I went to a meeting and was sitting quietly when my boss said “I’m going to be moderating the ABC meeting at 1:30.” His boss said “you’re needed in the DEF meeting at 1:30.” So my boss turned to me and said “Jaybird, you’ll be moderating the 1:30 ABC meeting for me.”
I’d never moderated a meeting before. I am always the guy invited to meetings to give a 3 minute status report on my own stuff somewhere in the middle. What was there to do except say “Um okay?”
The meeting went well. I took roll, took notes while everyone took turns giving monologues, answered the questions as I was coached to answer them, asked everyone by name if they had anything further to say, and thanked everyone and left.
It was terrifying.
So, this weekend, I’m going to relax by doing laundry, gaming on Saturday, and, I understand, there is a sporting event of some kind on Sunday.
So… what’s on your docket?
Game night tonight, adult birthday party tomorrow night, double child birthday party Saturday, and on Sunday I collapse at home because I haven’t been home (other than to sleep) since last Sunday.
Once you run a meeting, there’s no turning back.
Yup. You’re on the road to middle management.
The good – taking my boy to Busch Gardens tomorrow.
The bad – Fixing my computer. I think the hard drive is failing.
I don’t think I’m doing anything that anybody would find remotely interesting.
That has never, ever, even *ONCE* stopped me.
It’s like he doesn’t even pay attention to the name of the blog!
Well, the only place where the name of the blog is on the page now is under ‘Around the League’ with the latest post.
Ok, ok. I’m trying to finish out two weeks of being sick by finally getting better, writing a guest lecture on supply and demand for a guest lecture class, revising my lecture on the dropping of the bomb for my nuclear weapons and power class, and creating a list of blog post topics for my American Gov’t class three weeks after the start of term date that it should have been done.
There, now even I’m deathly bored with myself.
One of my favorite strategies in high school was figuring out how to write papers that could be used as is for more than one class. So explore Hiroshima and Nagasaki in terms of market forces.
And this is how we know Mike is a programmer.
My brother worked for a guy that said he only hired lazy programmers. The ones that are lazy will always seek out easier/better/faster ways to accomplish something. It’s the hard-working programmers that never save the org any time or money.
The other thing programmers do is find a solution that would be fun to work on, which is often orthogonal (at best) to company goals.
“We need you to rewrite this Visual Basic program in Java.”
“Hey, what if I write a system that converts VB to Java? Then we can feed all of our programs through it instead of converting them one by one.”
The thing is, he’ll suggest it whether “all of our VB programs” totals 1,000 or 1.
Even though we only have one VB *currently*, it’s better to design a tool that can be (possibly) re-used later, than to do the work “by hand” and possibly have to do similar work all over again later on some other program.
Assuming the LOE is roughly equal, I would much rather you build a reusable solution (the converter tool), than do a one-time solution on the one program. “Lazy” programmers are always looking for potential re-use/re-purpose, rather than always starting from scratch.
Some while back, my girlfriend was taking a VB .NET course. I don’t write VB. Last time I wrote BASIC of any sort was back in the 1980s. So here’s a common enough problem: retrieve rows from a database and present them, one by one, with page-forward, page-back, add, edit, delete functionality. What we call a CRUD screen, absolute bread-and-butter programming.
I’d helped her do the same sort of thing in Java. So I hoisted up the Java code on one monitor and the VB environment on the other. We implemented the same solution in VB without too much trouble at all, just fishing around in the language — surely there’s got to be a way to hold a pointer to the currently-displayed row, okay, on a writeback to the database, be sure to refresh the list and put the pointer at the just-inserted row… what about the possibility of the SELECT returning no rows, etc. Lots of tedious little gotchas to writing a CRUD screen and they must be handled in every language.
Same problem, same patterns, different language. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
VB.NET (and the other .NET langages, C# in particular) are really Microsoft’s version of Java. Same object model, pretty much the same datatypes, same semantics of threading and exception handling, slightly different virtual machines, etc. At a previous company I did write an automated Java -> C# translator and it was a core part of our development process:
* Write Java code
* Use ANT to compile it and run the unit tests
* Use ANT to convert the Java production code and unit test to C# and run the tests in .NET
* If that all works, integrate it
The result was a single code line that ran both in Java and .NET.
I dunno about MSFT’s “version of Java”. VB is a dog’s dinner. C# is great if you’re willing to walk around on the floating island that is .NET and the CLR. Nice language, though.
To me, C# is half-o’-this and none-o’-that. I’m no Java zealot, it’s got its problems. Wordy, awkward, enervated by dependencies on frameworks, a lousy front end visual environment, security issues, no native compiler, lousy bindings, lousy memory management. I hate coming in to fix stupid, ugly implementations. I hate Oracle for the same reasons I hated MSFT and Sun. Given my druthers, I’d never write a line of Java again and migrate to QT with C/C++.
I dunno about MSFT’s “version of Java”.
Having spent a month researching both to prove that a translator would be feasible, I do 🙂
Heh. Famous last words… “Jeez, it’s just a matter of parsing this with yacc and bison…”
That’s why you do the research first, to prove that everything that can be expressed in the source language can also be expressed in the target language, with no unfortunate differences in semantics.
