I still love you all!

Wow, its been six months at FaceTwit. Boy I have had to learn so much and had so much to un-learn. I though Hank Commerce had prepared me for the next big internet adventure, but wow, dealing with the scalability issues at FaceTwit... blows my mind. And forget about the reliability and uptime. Phew. It makes my head hurt.

First of all I get to write Java. Lots of it. Then I get to re-write stuff I don't like. My manager says "Sure, go for it. Just make sure the regressions pass". And then I just do it. No HoMo's to get approval, so psycho Ops nazi's to push the code, just peer checked and then roll out with the next iteration. We have continuous deployment during the day, its automatically picks a small set of the farm to deploy to and then, BAM... your code is live and being used and making a difference. Its wonderful. Our customers love us, we don't need surveys, just the every growing user base.

I've bumped into a few old friends from Hank Commerce in Mission bars from time to time. They look older and grayer, as if Henry has leached the last of their life force from them. Those who have left, well, they are smiling, lost a lot of weight and stress and look ready to rock the world again. Its great to see them all re-juvinated. Constantine, Euro-Fool, Stan and the rest of the "ex" all survived. Rock on brothers and sisters.

Back at the mothership, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir is still the old thug he always was so I'm told. Can't collaborate, does his own thing and then forces it on everybody else. Its a shame, nice guy, unemployable anywhere else in the valley according to some. Henry is managing to keep up his tan, which is great for him but lousy for the shareholders. Somehow Lonely-James has managed to grow his team just so that an irreverent link based on a tiny data set gets super high prominence on the landing page. I know that will swing the company valuation. What a waste of real estate. Stacy and the iPhone. Sure, its coming in the fall with bells on this time. Got to feel sorry for Franks-Mom, having to keep the pirate ship sailing, if she gets it sailing up and to the right then the true hero will emerge.

Apart from working, what have I been doing? Well, got this freaky phone call. Well it started with an email. I thought it was totally a hoax, but for sure its totally real. There's an agent in L.A., works with all the top names. Wants me to turn my blog into a screenplay. He says that it touches everything in the human condition, the personalities are so hyper vivid that he thinks it could be the first geek-buster movie that will make money. Everybody wants to laugh at geeks, this is going to be the one! He wants me to change a few things, but I'm totally up for the challenge. He wants to keep Can-I-Have-A-Latter-Sir "as is", thinks Ed Norton might be interested in an option, potentially Zooey Deschanel as Geek-Babe if she is available. If nothing else, I've hung out at some cool parties in L.A.

In the short term, I've been editing down the blog into a slim book. A friend asked me for a signed copy, so I put one together and it made me think that it could be a great parting gift for anybody else leaving the hallowed shored of Hank Commerce. I'll post a link when its ready.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : More of a wine man these days
Shots : I've cut down, really I have
Dinner : I cook at home with my girlfriend these days, its all organic and really heathy
Weight : 168 lbs ... lost 31 lbs

Its almost a New Year!

The last company meeting of the year was lead by the Three-Amigos. I think Franks-Mom had to put them up on a pedestal in order to keep some kind of control over them. They did a round up of what's going on in each of their areas. I know that a bunch of people had to control their mouths as they went through their slides. Basically they slammed Constantine and Euro-Fool for all the architectural flaws, wrong direction on the technical roadmap, over commitment and under delivery. They did not do this by name, just implied it but it was so shallow that any body could see thought it.

And then I thought, what was the point of that. Yes you won, perhaps by means that will not put you in good standing for the rest of your careers, since who the f**k is going to hire you again or recommend you when a VC comes calling. And I thought about it more, at the end of the day its Monday Morning Quarterbacking, something they seemed to have picked up from Henry. Don't say anything at the time, say that you "had to go along with it", don't actually make the effort to get it working and delivered right and then blame everybody else when it does go to shit. You know, a lot of Nazis were rounded up and shot after World War II for that type of behavior, what could the modern day equivalent be? Post your answers in the comments section.

