I suck at normal updates so I’ll spew a bit.

Went up to Indy yesterday, I picked up two 15oz Bodum Pavina glasses (to match the 6 x 8oz ones I have) (Side Note: I knew those were glass, Jenn said they were Lucite and I knew that was wrong, it is borosilicate glass aka pyrex), a few nice cocktail glasses, and some replacement plates for the random nicks and accidents our dishes have gotten since the wedding. We went by a coat place and I picked up a very nice, wool long coat. I have one currently that I’ve beaten to shreds, I payed a bit more for this one, so I expect it to hold up better.

We had dinner with Tim at an alright Italian place on the north side of Indy and then headed home. It was a nice, if expensive trip.

/dev/random

• Still debating on the camera. I’m fairly confident that if I decide to get a camera it will be a Nikon D80. But I keep going back and forth on whether or not it’s a good investment or just pointless spending.
• Got Super Mario Galaxy, and it is by far the most solid, polished, and well designed 3d platformer I have ever played. Highly recommended!
• I’m using plazes now a bit, it’s nothing special, but it’s interesting.

Holiday Plans

• Thanksgiving will be here in Bloomington, hanging with friends for the holiday.
• Christmas will be in Texas (12.21 - 12.27), hanging with Jenn’s mother.

Work

• Socialtext got some Fuding and a new CEO so that’s cool.
• We also have a cool little screen cast which lets me explain what we do to other people without as much confusion.
• Work is going good, I’m getting more integrated with the people I work with, which is both good and bad, encouraging and sobering. My coworkers both inspire me, and cause longing for a stiff drink. I take the bad with the good.

I’m writing (most of) this in the Cincy airport… I would be online, but all the airports have tmobile ‘pay to use’ wifi … bastards. I spent the past week in San Fran, hanging with coworkers at the most recent Socialtext F2F. A lot of went on is confidential and off the record, but I’m going over everything else.

I left Bloomington on Monday after having lunch with Jenn at Qdoba. (Sidenote: We both got fairly sick after eating there, and I don’t plan on ever eating there again) After I said goodbye I sped up to Indy barely making my flight.

I arrived in SFO around 7pm, and freaked out a little as I had forgotten to figure out how I was going to get from SFO to the hotel in Palo Alto. I ended up calling Ross, Brandon, Matthew’s old cell that belongs to a lady who doesn’t like me much, Jenn to get more phone numbers, Matthew (the real number this time), and John trying to find out what was the right way to get there. I was tempted to just expense a cab, but I decided I was smart enough to make it there on the CalTrain… so I wandered over to the BART, and hoped over to the connection to the CalTrain. I ended up very narrowly missing the CT, and since it was ~8pm at that point, I had to wait an hour for the train.

I settled in for the wait and I struck up conversation with my fellow platform companions. Talked with a German RFID Engineer and a German Industrial Designer. Talked art, UI design, wikis, travel, cool places to live, and other randomness… it was very cool. But, the train eventually came, and we piled in.

I got off at Palo Alto, and I tried finding a wireless cloud to get some Google Maps action going. No immediate luck, but I recall that I printed out the hotel’s (The Cardinal in PA) wiki page from work, and so I give them a ring. After committing some sketchy directions to memory I find the hotel a few blocks away, I check in and go unpack. After I get unpacked I go downstairs to sign up for teh internets, and I discover employees downstairs hanging out. I sit down and meet Shawn Scantland, Shawn Delvin, Kirsten Jones, and Bill Odem. We shoot the shit for a bit, and then Ingy, Luke, Melissa, Kevin, Marc and Rick came in and introduced themselves. Ingy informs me of impending debauchery, and I find out that I have the room next to his, which proves to have a detrimental effect on my sleep for the rest of the trip, but gave me motivation to be social.

After the people in the lobby all head off to sleep I go head up to my room and then to Ingys, a lot of people were in and out all night, and there was a lot of alcohol and enjoyment. Good times were had by all. But, eventually it was time to head to bed for the coming day ahead.

Woke up fairly early, headed downstairs and wandered across the street to the canonical breakfast establishment. I get some French toast but remember quickly that a) I don’t eat breakfast for a reason, and b) the Qdoba poison has not left me entirely. We wander down the street to the office 2.0 were people have started to congregate. We get settled in for the morning’s presentation.

(Time Passes)

We break for lunch and Ross starts the planning for open sessions for tues and wed. We use a open format, barcampesque scheduling format for most of the sessions.

I head off first to an hour session where we discuss what we need to do to make the appliance bad ass for our customers. We discuss UI changes, implementing a full time dev team for the appliance, and a few other pressing issues. I think I may try to get into working on some dev work for the appliance, but we’ll see how things unfold.

