Kyle Dickerson – Page 130 – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

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.

Easter!

April 4, 2010 1:56 pm

We, of course, colored eggs during Conference on Saturday:

And the Easter Bunny visited before the first session of Conference, and snuck in between sessions to hide the real eggs. Jess had fun finding the hidden candy.

Jess couldn’t find the last egg or piece of candy…

Then it was time to find baskets, which were more rigorously hidden. I found mine in a box:

Jess found hers on the shelf in the closet:

Yah, definitely stolen

March 26, 2010 7:45 pm

This evening I was cleaning raw chicken so we could bag it and freeze it. When I was done I went to throw away the remnants and to my surprise found a suspiciously new-looking laptop, slightly busted up and sitting in the dumpster on top of everything else:

The protective plastic on the top of the lid was still adhered, and it has fairly decent specs with a “Windows 7” sticker. It doesn’t look worn, just busted. The little pink sticker on it has the date 3-21-10, the words “Best Buy”, and the number 134 (the enhanced image of the sticker is on the left):

It just so happens that the closest Best Buy, in Dublin, is store number 134. Seems to me that someone stole a display model laptop, managed to bust it up, and decided to throw it out (which is illegal in and of itself due to the e-recycling laws). The thief destroyed the screen, but was apparently not smart enough to take out the RAM, or hard drive, or DVD drive, or battery and try to sell them.

I called the police department and reported it. They were supposed to be sending an officer by to pick it up sometime this evening, but it’s 10:00 now and I don’t think they’re coming (** Update: The officer came by and picked it up, and it was the same officer Jess did a ride-along with for her training. **). It looks like this model is currently retailing for about $500. Jess won’t let me mess with it anymore (after looking to see if the RAM and hard drive were there), but maybe the person was also stupid enough to take some pictures of themselves with the integrated webcam before breaking it.