In other news, we had a site outage for three nights (unplanned). Apparently, to add some more capacity to our Kodak SAN, they had to do a firmware upgrade. With our kick ass staff, on the third attempt we got it right. Sweet, we added another 30GB of disk. Yes I did say GB and not TB, our site really does not generate enough transactions to need a 1TB drive from Fry's. Probably cheaper and probably would have worked out of the box.

Why does it have to be so friggin' hard at this place? God, I need a drink. Happy New Year.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 13 (no more official drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more official eating!)
Weight : 195 lbs

Euro-fool leaves!

Wow. I have never seen Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir so happy. You could see he smile all the way from the East Bay where he lives. I'm super happy about Euro-fool leaving, he was such an arrogant guy, always thought we has better than all of us. So what if he had a cool clothes and a Porsche Cayman.

I went drinking in the city with the "Three-Amigos" to celebrate, they got shit faced. Stacy was so wasted he picked a fight with some Mission hipster (and lost) and that was just after three beers. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir went around hugging everybody in the bar like they were all some long lost friends, Lonely-James drank a Miller Lite by himself at the end of the bar. He can't take his beer either. Had some Indian food after the beers, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir said it was the worst he had, and then phoned up Constantine to say that he was so sorry for the shit he did to him. You could hear the reply of "Go F**k yourself" from across the bar.

It came out that they had forced Euro-fool to quit, they now have Franks-Mom in the right place so that they can continue to enjoy their lives and f**k around and she gets to carry the can. When the next shit hits the fan they will use the same story with Henry, that she is out of touch, does not get it, their passion shows their commitment, staff aren't behind her etc. The key is that they stick together and back each other up, if Henry tries to fire one of them then the others say they will go as well. Its one sweet deal.

I know who is really running this place!

The good news is that I think the Platform team will finally report into us, which makes perfect sense and I know that Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir always wanted this.

So things are finally looking up, at least for the Three-Amigos.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 18 (death of euro-fool celebration!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more official eating!)
Weight : 195 lbs

New VP!

Well f**k me. Franks-mom is made VP. I did not see that one coming. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir is pissed, he thinks it should have been him since he had given so much already. He's happy that's its not Euro-fool. We went drinking in the city with him after the announcement and he slurred about how he got one over Euro-fool. He did not make a lot of sense after his seventh Whiskey, but something about the "Three Amigos" and the deal of a lifetime with the devil.

Made me think after I got over the hangover. It was probably something to do with all the closed door meetings I saw him, Stacy and Lonely-James in, and then later with Iron-Mike and Henry. I guess they must have been planning for weeks on how they would get leverage for what they wanted. That's a pretty sweet and balls-to-the-wall move.

Nobody has seen Euro-fool, guess he got f**ked by just about everybody. Shame, but that's what happens here. The old guard back themselves up and have a gun against Henry's head.

Things have not changed much with Franks-Mom, the schedule is still impossible, the every other week release followed by the daily patching. She seems a little more stable than Constantine but she does not code so its going to be tough to see who drives the direction. Sure was can have the Henry-deal-of-the-day-feature or some more shuffling pixels around the screen. What has to change is architecture of the dot-com-era. Stored procedures? No thanks!

Mood is pretty somber around here since Constantine's departure. Hope Franks-Mom can make a difference.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 12 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares, but we have a VP now!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 192 lbs

H Staff disappear!

Feels like there is some sort of Stalin like purge going on. Let me recap

• Tori quits. This was a few month back, but had a better offer from one of our Advisors so the whispers are saying
• CFO disappears. We think he was fired, but may have quit. Perhaps he just had a difference of opinion with Henry.
• Constantine definitely quit, but has lawyers chasing him, probably after his parking permit
• DJ quit, according to Henry to "find himself"
• Stan is "on leave". After the slam-dunk of the Hank Orange Soda (tm) color scheme, I'm not sure whats going on there, perhaps he needed to rest after that effort.
  
