Time for a change?

I've been quite for quite some time now. It's certainly not from a lack of activity...

Over the past couple of months I have:

• Went to California and had an absolute blast with Dave at Comicon
• Made a trip to Errol to visit Jen's parents
• Went camping with Shane in Vermont and established a new camp site.
• Went to the final regular season game at Fenway (to go along with hitting the home opener earlier this year)
• Went down to Baltimore with Matt and Brian to visit with our friend Joel and catch the last 4 games of the season

While all of that has been going on, work had been pretty much the same. We've been struggling along with a crippled QA team while the contractors come up to speed and at the same time we've had an unusual amount of serious customer related issues. That's why when Matt told me about a position opening up at the Harvard-MIT Data Center, where he works, I jumped at the opportunity to interview. After two visits, they made me an offer I simply couldn't refuse, so at the end of the month I will be leaving my current position at Softech.

I'm really looking forward to this new position. I'll be able to work directly with people I genuinely like, have a short commute (at least when I'm not visiting Jen), and be able to get my butt in gear and start pursuing my Masters Degree.

Hopefully now that I'm winding down I'll have a little more free time to post here and get back on a regular posting schedule, but I've said that before so we'll see what happens...

Time to start printing resumes

Last Friday the company announced a round of lay-offs. Most of the victims were administrative staff or they worked on different products, so I think my job is still intact (for now). The thing that worries me is that they are outsourcing QA and "some" development overseas. They say that "some" is just the sustaining engineering, but I'm not gullible enough to think that it could me everything should things not improve.

With that in mind I'm going to ramp up my job search. I'm going to have to seriously look at jobs I wouldn't have considered before because of location or the kind of work. I still won't take the first thing that falls into my lap but I have to broaden my search criteria a bit. I need to update my resume...

Playing the waiting game

My interview on Monday went well I think. I met with the director of Development and the VP of Engineering. I really think that this would be a good fit for me and them. I have the kind of experience they're looking for and they seem like a company I could enjoy working for. It seems like a very relaxed, friendly environment and there's apparently no formal dress code (both definite pluses). At this point I'm just waiting to hear back to see if they want me to come in for a second interview. I'm just hoping it's just for a chance to meet more people and not a "technical" interview, but I suppose we'll see if it happens.

Back to Reality

Today was my first day back at work since Thursday. I took Friday off as part of my vacation in Bar Harbor. I had a pretty good time even though it rained both Friday and Saturday and didn't really clear up until I had to leave on Sunday. I got a chance to see my folks again and visit with my sister Sam and her husband Anthony and the new baby, Kaeleigh. I've got pictures that I'll post as soon as I get home tonight (didn't have the time or energy to do it yesterday). *UPDATE* The pictures are up.

I will be leaving work earlier than normal today though, as I have an interview at 3 in Cambridge. A company I had sent my resume out to through HotJobs finally got around to calling candidates (something I'm familiar with as we've done the same thing here) and I set up an interview. We'll see if this one works out better than the last. It's definitely a better fit for my skills I think and is a true developer position, as opposed to the other job I interviewed for. The company is actually located right down the street from the coffee house Sarah works at.

19 days and counting to my real vacation. It can't come fast enough at this point.

Doing some work on the side

The job search is ongoing, but has as of yet, yielded no results. In the meantime, I've been working with a coworker on a side project. He first approached me regarding helping set up a database application for a client of his web consulting business. He's an extremely accomplished graphic and web designer, but when it comes to actual database configuration, administration, and population he was a fish out of water. So when his client asked him to set up a mirror to a NH real estate database, he didn't know how to handle it. That's where I came in. I put together an application to set up and mirror the data from the centralized DB (running MS SQL Server 7) to a local DB (running mySQL). It was a good test of my JAVA skills and a chance to familiarize myself with the JDBC interfaces.

The best part of the deal is that my coworker seems to think that this could possibly mean some residual income for us both, as there are a few other customers he has that may need a similar setup. I'll never complain about extra money...

