Wow.  Today has been one of those, "go here, go there, do this, do that, quick hurry, finished, done, thanks, awesome, bang" type of days.  Getting a lot accomplished, but also so busy it is hard to see the finished efforts for all the new efforts coming by way.

Lunch 2.0

Today I did manage to make it to my first Lunch 2.0, saw some familiar faces and some new faces I haven't met.  One of these new people that I met was Eric M. Curtis, the creative director & interface designer for rgb Design Studio.

Business Development

I also had a morning coffee at a ridiculously early 7:10am today with some un-named sources.  We discussed some new upcoming analytics business opportunities that may be heading Webtrends way and the recent large event in the analytics industry, the acquisition of Omniture by Adobe.  This of course is on my mind as I have developed tons of Flash & AIR tagging solutions over the last few months, which now gives me pause.  Many in the industry wait with bated breath as to the path Adobe will now take with this acquisition.  As many in the industry have already stated, it is a somewhat strange pairing and not to jump on that bandwagon, but it does seem that way.

In Other News

I have a number of projects I am working on, all which will benefit Webtrends Analytics customers as well as people in the analytics industry in general.  A few blog entries (which you'll have to read on the Webtrends Blog or the Webtrends Developer?s Blog), and a whole bunch of awesome technical bits, code snippets, and other code based sundry.  So stay tuned, more to come.  :)

Eric (@ericgerhardt on twitter or here) found some broken data and reported the problem.

Dear customer: we were going to deliver your data but we found it melted on the limb of a dead tree in an infinite wasteland.

Just classic, all I can say.

...and I hate it.

Excel has a model, that seems to be broken all the time, and appears that there are a zillion ways to do things that are not a preferred way.  The most common situation seems that Excel either breaks, crashes hard, eats up on the memory, or some other monstrous thing happens to cause a day to go south.

But the reason I love Excel, and maybe it is the pack rat collector mentality I have sometimes is - you can put stuff in it.  It isn't just putting stuff in it, but arranging, formatting, calculating, and crunching the numbers is interesting to me.  For some reason, this almost seems odd, as if I should be bored silly.  But in all seriousness I really dig working with Excel.

That's my epiphany of the day.  Later I'll probably write something more useful for myself, but alas, I was thinking...

Oh my, this is exactly how it seems to work.  Doh!

This Wednesday I'm going to be meeting with a group of recruiters to go over some .NET Framework topics.  I'm doing this to provide a good foundation in which to discuss, question, and inquire with the prospective candidates that they speak with.  I've been wondering for a long time what training, if any, recruiters go through in the technology sectors.  This is an opportunity for me to provide some of that insight and also to possibly gain some for myself.  It should be an interesting experience.

In the meantime I have some questions that I'll be speaking to and about during our meeting.

I've had it with my TV...

So I've about had it up to hear (imagine me placing my hand above my head to see what I've had it up to hear with...).  I'm sick and tired of the piece of crap ancient TV we have in the ole' apartment.  Pending some cash flow in the next week or three, I'm doing away with it and getting a nice silent, non-dog frequency emitting, flat screen LCD 1080p wide screen TV.  Possibly with some cool add on stuff like an XBox 360, surround sound, and who knows what else.  This will happen, probably, about the same time that the move into the bigger place that has been scoped the last few months.  The space is sorely needed, the second room for an office is driving me as nuts as the old crappy dog frequency producing TV, so it is going to happen soon.

Cloud Control for .NET...

On another note, I'm looking for a cloud control.  Anybody have any suggestions?  A nice solid one with good properties and options, I'd prefer a free one, but a small price would be ok - $10-50 bucks.

F# and LINQ totally RULE!

I never realized it, several months ago as my friend and coding cohort Ryan coded away at some oCaml (I believe that was it) that functional programming was going to be in my near future.  Well, 6 months in my near future.  A few days ago I picked up an Apress book on F# and a few days after that I finally bit the bullet and got a LINQ book.  Over the last few days I've been digging through them both, I am absolutely stoked about becoming more adapt and quicker and laying down some of this code.  Functional programming combined with LINQ for data access is awe inspiring!  When I get good at it I think I might begin my evangelizing this pair for full scale development.  I'll just have to wait and see, as my time I get to spend ramping on LINQ and F# combined is minimal, about 15-30 minutes a day at this point.

Way Back (Internet Time) in 2006 I Built a Blog Engine and Hosted my Blog...

I dug up some screen shots of it.  Which you can see on the right side of this entry. 

The one thing I was having a hard time figuring out back then was what needed to be done to allow post backs.  Well, I'm building a blog engine again, a simple one, that probably doesn't even need post backs.  However, I'd definitely like to add them for a good kicker.  I hope that I don't stumble like I did last time, it seemed there was about zero documentation on what the spec was.