• Guy who ran support, nobody remembers his name, been here for ages, but has an accent, gone as well. Probably fired.

In terms of H-Staff that leaves

• Henry
• Arnold the VP of World Wide Sales

Henry should have just rolled in some NRA buddies, told them we were all "commie-pinkos" and had us all shot. The blood seems to be running down the corridors and I don't want to spoil my Nike Air Jordans in white that I won on eBay last week.

Just to break the monotony of the constant departures, Henry has been showing us on a weekly basis the latest customer acquisitions and transactions. Weirdly they were as red as the blood in the corridors and also remarkably never changing week after week. If I read the charts right green is good, red is bad. I'm not sure how you can stand up and talk for an hour on basically nothing. We do love Henry, but Henry does love the sound of his own voice. Time for a drink.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 13 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares, we still don't even have a VP)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 192 lbs

Constatine leaves!

Never seen a guy so happy in my life. People say that this was "how he used to be". I guess working for Henry can be tough, he's a task master most extreme.

But wow. What a shock. We all though he was in for life, without parole, plenty of long term benefit but lots of short term effort and stress. He's said he would stick around for a month to hand over to the new guy. No word on who that may be. I'm thinking Euro-Fool, which Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir would be pissed at, but that would make the most sense. Despite his garlic breath he has actually worked on platforms and infra-structures for decent sized and successful companies. I pray to Jesus that we don't have an Applications person run the team, that would totally take us down a path of zero interesting architecture work. It would be totally like, dude, put your head in the sand.

Saw Constantine a day or so after it was announced. He looked angry and then he totally vanished. Apparently there was some big shouting match in Henry's office and "Fuck you asshole", slamming doors and he was gone. Saw Henry and he brushed it off. Apparently there are lawyers and everything. That's some bad shit for it to end up like like after all the effort and success Constantine has brought the team. I'm sure they both have their reasons but it feels totally rudderless with Constantine's guiding light.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 16 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares, we don't even have a VP)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 192 lbs

I beat my performance improvement plan!

I had to laugh. I have had Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir check my hours, all my check ins and my dates for delivery like a friggin' hawk. So its my fault for asking Constantine why I did not get the promo that I had been promised, but the medicine that Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir punished me with was a like, dude this totally sucks I'd rather drink eggnog.

So I had my follow up with Old-Dude-In-HR-That's-Cool and he basically said that if this was a cop show on TV I would have beaten this rap before the first commercial. He did not sign off on it, but Henry said that Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir gets what he wants, he's mega key to the success of the organization.

So what the hell, he lost and I won. We had our regular 1:1 where he basically said "I knew you could do it, I have the faith". Bullshit. He just didn't like the fact that I stood up to him and escalated when I saw I was being screwed. He did not like that fact that I beat his rap. He did not like the fact that despite his best attempt I rose above it all and won!

So the work? Its kind of crap right now. We are in the death march that Mega Enterprise has become. We are grinding out a result just like the Yankees, not fun to watch but the result will be another world series.

Henry seems pretty joyless at the moment. Stacy said something about another assistant being let go, I'm thinking that was probably the leggy blond this time. I asked him "How's it going" in the elevator. He told me to "Go fuck your pimply self". Sure I could do with more Clearsil, but dude don't make it personal, I can't help my zits.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!))
Shots : 18 (celebrating beating my performance improvement plan)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 187 lbs

DJ quits!

Wow! I was not expecting that one. DJ runs all of our operations across all our geo regions. His crew are crazy but do a swell job, at least when they are not packing on a release night. They all like guns far too much for my liking and I'm from the mid-west.

Never seen somebody with such a big smile. Henry announced his departure at the company meeting, said that he was going to "find himself". Stacy thinks he will continue to write his political blog and may even run for a state seat in the elections in the fall. He's some sort of Libertarian, which when I first heard that I thought he was in favor of people who file books in a Library!

Constantine has taken over Operations in the short term. I think this makes sense, we need to get the Engineers and Ops guys closer together, we have too much of the "throw it over the wall" attitude. If anybody can bring the groups together I think its Constantine, since those guys really respect him.