Job Update

The interview I had last week didn't pan out. The wanted someone who had more experience dealing with customers, seeing as it was a consulting service that offered custom solutions. They said they thought I had the technical skills for the job, but I might have problems interfacing with customers. What I really think it was about was my personal appearance: long hair, beard, casual clothes. That's fine, that's their prerogative to define who they want representing their company.

I'm still in contact with the recruiter that originally got me the interview and he thought there might be another opportunity he could get me an interview for. I'm still waiting to here back, but I'll post if anything else on that front happens.

Get Busy Child...

So I haven't posted at all in the past two weeks, but it certainly hasn't been for a lack of anything going on. Last week I helped two friends celberate their 25th birthdays, caught the Crystal Method show at Avalon (where we got back stage! w00t!), and went to go see the Sox home opener (which they lost).

This week has been far lower key on a personal side, but work related issues cropped up, not to mention my taxes, that added some stress to my life. The whole thing has got me seriously considering moving on with my career. To that end, when a recruiter called me up this week I jumped at the opportunity to go on an interview next Tuesday. It's definitely a more cutting edge company, though it's a more solutions based company as apposed to a product. That would most likely mean the end of my t-shirt and jeans work outfit. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about that, but if everything else is too good to pass up, I'll get over it.

I'm looking forward to a somewhat lazy weekend. The weather is suppose to be sunny, which will be a nice change from all the recent rain. I'm sure Shane and I will be out playing Frisbee at some point this weekend. Otherwise I plan to plant myself on a couch and veg.

Just Call Me Mr. Krispy Kreme

There's a big meeting at the office all this week. Our sales reps from all over the world are coming in. And where there's a sales meeting, the free food is not too far behind. Coffee and soda have already been deemed free (though normally they're only a quarter each any way) and a big company-wide lunch has been scheduled for Wednesday. There's also the left overs from their lunch meetings that will be left for the scavengers (and yes, this includes me), not to mention bagels and muffins in the morning.

Thursday morning is the one I'm looking forward to the most though. Now because of my proximity to one of the few Krispy Kremes in the Northeast, I've been charged with picking up an order of donuts for the entire company. We've done this before, though someone had to drive down to Medford to pick them up. This time I'll be the one to pick them up, plus the inevitable side orders everyone else will want. I've become the de facto Krispy Kreme delivery man. Not that I mind all that much, gives me an excuse to go there and get a free warm donut.

There's a reason I don't work in customer support

Recently at work I've been working a lot on customer related issues. Most of the time a customer calls in with a problem and if it's necessary the customer support people ask me to take a look at a problem. Recently though, there's been one particular customer who's been making a lot of noise, complaining about this or that. It's gotten so bad that I had to sit in on a few conference calls with him to help explain what's going on.

I used to work in customer support, so I know how to put on the happy face, but at the same time I stopped working in support because I drop the happy face to easily. Some people just really get under my skin and will cause me to lose my cool. This guy is one of those people (though he annoys everyone, not just me). So for the past week he's been complaining that something doesn't work the way he wants it to and basically telling me how to do my job. I have no problem taking criticism from a co-worker or my boss, but when some schlep out in the Mid-West starts telling me how to write software when he doesn't know the first thing about it, I lose it. A couple of times I had to get up and walk out to clear my head it was just so frustrating.

I think we've finally appeased him enough that he'll leave us along for a little while. Some people are just never happy.

Kiss me I'm Irish

So today is that most wonderful of holidays, St. Patrick's Day. It's day when everything is turned green (even the water in Boston). As I type this, I'm enjoying my yearly Shamrock Shake. Tonight I'll be having a few Guinness tonight with the boys from NU at a local Irish pub where we will also partake in the corn beef and cabbage. I don't imagine I'll be making into work too early tomorrow.

