Blog Purpose

I'm finding myself shy on things to write about these days. Historically that's only happened when I had a girlfriend, someone to listen to all of my stories. I'm single now. It's been a pretty long dry spell since I dated anyone, and a really long time since I've been in a relationship that involved the "L" word.I think a big part of my lack of blog motivation is that I feel like I finally understand who I am ever since I realized that I need to be needed. I've known where I want to go for a really long time.

I've always blogged so that people reading what I write won't feel as alone in the way they see things.Now, I'm not sure I have any further insight to offer. I don't proclaim to have figured out everything, but I feel like I've got a really good handle on myself. I look back at my posts and I see that the things I find myself wanting to write about are really just repeats of things I've already said. Maybe it's time to take a break from this too?

For Not Fencing

I sure seem to be "involved" a lot more with fencing than I thought I'd be lately. I have fencers asking for references to be refs at club nationals, fencers asking me what events to go to, I'm redirecting requests for me to ref in Inidana, I'm wearing fencing shoes as my street shoes, I even had a fencing shirt on today.

Wine Wedneday

Tonight I had the unique opportunity to bring together many parts of my SF life into one room. I invited Lara, from my old job at Jobvite, and Rosey, who I met at Microsoft Bay.NET meetings, and Sarah, who is part of my Euchre group. Rosey also brought Dave, Shaun, and her roomie Fiona.We went ot a wine bar on Grant St. that I've been wanting to go to ever since I first got to San Fran, called Rouge & Blanc.

Conversation ranged from work to Europe, to hip-hop in the Republican party. Everyone had a chance to talk and listen. Sometimes the whole group would listen to one person's story, and sometimes there were three conversations going on between six people. I loved it because everyone, despite not knowing each other before hand, got along very well. By the end of the night we were talking about where to go the next week! So we're heading to the Press Club, where they have the wines of several wineries, and it's really a wine-tasting place. I feel really good about having a small group that wants to get together on an ongoing basis.

Impatient

Yesterday, it was pointed out to me that I need to be patient (in the context of work). But I think the concept probably applies to more [all?] areas of my life.I kinda disagree that I'm impatient, because my spin on it is that I "have a low tolerance for inefficiency".  It's inefficient for me to wait till I'm 16 to drive if I posses the needed qualities and knowledge at 15. It's inefficient to have to have three people sign a document, when only one of those signatures really matters. It's inefficient for me to write code when you can buy a polished product for less money than my time would cost. I don't think it is efficient for me to go to a bar and wade through the girls who are dating already, and the girls who are not what I want, just to get to the one in the room who will go on a few dates with me and then tell me I'm "nice".

OK, I need to stop because I'm getting complainy. But seriously, a lot of things should work better, and they don't and it's dumb. And so that view makes me impatient.

Today

I spent the better part of today in a non-work meeting. I've been having more of these lately than... well more than the none I had before, so it's infinitely more. Today's was tied to a group of people who are interested in doing agile software development for non-profits. This becomes even more interesting when you understand that the group is comprised of people from the BayAPLN (which I attend). The acronym stands for Agile Project Leadership Network. The translation is that I'm usually one of two or three developers/engineers, and everyone else is a project manager or a program manger, or is somehow removed from the coding part of the development process.

What threw me for a loop in the chartering meeting today was that overwhelingly, this group of nineish project leaders and one engineer (me) said it wanted this new organization to offer development as it's primary service.  Going in, I had expected this group to say that its primary service was to help non-profits develop a better process for delivering value through the use of Agile and occasionally using software as a vehicle for that goal.

So now I feel very cautious. I still think that this can work out to be the volunteer opportunity I wanted, but, it is going to take some additional effort on my part to ensure that the worker to manager ratio is balanced. Which translates to me going in to work and asking people to volunteer. Which means I have to do some growing before Monday.

Having Cake

This is  whiney post. If you don't want to hear me whine, do not read on. It's unjustified complaints because my life really is good, and so I really ought to be thankful, but I want to get this off my chest if only to better assess my mental state.

I'm a little burnt out from the week. Going from sleeping till 4 in he afternoon to waking up at 7 was shock enough. I also had all the regular stresses about starting a new job, wondering if they're still happy with me (turns out they probably are, since I'm working with a client starting next week). Then I also had something in the evening every day this week, and the earliest I got home was 10:30, some nights were almost midnight. So if nothing else I've been shy on sleep. The fun continues this weekend with more meetings and a euchre tournament.