Looking forward to my first date with geek-babe next week. That is going to be sweet! Is there love in the air? I hope so!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!))
Shots : 8 (I don't give a crap, so I drink at my desk)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 184 lbs

No promotion!

Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir is a piece of work. So I have been working for months on Mega Enterprise, really pulled out all the stops to show what I can do and how I totally add value to his team and the whole organization. He made me promise after promises about what he would get for me if I did all this.

So the promos were announced this week. You would never guess that I was totally screwed. Went to see Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir afterward and his attitude sucked. He said that I should be grateful that I have a job in this economic climate and that I should not complain. When I called him on his promises he said that it was his motivation technique to get his staff to "pull one out of the bag". I call that plain old fashioned lying.

I was so pissed I went to see Constantine. I explained the time line, what had been promised and what I had delivered. He nodded in a wise-old-man kind of way. He took a sip of Whiskey and then said "basically, you are fucked". I thought about this for a moment and then realized that this was the first truth that I had been given since I arrived. I thanked him and went and found a bottle of Tequila in my top drawer.

I went back to my day job. I worked hard and diligently. The next day Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir pulled me into a meeting room. He passed me a letter, perhaps more of an ultimatum. I read it. My blood boiled. Basically he has put me on a Performance Improvement Plan. I don't think this was a constructive act, since I think he took a poor view of escalating this to Constantine.

So he records every hour I am working, which makes me laugh since I get in at 8.32am every morning and the scum-bag gets in at 10.45am, claims he has been "on-line" since 6am. Does not seem to be able to answer an IM at that time. I don't have a lunch hour. I often work from home in the evenings and at weekend, but those are not credited. Every hour I'm late with a check-in he writes it down in a Black Moleskin binder.

I went to HR, they said, "You are out of f**king luck". Super. Glad I work at the next big internet story, aka "You are f**ked the first second you walk in".

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 11 (I don't give a crap, so I drink at my desk)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 183 lbs

Its expensive to fix it late!

So there was an Engineering all-hands this week. Constantine took everybody through a bunch of metrics on the cost of bugs in production and having to fix the stuff our customers find. It was mega-scary, it was like an exponential multiplier at each later stage in the process to fix the bug. Wow that gets expensive!

Other places I have worked you hold the release until its ready and then push it. We use a different method here, its Tuesday so we push period. I though this was super agile, until I saw the facts of the cost of fixing bugs rather than holding the release. I get the fact that we have customer commitments, but wouldn't they want the release to be late and working than on time and full of bugs? Now I see that we could have employed a dozen more people (or not let a dozen people go). I see the faults in the process. What we have is bogus despite what the "old-timers" say. That includes Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sire, Stacy and Lonely-James.

I talked to Dave (Chief Architect) afterward and he said "Its sucks, but its so much better than we had a YahBay". I say that's not good enough, we need to be better than everybody if we are to be the next big story. YahBay are dead, Hank Commerce will live long into the shared internet memory.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!))
Shots : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 179 lbs

Finger pointing!

It was awesome, I have never seen anything like this before. In the middle of the floor Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir and Euro-Fool were in a ice hockey brawl in-front of everybody. It was so out of control, but very cool to see that raw energy and passion.

Apparently, very unreasonable, Euro-Fool wanted to get a plan of what work was needed to complete Mega Enterprise and which resources were assigned to which tasks. I mean, its so last century to put together a resource plan and then resource level it! We are agile, we don't do that shit! Its the whole point of SCRUM, we do everything in small increments, we adapt as we go along, we don't even need designs because we formulate our ideas as we progress. It does away with all that unnecessary time spent spec writing, reviews, allocating resource and all the stuff in the IBM, Microsoft or Yahoo! handbook. We are not burdened with all the old skool stuff.

Lonely-James tried to inject himself and calm the situation down, but was told to "Fuck off, arm pits". Not very complimentary in my view. Finally Constantine came in and calmed the situation down. I'm not sure that the putting them both in an arm lock was the best idea, but he had to do something, there was going to be murder otherwise.