It's that time of year

I've been so ridiculously busy lately. At work, we're trying to get the next release out the door. It hasn't been going particularly well so far. QA is going to be in the office this weekend doing testing, which will hopefully help us catch up. The only problem will be is if they find a ton of problems. With 2 weeks left, too many show stoppers will significantly delay the release, and if the release is delayed at all, it'll ruin everyone's holiday plans.

Speaking of the holidays, I'm quite sick of having to deal with the extra traffic in the neighborhood. All the people going to and form the mall has added 5 to 10 minutes on each end of my commute. I'll be happy when the traffic patterns return to some sense of normalcy, but that most likely won't happen until after New Year's.

This time of year also brings the snows, but that is definitely not a bad thing. We've already had one sizable snow storm this month and the forecast is for another coming Sunday. Hopefully all of the snow will translate into another good ski season. I know I won't be able to get to the mountain as often as I did last season, so I'm hoping that when I do go the conditions will be good. I'll be keeping my figures crossed.

Guess I won't be going anywhere after all

Well, as I talked about before, I had a phone interview with a Microsoft recruiter last week. It didn't go particularly well, they were looking for someone with experience in writing test automation software. Somehow the fact that I listed that I had written a test harness for my company's APIs implies I'm qualified to do this kind of work. I knew after the interview that I basically had no shot at a call back, but that didn't prevent me from feeling a slight pang of disappointment when I got confirmation yesterday from the recruiter that I was no longer in consideration for the position.

Luckily I'm in a position where it doesn't hurt too much that the interview didn't go anywhere, but like I said in the earlier post, it's about time for me to think about moving on. This just means I have to start actively looking for something elsewhere, contact the people I know in the industry, and start polishing up my interviewing skills.

The Dark Side is Calling

I received an e-mail from a Microsoft recruiter a couple of days ago seeing if I was interested in interviewing for a position with MSN Search. Now I'm pretty happy with my job right now (a few minor problems not withstanding), but I've decided to at least do the phone interview to see what it's all about. I've been doing the same work essentially for 3 years now and it's getting to the point where I have to seriously consider the next step. Of course, a move to Microsoft would mean a move to the left coast, leaving behind friends and family. It's a scary proposition, but if there was ever a point in my life I was ready to make the leap, it'd be now.

Of course this could all be moot any way as I may not even get offered anything, but it has gotten my brain moving in that direction. I've always had feelers out for other jobs in the New England area, but it may be time to start looking to see if there are opportunities elsewhere.

Now that was a stupendous waste of time

So a while back I talked about how I was having issues with migrating my company's application to Oracle9i. Well when I wrote that, I thought I was done with all the issues. About a week later, QA came over to tell me that they were seeing a crash on Solaris. I spent 2 weeks trying to figure out the problem. I knew it was coming from the Oracle libraries, but I wasn't sure if it had to do with some combination of Oracle and Solaris we were running. Again I tried talking to the people at Oracle, and again they were of little to no help.

Finally today, the guys at Oracle asked me to send them a trace of the listener and the client session. So I set up the trace, but noticed that the data in the file was messed up. There were just a bunch of errors about not being able to find messages. Having seen this before, I set the ORACLE_HOME environment variable and tried to run the trace again, but this time the application didn't crash. I didn't believe it at first, so I unset the variable; the application crashed; I reset the variable; no crash. An application should NOT crash because an environment variable isn't set, an error message sure, but it shouldn't crash. So needless to say, I'm glad to have that monkey off my back again, but I'm really starting to dislike Oracle.

Could I please have my sanity back?

So I haven't posted much to the main blog lately, though I did manage to put up some new links and a new review. It's due at least in part to much more work than I usually have to do. The company I work for is small enough that everyone has to wear multiple hats. Well I also have to work on multiple concurrent releases of our products, so when things go wrong on every release I'm working on, in various areas that I'm responsible for, I tend to get overwhelmed. I'll have 3 things that are "urgent", 2 things that aren't urgent but need to be done in a short time frame, then a pile of stuff that has a long time frame. The real problem arises when the urgent pile grows faster than I can handle it.

