What's it all about, Alfie?

OK... the place I work is moving from one office building in Chicago to another office building and this past weekend my servers were moved. Nothing every goes really well, does it? This was no exception. I'm very tired from trying to hammer out the last of the bugs in the move and missing on some very important sleep. Nothing comes easy, I guess...

At the same time, I have to hold myself back from tagging a few goobers at work. Specifically, in this sleep deprived state when I tell a developer that they are hitting the Test version of my code because I can see the logs it's more than slightly annoying to hear them say that it isn't. I'm not asking for a confirmation here, I've already got my own confirmation by looking at Test and Production. Instead, I'm telling them that it's wrong and I'm getting attitude back?

More importantly, why is it that I'm supporting their users? Yes, I understand that it's because I will and they won't, but that's their problem and my burden. There's something terribly wrong with this situation if I'm supporting their users.

It's all about the Prodigal Son - the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Now I'm not trying to fish for compliments, but when an organization or professionals allows such incredibly poor performance then it breaks an implied contract to those that have worked hard and pulled their weight. The implied contract is we have worked and met your expectations - those expectations are for everyone - not just those that really work hard.

When I see professionals doing less than my 8-year-old and not being held accountable, then I have to think that the expectations were really not meant for anyone (i.e. they wanted to have high expectation, but didn't expect anyone to really achieve them), or they have expectations and then when people put out "average" work, they aren't taken to task about the fact that they missed the expectations by so much.

Now if this were a co-ed softball team out for a game every Saturday afternoon, I'd say that it's no big deal, we're out for the Fun and Sun. But when we're supposed to be professionals at this, it's entirely different. Professionals are supposed to be professional and not get attitudes, or whine, or complain... they are supposed to be good enough at what they do to continue doing it under severe and challening conditions. But what I'm seeing is what I once would have called a bunch of babys.

There's a lot going on these days and it's hard to make time to write in the Journal, but I'm taking a little time out now to fill in a few details.

Apple is making some seriously foolish moves with charging $129 for the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.2, and removing the free iTools email accounts that Steve has promised will be free for life. Since Apple exists due to the loyalty of it's customers, and only those same customers are going to be hurt by these moves, it just doesn't make any sense that they'd charge so little to offset the horrible public relations that this will cost them. But then again, smarter people have made dumber mistakes... I guess Steve's just due for a couple of big ones.

I've taken the time to reformat my iBook to use the HFS+ filesystem from the UFS filesystem. I'd heard that the performance is better, and there are certainly a lot of programs that can't be installed on UFS, so I decided to take the time and reformat the box. At the same time, I used the iBook image disks to make it out-of-the-box compatible. Not bad at all. The CD-RW made it pretty easy to back up what I had and re-install it on the new build. Not bad at all.

The performance improvements are significant. Installing new software used to take a long time. Now it's exceptionally fast. The change is very minor to me - mostly in case-handling of filenames, but I can live with that for the speed. Very nice upgrade.

Work is going well - at least as well as can be expected when I have to deal with the kinds of people that I have to deal with. For the most part, the people at the company are OK, it's the vendor's people that are almost too hard to believe. This vendor has an 'in' with a powerful person in the company and because of that they feel that they can pretty much have free run of the place. They can't, and they're learning the hard way, but I'll make sure that Karma is conserved... they'll have to change how they deal with us sooner than later.

Home additions/remodeling is going slowly. Liza has decided to add a pool to the backyard this year, so she's trying to get everything coordinated and get it in before the first snowfall :). I'm sure we'll love it and the kids will be in it every single day they can. It's a big bonus for all the parties that the kids will have. I'm really looking forward to it.

I was approached by a headhunter for a company here in Chicago. It's doing something I really like - cluster computing. Golly... I do love having machines solve really big problems - even if it's for the financial industry. It's certainly a possible move, I'll have to see what they look like in the phone interview and see how much of the job is in the face of clients and what their expectations of the job are. Could be really nasty if the face-time is most of the job, and it's a suit-world. That would make me quit no matter what the job was. But I'm trying to keep an open mind when people come calling with jobs.