Author: Kyle Dickerson

Florida Part 2

May 16, 2010 10:07 am

Our original plan was to go to Epcot on Thursday. But, seeing how we didn’t get to the hotel until 2:30-3:00am we ditched that plan and slept in. We spent the day relaxing and recovering from traveling.

We eventually got up and went to lunch at Chick-Fil-A. Jess was very excited since the closest Chick-Fil-A to us in California is about 30 minutes away. It was very tasty and probably the best service I’ve ever seen at a fast food restaurant. After lunch it was back to the hotel for more rest and relaxation.

The hotel we’re staying at is on a resort property which has a miniature golf course. Nothing fancy, but something to do for fun. So we played a round.IMGP1816As we walked back to our hotel room we discovered that the little covered bridge on the property was lit up. So we stopped to take some pictures.IMGP1854The rest of the Dickersons, all of whom also participated in this trip to Florida, had spent the day at Magic Kingdom. We met up with them at the house they’re staying at to celebrate Chad’s birthday.

That was pretty much the entirety of our second day. It was quite nice to just kick back and relax. So we were all rested up and ready to go for day three: launch day.

Florida Part 1

May 13, 2010 9:45 am

So… We drove down to Sunnyvale and left our car at Mike’s house and took Caltrain to BART to SFO. That took about 1.5 hours. Then we went through security and waited at our gate. Our plane was delayed, apparently because of a mechanical issue in Salt Lake. But it wasn’t delayed much. So we flew to Salt Lake and found that our connecting flight was already boarding. So we power-walked through the airport and grabbed some slices of Sbarro so that we’d have some real food to eat (we also packed all sorts of snacks into our carry-on bags, and we didn’t check any bags, but those slices of pizza would soon prove necessary). So we got to our next gate and attempted to board to find out that they had run out of carry-on space so we had to plane-side check our bags. So despite not having any bags to check we still had to wait at the baggage claim when we got to Orlando.

The flight wasn’t too bad, we watched The Abyss on my laptop which killed about 4 hours. However, our backs are still a bit tweaked from the service project on Saturday, so sitting on the plane wasn’t a bunch of fun.

We arrived in Orlando and went to the baggage claim. Our bags showed up fairly quickly and then we went down to the Thrify rental car desk. There were about 25 people in line and 2 people working the desk and I think it really took them about 20 minutes per customer. It was pretty ridiculous. Eventually a third employee showed up which helped. It took about an hour. So by this time it was 1:00am.

The employee had given us a little map telling us to go out to the area labeled “Economy”, as it was labeled on our map. Well, they don’t actually have an area labeled “Economy”. So I eventually found another employee who said they don’t have economy cars and they were out of compact cars so we should pick one of the SUVs or minivans in the mid-size section. Well, we didn’t want to drive an SUV or minivan in an unfamiliar area. There was, however, a compact sitting off by itself in an unlabeled area. Since Jess has to do all the driving I was letting/making her make the decision. But the lack of sleep, and frustration and stress of traveling was getting to us both and things were looking grim.

An employee drove by, apparently done with his shift, and asked if we needed help. We told him our problem and he said that the compact was available, but seemed confused that we wouldn’t want the “free upgrade” to a mid-size. So we took the compact, a thoroughly unimpressive Chevy Cobalt. But we’d rather be driving that than a big honking SUV or minivan.

Now it was time to start off for the hotel. Placing too much faith in magical electronics I hadn’t looked up any specific directions because we brought our GPS. Well, the GPS had no hope of getting a signal inside the airport or the parking garage. So we started driving out of the airport “blind”. I did know we needed to go south-ish and west-ish. So we started following signs matching that plan which worked out fine. It only took about 5 minutes to pull up a solid signal.

We then discovered that to drive anywhere around Orlando you apparently have to pay $1.25 for every 8 miles. So we paid a toll. Drove 8 miles on the same road. Paid another toll. Drove 2-3 miles and exited. And paid another toll. We finally arrived at our hotel, Holiday Inn Express at Summer Bay Resort. Which is actually fairly decent. We checked in around 2:00 and asked where we might find some 24-hour fast food. So we went to McDonald’s to get food. We drove back to the hotel and got to our room, ate ‘dinner’, and fell asleep.

We had originally planned to spend today at Epcot, but, since that plan also thought we’d get to the hotel by midnight (local, so only 9:00 our time), it was abandoned and we’ll push Epcot to Saturday. So this morning we slept in, and are watching the History channel.

Yup, I’m good at what I do

May 7, 2010 6:19 pm

I just want to make sure everyone knows that I’m good at what I do. I gave a presentation to our department about the new application our team has been working on. Before the presentation the department head presented me and my two coworkers with Silver Awards for the previous application we put together. A nice little recognition which comes with a monetary award of $350.