So I think its a clash of cultures. The ad-hoc "we are agile and we know best, trust us" versus the "old school plan, plan, plan and TPS reports".

The empire may have struck back, but Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir so got one over Euro-Fool!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 182 lbs

OMG!

Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir is pissed. Like I mean really pissed. So pissed that he missed his beloved bocce games all week. All of Constantine's staff have been locked up in a meeting room for hours at a time with various graphs and charts being projected. There were in the conference room next to my desk so I got to watch in real time, mega cool.

Constantine did not look happy as Lonely-James waved his sweaty armpits around. I could not understand what the F**k the charts meant and I'm working on Mega Enterprise. After Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir calmed down a little, apparently the QA testing and bug rates are all to shit and there is no way they are going to make the 1-July release date. All the stuff for American City Bank that has priority, Stacy also wants to get the iPhone Server part released and all sorts of other shit. Pity the client is another 6 months out.

So if Mega Enterprise slips, then it slips into September. The release process is a F**king zoo, with just about every other project (or animal in this case) ready to eat your hind.

Apparently the QA team are always "two weeks away" from having an answer to the basic question of what does your plan look like to execute the test plan. Like, dude that's a bit late in the cycle to be working out that shit! I mean, QA they are like a total waste of time, especially in the Applications team. I want to go up to Constantine and just tell him to "Trust Me". We are so part of the team that if the shit does hit that fan, we will be on it like a flash, debugging and hacking away at production to make this beast live!

Apparently, Henry promised this to the board, so he it totally f**ked.

We have a new rule, after 5.26pm you can drink at work, as long as you don't even look at keyboard. If Henry does not like that, then f**k him and his moccasins.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!))
Shots : 6 (I think I'm sacked (again)!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 182 lbs

Death by twitter!

It was so lame. I've been attending the daily stand ups that Euro-Fool has been running for "Mega Enterprise". Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir has been going crazy because Constantine put Euro-Fool in command rather then him. So he attended for a while and then stopped showing up. Euro-Fool, I guess, then got Constantine all riled up to shout at Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir so he started showing up again. Now I'm his delegate. The only cool thing in this sorry story is the Geek-Babe attends, which is very cool, so I hang out with her for 27 minutes each day.

The idea is that its cross functional, so along with Product Management, Program Management, Eng & QA there is also Marketing. Henry has said that "Mega Enterprise" is going to be key for contributing to the bottom line because we are in control and don't have to chew the costs and late launch that we do with American City Bank. The trouble is that Marketing are a little weird. First they dress weird (how do you say "Gay!"), they talk weird (its all about positioning, drone, drone, drone) and they also cannot keep their mouths shut.

Henry says that "Mega Enterprise" has to be kept secret so that we can make a huge splash and totally change the market. So what does Fresh-New-Marketing-Dude do? He starts twittering about it to start some "buzz".

Henry went ballistic, well that's what at least Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir told me. So our cover has been broken and everybody in the industry knows about it. There was some chatter on Techbyte but Henry got M.Arrington to take down the post and the comments. Their kids go to school with each other and M.Arrington owed Henry after the incident at the school with the new first grade teacher. Apparently she was not as cute as BayGossip claimed.

So Fresh-New-Marketing-Dude is trying his luck at another company, Henry fired his ass right out to left field in a matter of seconds of finding out. Well, in fact the twittering had been going on for weeks, but Henry does not Twitter so it took his assistant to blog about it before he was in the loop.

Sad. Nice guy. Bad taste in dress shirts.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 177 lbs

American City Bank delays again!

This delay is totally our fault. They came to do an audit and it appears that we store some of their data in plain text, I don't know all the details but apparently Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir was supposed to build out some components that only partially got completed. When I say partially, I mean it was a basic pass through.

