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Wednesday, January 29, 2003 ( 10:53 AM ) iggry Work Yesterday I ended up spending the day implementing the latest type library that my coworker gave me, so today, I get a fresh start with a clean app, and continue my mission for yesterday. I also managed to volunteer to become the software librarian :-). InshaAllah, I want to keep getting more work in the Sys admin area for the office, because our office really needs it. This is just so long as management realizes that we need it, and that it takes time. My son is sick today :-( He is staying home form school, and being a poor fuzzy (fussy) lil' boy. # Tuesday, January 28, 2003 ( 8:51 AM ) iggry Work My mission for the day... Continue to add DB connection to form to show price list, and send information to discount server. Apply discount results, Add textbox for quantity input, and calculate final price based on selection, discount, and quantity. # Monday, January 27, 2003 ( 4:34 PM ) iggry Happy Monday Work Today I was in a 7 hour CMM level 3 required meeting?!?. CMM, Capibility Maturity Model, is a methodology developed by the Carnigie Institute and a status that rates companies in their effectness in documenting, and repeating performance. Government agencies require a certain level of documentation in order to bid for contracts in areas such as health care, defense, and chemicals. The meeting elaborated on my responsibility, as a developer, in maintaining our current rating. Alhumdulillah, that is over with *sigh*. Now it is off to Delphi, where I need to put a query on my form to pull prices from the database. Hope everyone has a good day! # Friday, January 24, 2003 ( 5:31 PM ) iggry Friday It's Friday!!!!! We got great comments today during the Proof of Concept demo! Alhamdulillaahi rabbil 'alameen, My son did wonderful in the District Spelling bee. He lasted through 5 rounds, and there were only seven students left when he was eliminated, and the whole time, he was cool, calm, and collected. I was spelling with the kids, and I would have been out in the third round. I spelled the words with some of the students (silently of course), we both spelled the word the same way, and the judges still held up the red flag. I was thinking "wait a minute it is spelled ARGUEMENT... isn't it?" Humph, I think the judges made a mistake because they clearly didn't know how to spell argument correctly ;-). # ( 4:20 PM ) iggry Work Sorry this is a note to myself to timesheet tracking :) Assignment for the day... Add fuel grade buttons to Cat server to determine price (show price, and grade on form, add button to select grade, and determine price based on grade. Today, I worked on creating a Cat Server client, to simulate 6 fuel pumps. I modified the CC verification so that the bulk of the code resided in a function, and I start working on querying the database for fuel prices. I also reviewed documentation, and corrected some document. I also spent an hour in the lab copying our work to an isolated environment for testing purposes. Yesterday, A consulant left, that had been with the company for 12 years! He was the first one in our office, and now he's gone... He was shocked by what had transpired. We had an hour meeting with the branch manager to discuss how the company was doing, and additional projects down the pipeline. I spent 7 hours working on documentation for my project. I created a processdiagram, and a proof of concept powerpoint presentation showing how the different programs will interact with each other. I had lunch with our sales rep at Tomatillo's. Mmm, free lunch, and spicy Mexican food :-) # Tuesday, January 21, 2003 ( 7:58 PM ) iggry Delphi is evil I'm still at work! My teammate set me an updated version of the prototype we are working on, and it isn't compiling on my workstation. This is to irritating! We have set up a dcom server to communicate with a remote program, and in the process overloaded a procedure to take one or no argument. He stayed up all night to get it to work at home, and now is here with me trying to get it to work at the office... *grumble* I am on my 11th hour, and not planning on staying too much longer though. # ( 1:38 PM ) iggry New Years Blog Resolution Eeks, I started 3 of the past five entries with Wow... I'm getting sloppy! Sorry :-) I need to start adding titles like I was before, and to be more careful of the presentation... Alas, we are required to keep track of our daily activities, so there will probably be a section appearing so I can look back, and validate my existence to my managers *Blah* As an aside, we had our yearly kick-off meeting last week. The CEO and COO visited the branch, and discussed our vision for the year, and changes that