BrockLi Soup

This week, I’m working from home home - my parents’ house in the suburbs of Buffalo. My brother is getting married this Saturday, and I came up on Thursday for his bachelor party this past weekend. Rather than making the trip twice, I’m staying through the week and working from here for a few days.

This is the longest I’ve worked remotely. Once in a while, I’ll work from my apartment for part of the day if I have a doctor’s appointment or something like that, but I’ve never done it for three solid days like this. I thought it would be great, but it’s kind of weird. Without the office environment, it’s a lot harder to get in the swing of things. I’m working at the kitchen table here, so it’s been a challenge to get comfortable and get the light at the right level (it’s about the only thing I’m fussy about in my office). The time seems to fly by, and I feel like I’m not getting as much done as I usually do, but I can’t figure out why - it’s not like I’m goofing off. If anything, I’m more focused because I’m not talking to co-workers as much as I would be if I were in the office. Maybe it’s just because I don’t feel like I’m working.

I’ve always thought I would like working from home, but I think I would need a decent office if I were going to do it long-term. The kitchen table will work do three days, but I don’t think I could handle it much longer than that. But even if it isn’t very office-y, at least there’s no commute.

We’ve been in Denver since Wednesday night for a conference, and this town gives me a weird vibe. Granted, we don’t really get any time to do much touristing when we go work in another city, so I haven’t seen anything further than five blocks from the convention center. But click on that satellite picture for the bigger view - “downtown” is about a square mile of tall buildings, surrounded by suburbs.

It seems so stupid to go to a new city and see none of it. I get home and people ask, “So how was Las Vegas?” and all I can tell them about is the hotel and convention center because I didn’t even go outside for five straight days. It’s fun to travel once in a while for work, but it’s just that - for work. I might get some more time to see more of Denver later this week, though. The show ends mid-day Thursday and we leave Friday morning - hopefully, we’ll finish up early in the day Thursday and we’ll be able to see some stuff that night.

Have you ever had one of those mornings where you’re thirsty, hungry, and you have to pee, but you’re too busy working on something and don’t want to lose track of what you’re doing so you don’t get up to deal with that kind of stuff?

That’s how my morning has been so far. Sometimes, it’s really satisfying, because you keep doing that “just five more minutes, bladder” thing, and then - hurrah! - you finish whatever it is you’re working on, hit the head, and grab another Coke. Other times, you find a bug, and know that it won’t be finished before your bladder explodes.

Sure is nice to stop and take a leak though, isn’t it?

It’s Wednesday night, and I finally have enough energy to talk about the weekend. Erin and I moved in together, which has been great, and my company moved to a new office. As far as I’m concerned, I did three moves this weekend: me, Erin, and my company. For those of you I haven’t spoken to lately, Erin and I managed to get a one-bedroom in my building. It’s in a great location, pretty cheap, and in good condition, so we were hoping to stay here. The place we got was at a reduced price, since not a lot of people are moving this time of year, and it had just been re-done with new carpet and appliances. Really, it worked out pretty well.

So, the quick and dirty:

Spent the week packing up our office. Erin and I signed our lease and got keys Thursday night.

Friday, we moved to the new office, and then I went home and moved most of my crap up to the new place while Erin packed up her stuff.

Saturday, I woke up early and went in to the new office to unpack with the rest of the company. Went straight to U-Haul after that to get a truck, then went to Erin’s to load up (which only took half an hour, with Schmitty and Aubri helping).

Sunday morning, Erin and I unloaded all her stuff in less than hour (I was pretty proud of us). We spent part of the day unpacking, had ourselves a nap, then had my company holiday dinner, which was awesome.

Monday was the first day at the office. Finished most of the unpacking there and at home.

Erin and I are pretty much settled. We’re getting real furniture sometime in January, which kind of sucks because we’ve just got patio furniture in front of the TV right now. Without actual furniture and everything moved in, I just feel kind of unsettled.

We’re pretty much moved into the new office too. It’s a lot bigger than the old place, which keeps surprising me because there was so little space to move around in the old office. I keep being surprised that I don’t have to goose step my way around road cases, boxes, and desks that were strewn about.

