A Long Week Before a Long Weekend

It's been a long week. O doesn't seem to have had any major problems, although we did discover that we left out a change from one of the data extractors. Took about a minute to fix and send Tiffany a new zip. A, on the other hand (the one I was having so much trouble getting done a couple of weeks ago) is not so lucky. We put them into a hosted staging environment and discovered a small bug in my code; fixed that, but now Rich is having tons of database problems. One of the DB guys in Engineering wants to blame my process, but I'm not really doing anything unusual, so I think it's something else. We finally got the work order signed for J; I've been working on it for more than a week anyway, but it's good to have it signed. And I even got LKB in Atlanta to get the codes in today so I can actually enter my time for it. I am hoping that they will even ask for more based on some conversations we had earlier this week. Or maybe that was last week. Oh, and N is having a devil of a time getting NT authentication to work. I think it's because they're giving it an Internet machine name for a load balancer instead of NT server names, but the only guy who can tell us the real server names instead of the load balancer won't be back until Monday. And he's a prick. Can't wait to get on the phone with HIM again.

In other news, for some reason I've gotten three contacts about new jobs this week. One of them expects 75% travel, and that's far more than I'm willing even to consider at this point. Another is with MacroMedia, and I actually have a phone interview with the hiring manager (she's in Massachusetts) on Monday. Should be interesting. The recruiter and I talked about salary and such and it sounds as if I might be pushing the limits of what they want to pay, but they may have enough. They're in downtown SF, so it won't be too hard to get there, but it is going to make it tough for me to be part of taking Rachel to school and picking her up, at least until I've been there a while. We'll see how the phone interview goes. They've seen my resume, which I don't think even mentions them or any of their products, but they're still interested in talking to me, so I take that as a good sign.

I'm really hoping to be able to start biking again soon. I haven't been able to in more than 2 weeks because of messing up my back. Had an interesting conversation with Chris when we were bringing the new grill to my house; there's a book called the Tipping Point in which the author discusses, among other things, how being in a hurry can have a significant impact on people's thought processes. When I took the NG grill out of my truck by myself the first time, I was in a hurry to catch up with Dawn and Rachel at a restaurant. I knew perfectly well it wasn't the greatest idea to take it out myself, but I did it anyway because I couldn't close the truck all the way and didn't want to leave it sitting there while I was gone. Rachel and I were talking about biking last night as she was going to bed. It'll be great to get back in that habit.

But now we are nearing the start of a weekend. Dawn and I are going to Sterling and Angel's wedding. Talk about anti-climactic. Sterling and Angel have probably been together longer than Dawn and I... it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that they were going to get married when I met Sterling when I started working here... in September of 2000. It should be fun... large Chinese wedding with a whole bunch of my co-workers and former co-workers. Oh, and I imagine there will be a lot of people we don't know too. I think I heard that they're expecting 350 people. Rachel will be with my parents, probably spending the night at their place for the first time since before the end of the Pabu-Era (Pabu was Rachel's word for pacifiers). I think that will go OK, actually, but the hard part is that she wants to go to the farmer's market with them, which is in the morning, so I'm not sure how her nap is going to go... whether she'll nap at their place or come home and then go back with them after nap. Guess we'll see.

Rachel's doing really well. She's really doing a lot of imaginative play, make-believe and that sort of thing. Apparently yesterday at my parents' place she pretended to take my father's thumb and eat it. He tucked it into his hand and moaned about how she'd eat his thumb. She looked at it, didn't see his thumb, and, apparently, looked absolutely horrified and took it out of her mouth and gave it back. This morning, she picked up the fireplace broom and started sweeping and looked at me and said "I'm Gladys" (our housecleaner). Very cute. She's also really starting to get good at expressing feelings. On Wednesday night, I took a customer to dinner and didn't get home until right before Rachel's bedtime. She was having a little trouble going to sleep and I asked her what was wrong; "I'm feeling sad". Evidently she didn't like it that I was gone during the evening. She actually was fine yesterday, though, I think because she was at my parents' place while Dawn and I were at the game (Giants swept the Dodgers in 4 games with a 9-3 win. GO GIANTS!), rather than being home without me. Sometimes she really does notice when one of us is out and she's not, even if she's with the other parent.

Anyway, A is having some trouble now and I'm stuck having to troubleshoot it. Better go. Only a couple hours to figure it out without having to worry about impacting Monday's testing start.