Tonight, I discovered that Dan, an old college bud who graduated a year after me, would now be in Austin on a weekly basis, as he landed some work through IBM doing, of all things, Cobol programming. It wasn't exactly what he was expecting, and in a language he was never trained in, but in this economy its a good thing to be needed. And its also good mentally to be able to work towards goals that can be accomplished.
We went to dinner at Katz's deli, enjoying a restaurant in the New York style, and I tasted a very pleasant grilled-cheese and pineapple sandwich. The conversation flowed well, though I felt at times, somewhat awkward with myself. I think this might have had something to do with the confidence and disciplined self-determination that Dan seemed to be exuding. Or I could just be reading more into it, and this pseudo-awkwardness I intuited was easily explained by the fact that Dan and I hadn't seen eachother or really talked since March.
After dinner, I headed back to the office this evening, and after a few hours I completed all the tasks I needed to do. Before heading out, I dropped down to the first floor (my office is on the third), and had a brief conversation with my friend Kevin, with whom I am attempting to figure out plans for a ski trip prior to the new year. We figured some things out, and while I was talking with him, one of the Firm's new hires 'announced' he was having a problem with a technology that I am very familiar. After a quick spin through all my common debugging methods, the analysis showed that the problem was with his code, and at 1:30AM I departed, leaving him to correct and improve upon his work. I recall a time when I was the new hire and others had the task of helping me over obstacles - things may have come full circle.
Much earlier this morning the most senior technical individual on my project accidentally deleted enough data from one of our test databases that I had to spend about 30 minutes reconfiguring the test environment. We also had to apologize to the customer team that was working this week against the test database, as their data for the entire week had been lost. Since it was a testing environment and my instructions about activity for the environment had been clear, there was no expectation that the data would be deleted; but it was. And so I made sure this time that hourly backups were scheduled. No more lost data. The customer team was not observedly upset, as most of their tests were self-contained, and they were able to continue working shortly. Plus, they knew the technical member of the team responsible, and I guess they figured that if he could make a mistake then he was at least human - reaffirming their own humanness, and their own ability to err.
In a final note for the night, I wish my old friend Maria a happy birthday. I have made an initial plan to visit her in a coming weekend, and I look forward to this greatly. The last time she and I saw each other was late September, but it was with a few of my college friends, and so we really did not get a chance to spend some one on one time together. If I do indeed visit her out in LA, it will be my first time in California, my first time on the West coast, and my first flight greater than 1800 miles.
Posted by brian at December 6, 2001 04:19 PM