tigertoy

From the just when you thought it was safe to get back in your car department, in an exclusive limited engagement from beautiful northern Alberta, it's Snow II: the sequel no one wanted.  I'd just escaped from the horrors of Tuesday by midafternoon Thursday, salvaged a day and a half of the work week, restocked on perishables, and was enjoying a little gaming Friday night, and a light, powdery snow started falling, right on schedule.  (Somehow, after a decade or so of winter storms that were always less serious than predicted, we've had two in a week where the WILL weather team was spot on.)  Driving home Friday wasn't actually a problem, except for a few drivers that were spooked into thinking it was worse than it was, but by this morning, we had about three more inches, and the wind picked up and was busily piling up drifts.  By late afternoon, the wind had died down a little, but it was the second worst snow event we've had in about three years.  I shoveled my driveway out and hoped the lane would be cleared, but it didn't seem to be happening, so at 5:00 I started knocking down the drifts on the lane that looked too big to drive through.  As it was getting too dark to see, I decided that I'd done enough that if nothing changed overnight, I had a 90% chance of making it out to the road in the morning.  And just as I was trudging back home, the big 10 ton earth mover that had finally dug a tunnel to civilization on Thursday came through and actually plowed the lane.

The big snow set work back basically a week, and is going to cost me some vacation time that I won't have to spare if I really can go to Africa in the fall.  (For those of you who don't get this on your local news, the latest official statement is that everyone gets Wednesday off, and people who actually came to work Tuesday get the day off, but despite the fact that both the University and all the roads outside of Champaign-Urbana itself were closed, they're still saying you have to take vacation if you didn't come in.  They say that's what they did in 1979, so it's a precedent.  That's like saying that if my father punched your father in the nose, I should be free to punch you in the nose because there's a precedent.  A past injustice doesn't justify another one; English common law is a steaming pool of pig excrement.  But that's a whole nother rant.)  If the second snow keeps me from being able to see my tigers tomorrow (and while I'm confident now that I can get to Clay County, I don't know for sure that I can actually get through the back roads the last couple of miles; I'd walk those last couple of miles if I had to, but there isn't anywhere in Ashboro I could leave my car), you won't want to be near me, or even on the same Internet with me.

Good thoughts for my travel tomorrow and for the welfare of the cats (who are probably having some trouble coping with all this) are welcome.  "Funny" comments claiming responsibility for the snow or saying how wonderful it is will be taken as evidence that the commenter genuinely hates me.

Awhile back, I got email at work saying that I had to take some online ethics training, and I would get a message with the details.  I didn't pay much attention, figuring I'd just wait until I got the message with the details.

Today, I got a nastygram telling me that I hadn't done it yet, the deadline is Thursday, and by the way I could face a $5000 fine for blowing it off.  But it didn't have the actual details of how to log in.  I searched my inbox.  No, I hadn't managed to ignore it when it came in.  It wasn't somehow in the trash.

Eventually I found it in the spam folder.  I don't actually get spam on that address (yet), but I have the filters set up for my other accounts where I get boatloads, and I'd accidentally enabled it for the work account as well.

So, now I've completed my required ethics training.  Basically a waste of an hour -- what isn't just common sense is stuff I already knew about Illinois law about using state facilities for political purposes.  But I guess there are people who don't have my common sense and either haven't lived in Illinois or lived under a rock and don't know that if your boss tells you to work on his brother's political campaign, you don't have to do it and are supposed to report him, and people really do need to know it.  And at least I didn't have to waste the whole day going off to a classroom to have some poor sod drone through a Powerpoint presentation of the same material.

But if the nastygram had gone into the bit bucket along with the message that told me how to log into the training and the two subsequent reminders, I could have been in hot water on Friday.  And it would all be the fault of those complete wastes of protoplasm, the sort of humans who could only make a useful contribution to life on earth if they were run through a chipper and used for fertilizer -- the spammers.

I've made it through my first week at the new job.

No apparent personality conflicts with my coworkers; no tremendous bonding either.  My main accomplishment for the week has been the apparently successful negotiation of most of the bureaucratic maze involved in joining the University.  Other than that, I've been learning things; I didn't have any expectations of writing any code this soon.  Reading just the first couple of chapters of the textbook that explains the theory behind the software makes it make a lot more sense.  And an hour with the Tcl/Tk book makes me feel almost ready to start hacking on it -- I'm already appreciating the appeal of the language.  I've also scratched the surface of understanding the corpus of existing code, but definitely not very deeply.

I'd like to keep this post public, which means that I can't go into much detail about either the work or the people -- I don't want to have any worries at all that someone might think I'm saying something I shouldn't.  So I can't really say much about the software.  I'll just say that software engineering practices at the lab are even more primitive than I'd realized.  Hopefully the next few months will see me teaching them to do things better, rather than just becoming frustrated.

On a personal level, the boss (whom I'll refer to as C) gave me the first promised session of "mentoring" yesterday.  (As we discussed when I interviewed, C perceives (rightly) that my technical qualifications are more than sufficient for this job; I will sink or swim based on how I handle things emotionally/psychologically.  And when he offered the job, he promised that he would help me with those problems.)  He stressed that he expects me to work with the group, not just for him.  And today, I actually spent at least half the day in the lab, split between working one on one with R as he was showing me part of the software, and discussing some software engineering issues with the group.  I also have actual stuff to report and discuss at the group meeting Monday morning.

Now, I just have to find enough time to do things in my life, like keeping up on LJ and posting some pictures from my trip.  (I have a ton; many aren't going to be as good as I wanted for printing, but they'll be stunning at web resolution.)

The offer came through by email this afternoon.  I have accepted a position as a Visiting Research Programmer within the Hydrogeology Program in the Department of Geology.  I will be starting Monday, June 26.  (The "Visiting" in the job title means that I can stay in this position for a maximum of three years, but once I'm settled in and I've been productive in the position for a couple of years, I will have a big advantage when they do a formal search for a person to fill the permanent position.  If I can prosper in this position, I can expect to have it for a long time.)

I want to thank everyone for their good wishes in these last few weeks, and appeal for your continuing emotional support.  Getting back into working full time will be a challenge for me, but I'm determined to make it work, and I will have the support of a boss who understands my situation and has promised to help me succeed.

I told my boss that I was going to Las Vegas for 3 (work) days at the end of July, and he didn't seem to be upset at all.

I had my physical today. My blood pressure was 132/70, my pulse 60, and my weight 238. I told Dr. Graham about the allergy symptoms I've been having and that I think I have an infection in my pharynx. He prescribed an anti-allergy nasal spray and told me he doesn't think there's any infection. He also brushed off my concerns that I should be getting a more thorough exam than the quick listen to my breathing and heart that he gave me, telling me that I was too healthy to be spending time in the hospital. When he first came in for the appointment, he was very sociable; we talked for a couple of minutes about the book I was reading (Quicksilver -- see the previous entry), and about the problems of computerizing the hospital's patient information. Unfortunately, once he thought he was done with his exam and had written my prescription, he was pretty blatantly not willing to spend any more time talking to me.

Work is going a little better these past few days. We're doing a demo Thursday of some stuff, so I have some pressure, and Mike is working closely with me to get ready for the demo. I'm at least able to concentrate and make some progress, although I still don't feel like I'm the smart, productive person I used to feel like.

I took a much-needed break for a walk around Meadowbrook Park (a large local park with more nature than the average city park). ( Read more... )
I went back to work for another hour after the walk. But even after the aggravations that brought on, writing this has reminded me of what a nice walk it was. I need to do that more often.