Also, I’m STILL looking for someone to move into my old place and replace me on the lease. We’ve been meeting people for like three weeks. My old roommate offered the room to about a half dozen people. Three of them accepted, only to back out on us. It’s getting pretty frustrating. If you know anyone looking for a place in DC, you be sure to let me know, because I don’t want to pay an extra $900 at the beginning of January.

I feel like I’ve been a few paces behind for the past five months. I’m behind on the magazines stacked on my headboard, behind on the thousands of news items in my RSS reader, behind on the dozens of posts I have wanted to write here, behind on keeping up with friends both out of town and in, behind on e-mails that have sat in my inbox for months awaiting response. About the only thing I’ve managed to keep up on is paying the bills, and sometimes just barely.

I realized that I’ve been in my “new” apartment for a couple weeks shy of six months now. I look back on things that happened, conversations I had, and can’t believe how long ago they took place. The past five months were a frenzied blur; I was so busy with work, and then so occuppied with a new relationship, that everything else was just put on hold. For a while there, BP was coming down to visit practically every month; I don’t think I’ve seen him since I drove up to Buffalo for Bill’s wedding back in June. And speaking of Bill, I don’t think I’ve even spoken to him since I called a month after the wedding to ask about married life. Too many things took a back burner for too long, and I regret that.

Everything was pushed aside because of a major project at work - the biggest I’ve ever been involved in - that dominated my time and caused me unbelievable stress for a few months there. Sometime around late August, it calmed down a little bit, but was still a challenge. About the same time, I started spending a lot of time with Erin, so that contributed to it. That part, I certainly don’t regret; I mention it because it was easy for our relationship to fill what little room had been given up by work, and the cycle continued.

The project that caused so much distress ended November 1, and things were supposed to be smooth sailing after that. Erin and I spent the first week of the month in the San Francisco Bay area on vacation, which was fantastic, and then I attended the DC-PHP conference and spent a weekend visiting Erin’s sister in Raleigh. When I finally got back to the office, November was nearly halfway over and things were still a little hectic. I spent so long looking forward to the end of that project that I almost expected that everything would be cupcakes and puppies once it was over. I mean, there’s obviously still work to be done, but I really thought we’d be able to have some down time for a month or two to recover from the six months we had spent busting ass, but no such luck - yet.

At any rate, I feel like I need a few weeks off from everything to recuperate and catch up on everything. We spent this weekend doing almost absolutely nothing. It was wonderful and relaxing, but not nearly long enough, and I didn’t do any reading or writing or anything, so I did a lot more of the recuperating than the catch-upping. I’m hoping to have a little more downtime over the coming weeks to spend on my own stuff. If nothing else, Erin is going home for almost a week for Thanksgiving, so that will give me a chance to catch up with local friends I haven’t seen much of and maybe do some reading.

Or maybe I’ll just lie around for a few more days. That’s been pretty nice, and it’s been so long since I’ve been able to get away with it that I almost want to do it as long as I can.

Well hello there Internet. I haven’t had much time or desire for blogging or Internetting lately. Work is still kicking my ass, but things outside of work have been pretty great. I’m going back to San Francisco in a couple weeks for work again, then out to Vegas for the last week of October, and then I’m hoping to take a week or two off because I need it.

One of the fluorescent bulbs in our bathroom died, and the other is on its way out, so it’s pretty dark and I almost fell asleep in there.

I kind of like coming into the office on Saturday. There’s no one else around (although Terrence is here with me today), and no clients are working, so I can keep working without being interrupted every ten minutes.

Of course, that brings a new problem - my eyes aren’t used to staring at a monitor for uninterrupted hours on end, and I tend to a headache if I don’t get up to wander around once in a while. Plus, it’s Saturday, and I should really be doing any number of other things.

College doesn’t really prepare you for the real world. You learn a lot of stuff, which is nice, but a lot of times they don’t teach you how to use it. It’s kind of like learning geometry in fifth grade: I memorized the details and thought I understood the concepts, but it was years later before I knew what to do with any of those concepts.