After that session I head over to Office 1.0 where we discuss the retirement of our main wiki workspace because it would be an easy way to get a fresh start and eliminate a lot of the bad blood and past drama. I feel that it would help to purge it if we want to work more as a team. Ross is still in mourning over the loss, and I can understand how it’s hard for him to let a wikispace that was a major archival space for the past 5 years vanish in a puff of bits.

I go join the discussion Luke is giving on hacktastic tricks after I get done arguing for the wikispace execution. Luke is showing off a lot of neat little tools like Wikrad, REST, and some firefox tricks. I should start using wikrad, it’s pretty bad ass.

We wrap up and head to dinner at an Italian place across the way from the office. We fill up 6 full tables. The food starts coming and doesn’t stop, my poor addled intestinal tract can’t take it and I have to eat very minor amounts… but that’s probably for the better. There was waves and waves of Italian food that was all fairly good. Fried Calamari, Garlic Bread, Salad, Chicken Fettucini Alfredo, Sausage Penne something or other, Chicken Parmesan, Meatballs, and more gallon bottles of Cianti than I could count.

After dinner we all migrate back to office 2.0 were we split into groups and play werewolf). I get killed off early the first game, but I got my revenge in the second game; I was a werewolf and we killed everyone. We moved on to a big group game to finish off the evening, and things started getting crazy. Ross was leading the game, and fairly inebriated, and was getting into the game hardcore. It was pretty excellent, and I ended up winning that one as a villager so that was cool.

We hang around and shot the shit for a while, and then I head off to procure liquor with Lyssa, Melissa, George and Brandon. We walk a few blocks to find the store closed, so we stopped by some random sports bar to have a few rounds before we head back to start drinking proper.

Get back to Ingy’s room and had a great night. Good energy and wonderful people. Very incriminating photos. Luke tore a phone book in half and Zac shattered a glass.

Up at 9:50 the next morning, shower and run to the office and sit down (out of breath) right at 10:00am. We start the days general presentation.

(Time Passes)

I head to my first open session for the day, Sales 101. I listen to our lead sales guy answer questions and explain the processes behind sales. It was fairly enlightening to see some of the internal mechanics of how the sales team functions.

After this we had reheated Italian while discussing Support Team problems and solutions. It was nice to rant about the simple breakdowns that support faces.

Then I headed over with Paul and talked with a few people about how to make the first 90 days of a new customer’s experience more smooth.

After that, I attended Ingy’s UI - Sales team face off where the UI team polled the sales team for what felt like the most important UI problems of late. It was kind of interesting to hear what the customers want the most.

I headed over to hear about skins from Lyssa last, but the session kind of broke down, and we all kind of wandered off. I socialized for the next few hours with a multitude of people while waiting for our dinner group to finish up their loose ends. Ingy and Zac vanish on a quest for liquors to drunken, and no one seems to know where they actually went. We head to a vegetarian Thai place for dinner, and wander around a bit before someone decided to call someone who knows where the fuck the place is actually located.

We sit down across the way from the other group (we came in shifts to be less mean), and we sit down to order. I’m immediately accosted by ShawnD who informs me of an impending switch to bugzilla that the devs are going to engage in tonight while drunk. I’m mildly concerned, but I don’t care that much.

Someone checks twitter. Sees this post I get concerned for the state of my chocolate.

We eat, it’s yummy, we head back to the hotel. Sure enough, my room has been invaded, Matthew, Luke, Kevin, Liz and ShawnD are camped out installing bugzilla. Matthew evidently climbed into my window thinking it was Ingy’s. I dump my stuff sigh at them, and head to ingy”s room. We drink a lot, and start watching the life Aquatic. I don’t think anyone cares except Ingy and I… philistines.

I fall asleep in my chair, and wake up around 5 to see most everyone has either passed out or left. I gather my crap and go back to my room and head to sleep. I wake up the next morning and head down to the office.

I meet up with Matthew, and after I wake up we head back to SF to hang out for the day. We hop on the CalTrain right as it leaves, sans tickets (no time to buy them). We get harassed by the conductor about hopping on at the last second. And he wanders off w/o asking for tickets… he comes back in like 15m asking for everyone’s tickets and gives us an eye roll when we tell him we don’t have them, but doesn’t give us a ticket. Whew!

We transfer to the BART and drop Kevin off at the airport. Matthew and I head back to his place and relax for a bit. Beth’s home and we talk a bit before heading to grab some food from a nice little place called Toast. It was very tasty. We head back and talk for a while about what I want to see in SF, and I decide that relaxing sounds better than being a tourist, so we chill and I show Matthew portal, which he seems to dig. We futz around with some games for a few hours and then We go grab some excellent Vegan Japanese at this place called Cha-Ya. It was excellent!

We drop Beth off to hang out with a friend and Matthew and I drive around and talk a bit about city life, and work, and other randomness. We drive up to the highest point in the city for a nice view of the bay and the Goldengate Bridge.