Also draining on my emotions is the aftermath of this weekend. I had a really fun time with Denise and since I wear my heart on my sleeve these days I was hoping it would turn into something more. As you might guess, it is turning into a friendship. I feel like I should be heart broken, but I also feel like it was just one date, so I shouldn't feel anything at all. Essentially I just feel confused on what I should feel. I know I'm starting to feel jaded about being "a nice guy" or "a great guy" because I find myself saying, "How can I be a jack ass slime ball for a change?!?!" I don't really want to be that either, I really just want to be "the right guy", that's all really.

Job Day 3 (and 2)

This will probably be the end of my daily blog posting about work, just FYI. So far days two and three have been challenging and rewarding. On day 2 I played my first game of Pivotal ping pong on the company table and managed to get wounded (just a blister from a small collision). They take their ping pong seriously and I had never really played doubles before with actual "rules".

I have been working on the Pivots project, which is an internal project that supplies all the content to http://pivotallabs.com. While it may not get as much love as it deserves since it is internal, it is kinda super important because it's our face to the world. BTW Jon, I don't know when they'll take my picture, probably when I least expect it. I've been working with Benny and we've learned to do things like install new versions of IDEs, and upgrade the unit test engine the project uses (which created some nastiness because things were suddenly not done in the right order). We hunted down some old user data. And we even did some performance monitoring because the page loads are a little poky right now.

Tuesday night I chimed in on an email thread (they use the corporate version of GMail FTW) about the difference between defects and bugs and which ones should be assigned costs to them. The pair programming has been great because it is so easy to stay focused and feel productive. I saw pairs giving each other high fives all over the office every day. Any former coworker of mine can tell you that I'd fit right in on that alone.

The work day goes from 9-6 so the last two days have been long because i went straight from work to outside meetings and haven't really been home before 10:30pm. I'm thinking that's a sign I need to cut back on what I do so I can get some R&R built into the schedule. But the food there is still amazing. This morning I had a huge sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich that was like eating many bites of breakfast heaven. My friend, Davis, is also back in the office, so I feel extra at home.

At the end of the work day today I was introduced to my new team. I think it'll be 6 people total and we'll be adding in some search functionality, and some polish along with some other things to get it ready for a private beta the week after. I don't know how much else I can say here, so I'll leave it at that. I was also kind of excited today to find out Pivotal had a hand in building Urban Dictionary, so if I have the approved opportunity to share some pre-release user accounts, I'll be sure to let you know!

P.S. On day one I got a Pivotal hoodie, pull over, and t-shirt. Tomorrow is gonna be a t-shirt day I think.

Work: Day One

Work was great today, even though my pair, Benny, may have worried about it. It was kind of different than most products because we're working on something internal, so it is just us and there wasn't a hand-off process. Our product owner was out of the office too. And Benny is a contractor, so using a Mac is just as new to him as it is to me.

But Benny does know Rails, so I learned a bit about RoR from him today. We also kind of had to bother our environment to make it cooperate. We're using RubyMine, which looks to be a great product, but it's still in alpha, so you get all the funess that goes with non-stable software with features in flux.

High notes for the day: We did complete a story. That's good work for a first day I think. I got all my account info and everything seems to work so far. Lunch involved going to King of Thai and a really good conversation about government subsidies on things like telephones and internet to rural areas where the demand is too low to make it profitable. When I described it to Kevin he said "sounds like people are really good friends there", which is really the truth, they can disagree productively. The food supply is AMAZING. And, #1 point of the day, Rob, my boss, and head of the entire company's workings, came over after Benny told him of our woes, and Rob made sure I was ok in a way that gave me the sense that he actually cared. It was huge. I <3 Pivotal Labs.

Delicious Drinkage

I was feeling celebratory and the Dickersons treated me to a meal that I had planned to pay for, so I decided to extend the celebration, that we should try making Skittles infused vodka that I saw in my Google Reader.

From Valentine's Day 2009

So we grabbed the ingredients from the store and we were on our way to a weekend long project. The jist of the process is combine roughly 10 skittles per 1oz of vodka, shake, let the candy dissolve overnight, filter through a coffee filter, drink. The details can be found in the link above.

Results:

1. It was way fun to make and just the right amount of monkey business. I wonder if there's a kids drink you could do this to?


2. The mason jars worked well for shaking. The tutorial also suggested old water bottles, but Lauren loves glass jars, so this worked out.


3. Just filtering once seemed ok by me. Some were a little thick by vodka standards, but none were like a slurry.


4. I want to invest in the flasks that they suggested from The Container Store. The mason jars just don't pour very well. I also kinda wanted a hip flask just to carry with me to the various events this weekend, or perhaps on the train ride home.


5. The red vodka alone tasted like cough medicine, not great for shots. The purple tasted like Dimeatap when combined with Sprite. NONE were very good when combined with regular Coke (and resulted in a beverage that looked like granny poo). Lemon (Yellow) and Lime (Green) went excellently with Sprite. I suspect Orange would go well with a citrus juice.