College was the same way - or at least, it was for me. You spend a lot of time learning about programming languages and syntax, but not a whole lot of real-world project development. For homework, you get clearly defined projects, and the professor never changes the specs halfway through, or adds a bunch of new requirements after seeing the first version. I can’t imagine what would have happened if a professor tried to pull that on a class, but that’s how it goes in the real world. While you’re taking classes, you have to track where you are on a project or two for each of them, but generally, that’s it. Right now, I’m working on two major projects: I’m doing a couple big parts for one, and managing (really, “coding most of”) the other. There are several parts of each that I’m responsible for, parts that other people are responsible for, things I’m waiting to get from the client, and the remainder that isn’t clearly defined yet.

I remember taking Needs Assessment and being told that we would need to know how to gather requirements and things like that, but I didn’t really believe it at the time. At the beginning of this year, I really didn’t need to know how to do it - my manager or a senior developer would come to me with a fairly well-defined project to do, and I’d do it. Sometimes it was changed after the fact or even partway through, but I got the set of requirements and wrote the code as specified. More recently, I’ve been dealing directly with the client a lot more than I used to, and I’m doing a lot more project management than before. I’ve got changes, new requirements, and bug reports coming in from three or four directions and need to manage the schedule for all of it.

In retrospect, this is what Needs Assessment and Tech Transfer (two classes in the IT department) were meant to handle, but I don’t think that any of us took it seriously at the time. In my defense, I took both of them my last quarter at RIT, so my priorities were elsewhere. Would I be better prepared for my current job if I had paid more attention? Well, it’s hard to say - since I wasn’t too interested, I really can’t even remember what we did in those two classes.

Then again, sometimes the sink-or-swim method is the best way to learn. I’m doing a much different job than I was six or eight months ago, and I’ve learned a lot in the process. As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been reading Getting Things Done. I haven’t gotten very far, but I already feel like I’ve got a better idea how to handle all this stuff. Plus, you know, the Internet needs another GTD fanboy.

I need to make more time for books. So far in 2007, I’ve only finished seven books, and one of them (the hilarious The Pirates! In An Adventure With The Communists) only took an afternoon. I’ve got two more in the works now, but a quick glance over my book list for the past year and a half shows that my time for reading lately has been woefully inadequate. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was splayed out on the couch with Everything Is Illuminated or any one of David Sedaris’ books, but I read those in my old-old apartment - the one I moved out of last May. I’ve read so little since then that they’re still relatively fresh in my mind.

I keep hoping that things will calm down soon and I’ll have more free time. I’m back from two weeks in SF, moved into a new apartment, spent this weekend in Buffalo for my buddy Bill’s wedding, and I’ve already spent 35 hours in the office this week. I’ve barely touched my news reader since I left for SF almost a month ago, so I’ve got thousands of blog posts and news items waiting for my attention. There are still a few boxes I haven’t unpacked because I need to get rid of other stuff to make room for them. I got a USB hard drive to store all my crap, but I haven’t even plugged it in yet because there’s a monitor (which also needs to go) on the table I’m going to use for my computer, and I haven’t had any time to fiddle with it yet anyway. The MacBook I got last week (which I LOVE, incidentally) has some 80 GB of crap from my old laptop and desktop sitting in the Documents directory, waiting to be sorted and backed up as necessary. I still haven’t really grocery-shopped since I moved over a week ago, except for a quick trip to grab milk, eggs, apples, and some frozen dinners. I haven’t had time for SNFC - the local chapter I so wanted to start - in a full month, and probably won’t this week either.

And, of course, there’s about 20 books on my book shelf that were purchased in more leisurely times, when their chances of being read were as high as 1 in 6. This one especially bugs me because of the money I’ve invested in my collection and the effort that’s gone into moving all of them from apartment to apartment. That shit’s heavy, yo.

My bowling ball/baby/shark situation has surpassed, “Just get through this quarter,” and I’m not really sure what comes after that. Semi-year? Either way, I just keep chugging along, and hope the train stops before the wheels come off.