All that work usually means the last thing I want to do when I get home is even look at my computer. The end result of course is no updates. I need to get into a better habit of posting at the end of the day, but I'm not quite there yet. At the moment I post when the urge strikes me, or when I see a lot of empty space on the MT calendar (like today). But I think what I really need is some sense of sanity back to my day. Work is in a down cycle, so I can go home with some "fuel left in the tank" so I can stand to look at my computer when I get home.

I'm #1

Like I said last week, the other developer in my group is now telecommuting out of Seattle. This means I've been doing a lot more customer related issues and dealing with other stuff that before now I had only infrequently come in contact with. The major issue over the last two weeks has been migrating our application to Oracle 9i. When I first rejoined the company, the guy I was replacing was "finishing up" the work on the migration. He told me everything was taken care of and that I just needed to be aware of the issue so I could support it in the future.

Well fast forward 2 months to developments first CD to QA. None of the 9i tools work correctly, you can't build a database instance on any of the platforms we support. I come to find out that the former coworker hadn't put some necessary files into the scripts to be put on the CD. This only solved the problem on Windows. He hadn't even bothered to put together anything for the UNIX platforms we support. So I had to rush to translate the windows tools to something that would run in the UNIX install, during which we had serious issues with just installing Oracle on the machines.

Finally, the database creation issues were resolved and QA continued trying to setup their test machines. One giant problem, the applications we gave them were linked against Oracle8i. Somewhere along the process of this release someone said that an Oracle8i application will connect to Oracle9i databases. After some initial testing on my own I was satisfied of this fact. Apparently my testing wasn't broad enough, as QA was seeing crashes right and left. So yet again, I had to spring to action to fix our builds so we could build both 8i and 9i versions of our software. Windows was easy, it was mostly done already. UNIX was a little harder, but after some simple changes to our make files I got the application build on HP-UX. Solaris didn't want to cooperate though. We were seeing some weird undefined symbols, things that should be defined.

They were coming from the Oracle libraries, so we thought we'd give Oracle support a call. I call them up only to find out that some time in November (around the time of the sale of the company) we stopped paying our maintenance, so they wouldn't answer my question. It took almost a week for Oracle to finally get back to our Controller about renewing maintenance, and in the meantime we couldn't build against 9i on Solaris. QA was able to do some testing with what we gave them, so it wasn't a total stoppage thankfully.

Finally, yesterday I started conversing with someone at Oracle support. They weren't very helpful in figuring out the issue. They kept suggesting I use their included make file which is woefully inadequate for our application. He suggested I re-install, which I did. At the end of it all though, I was playing around with the order of some included libraries and managed to get the application to build correctly. It was ld-voodoo at its finest. So now everything seems to be set with something that should have been done 3+ months ago and I finally feel like I've earned the spot of "#1" (The head of QA likes to come in my office and say "How's #1 doing today?" or "Don't worry, #1 will fix it.").

New Responsibilities

So I haven't been posting much over the last week. Well there is a very good reason for that. The team I work on consists of me and one other person. He's an awesome programmer who's managed to balance a lot of responsibilites over the last 2 years (he's actually worked there less than I have, but full time for a lot longer). Well he recently got married and decided that he wanted to move outside of New England. So he and his new wife decided to move out to the Seattle area.

Luckily he's still staying with the company, but obviously in a telecommuting fashion. This means that I have had to pick up a few of his responsibilities. I now have even more respect for him than I did before. Over the last 2 weeks I've had to work on 3 different releases, resolve serious customer related issues, and resolve serious issues with a new release that is a scant couple months away.

All this has lead to me working all out from the moment I get in until the moment I leave. This leaves little to no time to post to the blog during the day. Of course, when I get home I want to unwind, and I've often forgotten completely about the blog and other things (I've got a huge backlog of anime to watch). On the bright side, I think I've managed to figure out how to manage all the concurrent tasks, so I shouldn't be so stressed ::crosses fingers::.