Long and short if it, he spend many hours with Constantine and Henry this week. I think Constantine is at the end of this rod with him. I also sawhim and Euro-Fool plotting, they always seem to go to another floor and then draw on whiteboards that can't be seen from the outside which are always clean (I checked).

I get the feeling that something big is going to happen again. It upsets me, since we have trying to pull it together since the layoffs. Why does the management team hate Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir? He is the only true leader here.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 179 lbs

No more drinking!

Henry dropped a bomb shell this week. We will all be in shock for sometime, especially Constantine and the management team. Henry basically said that if anybody drinks on site or has drunk and then connects to a production system they will be marched out, no severance, no anything. It was pretty harsh and I think we all got that he was serious when he said "I'm f**king serious guys, I love you all, but no f**king drinking". Henry has to be one of the biggest drinkers on the exec team, but if he said if he can do it then anybody can. I love that "can-do" spirit.

A couple of us went through the drawers, refrigerators and in the stock room to see the acres of beer, wine, scotch, tequila and Bourbon all being boxed up by the security team.

The rumors has it that it all went down after American City Bank came for a pre-launch visit. They had all the regular glad-handing that goes on, everybody was dressed up (i.e. no holes in jeans) and had showered that day. Nobody had told the Platform team who had a marathon drinking session during the day. Erik, one of the super tech leads on that team, had lost a bet that he could drink a dozen shots of tequila in an hour and keep his lunch down. He looked green, but had kept his Una Mass down, until he made it to the elevator.

The trouble was that he held the elevator for the American City Bank team and Henry. They were going to PK Changs that night in Palo Alto. Henry was trying to ignore Erik, who then said "You're those f**kers from American Shitty Bank" (we was slurring) and then threw up his Una Mass all over them.

The retribution has been pretty horrible. I think Henry thinks we don't work hard enough. No doubt that American City Bank gave him shit as well. So we all will suffer. Thanks Erik!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

Big shouting match!

Not sure what the hell is going on. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir and Constantine have been in meeting rooms all week. Lots of shouting, slamming doors, crying, going to Henry to "talk it out". Its got me and the rest of his team "seriously freaked out". I mean he is our blood, he is our glue, without him life could not possibly exist.

I think Euro-fool senses blood. He poached one of the team last week as part of the "Large Enterprise" product work. That seems to be sucking the life out of just about every team, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir has stood up and said that its all bogus at the last company meting . Henry got super angry and apparently sacked him on the spot. Or well, the story says that he gave Constantine the authority to sack him and then kyboshed his actual sacking. Weird.

I've got my head down working on the shopping basket. Its looking pretty sweet. Even Geek-Babe came over to my desk for a demo last week. I don't think she noticed the sweating and my flustered nature, I think I got away with it.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 (up 1 from last week)
Shots : 6 (up 2 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 186 lbs

Apple's are cool, Apple's for management is bogus!

So Apple makes some sexy product, no doubt. The iPod was cool, despite being a re-package of what a zillion other companies have done. Yes, it needed that Newton inspired magic that only Apple can provide, but its still a hard disk and it could only play music. So they took it to the next level, went solid state and put in a phone, and then allowed a select few to develop application for it. Ok, so its cool.

Now the laptops? Ultra, mega cool. They are all very aluminum and cool. I have a IBM Thinkpad, which is black and very uncool. I think its a Leveno so even uncooler, its not even an American product, designed and made by Americans!

So Iron-Mike got me at the interview by saying essentially "Apple for everyone". Wow, I thought what an amazing and insightful company, putting its engineers first and not only giving them a cool laptop but BSD instead of Linux and Windows. How forward thinking. How progressive.

First I wanted to fit and and show everybody my true value to the organization. I think I'm there. So last week I ask Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir whether I could order an Apple. He turned around and said, and I'm quoting directly "Go f*king buy one yourself, only management get Apple's here". Thanks I thought, thanks a bunch. Then I scanned around me.