I then presented our new application designed for the use of many of the people in our department. An application which the software team has created 3 times previously over the last many years and which the department never really liked. This iteration was enthusiastically received by even the toughest critics in the group who, rather than detail why the application wasn’t going to work for them, said they liked it and requested some very small features which I then implemented by the end of the day. The department head later let us know that he was very pleased with the presentation and excited for us to get to the next application.

I feel pretty good. I researched and selected the Grails framework which we’re now using to make our small team of 3 (now 4 and soon to be 5) incredibly more productive. I designed and wrote the previous application and drove many of the choices which resulted in the positive reaction to the new application.

I’m really enjoying my job. My work is almost entirely autonomous. So I get to decide how I’m going to do things, solve interesting problems, recommend changes to critical design issues and create good, solid code. My boss is great and my coworkers are excellent as well.

Because of the nature of the job, I didn’t have a whole lot of information when I decided to accept the offer back in April 2009. I’m really glad I took the job at LLNL over the other offer I had. I don’t think I’d be nearly this autonomous or happy at the other company.

The only frustrating part that I deal with regularly (aside from personal email not being available at work, though they are running a pilot program to remove that block) is that I can’t write interesting blog posts about what I’m doing. (The other offer I had would have had the same restriction.) But the work is interesting and the impact is larger than I usually get to know. It’s not unusual to have my boss say something like “Someone was using that new application and they really liked it, but we can’t talk about what they were doing in this building.” And since I pretty much never go to the buildings where we could talk about it I end up not knowing. But applications that I wrote are being used on an international scale to help keep people safe. And that’s pretty cool.

A Book About Rabbits

April 30, 2010 7:06 pm

Jess and I both happen to have copies of Watership Down which neither of us had read yet. So we decided to read it at the same time. Turns out, it’s a book about rabbits. And as the author states in the Introduction (which Jess’ book has and mine does not) “I want to emphasize that Watership Down was never intended to be some sort of allegory or parable. It is simply the story about rabbits made up and told in the car.”

Regardless, I enjoyed it. I think it’s a fun story. It also leads to some interesting thoughts on the practice of trading freedom for security (in the case of the Efrafans) and trading one type of security for another (in the case of Cowslip’s warren).

Anyway, I’d recommend it. It was a quick read. My only complaint is when the author writes speech in a manner to convey the speaker’s accent. It mainly becomes hard to read and understand. If that’s the point, great, but if I’m supposed to be able to figure out what the character’s are saying, please just write it in normal English and say the character has an accent.

A day off…. sort of

April 5, 2010 2:48 pm

For whatever reason, today is a Lab holiday. So, what did I get to spend the day doing on my day off? Waiting around at the DMV of course. Trying to finally get the title change done for my car I went and waited for 2 hours. 2 hours so that I could hand the form to a person who looked at it, printed out something, stapled it together and said, “Your new title will be mailed to you.” Awesome. Well, at least they didn’t tell me I had to get some other random form signed.

I did manage to get some additional problems taken care of during that time though. Remember how I thought I had actually won when I called AT&T to complain about raising the price of our DSL? and then ended up with phone service which magically would lower our overall monthly bill? Well apparently the CSR I spoke to was ‘mistaken’ when she told me there was no activation fees. We got our first new bill last week which had an awesome $40 activation fee. Also, got a bill for our previous account which said “Final Bill”, but wasn’t pro-rating the DSL price for the partial month. So, based on the bills I had in hand, we were getting double-charged for the DSL service for 2 weeks.

So I called the customer support number listed on my bill. After waiting on hold the person I talked to asked me what state I was in and then said she’d have to transfer me to some other department that has access to California accounts. [Really? well, why don’t you list this magic other office on my California bill?]

Then I get to wait on hold for another 10 minutes. This person answers and says she’ll have to transfer me to the department that handles California Billing. [COME ON!]

Then I get to wait on hold again! So when Brandon picks up I ask what number this office is so I can avoid getting transferred in the future. He says he’s just at the regular nationwide customer service center at the number I originally called and has no idea why I was transferred twice. [Holy Crap AT&T! Get your act together!]

Brandon tells me that the CSR who made my accounts changes shouldn’t have told me there’d be no activation fee, but agrees to reverse the charge. He then tells me that the other bill I received that said “Final Bill” was really an “Initial Final Bill” and that I’d received a “Final Final Bill” with the pro-rated charge on it. And that even though the bill says my automatic payment will be debited on April 12, that it actually won’t. So we’ll see how that goes.

Then I got to call our insurance agent to change the policy to reflect the new title information. But Amica is quite good and I didn’t wait on hold and our agent had it taken care of very quickly.

So that’s been my day.

Jess got to go to U.S. Bank to try and determine why she keeps getting charged monthly fees for a free checking account. However, neither the people here nor the people at the branch that ‘owns’ her account in Utah had ever seen these charges or knew why she was getting them. So, how do you solve such a problem? Close the account and open a new one at the branch here in CA! Which will supposedly solve the problem.

Wooo. Fun times all around.