Teaching is not my strong suit

Yesterday at work I had to spend my day running an informal training session for our consultants. I talked all about the XML reporting engine I wrote last year and what you could do with it. Public speaking has never been one of my strong suits, and I often have a hard time explaining things to a large crowd. Luckily I knew all of the people there, so it wasn't too bad.

Plus the fact that I got some free food out of the deal wasn't half bad either.

Back to work

Actually, yesterday was my first day back after my week and a half vacation, but that's besides the point. Unfortunately I didn't get up to Bar Harbor last week because my cousin Steven was using the house for his honeymoon. So I spent most of last week working on various things, like setting up a new file server, cleaning and organizing the apartment a little, but mostly just video games and TV.

I did catch both T3 and Pirates of the Carribean in the last week. I thought they both had their merits, but I thought Pirates was the better movie overall because the action wasn't just about things blowing up and the plot had less holes in it.

Shane got an offer from his friend Matt to go down to Florida and work for his dad's company, but he's not sure if he wants to move down there. Part of me wants him to stay b/c he's my friend (not to mention I could use the extra money I'm saving by him sharing the apartment), but I also realize this could be an interesting opportunity for him. The market in the northeast is still horrible as far as tech jobs go, so I wouldn't be surprised if he took it.

Stupid Busy

Blah.... a week lag in the blog. This last week has been fairly hectic in terms of work, to the point where I have no desire to do much of anything when I get home except possibly drink a beer or smoke. It's finally let up so I have no excuse not to post!

Shane will be moving in a scant couple of weeks. This is very welcome news to my wallet. The money I gain from splitting rent with him will all go towards paying off the monsterous credit card debt I'd accumulated (almost $20k). It's now about 15, and a lot of it is at or near 0% interest, so doesn't hurt quite as much as it used to. I figure by this time next year I should be credit debt free, at which point I can focus on paying off the car early. It'll be a long road to get out of the hole I've been in, but I can honestly say that I'm better for having gone through this myself.

Writing Specs

So this week I started working on Functional Specs for projects I'll be working on for the next major release. This has got to be one of my least favorite things about my job (right up there with meetings that go nowhere). I've got one that's gone through one draft review, one more that's about 20% through first draft, plus probably 3-4 more that need to be done before the end of the month. I suppose I should get back to work... ;-)

Starting to get back into the groove

The second day back has been far more productive. I got my desk back, but I had to spend a large portion of yesterday and today setting up my build environment (stupid Windows). Actually managed to fix a bug today, plus I closed out 2 more without having to do any coding (remember kids, it's always someone else's fault ;-) ). Now I have to start looking at the next major release and what projects I'll actually be working on. There's some neat stuff buried amongst the planned projects, so it ought to be fun to pick and choose.

Back to work...

Back to work in Tewksbury today. When I got in I went over to where my desk is suppose to be (the former desk of the guy who left), only to find that someone was inhabiting it already. So I'm back to my temporary home. The good thing is this desk as a window view.

Getting paid is a good thing

I got two checks from Softech in the mail today. It'll be a nice little boost to my bank account. Tomorrow will be somewhat busy, going to the gym with Dad in the morning, then have a physical before lunch. Then I would like to get a couple things done like closing out my Fleet account before I head down to Boston.

I'll be meeting up with the boys at Boston Billards as a send off to Joel. Apparently he's moving to Maryland for a new job, this is the first I've heard about it. I'm losing my friends one by one it seems. Though on the bright side, the reunion may rekindle a few friendships along the way. We shall see.

This feels like unemployment

Was suppose to go to the gym this morning with my dad, but I got a call this morning just as I was getting up from my mom. Apparently Dad didn't get to bed until 5AM, and had developed a fever. Part of me wonders how much of it is just psychosomatic. I'm going to have to come up with a contigency plan if he's going to do this to me once a week.

Ended up not really doing much at all today. Watched a little more anime, still trying to catch up with the stuff I'm actively downloading, haven't even thought about the backlog yet. Need to get more motivated tomorrow or this two weeks is going to end up like my unemployment.