Of course Constantine has one, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir obviously, but also Lonely-James, Stacy and Euro-Fool‚ he even has a MacBook Air, what a f*king pointless device that it, the poseur! And what do they use them for? Well Constantine does write code, the others just do email, IM, update bugs and PowerPoint, but mostly surf tech blogs and job sites. What a waste!

You know, I'm happy with my Leveno and I'm going to show them that.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 4 (down 4 from last week)
Shots : 4 (down 4 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 185 lbs

PMO have vanished!

Its true. I did not pick up on the vibe. Its was all a bit "I know What You Did Last Summer". First Tori, one of Henry's super,super lieutenants just disappeared. It turns out, and the story was very confusing for a while, that she decided to leave her partner, move out to Yuma, AZ and live with Henry. See I got you. Not our Henry, but one of the board members that is also called Henry.

There was this totally wild story that went around that you had to be called Henry to get on the board, until Henry then appointed some kid (literally) from Gunn High School in Palo Alto to the board by the name of Frank and not our Euro-fool Frank!

Back to PMO. So Tori disappears. Then I noticed that my stand ups became bearable. SCRUM is cool, you have "cows" and "farmers". Basically the cow is committed to delivering the beef jerky and the farmer makes all the money. Generally the engineers and product managers are "cows" and PMO are the "farmers". They get to say "told you so" when there plans all get f**ked up because, well the unexpected happens. Its not like we are building the new bay bridge and its all a totally known science. I'm totally jealous of those types of engineers, everything always seems to go to plan for them.

Our stand ups are characterized by the PMO types asking the same question over and over again. I swear, you could record them and it would be word for word every friggin' day. And then there were none. They just vanished like it had all been a bad dream. Click your heals and return to Kansas. All very cool.

I'm sure that Constantine is working on some new engineering lead process. That's going to be cool, lets the engineers run the engineering process. Totally makes sense.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 (up 2 from last week)
Shots : 8 (up 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 184 lbs

Sacre bleu, Euro-Fool is bogus!

Another week, another tech-sess. This week, Constantine's new "golden" boy presented. I am starting to understand why my boss, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir really hates this guy. Basically he spent 90 minutes talking about dynamic and scriptable systems, extracting configuration into the hands of the Ops teams and Support etc.

Afterwards, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir almost blew another fuse. He was ranting and raving about how we have been doing that for years, how we already learnt to scale this better than YahBay (where I think Euro-Fool came from) and why he should be running the platform team as well. I saw him later that day, tears running down his face, in a conference room with Constantine. I guess he was really showing his passion for the company and the mission. Just hope that Constantine was listening, we can afford to loose him!

Also, I was pulled into Can-I-Have-A-Latter-Sirs inner circle this week. He's pulled together a crack team and wants me to join. They are re-writing the build system to use something called "Raven". Its something really cool for the creator of "Git" that will blow away anything that Euro-Fool and the Platform team can do!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : zero bottles (same as last week)
Shots : 6 (6 up from week)
Dinner : 3 nights (3 x pizza)
Weight : 181 lbs

Bogus euro dude!

Bogus, bogus, bogus. I can see it already. Constantine our VPE has brought in some new management. Its some French dude, dressed too well and too much aftershave. I think he's real name is Francois, but people have been calling him Frank. Apparently he gets super annoyed if you do that. My boss, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir, is really pissed. Looks like they will give Frank the platform team, which I thought was the team I worked in. After Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir stormed out of the building, I caught up with him the next day. Apparently we are now the Architecture team and we lay the ground for everybody above us, including the Platform team. So sticking one finger in the air to Frank already.

I have grown to love Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir, we did not see eye to eye to begin with. But I'm learning my lesson and not judging a book by its cover. He really knows his way around the code and the system, and I should have respected that. I can see he super loves us in that I-will-beat-you-but-its-for-your-own-good sort of way.

Now I just need to finish that shopping cart feature.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 2 bottles (down 13 from last week)
Shots : 2 x Bourbon Shots (down 8 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (1 x Thai, 1 x Una Mass, 3 x Pizza)
Weight : 178 lbs