On the home front Karen is feeling very, very tired.  She’s escaped morning sickness per se, but not the general feeling of nausea.  It’s safe to say that she’s sick and tired of being sick and tired.  I read that this gets better soon.  That’s the plan, anyway.

The holiday season has gone relatively well, despite having to work more than I’d like.  I got to see my family and hang out with Karen’s family.  I ate a bit and gifts were exchanged.  Pretty standard fare, and I dug it.

Stephen needed some pictures of himself, his girlfriend and her daughter for a Christmas card, so I met him out at Forest Park and clicked the shutter button a few times.  I’ve not taken a lot of pictures lately, but this happens in the winter.  The shoot went well enough, I think – I’ve not heard bad things anyway.

I picked up Portal2, and that’s consumed a bit of discretionary time.  It’s tons of fun though.  Stephen and I have been playing the co-op version when we should be working.

And that’s about it, at the moment.  Tonight I am off to see a hockey game and next weekend I’m off to Colorado to poke around the high country.

I’m really enjoying grails development with IntelliJ.  I’d spent a non-trivial amount of time writing, or at least thinking of writing (I spend much more time thinking of doing things than I do actually doing them) a system that generates a skeleton application given some sort of XML configuration description (or something similar).  I thought Maven’s archetypes were the answer to this, but Grails does a wonderful job (within it’s scope, of course).  So, yeah, easy and pleasant so far.  My time spent playing with Adobe Flex is possibly wasted, given its forecasted imminent demise, but I have committed to giving a technical talk (to co-workers) on HTML 5, so I suppose I have somewhere to jump.

Speaking of spending more time thinking of stuff than actually doing stuff, I decided that it would behoove me to transition from thinking about getting some sort of daily exercise to actually doing it.  To that end I’ve decided to wander around Castlewood State Park at a brisk pace on a regular schedule.  So far I’ve done this once.  I’ll build on that momentum and do it again tomorrow.  Hopefully I can make a habit out of that.

Karen’s been feeling pretty un-well of late.  Her legs hurt, she’s nauseous, and her temperature regulation system is unstable.  I try to make her comfortable the best I can.

On the work front.  At the start of September (I think) I was asked to be a tech lead for this MasterCard project.  This would involve leading a team of three developers through a four week sprint to get a relatively small and easily understood project done.  It would also involve being on-site.  I decided that I liked the challenge and accepted.  Besides, I don’t like backing down from a challenge, so there’s that.

The experience was most – enlightening.  First off, the client decided to pull me off the project in order to draft two design documents for them.  We added another member to the team to make up for my absence and crossed our fingers.  It didn’t work out well.  One member of my team was a pretty good stand-in tech lead, but my absence coupled with adding another member in the middle combined with our newness as a team to spell about a 2 week delivery delay on a 4 week project.  This was not good at all.  And we only pulled this off by working crazy hours.  There’s a whole laundry list of lessons learned, but I’ll save that for another blog.

We started the next project for the same group.  We were already a week behind schedule and I was finishing up the second of those two design docs.  But the guys stepped up and we finished one of the two projects on time.  The other project came in late (in fact it still may have one outstanding issue).  This caused a lot of tension.  We are about to start the next project with another group.  Armed with our lessons learned I think we’ll have a better experience.

On the personal project front.  I’ve been playing with a bunch of new (to me) technologies.  From Grails to Erlang to Flex to the Mint distro and Git.  I’m enjoying it very much, and hopefully somewhere in there is something which will keep me employed later.  That’s the thing about being a software guy; you have to keep learning or you get stuck – and sometimes getting stuck is manageable, but sometimes it’s not.  So, functional programming, dynamically-typed languages and UI description technologies like Flex and Griffon is where I’m currently concentrating my attention.Oh, and I’m incorporating some agile/scrum techniques into my own life. So, there’s that.

Thanksgiving came and went with little fanfare – though I am quite thankful for my life.  For lots of things, really.  I went to visit my parents a couple weekends ago (late due to work).  Oh, I picked up Portal 2 – fun stuff right there.

And on the personal front.  I don’t know who reads this blog anymore – I moved it a couple years ago without telling anyone and my blogs.bifrostbridge.com redirect no longer works, so it might just be me and Scott J (Hi Scott).  But, and this is very, very preliminary, Karen is, at this very moment, pregnant.  Which means sometime before next fall I could be a Dad.  Which is pretty amazing.  So, there’s that.  We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

Saturday we meandered our way across Arkansas and early Saturday evening we pulled into Uncertain, TX.  We rented the only accommodation around (well, the first one we found, actually) a rather large trailer at Johnson’s Marina.  I set up a boat tour for the next morning, and Karen was on the fence.  Until she saw the boat.  Then she got off the fence and told me to wake her up on my return.