6. 2oz of infused vodka with 6oz of sprite (8oz glasses) was just about perfect. You couldn't taste the vodka, but you could sustain an entertaining level of intoxication for a solid evening without being wrecked the next day.

All in all it was a fun project and a great way to spend time with friends. I also got suggestions to try this with Jolly Ranchers, which I suspect would not require the filter step. other suggestions from places I've beenand the internet include things that don't sound great, like peppers and pickles. If this continues to be fun I may start making gifts out of this.

Job Offer 2 - When it rains, it pours

Friday on my way to Sacramento, I got a second job offer, this one from Pivotal Labs. I had been trying to get a job with Pivotal since November after my initial meeting with Davis, and later with Davis and several Pivots (Pivotal employees). The quality of the work environment they depicted was amazing. They pair program, they rotate pairs daily, they pair with the client, they do Test Driven Development (TDD), they devlop in Java and Ruby on Rails (RoR). They do their work on giant iMacs so both people working can see the screen.

They als o do brown bag lunches that I make it a point to attend when I could and it's exciting to see a company that is willing to open its door that way. They also offer breakfast, like catered breakfast crepes for example, EVERY MORNING as an incentive to be there at 9:05AM for the daily stand up meeting.

The people I've paired with are very communicative, and very into what they do while also being knowledge workers, people who you can trust to make decisions.

To top it all off, I was offered 25% more salary, 50% more vacation time, plus vision and dental plans over GoodBarry's offer. There's no way I could say "no" to Pivotal. During the interview they alluded that this is not the environment for many people, that it can be overwhelming to work so closely with the customer, and share a desk with another developer, and that burn out happens to many. While I do tend to throw myself into work easil, I suspect that I will not burn out for any of those reasons. I like people too much, I like sharing knowledge. I like challenges. I expect to be a happy employee here for a long time.

P.S. I start today!

My Belief System

At the very base of what I believe about myself is that my purpose, everyone's purpose, is to be happy. It stems from my belief that when I die, that's it. So if there's nothing before life, nothing after, there's just life. It seems wasteful to live it any other way than happily, so that must be the point.

"Happiness isn't real unless it is shared." This means that living happily alone is a falacy. You have to be part of a group, to share your life, to be part of a community in order for your happiness to carry any weight. This means that you must compromise and sacrifice at times, in order to remain a part of that community. What you lose in happiness, you gain in validation that your happiness is real.

Struggle is necessary for happiness.

I need to be needed.

Job Offer

Today I got a job offer. To answer the rest of your questions in order: It's with a company called GoodBarry which a re-brand of a product created by Business Catalyst. It's small, maybe 12-15 people total, with an office here in SF and one in Sydney, Australia. I'll be a mid-level software engineer programming in .NET. There's a pool table in the SF office, which I plan to use the hell out of. The guy I'll report to was key over at Pageflakes.com. I could start as early as Tuesday next week. And yes, I'm excited.

In the short term, I'm excited that I won't have to sell my Wii or kiteboarding gear, both which were up for grabs previously in an attempt to buy more time. Though learning Ruby on Rails would have been exciting, I am excited to be working in a language I'm comfortable with. I'm excited to hopefully learn more about large-scale architecture in applications. Till now I've worked on projects that had minimal server load, or it was taken care of by someone else.

Long term, I'm excited to be working again. I mentioned that my work doesn't define me, but working is part of who I am. I need to be busy, and though I've done a good job of being involved in the APLN and the Microsoft Bay.NET groups, when it comes to consistency, you can't beat a 9-5er. I hope to form a good working relaitonship with the people at GoodBarry quickly so that I can also enjoy that work-place-friendship that I craved in my downtime.

Tonight, I went to IHOP and had a stack of chocolate chip pancakes to celebrate. I breathed a sigh of relief as I poured chocolate syrup on top. I realized that being unemployed has led me to take far fewer financial risks, and I think that's also carried over to non-money-related risks that I normally would take. I feel like I haven't been my normal adventurous self since the end of November. I forsee that version of Will returning shortly after a few paychecks.

About ten days ago I wondered if I was jobless because I needed to learn somethings about myself. It was that thought which opened my mind to reading the thoughts of the Dalai Lama on the subject of work. He reaffirmed what I already knew, that work is largely as good or as bad as I choose it to be.  This job may not have been where I started my job search, but there's no reason it can't be great; I think that was a big part of what I needed to cement in my head.