Head back to Matthew’s place to grab the bags, and we head to the airport.

I had a great stay in PA/SF, even if I didn’t get to see much of the Bay area.

Maybe next time I visit.

So it’s been a week since I started working for the fine folks at Socialtext. It’s been an interesting, if humbling, few days.Going to repost some of my blogging that I’ve been doing internally. I might move my ST blog to an externally readable location at some point.

Expect more posting here in the new future as I figure this Markdown crap out.

08.02.07

Second day here.

Yesterday I was a little damp from sucking the fire hose that is the information flow around here to really put together anything resembling a coherent thought, much less a blog post.

So here I am, working from home at a startup in an industry I love. Thrown screaming (from joy? terror? we shall see!) from the comfortable and atrophic confines of academia. Surrounded by people who intimidate me immensely, but also inspire.

Intimidation factor is high. But I shall persevere!

Alright, enough of that. Today was a good day, working with Brandon and Lyssa these past couple days has been a welcome departure from the past year or so working in isolation alongside my coworkers instead of with them. Later, I worked with Lyssa and dealt with a few tickets. Then, I paired with Brandon and played with some scripts and poked at some of the ST APIs. We also spawned a dev environment so I can start to prod at things and start learning the code and developing scripts.

Then I dove headfirst into /corp and quickly found myself with 40 or so tabs open in firefox, and didn’t emerge until several hours after I was supposed to be ‘clocked out’. I suspect this trend will continue unabated for several days at the least.

I’m unsure how the effect of working alone at home is going to affect me long term. I tend to be rather hermit-like when I work, donning headphones and only emerging when I’m in need of sustenance. So, I can’t expect the effect will be large. I should work on finding people the real world to meet for lunch so I don’t go stir crazy eventually.

Random things I’ve learned.

• My… “inclination to forget” about my bloging, will not be tolerated.
• No one knows what my official title is, and that doesn’t really matter.
• People in support (so far) all have many pets, and the fact that I have three cats is relatively sane.
• Google Reader is probably not going to cut it… even though I wish it could.

Thoughts on communications.

• VoIP/Skype makes me far happier than landlines or cellphones.
• Three years (almost) of living on “Ventrilo”http://ventrilo.com/ for WoW has left me extremely comfortable shooting the shit (aka BSing) in skype and VoIP calls.
• Ventrilo’s default state is muted, VoIP’s default state is unmuted. Mixing these up is bad.
• I enjoy tacking on time to calls in order to BS; other people will/may find this obnoxious. I must watch myself.
• When I BS on voice I tend to be able to work with more fluidity on multiple tasks.

08.03.07

Continued Learning

Today i continued to work on picking up stuff around here. Worked on more tickets. Ran off mid-day to pick up my car from the dealer. I have A/C for the first time in over a year… it’s pretty amazing. Lurked in on Brandon working with zbir working on an LDAP problem with a client, and got my laptop ordered finally. I chose a Dell XPS M1330.

Shiny.

Deep Thoughts

I’m shocked at the volume of tickets that seem to languish around here. Recent St-Dev list traffic suggests that this is not something that I’m alone in noticing. Once I get going here I might have to watch myself that I don’t work on tickets all night. My last position got it fairly well ingrained in my brain that the RT queue needs to be empty. If a ticket sat for more than 24h my manager, cool as he was, would start breathing down my neck. Quite literally. Several times I would turn around to find him standing there. We’ll see how things go as I merge into the flow here. (Edit: this has gotten way better in the last week)

Started [brianhabererthingsthatannoy]. Figured that if nothing else I’m a fresh, critical eye. I also assume that when I find problems, I should write them down even if they are things people have been dealing with for months. We’ll see how useful it proves.

Thoughts on increasing random communication.

Read [cdent]’s [recreating_lunch] (however old it may be). I think that recreating an atmosphere of office social interaction is a good idea, but VoIP and Skype feel like bad avenues for casual communication. I’m tempted to suggest some form of groupvoip like Ventrilo for that level of social interaction.

Vent servers are poor traditional voip servers, there is no way to engage someone in pure one on one chat, nor is there a real way to not be on a call (other than being disconnected). However they make great casual social interaction space. You have a clear view of who is in which virtual space, who they are talking with, and who is actually talking. People are announced by name as they enter and leave spaces/channels, which is something I find frustratingly absent in voip sessions. (The bings and dings don’t cut it)

The main problem with that is that the Mac support is lackluster (or used to be, it might be better now) and the Linux client is nonexistent. There’s also the point that introducing yet another voice client for people to install is a bad thing. I also feel that people don’t like to talk, only type. Which is a deathblow to this kind of thing.

That’s all for today’s brain dump…

So, it's been a while since I've had a chance to update. A lot's been going on, and I've not been able to keep everyone up-to-date with everything going on in my silly little life. So here goes an attempt to relate what's been going on.