So the next morning Captain Billy and I shoved off in his john boat and wandered through a narrow straight and into a bayou full of water lilies and cypress trees.  And birds.  And Spanish moss.  It was a great trip.  Captain Billy was entertaining and contributed some creative ideas to the photographic fun I was having.  It ended up being about an hour and a half, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

We headed back through the middle of Arkansas to grab  a room in Branson, then pick up Karen’s son and our dog and head back to Saint Louis on Monday.  A good time was had by all.

Work has gone a little crazy.  The project I was working on is still dragging on, but only because I don’t think anyone’s deployed it yet.  The project I was going to pick up for this client didn’t happen because they didn’t like our time estimate.  I’m quite pleased our business development people let this go rather than try to accommodate the client – there was a reason why the estimate was what it was.

I picked up another project though, as a tech lead for a J2EE project.  The project is rather small, but it’s just the first piece of work in a year-long string of work.  Just as I was getting comfortable with this idea the client asked that I convert my role from lead developer to straight lead and spend most of my time designing another project.  That’s where we stand right now.  This will likely stretch my rather poor organizational skills quite thin.

Stephen and I are meeting relatively regularly to work on our stuff.  Right now this is a quick (month-ish) project to get used to working together.  It’s going as well as can be expected.

I’m working on a personal project as well, which I hope to wrap up by the end of the month (Java back end, Flex front end).

So – lots of development/design stuff in my life.  Which is good.

Today I weeded the little garden and potted some plants which have likely been left in water too long.  We’ll see.

The move was motivated by the school district my last place was in.  While the old place didn’t have enough space for all of us, it would’ve been much (much) cheaper to find a larger place in the old neighborhood.  But the school district was not only academically poor but a bit – rough – for our tastes.  So, out to the suburbs.

The move was difficult.  I have way too much crap.  When I moved over here I used a car and a U-Haul (I don’t remember the size of the truck).  The only furniture was a futon I’d purchased from a friend.

This time around I used a 19′ truck, a 24′ truck and many trips with my car.  I still have the futon but have added – lots.  I really need to pare down.  I needed to pare down some time ago, and now that I’ve moved into a spot with more space I need to make sure that, should I fail in my quest to reduce my amount of stuff I don’t expand my stuff collection to fill.

My friends Mark, Chris and Steve helped me move most of the big stuff from my old place to my new place, then Mark and Steve returned to help me move the rest of it.  It was brutal hot.  Then my parents came to help me clean and move the last few loads over.  It was still hot.  These folk were lifesavers.

The new place has a garden. It’s a small raised-bed plot, and I’m kinda excited about growing stuff there.  We’ll see how that goes.  For now I’ve got more than enough to do in the unpacking job.

The project that I thought I’d wrapped up is still hanging on – not really a good thing, but I hope to iron out the lingering issues post haste.  But I am starting a new project for the same company soon, and this is a good thing.

One of the reasons we stepped up the schedule for moving into the new place is the wicked heat wave overpowered the window unit I used in the old place.  Even when we abandoned all but one room of the house to the heat it was still muggy and uncomfortable.  Annoyingly coincidentally the central air at the new place failed our first weekend there.  That was wonderful.

The wicked heat wave has abated, by the way.

Not to jinx anything, but I seem to be riding a shallow but extended productivity wave.

I really need a haircut.

Nothing new on the horizon, except a possible Labor Day photo journey.

Karen moved up in mid-May.  The transition was, from the point of view of our relationship, easy and seamless.  Again I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but it keeps getting better.

I picked up an off-camera flash and have had three photo shoots so far – all more-or-less successful.  The full accounting of my photographic fun is found over at roadside fruit stand.

Karen, her son and I went down to Sam’s Throne and had a grand time wandering about the woods.  There was a lot of wind, and a ton of locusts.  It was a biblical time out in the wilderness.

I helped my friend Max with a project of his using technology which I wasn’t at all familiar with, and it went (from my point of view) pretty well.

I managed to hang with the yoga class, and had a photo shoot with my instructor, but now my instructor moved away and I am much less motivated.  I try to carry on on my own but the move has gotten in the way.  We’ll see.

Karen and I wandered up to Toronto this last weekend and that was a good time.  The weather wasn’t that much cooler, but we’ll take whatever we can get.  There was lots of food and conversation and walking around.  We visited Niagara Falls and rode the Maid of the Mist.  I met some folk I only knew from online interaction and got to hang out with Max and Sarah, which is always a good time.  Karen sprained her ankle just before we left, which was not such a good time – but she’s a trooper.

My time at the moment is taken by moving my stuff to the new place (I’ve moved out west).  Stephen and I have been meeting semi-regularly but there’s not been a lot of movement in that area.  I finished up a paying project at work and am now back to a couple internal projects for the foreseeable.

