James Pearl Thinks Blogging is Dead

Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Ok first & foremost, props to @jmanic for wasting no time at all to call the number and leave me a message. That made me legit LOL last night as I got the email with the MP3 attached. Respect! As it turns out my phone does not ring when you call that number.

Some fast replies in bullet form:
  • I don't have an office, other than my office at home, so no free supplies. @jmanic
  • My hours are the same, but since I am not being paid by the hour I feel less compelled to work every free minute of the day.
  • It is a start-up, so I still work plenty.
  • I probably have a little more time to ride. @pooriggy
  • Still at home, but not texting on the rollers. I have moved back to the trainer this year. @1sh0t1b33r
  • This is actually a raise, so the pay/hours thing works out. @jackx
  • No standing desk. @fidodie
  • Monday evenings still free. @Glenn Rides After 4 PM CST
  • The only real relocation option would be Chicago if I wanted. But I don't. @UtahJoe
  • We don't sell toilet products. @rottin'
@fidodie - I am part of development and this, right now, is a small & competent team. Though there are really 2 parts of the requirements gathering here. So...ideally I would go out to the client sites for workshops. This is what I did for both Duke & Christiana (Delaware). I go out and work with the client and build the requirements for their specific implementation. Then I turn these over to an implementation team (3rd party). This 3rd party...in terms of choosing I have some say. But the other part is when I can take some of the things that the customer wants, and take that back to the development team and we try to add it to the product to make the product better. And by virtue of this, we rely on that 3rd party less and less.

@1speed - so the problem with allowing these customers to be part of any design is that they all think they do things the best. And after working with however many clients I can tell you, most of them do most things totally backwards and uniquely. So it's on me to take as many different perspectives as I can and make a design that works for most of them, but requires some form of standardization. Allowing every client to have a totally unique setup is great and all, but it isn't good for upgrades & maintainability. If you are the only customer, then it's not really the same. The MS Project people are my enemy also. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

@Dominos - that's a pretty good description of the mix of skills I need for this. I guess I'm good at a lot of those things but not great at any? I love this role, I will say that.

News Flashes

I won't be going to Stanford. That fell through literally as of about an hour ago.

The picture below is the tragedy happened today. This is a teapot (maybe TPA is Tea Pot Aficionado) that I brought back from Taiwan a bunch of years ago. I have been using this as my oolong tea pot for the last year or more. It is not the best pot in the world but I liked it a bunch. I do have another 1 from the same village which I may need to graduate to. They are probably supposed to be mostly ornamental with the occasional use. I can probably glue it back together which I will consider doing. Either way, behold the tragedy:

IMG_5809.JPG
 

jmanic

JORBA Board Member/Chapter Leader
Staff member
JORBA.ORG
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Okay, bummer about the office supplies. You'll just have to go shoplift from the OfficeMax. Same thing.

Cool on the WFH and hours being roughly the same. But not being compelled to bill every free hour.
And ride time.

And the raise. I mean what are we in this for? I don't set an alarm clock for the love of the game.

Anyways, congrats again.

Bummer about the teapot.
Gorilla glue will totally fix that.
 

mattybfat

The Opinion Police
Team MTBNJ Halter's
I would imagine your work would not affect my life but maybe I wrong. I am happy for You as long as your happy. Good luck!

Ps I build things too so I guess we are kinda the same :cool:
 

1speed

Incredibly profound yet fantastically flawed
Oh, I understand your point. I think we had the discussion in an earlier post a while back. My point isn't that I should get to say what is included entirely -- my point is that very often the people who are telling you guys what is needed don't know what they're saying.

As a case in point, a while back I was asked to UAT the transition of a major data source into our data warehouse. Previously, this source existed only as an ad hoc deliverable coming to us from our primary data vendor, so it was a fairly manual process to link the institutions in that data source to our customer master. This was good and bad from an end-user perspective: the bad was that it didn't allow us to easily link these institutions to the customer records we had for them in our customer master (no common ID.) But the good part of it was that this source was built on a completely different principle than our customer master - the customer master was built around locations only. This new source was built around a hierarchy of business relationships. For about 2/3 of the data, this was a non-issue. But for other 1/3 it created all kinds of problems. As anyone who has ever gone to a medical complex knows, a single building can house multiple group practices and physician offices. Under our existing structure, the all shared the same ID because they were all in the same physical location. But some of them were owned by different corporations, and the new source needed to reflect that. Of course there are workarounds for these types of things - I have my own ideas of the best way to do it, but I certainly recognize that it's not the only way and there are plenty of others that could legitimately work. The problem arose because the people who met with the architecture group who were building the new structure to accommodate this new source in the existing warehouse didn't recognize the problems that could arise between location-based and owner-based roll-ups, so they never communicated it, and an entire front end was built to merge and match up the data that undid all of those relationships. And when I discovered this and reported it, a lot of folks on the development side got angry at me. But I wasn't telling them they did it wrong - I was telling them they never had a chance to do it right. If myself or someone on my team had been made available for consultation, I'm sure we would have been able to work out something that would have fit our needs, even if it wasn't exactly what I thought it should be. But because that didn't happen, what we got was just wrong and it ended up taking considerable time, money and resources to fix. And that is a pretty typical example of my experience with UAT here. It's insane that the people talking to folks on your side continue to exclude users from their conversations with you on new projects. I don't know if it happens everywhere, but it happens at my place all the time.
 

Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
The basketball. That’s where we are tonight. Zac is on the 6th grade travel team this winter and he’s taking a liking to it this year. Last year he really wasn’t as into it, but that was a sort of junkyard Rec League. This year it’s more organized with actual coaching. Plus he’s like 5’6” so he’s a hot commodity in the paint.

This other team has one of these kids that came out the womb dribbling the ball. I think he’s taken every shot so far.

In any event I won’t be sitting down to write much of a post once we get home. So bleacher blogging it is.

I’m enjoying the 6th grade sports thing so far this year. In the fall he played soccer for the middle school which is 6-8th grade. He managed to be a starter which was impressive as he was one of just 3 6th graders who started for the team. The real leap here is that the competition is so much better than the Rec League. As a result, those games are starting to resemble actual young adults playing the game as opposed to a bunch of kids on the field with a soccer ball randomly out there.

Basketball is a bit on the same track but these are all 5-6th graders so there isn’t any 8th grade influence raising the skill level as much. Still, it’s starting to become more of a game and less of a scrum out there. Starting to get more enjoyable.

Up 13-11 at the half. That is all for now.

4C847964-7DA4-43FD-A750-47B06DD572F5.jpeg
 

jmanic

JORBA Board Member/Chapter Leader
Staff member
JORBA.ORG
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Despite having some height, and scoring for some D-3 scrimmages as a kid (Dad was phys-ed director for a college in the city and it kept a hyperactive child busy), and spending some time with the Harlem Wizards (Dad had a side gig with them), I never really got into round ball.

When it was time for pick-up games in early adulthood I would just play blocker.

Although I have always followed UConn basketball.
To some happy endings.
 

Patrick

Overthinking the draft from the basement already
Staff member
same ref that did branchburg rec/travel.
Oh - the politics of kid sports!

Watching all of the kids get better over time is one of the best parts.
Listening to the parents...not so much.
 

UtahJoe

Team Workhorse
Team MTBNJ Halter's
This Mark eaton...7'4 IIRC....I do remember Stockton and Malone looked like little people standing next to him

4Mark-Eaton.jpg
 

stb222

Love Drunk
Jerk Squad
And one of them is a Hall of Famer.

Hint: It's not the big guy.
I am blissfully unaware of anyone in basketball and mainstream sports in general except for the biggest names.

The cool mark eaton is a flatland and video pioneer. Really innovative filming techniques for the time using roller skates for smooth and low shots before image stabilization was common. I rode with him some when he had a return to bmx and he would ride my trails (jumps) and tore his acl 360's on a set. I think that was the end of his comeback.
 

Pearl

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
"Accurate palm strikes, on like disposition, John Stockton I'm scoring and I'm also dishin'"
 

Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Friday Quickie

Friday afternoon and I'm sure we're all ready to be done with this so instead of waiting on tonight when nobody will read, I'll toss some random shit out...
  • In the end they lost by 10 or so. The other team kind of obliterated them in the 3rd quarter.
  • @fidodie - the ref in that picture, loved to blow the whistle. HEY REF, YOU BLOW!
  • Yeah I rode the trainer today at 55 degrees or whatever. 65 minutes is my standard time right now. I am 1 hour behind pace for the year.
  • I finished up the first season of Slings & Arrows which is a Canadian comedy (ish) from the 90s. The season was good but the last episode was excellent.
  • Now I want to see Hamlet.
  • @1speed - I think that's where this awful "business unit" idea comes from. I hate the term but I get it. I was saying to my boss this we we need to rebrand this idea and call it Crew, or Posse. We need to modernize this shit. They should also rename Sites as Hoods, Buildings as Units, and Area/Departments as Cribs.
  • I never much liked the Utah Jazz.
  • This weekend D's parents are coming down. So we're having late Xmas #whatever-it-is now.
Facebook says this was 4 years ago:

1554400_10152130846383954_1574404508_n.jpg
 
Top Bottom