Just a note to any readers and a note to self about this particular first quarter of 2008.  I've been excessively busy, and it looks like I will be on through at least the beginning of April.  If things keep going this way it'll definitely be some great accomplishments, but in turn my blog entries and quality of those entries is going down the drain.  So I'll still be posting semi-frequently, just don't expect any cool stuff about unit tests, MVC, patterns, or other topics.  For the next few weeks I'm going to be heads down getting some serious work accomplished.

On the train again, 6:07am, 2 minutes before the doors close, 3 minutes before departure.  These last few weeks have been really nice in the sense of the commute.  I've been taking the Sounder back and forth in the morning and afternoon.  On the train they have relatively comfortable chairs, the standard smooth train ride, and the kicker is the wireless that is available on the 3x, 4x, and 1x series cars.  It's been reliable at least 85% of the time.

The nice thing about having a commute like this is that I can really catch up on post work e-mails, work related tasks, and other things like that.  On the other hand, it does consume an additional 2.25 hours a day.  In other words, it is awesome for a short period of time but on a daily ongoing basis, that level of time consumption is purely idiotic.  There is no reason for an intelligent person to eat up an hour plus of time each way to and from work.  But I digress, next week I'll be down to a reasonable 20 minute commute with the Portland Streetcar, 18 minute commute with the bus, 14 minute bicycle ride, or 25 minute walk each way.  In addition each of those trip options is by numerous coffee shops, diners, restaurants, and other great places where the commute times just don't even matter when one can make use of the time.

All that makes for a nice business case against the long commute.  But with that I'm diving back in the trenches with the troops, and get some code locked and loaded.

I got up after a development all-nighter a few days ago.  The GF and I hit the computers at about 10:00pm.  We both played WOW for a bit.  She kept up the adventures of WOW while I jumped into dev mode about 11:15pm.  From 11:15pm until 5:00am I coded away with .netTiers, Windows Apps, and trying out different scenarios with the various entities and database generations.

When I got up that morning and I was still in that mind set.  I got myself together just barely and headed out the door to my thinking place.  So what is that place?  I like to work, think, and ride the streetcar all at once.  For some reason it helps me keep my thoughts together and focused even when there are dozens of people getting on and off, conversations taking place, and all sorts of hustle and bustle.  I like being able to look out the huge glass windows and contemplate and see changing scenery.  Other places I prefer are coffee shops and various other places I'll leave unmentioned at the moment.

I ponder sometimes, what are the places other people like to work aside from just the office.  Then of course, does anyone really like being in the office, some do, but I gather that many don't?  I have mixed feeling about being in the office.  When offices are distractive, I generally like to grab a streetcar ride somewhere and get away from the disruptions, but if the office is calm and it is easy to work I don't mind being where the other minds are working away on similar solutions.

I ponder what other's places to think are?

One of the things I really got ingrained in my habit while working at Bank of America was the respect of other people's time.  Especially in fast moving projects this is a very important thing to practice.  While working at BoA one could literally be let go if they did not respect other people's time when scheduling meetings and other such time consuming, yet much needed, work related events.  I was digging around some material I had found in storage a few weeks ago and it got me thinking about this.  The core facet of this trait is simply, "respect other people's time".  Everything about one's work habit within a team should encompass this.  The core idea behind this trait is, "empowering the individual" and is simply part of a "meritocracy" based environment.

• Don't be late to a meeting.  Not even a few seconds.  The only acceptable arrival times is at the scheduled time or before.
• If you're going to be late notify well before the meeting and be sure to give an ETA so an accurate rescheduling decision can occur.
• Make sure to send any notices for a meeting well in advance of a meeting.  (2-4 hours minimum)  Otherwise expect nothing more than a quick conversation of 5 minutes or less.
• Take into account other people's meeting schedules.  Don't double, triple, or otherwise book people.  Even if you're the boss, don't do this without notifying the person of their priority, or asking what their priorities are for the day.
• Make sure to have clearly defined topics and understand the objectives and goals of the meeting.  Do NOT go to a meeting and just start conversation on a "cloudy" or unclear topic.
• Do not surpass the scheduled meeting time.  If you think you need time, schedule as much of it as you believe will be needed to cover the topics.
• Preferably take meeting minutes and designate a specific individual to meeting minutes.
• Make every attempt to stay on topic during a meeting.  If one leaves topic, have a designated topic watcher to maintain the flow of the meeting (the meeting minutes person usually is good at this).

Those are the summarized meeting points for the material I found.  I've blogged because I think this is a highly underrated trait, often unnoticed these days, and even more so unnoticed on the west coast for some reason.  However the amount of productivity lost to non-punctual, unscheduled, off topic meetings is massive.