Last weekend I had hoped to make some significant progress on my software architecture certificate project.  No such luck.  Friday night was spent at my co-worker Charlie’s place experimenting with my new external flash unit (cheap Chinese model speedlight).  Saturday I didn’t feel particularly well, but managed to get some basic household maintenance done.  Stephen came back into town on Sunday to stay a week while looking for a place to live up here, so we hung out a bit and eventually he bought a new computer and then, of course, we had to play some StarCraft II.  That pretty much did it for Sunday.  I’ve been similarly adrift at work, staring at a screen an alarmingly large percentage of the time.

What I should be doing:

• Cleaning out the spare bedroom
• Boxing up stuff, throwing stuff away, getting stuff shipped out
• Creating a photobook for Mom and Dad (from their anniversary)
• Software Architecture Certification
• Personal Software projects
• Personal Photography projects

What I do:

• Poke around the internet
• Sleep

So I think I may have discovered at least part of the reason that I’m not seeing the productivity that I’d like.

This coming weekend is Karen’s birthday, so I’m headed down that way.  Maybe I’ll find some motivation along the way…

Anyway.

Stephen came up this weekend and we had planned to head down to the Arcadia Valley and do a little poking around.  The weather appeared to be intent on thwarting those plans, as Friday night was full of storm sirens and tornado warnings.  But the cell that was aimed right at me wandered north and demolished the airport instead.  So, bullet dodged (unless you were on that flight headed to Chicago).  The next day dawned grey and rainy, but we headed south anyway.  At the very least we’d have a good drive.  Things were pretty dicey going down, the road was closed due to flooding, but we too the back road in and – it all cleared up.  We wandered about in relative dryness and warmth, and then we headed back through pouring rain.  We managed to visit all the points we wanted save Mina Sauk falls (the trail was a river/muddy bog) and still have a nice drive.  That night we took some just-for-fun head shots of Steve and chatted.  It was a good time.

Today we went out looking for food and settled on Mexican, but the spot we went to was closed for Easter.  We hit this Chinese place just past it, with some misgivings (since we were the only ones there).  The food was wonderful.  So, there’s that.

Stephen took off and I hung out here not accomplishing anything but a nap and some relaxation, which in retrospect I am totally fine with.  All in all, a delightful weekend.

Things just worked out.

Since last we spoke I’ve managed to make no measurable progress on the internal project I’ve been working on.  But I have taken a few pictures and that’s something.  I’m also managing to keep myself fed and clothed (in clean clothes, even).  This is what passes for “keeping it together” for me .

On the photography front I’ve built myself a light box (a cardboard box with the sides and top cut out and an old white sheet thrown over it, with a piece of posterboard as a seamless backdrop).  So now I put everything in the box and it’s new and interesting.  I briefly entertained thoughts of astrophotography (well, just between you and I I’m still contemplating) but there are a couple good points to consider:

• It requires you to wait for moonless, clear skies and then drive to a dark sky location at ridiculously early hours, possibly in the cold, and then hang out taking a series of long exposures.
• Not much changes up there.

I’m also contemplating off-camera flash/studio photography – the issue here is that this involves taking pictures of people, and I don’t really do that.  But, you know, it’s a learning opportunity.  If I have fancy equipment maybe I’d feel more confident taking pictures of people.  Not sure.

No progress at all on the deepwrap or SEI certification front.  So, yeah, becalmed.

I’ve been sticking with the yoga thing, though – which makes me happy.  Though I’ve still been feeling somewhat crappy – and now I don’t know if the odd muscle/joint pain is me getting used to stretching regularly or something to worry about.  Still happy that I’m sticking with it.

I went to a seminar: http://www.theflashbus.com/ (with David Hobby and Joe McNally) and it was all kinds of good.  I got in free thanks to my friend Charlie, and got to hang out and learn stuff.  Now I’m all revved up to take amazingly-lit photos.

As soon as I can buy a flash.  And a stand.  And an umbrella.  And more gear.

Maybe I have a finite amount of motivation and the excitement of the photography stuff has siphoned off excitement for software stuff…

Ok, so, real-time update – I just ordered a beginning off-camera light kit.  So, yay me.

Oh, last weekend I ended up rear-ending the car in front of me.  Not hard, but hard enough to do about $560.43 (ish) of damage.  I have a bad habit of hitting parked cars.  This is a result of the way I drive.  I make a model in my head and whatever part of the world I’m not looking at I react to anyway because it’s modeled in my head.  And in my head, this car should have already been going down the entrance ramp.  But in the real world, it had stopped.  So I hit it.  Because it wasn’t supposed to be there.

Now, like I said, this isn’t the first time this has happened.  And my first reaction is to wonder, somewhat incredulously, why this person stopped in the middle of the road.  But my second reaction is to shut the hell right up, because I hit a parked car.  And the driver’s model of the world was likely different from mine.  In his world he didn’t have time to merge.

So, yeah.  That’s a bummer – but I’ve come to think of this as life’s way of informing me that I really need to keep my eyes pointed in the direction of my motion.  This is a good lesson, I hope I’ve learned it.  This time.