will be implemented from last year. It was an interesting meeting, but too long! The COO did most of the talking, discussing what markets we were in, and where we were going. Someone in my office asked a question, and said Yada yada yada. The company president proudly announced, did you know yada was yiddish for knowledge? He strutted around like a proud rooster after saying that. He also started dancing when someone's Cell phone started playing HoeDown. Part of his attractiveness to potential clients is his boyish charm backed by the intensity which he presents the company and values... For now, I enjoy the company because it encourages healthy work ethics, and it is still managing to grow in this soured economy. # ( 1:27 PM ) iggry Happy Tuesday! I had Monday blah's yesterday, and ended up catching up on e-mail, and working on Delphi. Alhumdulillah I had a good weekend though. I took my kids to watch Spy Kids II. They enjoyed it more than the first one, and I thought it was a cute movie. (OK, we waited until it got to the dollar theater...It wasn't worth full price like say, LOTR or Harry Potter.... but Three dollars vs $21, we get to eat out also and the kids enjoy it more.) Sunday was lazy for me. I stayed home, cleaned house, and read Delphi while wifey took the kids to Madressa. I miss the adult lectures, but they have cancelled them this year, so I didn't miss much. Hey, I cooked Haleem Sunday! Mmmm, it is delicious. # Monday, January 13, 2003 ( 9:30 AM ) iggry I guess my blog has slowed down with my job change... I am having to readjust my schedule and sleeping habits back to a more normal life :-) My first week as a programmer has gone well. We have the project kick-off meeting in 20 minutes, where I will get my assignments, and see the project plan, so Alhumdulillah all is well. This weekend, we went to a friends house, and Alhumdulillah they had a lot of delicious food! They served Chana, Goat curry, Kabob, Basmati Rice, Lemon Pepper Catfish, corn, asparagus.... Mmmm. Our kids played basically well together. Their kids are adorable, but alas, mine decided to pick on each other. As long as they were apart, they behaved, but they are going through this phase where it is not good for them to be in the same room together :-(. Sunday, I went to Madressa for the first time in a long time. There aren't any classes for me any more, actually, there is one class, but it is in Urdu. I guess about a quarter of the people speak it, but most of us dont. They also have Arabic classes in Urdu. There was an argument during Zuhur, so all in all I don't feel like I have been missing anything much by skipping. Last year, there were three classes in english, Deen, Seerah, and Tafsir, and I miss attending them. After Madressa, we shared a plate at the masjid, and I took everyone home, then went to my parents house to install a CD-RW they got for Christmas. # Thursday, January 09, 2003 ( 12:34 PM ) iggry I've been a delphi programmer for 4 days! We turned in our assignments yesterday, and the staff expert said he thought I was one of the top canidates in understanding the material, and code. Now I'm scared, because I answered the questions based on the comments, and not the code! I have no doubt that I can learn it, and come up to speed, it's just I don't want to set the wrong expectation... My background has always been server administration, and very light programming, so the aspect of working on this project is daunting. I lay awake at night wondering if i will be able to pick it up fast enough, and what will happen if I don't. At the railroad, the customer service department has 3 desks per person now, and anyone with less than 23 years in the union was laid off. I dislike what the current government has done to the economy, and in bringing us into a recession. Maybe it is time to get out of consulting, and find a nice 'stable' work environment, if only I could find a company that isn't laying people off. Oh, well, so much for worrying... Gotta get work deciphering this code. # Tuesday, January 07, 2003 ( 7:48 AM ) iggry Wow First day done at my new assignment. My project manager visited and asked if I had exercises ready. I asked what exercises. I told him I had been working though the examples in the book, but I had been skipping the end-of-chapter questions becuase they felt too much like homework :-) He laughed at that, then asked me to do them for Chapters 1 to 10, or at least as much as I could humanly get done in a reasonable amount of time. So Alhumdulillah, I got though about half of them. I feel like I am already a week behind though! ARGHHHHH!!! Other people in the office are fondly calling him the slave master, but to be more politically correct, I down graded it to task-master. (We