Site Cleanup

I'm working on cleaning up the website. Got to PHP-ize some stuff I'm working on for overall site navigation (not just for the blog). Hopefully this two week lay off I've got will help me get stuff the way I want it.

Life lessons...

The blog is back, but not without some issues in between. I've learned a few lessons in the last couple months. First and foremost, ALWAYS backup your time-sensitive data, like your website. My firewall/web/ftp/etc box had a critical failure around July/August, which all but wiped out 1.5 months of work getting the site to look the way I wanted it to. I'm now using a D-link router for my firewall needs (the thought of setting up ipchains again gave me hives), and I'll be running weekly backups on the new web server.

Secondly, don't trust anyone. Thinking everything was hunky-dorey with Kate, we moved to New Hampshire to begin our new life together. Not one week after we moved, Kate dropped a bomb on me and said she thought I wasn't connecting with Laura. This lead to her leaving me a little less than a week later, leaving me an emotional mess. I later found out she hooked up with some other guy she met on-line in Ohio. I got royally pissed, broke into her e-mail account, generally rifled through her stuff, did some other not so nice things that got her real pissed with me. We've since been able to patch things up to a certain extent, though b/c of logistics, we haven't been able to talk much.

Otherwise, things are proceeding as normally as they can. At work, we're wrapping up the initial development of our next release. I wrote reporting engine for this release that is heavily based in XML/XSL technologies, which meant I had to teach everyone how it worked. Dave's visiting from LA for a week so he can tie up loose ends here in New England and become a full-time CA resident.

Mind the clutter while I once again attempt to get things in order around here.

Control freaks suck ass

To top off the lovely past couple of weeks at work, the CEO announced that there is now a dress code. Shirts and slacks, no sneakers or denim. Sigh, apparently gone are the days where I could come in with a t-shirt and some cargo pants. Next thing you know they'll be asking me to shave off my beard (which I do try to keep in order), and cut my hair. The instant they do that I walk out the door. I mean, I have to express myself in some way.

UNH graduation is this weekend, therefor I'll be in Merrimack for the weekend. Looking forward to seeing people I haven't seen in a while, play catch up, all that jazz.

I suppose I should get back to doing the research for the project I'm working on, but somehow, pouring over white documents and other technical specifications just isn't that appealing. 6 months, just 6 months....

Bueracracy in action

So the project I was suppose to start was canceled before Wednesday. Then on top of that I've been yanked back to development with still nothing to do. The long and the short of it is this: I was hired as a Developer therefor I should always be doing work for Development, at least as far as my supervisors are concerned. I guess that's the last time I show any initiative, now I'm just going to sit around and wait for them to give me something to do. They're very well aware that I have nothing to do and are trying to find something, but I have a suspision that it won't happen any time soon.

In other news, I went back to the gym today. I'm going to work on getting there Tuesday's and Friday's for a few hours and when I can do that easily move on to everyday. Of course that might not happen before the quarter's over. At that point I have to find some other time to go, like after work. Problem with that situation is that weekdays at around 5-6 the gym gets rather crowded. I'm not sure early morning is much of a solution either, but we'll burn that bridge when we're on it I suppose.

I was closer than I thought

The SGI build compiled and ran! Aparently the calls to getCurrentMilli() make a call to ftime that crashed the application. I still don't know why this didn't come up at link time on the library, but considering finding the parse time is not inheritly important to my application, I can live without it for now. Now all I need is that Solaris library built with CC, at least with that I know it builds properly.

I'm so close I can taste it

Made some huge progress on the IRIX build. Got the menu program to compile and run under IRIX with a few extra options to the compiler. Makes me wonder why they bothered making the makefile in the first place because it doesn't have the info to compile on all the platforms it says it can. It be nice for me considering my experience (or lack their of) with all the *IX's. Xerces also compiles with no errors but a host of warnings. Compiling the sample programs takes a little manual effort, but can be done. The big problem is when you try to run the samples on an xml file it fails and complains about a missing reference in the xerces lib. Well you should have told me that during link time!