I also learned that it is helpful to create energy around possible job opportunities. At first my job status was something I only talked to a few people about, most of whom lived outside of San Fran. Eventually enough people knew what I was trying to do and kept asking for status updates that I started posting the news on facebook, which got everyone involved. The life you all breathed into me came across when I interviewed because i wasn't just me that wanted the job, but it was like everyone with me wanted that job. It's easy to be great in an interview when you have a cheering section. There was a woman at my parents' church who had me in her thoughts, someone I never met, I hope that she finds work soon too.

That's my job news. I should get the written offer tomorrow. Thank you for all of your support.

Self Identity and Self Worth

I thought for sure I had once written a post about how, on dating sites, people identify themselves by their profession. Now I can't find that post. Anyway, the idea was that a person may say "I am a lawyer downtown." as their opening line, but if you take away the profession of lawyer from the universe, there is hopefully still a full person left behind. Who is this person? Does he enjoy debate? Does he seek the truth? Does he feel wronged by society? To me, this person knows what he does, but he does not understand who he is. Therefore, he cannot understand why he chooses to do the things he does.

Today, if you ask me who I am it would be more correct for me to say, "I am William Leleand Read", than it would for me to say anything else. I am a person who enjoys company at a meal, and seeks to learn new things, who strives for happiness in self and those around me... But I didn't always answer this way.

From 2000 to maybe 2006 or 2007 I was a fencer (or a ref, or a coach, or a club owner, but it was fencing related). My identity and fencing were so intertwind that when things went poorly in fencing, everything went poorly. When something threatened my ability to fence, my own concept of self was a risk, or so it seemed. If someone did a poor job of running a tournament, they instantly found themselves on my shit list. If someone quit fencing, it was incredibly hard for me to keep up a friendship with him or her because I no longer had anything in common with that person, or so I felt. If some family event conflicted with fencing, I internally questioned how they could expect me to make such a choice.

Conversely, when things were up in fencing, things were way up in Will-land. If I ran a tournament that brought in hundreds of fencers or thousands of dollars in club funds, or even just got compliments form the participants, I'd be on top of the world. Nothing could harm me if the latest beginner class had a high turn out. I'm sure at those times, Will Read the fencer was a lot of fun to be around.

I don't think I fully understood how much my identity and fencing were connected until I first withdrew from my fencing home and moved to Cincinnati. I made trips back to Lafayette to "check up on my clubs" almost every month. I felt lonely and out of place because the local club in Cinci didn't recognize me for the fencer I thought myself to be. Ultimately I moved back to Lafayette to fence full time, and it was then that I knew what I was without needing to change.

I wonder now if I could go back through my blog entires and see myself taking the steps to separate my identity from fencing. Somewhere along the lines I remember making a list of things I had been wanting to do ever since I got out of college. Things like "learn to dance" and "take a glass class" were on the list and when I asked myself why I hadn't done them, the answer always came back to one thing: fencing. I was at that point a fencer who wanted to be a William Leland Read.

In June of 2008, I left fencing. I don't know if I will ever be able to safely maintain an independent identiy and still hold a foil. That day may come eventually, but that day is not today. I write this because I worry about some of my fencers who appear to be heading down my path, a path I no doubt led them to. My hope is not that they quit fencing, but that they recognize where they are, and can use the advanced notice to strike a healthy balance in their own life that I could not.

The Art of Happiness at Work

I'm reading The Art of Happiness at Work by by Dalai Lama,  Howard C Cutler which is mostly a dialoge between the fourteenth Dalai Lama and Mr. Cutler. Both Susan and Art suggested I read this book, as well as the predecessor, The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living after my post on The Goodness of People. The truth is that I downloaded an audio book from the SF Library, and I must say that I am surprised by how similar my views and understands of human behavior are in line with those of the Dalai Lama. I am not saying that I am ready to accept the idea of Karma, or reincarnation, but I certainly intend to do more research into the Dalai Lama.

Raw Spaghetti

I love eating the stuff, the way it goes crunch crunch crunch in my mouf mouf mouf. I also kinda like how when I'm just eating a single noodle, it kinda makes me look like a country bumpkin with a long piece of wheat sticking out of mouth.

Unemployed Sick Day at No Cost

I woke up at 8:30am today to be able to answer a 9am phone call from my recruiter at TekSystems. She's got a job for me working at a company called GoodBarry (my phone screen interview with GoodBarry is on Monday). I had some waffles with syrup and immediately felt nauseated. So I turned on USA and laid out on my couch.

It was a waste of a day in many aspects because I didn't get much done, but when I thought about it, today was nice because I didn't have to ask for a sick day. I just called up myself and said "Hey self, I'm feeling sick and thought I'd stay home." Works out nicely because I would have been staying home anyway aside from a few errands around town.

But I also miss working. I miss adding value to something bigger than myself. I miss having work friends who roll their eyes and shake their head at me. I miss all the things that evn working form home couldn't get me. I miss being part of a group I guess.