3 Cheers for Qt, Blaise, I quite agree.
Have you used it on any mobile platforms?
No, I haven’t developed any mobile stuff in Qt, though I’ve developed several View components in Qt. The only mobile apps I’ve developed were for Android.
Can I see your slides for your nuclear weapons and power class?
We don’t use PowerPoint much. I am making a PPT presentation for my lecture on the decision to drop the bomb. If you email me I’d be happy to send you the file.
P.S. Understand that it’s not a highly technical course. Just 200 level, and covers the gamut from the discovery of the atom to the political battles over nuclear power. Designed to give students an overview of all the aspects of nuclear power that my co-teach and I find interesting, as well as demonstrate a liberal arts ideal by drawing from different disciplines–the co-teach is a chemist, and we draft a historian and a geologist to contribute at various points (Hiroshima, Yucca Mountain).
Running meetings is one of my least favorite activities, compounded by the fact hat all of ours are remote conference calls. It can be similar to herding cats.
For me I am going to enjoy sleeping in on a Saturday for the first time since deer season started in November. It’s going to be glorious. Then I’m going to put a serious dent in our DVR and tackle my enormous to-do list. UFC tomorrow night.
On Sunday I promised the daughters we would go snow sledding. We received one of those awesome snows last night that has a thin layer of ice underneath and by Sunday there should be another inch of snow on top. It’s going to be fast, fast, fast.
I don’t mind running meetings as long as it’s clear who’s running the meeting.
Having to run meetings with people who think they are in charge of the meeting (especially if they are) when they’re not supposed to be is a nightmare.
A few years back I was assigned to a temporary committee appointed to consider certain ideas for changing our academic structure. My vision was to do research on other colleges that used those programs so we could understand how adopting them would affect us. The philosopher wanted to spend meeting after meeting discussing “the big picture; what are we about and what are our goals?” And the chair came started meeting after meeting with, “what should we talk about today?” Never an agenda, never the faintest forethought given to what she wanted to accomplish in that day’s meeting. It was like a really bad movie, “Groundhog Day II: The Meeting.”
I finally just did the research myself, wrote the report, submitted it to the committee, which adopted it over the objections of the philosopher–who thought 5 meetings rambling on about the big picture and our purpose was horribly insufficient–and submitted it to the administration, which praised it before reading it and mischaracterized it’s findings as supporting adopting the program they wanted, then nothing more was ever heard about it again (I like to think they finally read it and acquiesced to the force of my argument against the program–either that or they have short attention spans and after all our work just forgot all about their big idea).
Good did come of it, though. I use it as an example in classes when I talk about agenda-setting (no bureaucratic event ever fails to be good fodder for a political scientist) and when someone occasionally asks, “whatever happened to that idea for X,” I take credit for killing it.
The philosopher still bitches about it, though, 5 years on.
I will not insult anyone’s intelligence by describing my plans for Sunday.
Oh yeah…Commercial Sunday!
Big weekend!
Tonight: Dinner with Burt Likko and Mrs. Likko!
Tomorrow: Brunch with Pat & Kitty Cahalan! Maybe (fingers crossed!) some Cahalan b-ball as well. Then a flight back to PDX, stopping at my local butcher on the way home from the airport.
Sunday: Up early, getting a pork butt into the Big Green Egg and marinating chicken wings for my son’s first Super Bowl party.
That feels like more than my share of awesomeness for one weekend.
I can’t decide if I have way too much homework to game, or whether I am overestimating my homework and it will be fine. S’bowl is not even on the radar….
Basically a big question mark:).
If Denver had made it to the S-bowl, would the J-M household:
1. Watch it?
2. Watch it only if there was nothing else that needed doing?
3. Boycott it because the Broncos had the wrong QB?
Tebow’s never lost in the Super Bowl!
I think I’ve started watching the Superb Owl because it’s a cultural event that is important enough with my co-workers that I will need to do more than just google it afterwards to partake in conversations the following week at work.
But if Denver made it to the Owl this year, that’s the *ONLY* reason I’d watch it.
Culturally speaking, I find it interesting that it’s taken ten years for the TV people to get over their trauma and have another sexy young thing at the halftime show. (Not complaining, because I enjoyed the decrepit old guys.)
I really don’t care about Denver one way or the other. Honestly, y’all Americans with your 4th down are playing the game wrong anyway:D. Also, homework has to come before everything entertaining, or I end up flunking out of school – WAY too many entertainin things in the world…
I ended up missing gaming to do one assignment, but I was SO LONELY today that I managed to get my other assignment done in time to go to Dman’s for the Superbowl. Also, I did ANOTHER assignment during the Superbowl. I need to get myself a box of gold stars, or something.
You shouldn’t have let on that you disdain American football, because anyone who gets even a slight kick from it would earn a whole carton of gold stars for doing schoolwork during that game/
Just got back from a rousing game of Agricola with my peeps. Tomorrow is chores and not much else. Sunday is perhaps another board game with a different set of peeps, plus a party where there will certainly be a TV showing the game, but with audience interest rather in doubt.