Anyway... last night was interesting. Went to the store with the cans to recycle at Stop and Shop. That one returns quarters so by the time I was done with the 5 bags of cans I had a big ol' pocket full of quarters. When I got back the girl who wanted to look at the apartment, Cindy, was waiting. She seems like a very nice person from what little I saw of her. I think it's a concensus that she's in the finals for the room. Never did get around to installing 98 on faye, too much involved with that process to be doing it in the middle of the week. Instead I played DOA with Dave all night. He's gotten better, but still is very much a one-dimensional player, I can often win by doing the same move over and over b/c of his wanting to counter every move.

I've been looking around other blogs lately. Probably 3 of my favorite right now are fury.com(he's got a neat look on life), Min Jung Kim (and yes, I do have a thing for asian girls), Emma (she reminds me a lot of a girl I used to like in high school). They've now become a part of my daily routine, on top of my comics, Slashdot, AnimeOnDVD, plus a few other anime related news services. Usually takes me about 1.5 hours to go through my routine plus read/respond to e-mail, but it keeps me sane.

I have no great plans for tonight. Another BU student is coming by tonight, I may hide for the night. Or maybe I'll chat with Britni and people, they know how to cheer me up.

It's about fucking time!

Finally got xerces to compile under HPUX. Had to do with problems with a threading library as I expected. The big problem was the way I was trying to get around it, which didn't work.

People are coming to look at the apartment this week, more people than we know what to do with. There's a girl coming today that will probably jump at the place because she has two cats and needs a place to put them. I'm not sure how I feel about 3 cats in the house, 2 was pushing it, but if they're well behaved I suppose it won't be too bad. Got a check from Grandaddy yesterday, it'll help a lot in the next month when I'm looking for a new apartment for next year.

Dave got me the 98 CD, tonight I may try to do the install of that on faye tonight, which will probably take some hardware swapping. This is week started off on a sour note, but things may be looking up yet....

Screw UNIX and it's compatibilty issues!

I've spent the entire day trying to build the Apache Group's Xerces XML parser on HP-UX and IRIX. I would have to do this if my company didn't use funky ass versions of compilers. Case in point: For a Solaris build, we use g++ 2.8.1 which is known to be buggy. I attempt to build Xerces with 2.8.1 and boom, compile errors and the likes. I now have the library built in CC but it looks like the Solaris port of the product built with CC is some time off. Now, I'm having issues with HP-UX, these are more likely problems with compatibility of the Xerces library with this environment. The Apache page says they support v11, we're using v10.20. IRIX is all sorts of fucked up. Those machines I can't even come close to building Xerces b/c gmake and autoconf won't build with gcc 2.7.2, man I could use a smoke about now....

Man I'm useless today

I've not done much today. About all I've done is work on my web site, hardly productive work in the eyes of my employer. These waiting periods where I can't move forward without a word from my boss are a pain in my ass. All I want to do is finish this project already...

I don't know what to do with myself any more....

I'm wrapping up my current project at work finally. Still having some major problems with a few of the things, coding in C++ is a huge change from Java. In Java you can be a little lazy with memory concerns, and a few other things. You atleast know that if you mess with something you have a chance to catch an Exception, in C++, exceptions are still iffy, and if you mess with the wrong memory...BOOM...no more application running.

New funny vid:
What did you just say Pikachu?

Hmmm... what to do now?

Went home to NH for the weekend. Saturday was my dad's birthday so my sisters and I went with him on ski trip we like to do every year. Dad had a bad fall, which is not totally unusual for him. All in all it was a good time. I slept so much after the trip though, I was super exhausted. Yesterday I figured out the bug in the program I was writing. It only took me a week to notice that there was something else wrong besides what I had already submitted into the bug database. Job is looking up, they say they have some sort of special surprise for me, I'm wondering if it's good or bad.