Hand Coding

If you’ve talked with me IRL recently, you may already know this, but I’ve started a new job on Wednesday :). The company is Bright Corner, which is out of Plano, and I’m doing front-end development for them (just as I was at my previous job). The company recently merged with Geniant and the combined company is taking the name of the latter (so, I actually work for Geniant).

They’re a fun group of people to work with and I’m enjoying it so far. To help give an idea of the company’s character, they have free sodas in the fridge and they’re down with wearing shorts & sandals in the summertime (whee!). It wasn’t the free sodas, though, that convinced me to switch companies. All the same, I left my last job on good terms and I’ll miss working with those guys.

As I was walking out of work this evening, I came to a “Don’t Walk” crosswalk and, as I waited, another commuter walked to the crosswalk as well. She then thought to strike up conversation:

• Her: “It’s nice seeing stars in the sky. I don't often see them after work.”
• Me: “Ah.”
• Me / inner dialog: “Stars? Yeah, fine.”
• Her: “Can you see it? It’s right… [pointing with her finger] there. ”
• Me: “How about that.”
• Her: “No, I’m not sure you're seeing it — take a step back… Do you see it? Right there?”
• Me: “Oh. There it is.”
• Me / inner dialog: You’re still talking?
• Her: And I know it’s not an airplane because it’s not moving. It really is a star.

Fortunately, the light changed at that point and we crossed the street. I have nothing against astronomy, but I guess I've seen enough stars that they're not that exciting to me.

This is why I love Teh Interweb. Ask MetaFilter — the site where you can ask just about anything and community members will chime in with advice and suggestions — has an entire thread on staplers. R0x0rs.

There're several mentioned, but the one that intrigued me most was the One-Touch Stapler from Staples with Staple Gun Power (!). As jjj606 put it:

Staples’ stapler reinvented the whole idea. You use the same force to go through 2 sheets of paper, or 20 sheets. It can stand on the nose end, too.

The next time that I have a need to staple anything, I’m totally getting one of those. Or maybe I should pick one up just in case :).

We’re working on a new design for our blog at work and our boss has given us the go-ahead to develop it live. So, we’re developing right on the server and you can follow along as we implement the design.

We finished the design itself earlier this week and we started on the front-end coding yesterday. And, as we went along, I periodically took screenshots of my browser; then, at the end of the day, I stitched those together to form a time-lapse animated gif of the development process.

The site is still a work in progress and we’ll continue coding it today. I’ll keep taking screenshots and I’ll later post a “Part II” animated gif of the progress since the first one. Oh, and should you need a screenshot utility for Windows, I’ve found Screenshot Captor pretty handy for that — what makes it better than just regular PrintScr is that it can be triggered with a hotkey and set to automatically save the image in a directory of your choice.

Though I work for RD2, I’ve recently been working on-site at a client’s office for the past few days. It’s a large company with an office in Las Colinas. In any case, the team and I (that is, the client team and I) went out for lunch together today. We headed off just before noon, and so the elevators were rather busy (especially as there’re multiple companies within other floors of this office building).

One of us pressed the “down” button and an elevator arrived a couple minutes later. The five of us got on — so far, so good — and then a few more people strolled around the corner and boarded the elevator. And, just as the elevator doors were about to close, a couple more people made a mad dash to jump on. By this point, it was fairly full; but, that should have been the end of it. However, there seems to be something about elevators that brings out the banal banter in corporate employees:

• Guy running: “Hold that elevator!”
• Elevator Person 1: “Oho! Can we fit one more?”
• [mild laughter among the group]
• Elevator Person 2: “Ok, everyone suck in!”
• Elevator Person 3: “Looks like we’re going to be cozy!”

There was a bit more nervous laughter among the group as the doors finally closed and then we descended to the ground floor. The elevator was full, to be sure, but not uncomfortably so. But is it the nature of elevators in general that brings out these comments or was it just because it was an elevator and it was full? Either way, this is one area of the human psyche that I’m unable to entirely understand.

I’ve been busy with work and I haven’t been able to write as frequently as I’d like. So, I came up with this haiku which I hope conveys my situation:

Work is So Busy
This Project Is Due Monday
I Will Blog More Soon

I’ve been working for RD2 as a contractor since the beginning of the year. They’re a small design shop on North Hall St, just off Blackburn & 75. The contractor arrangement with them was working out fine, but I got a call in late June from another company that was interested in interviewing me for a full-time position.

These guys were looking for a client-side specialist and that’s exactly the kind of position I was looking for. After two rounds of interviews (including a two-hour session of technical questions), they offered me the job. I was particularly impressed with the technical component of the interview process — though they were designed to test me, the questions themselves allowed me to learn more about the company as well.

I initially accepted their offer and went to go talk with RD2 about it. As it turns out, RD2 returned with a more compelling offer. Above all, I was drawn to RD2’s design-focused approach to web development. Working for them, I’d have the chance to work with many different designs over the course of a year (and not just a single company’s branding). In any case, I started with RD2 last Tuesday (after the Independence Day weekend) and I can see myself staying there for a while.

I’ve been busy with work (which is a good thing, I suppose), and so I haven’t been able to write many entries recently. I’m working as contractor for rd2 (yeah, they always seem to write it in lowercase). The name “rd2” outlines their development process, “Research, Design, Develop”, and the company was started by a friend of mine who worked at Hybrid with me.

The company is relatively small, and I enjoy that type of environment. I’m doing front-end coding for them and I’m able to work from home most days as well. It looks like a decent company and I’m pleased with how it’s working out so far.

Free trade seems to be moving forward, but the government hedges its bets — under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers can get benefits if their jobs have been moved overseas. Unless you’re a programmer:

Under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002, workers whose jobs have moved overseas can be eligible for a battery of extra assistance, including income support, job training, tax credits for health insurance, and job search and relocation allowances. Some older workers can even receive a temporary income subsidy, a form of “wage insurance,” which helps cushion the financial blow when a new job pays much less than the old one. For instance, if you go from writing code for computers at $50 an hour to selling them retail at a computer superstore for $10 an hour.

But Fusco and his fellow IBM employees who petitioned for the benefits were repeatedly denied. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration determined that programmers like Fusco do not qualify, because of the nature of what they’d produced on their old jobs: software. The government cited commerce and trade rules that classify software as a “service” and “not a tangible commodity,” rather than an “article” as the trade act stipulates. […]

I’m not sure how I feel about this one. Sure, I have sympathy for workers whose jobs were offshored, but wouldn’t they be eligibile for unemployment benefits anyhow? That aside, I do find it a bit odd that programming is considered a service rather than a product — I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion :-/.

Via Terry Labach’s quotation-of-the-day mailing list, I was amused by this report of some over-zelous layoffs at the Pickering A nuclear station in the UK:

“Personnel being laid off should not be assigned to work that is
associated with a special safety system.”

— from a report by a line manager at the Pickering A nuclear power
plant in Ontario. The report describes how, 14 minutes into a
risky repair job, the staff performing the work were laid off. The
workers began leaving the site and had to be asked back to tighten
a plug they had loosened in the plant's radioactive-containment
system.

Considering that it’s a nuclear plant, you would have figured that they would have thought that through. I suppose not ;).