Socialtext

So my emo-hair-tossing entry a week or so ago was in response to some events that occurred that caused me to retract my acceptance of the Socialtext job, and retract my resignation at UITS. Let me tell you how much that made me want to kick puppies.

Thankfully, things got sorted out ( For now; if you want the obnoxious details get in touch with me), and I'll be starting my new job on the first of August. A lot of the stuff that's going on is in the realm of "sketchily confidential company information", and since I just signed an NDA, I'll refrain from spewing it all here for now. Once I work for them I'll probably have a better idea where the line is for what I can (and should) disclose on a public blog such as this. I will say things are good now, and I'm optimistic that they will stay good.

I'm pretty nervous about starting work at Socialtext. This is the first real (non-educational) company I've worked for in seven years, and the first full time job I've ever had outside of the time I've spent at UITS. It's going to be weird transitioning from getting up and heading in to an office, to getting up and heading to my own office. It's going to be a weird transition period, but I have high hopes. I like the people I'm working for and with, and I enjoy the industry. So I guess I'm not all that worried.

Speaking of my office, Jenn and I spent last weekend swapping the contents of our rooms. I now have an office to my very own. It looks like a sty right now, so pictures will have to wait till I've at least attained some level of sanity. I like having my own space, and I look forward to using some money to eventually make it a nice work/play space for myself. I need to get some nice shelves, I forgot how many books I have accumulated. I got rid of approximately 7 trash bags worth of crap I no longer needed during the move. A lot of it was really old debris from life before I met Jenn and it had no real significance anymore. I found the experience cathartic.

Random thought; I need to figure out what I'm going to do about a new laptop for work. I've been rocking my Dell D620 for a year, and I love the line. I'm debating between keeping a similar machine in a similar form or moving to a Dell M1330. Socialtext sent me an email that strongly urged me to get a Macbook, but I'm not feeling much like drinking the kool-aid. I'm really leaning towards the M1330, it's stunning and is sporting LED back light, slot loading cdrom and other niceties. Only problem is that I might not be able to get one till a month or so down the line.

UITS

I've been going through a four week resignation notice at UITS, it's been a little uncomfortable and tedious. I feel bad that I quit, came back, and that I am now quitting again. I wish this had gotten handled better. I think that these events introduced a lot more friction than I was hoping to create in my leaving. So far my old manager has been a great sport about the whole thing, and my new manager hasn't said a word to me in weeks. So there's that.

I have my last EdCert class next week, and I'm not looking forward to driving up to Indy three times, and then having to go up there on Friday as well for some LSP appreciation event they are throwing. Should be a mind numbingly good time. However, I'm kind of looking forward to teaching the class. I always enjoyed the class, I just hate driving for an hour and getting up at 5:30am.

As I clean out my cubicle here at uits, I feel sad that I'm leaving. I had a lot of fun times here (and, yes, a lot of horrible times). I've grown up a lot while working within these walls, and so I tend to wax sentimental about my time here. I think it's a good thing I'm leaving, even if I ultimately come back for some reason.

Jenn wanted me to keep a list of the stuff I found in my cube, and I'm keeping an informal list of the randomness on the wiki at http://wiki.weirdo513.org/?title=CubeContents.

So a few weeks ago I applied for a position at Socialtext, a company that deals primarily in social software. I've been interviewing with them for a couple weeks now, and on Thursday Ross Mayfield called me during lunch and offered me the position. As of Monday afternoon, I have officially accepted their offer and given my notice at IU. My last day is July 13th.

This is an amazing, and fairly daunting opportunity. Indiana University has become my little safe haven, and I'm comfortable here. I finally realize how dangerous of a situation that can be at a place like Indiana University. While there are some amazingly intelligent and compassionate people working here, there are also many people just wasting away until they can retire. I don't want to end up like that, even if it's a low likelihood. I like the people here, but I feel that I need to move on and get some different experiences. So this is going to be a good thing.

So the new gig is Senior Technical Support Engineer. I'm not completely sure what that means in the grand scheme of the company yet, but I stand to learn a lot in a very short period of time. Since I've also been getting into wikis and social software, and I'm loving this stuff. So, I can't wait to sink my teeth into Socialtext.

One of the nicer things about the Palo Alto based company is that a large portion of the employees telecommute. This means that I don't have to leave Bloomington anytime soon, but it also means that I will be working from home for the foreseeable future. This means I will be needing to set up an office in my house post haste. I've been looking at finding a desk that's more conducive to work, but I can't find one I like yet. I also have a whole host of items to replicate so that I can have a conducive work environment. But overall I'm looking forward to having a real office at home.

As for my current work? Well the LSPS stuff was looking a little bleak, even if the people were looking pretty amusing. Being the Linux poster boy in a room of windows support guys? Not really what I need to advance my career.

However, I will miss that A pass come time to take classes.