have PC sensitive managers) All in all it was a good day. # Sunday, January 05, 2003 ( 5:36 PM ) iggry Well, this morning was my last day at the railroad... I had trouble sleeping Saturday (I finally got 2 hours sleep), and I was off to work at 11:00pm, and so sleepy. What is it about sleep that makes it so nice to do it at night? I always assumed 3rd shift workers were like vampires. Anyway, co-worker was remorseful, but I was dead. I dozed off a coule of times to his amusement. It was quiet so all's good. Ha, I got to wake up my manager one last time, when xpath broke (A communications software package between an IBM mainframe, and UNIX using SNA). I put my badge and access card in my manager's desk drawer and left. This was my 9th client site, and it still feels wierd on the last day to leave people with whom you have gotten familiar. I saw these people 40-50 hours a week for the past 19 months, and now I am closing the door on that part of my life, and moving to the next... It was fun working at the railroad, inspite of the night hours, the job was non-stressful, we made a good team. Who knows, I may be back again as they continue to move to Omaha... Heh, my co-worker gave me a going away present! We have often discussed what we watched on TV, and he felt that I really needed to experience the Cartoon Channel. So He recorded 5 hours of Sponge Bob Squarepants, and the Fairly Odd parents. I played Monopoly with my kids yesterday, and my youngest one is crafty! I owned over half the board, but I consistantly landed on the orange properties, and he kept taking all my money! So I never could keep enough money to build on it, and he kept putting more houses on his property. It was a fun game though, an I enjoyed watching him. I look forward to going to bed tonight. It will be my first of many nights, being able to sleep and not worry about waking up for work! Good night everyone, and pleasant dreams! # Friday, January 03, 2003 ( 3:52 AM ) iggry Argh, i got caught! A server went down last night, and I rebooted it. I guess I was hoping that no one would notice, but our monitering system caught it, and a engineer checked the monitoring system, called my manager, and started asking questions. Well, alas, I didn't create a log entry, so my manager was clueless, and has no recourse but to send an e-mail to me asking what was up. So I am caught red-handed and guilty of making the group look bad :-( I knew I should have logged it, but the server goes down like 5 times a day because of a known bug and no one has fixed it yet. Oh Well, the philosophy of the team is that we are human, and make mistakes, so he is understanding. But I still feel guilty for putting him in a difficult position. Heh, only 2.5 days left :-) I'm suspose to be extra good, and leave on a happy note. I was told today that if the opportunity came up, the would contact my company first, and ask for me back, and here I go being careless. It makes me feel like pond scum. If anyone needs me, I will be hiding under the desk, sulking, and reading delphi.... # Thursday, January 02, 2003 ( 2:09 AM ) iggry Happy New Year!I went to my parents for New Years Eve, but we all wimped out, and I left at 10:30pm. (They drove home from Colorado the night before, so they were exhausted). Alhumdulillah, it was a quiet night. I ended up spending about an hour on their computer cleaning it up. When finished, their network connection was much faster... YEAH, we went to a Malay open house today. Lots of delicious food :-) We had goat curry, briyani, chicken, and a type of salad with peanut sauce (sorry, I forgot what it was called, but it is similar to Roja with rice cubes instead of noodles). By the hostess' request, Wifey made Lasgana, which disappeared quickly :) Two male students came, and met the group for the first time... It was wierd, becuase they both tried to shake everyone's hand. They reached for my wife's hand and she withdrew her hands, smiled at him, and shook her head no. I'm so proud of her! So many times, I interview with a lady, and she tries to shake my hand. Sometimes I get away, and sometimes I forget and then feel guilty about it later. Wifey is always firm, and consistent. I have mixed emotions right now... It happens everytime I go to an open house. By living in the U.S. I am able to provide a lot of financial support to my in-laws in Malaysia, save for retirement, and prepare for my kids upcoming tuition. But we were talking today, and one family is going to go home at the end of 2003, another one plans to leave in 2004, two families have already left, and so our circle of friends is growing thinner... Sorry, 5 more days to finish my delphi book, so off to read... # |
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