I suck at chili eating!

There's a weird tradition in my team. But its cool as well.

We always have somebody on call from our team, we are the core and fabric of the system so we always need to be there. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir trusts me to do this now, which is awesome.

We used to do it on rotation, everybody got their turn in order, you know where you are from week to week and so could plan. Big Bill, the Database expert in the team, super techie and has the biggest Afro, came up with a cool idea.

Basically at the team meeting each week, we select who's going to have the pager but eating Chili's. Awesome, its like being back at my frat house all over again!

So he lines up three paper cups and lids. He places a pile of chilies in one, and the other two are left empty. He them shuffles them around the table like one of those side walk games. I don't know if you have every seen one of those, but its a complete hoax. They have somebody in the crowd who gets to win, just to get the everybody else interested. Then they shuffle the cards or shells in such a way that you always loose. You would have to be stupid to get suckered into that.

So back to our selection mechanism. Basically you get to choose a cup, if its empty then you don't have to take the pager. Big Bill shuffles for each team member. Weird that I have been selected and then had to eat the chilies three weeks in the row. My bad luck I guess.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 180 lbs

Scritable systems sucks!

I love how we are changing the world, one customer at a time. But our platform is so friggin' tough to develop and then debug. I mean I love XML and XML Spy, you can do some wicked smart things. But developing an MVC application in XML, its pretty mind bending. The idea, and its pretty cool idea, is that we become a Platform As A Service. Something that Salesforce think they are doing, in reality they have just moved Oracle CRM onto the web and have a bunch of forms that allow you to customize it. Admittedly, its over the web which beats any Oracle technology by four or more years due to their release cycle. But its not as cool as the platform we are building, we call it "SkyNet" after the Terminator movies. We are that cool!

Here's what we are going to do, and its a killer plan. We are opening up the Platform for anybody to build any application. To demo this, a couple of the Product Managers built a Dinner Outsourcing Application (DOA), which allows you to pre-configure your selection for dinner, it then aggregates the days results and with the trends of the previous days, week and months then placed the order with the vendor (over Fax). Soemtimes it even gets the order right, but mostly orders pizza. It can then use the aggregation algorithms to either try a leveraged buy-out of the franchise we buy from most frequently or try to get a corporate rate established though Book-a-Table.

The application is wicked smart and they built in a couple of days. And they are Product Managers! Pity that during the time it took to develop, Henry stopped all the dinner orders. It could have been wicked cool application on our destination site. I think our engineers would have loved it.

So the plan is that anybody can build an application that can leverage our aggregation and broad range of services to create their own mash up. I'm thinking about building an application to examine the costs of flights between New York and Charlotte, NC and San Francisco and then recommend when Henry should travel. Its kiss ass, but he really needs to know who I am!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 10 (up 2 from last week)
Shots : 16 (up 6 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

Dinners are gone!

Disaster. At the company meeting this week Henry said that we needed to "preserve cash". Its not clear to him what is going to happen in the financial meltdown that appears to be looming.

He left it at that. Later in the week, Javier who runs finance sends an email around, no more dinners. Pass me a hail-mary! How the hell I am supposed to do that debugging marathons on an empty stomach? How crazy is that!

I know that a bunch of those South Bay types basically come in late, have a long lunch, go for coffee, stay for dinner and then leave. I get that. Why pay a bunch of cash for people who are lazy? I thought that was what management were paid to do, find the weakest links and dispose of them. So you take the strongest players, like me, and then starve them. How does that help us be the next big internet story?

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 (same as last week)
Shots : 4 (down 2 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 186 lbs

Fun in the sun!

Wow. What an awesome way to say goodbye to the old cramped office, a fun day in the sun and "hello new office" next week.

It was an awesome day, Henry did look spectacular in his Ralph Lauren (not Polo) Polo short, cut off Seven Jeans and his regular loafers (no socks). He really showed what it takes to be a king of the valley. Not only did he land some big fish so far this year, he took the time to let down his slightly thinning hair and hang out with his staff. Boy, he also put away a few PBRs in the process.

Tried to hang out with Geek Babe, but she was too busy throwing down Jello Shots and throwing up the Una Mass from the catered lunch. I will miss the old office, with the wall of shame (aka where you go to punch out the dry wall), the coffee stained walls (aka when DJ had a fit when the site went down for the 3rd time that day) and the great food.

The future looks bright, we are not moving far, just into the other tower. We will have three floors to fill out so the recruiting team will still be hiring, hiring, hiring.

Henry had a little rally call at the end of the day. We were hot, sweaty and drunk. He said the most amazing thing, "You are my family, I love each of you like you were my brothers. We are all brothers in arms". I'm starting to think that Henry is that father I never had, he is so inspiring, my father was such a looser working at Washington Mutual all those years.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 15 bottles (up 10 from last week)
Shots : 10 x Jello Shots (9 up from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (4 x Pizza, 1 x Una Mass)
Weight : 177 lbs

Awesome waffle breakfast!

Wow. I was blown away. All the VPs got together this week cooked all the employee's breakfast. Hey it was Bisquick Shake & Pour but it was super tasty, in a processed kind of way. I've never seen such a controlled form of chaos in my life, must be the fact that Henry was not there. He did say at the last company meeting (from his cell phone) that he would be there leading the charge, but apparently some Red Sox game was playing so decided to stay on the East Coast to watch it. He loves them Sox.

I chatted to Geek Babe, you know, her best advice on Spring dependency injection and so forth. I think she recognizes talent if you know what I mean.

One of the teams has started a bake-and-bring weekly event. Apparently, you bake something and bring it into the office. Sounds totally yuk to me. Why would I want somebodies homemade cookies, coffee cake, etc. when I can just go to Starbucks and get the real thing. Don't people know that home style stuff is so like my grandmother would do?

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (down one from last week)
Shots : 3 x Tequila (same as last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (4 x Una Mass, 1 x Thai)
Weight : 171 lbs

Where have the bagels gone!

At first I thought that I was just unlucky. You know those creative and marketing types. Dressed in the too cool 80's game t-shirts and army pants, they are first to the poppy seed bagels when they are not spending the morning making their third double iced latte. You have to be totally committed to get a poppy seed bagel around here. I mean, like, get there before 10.30am on "Bagel Thursdays".

Last week I just about managed to get the last one by beating down "legs" from Finance, but this week... the horror of it all.

I get there at 9.45am. I'm totally going to get a poppy seed bagel this time. I'm so ahead of the game here. I get to the kitchen, first shock is Noah's (otherwise known as bread-with-a-hole-disappointment-its-not-a-bagel). Second shock, they have ordered some kind of artisan shit, with all sorts of crazy stuff in them. Wow! This is so uncool. Hank Commerce is changing before my eyes.

Big rumors is that our VPE and Henry have been out shopping. Some people are talking companies, other are talking a new management team. I hear from the old timers that we get a new management team every 18 months, so this could be my first big change!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (3 up from last week)
Shots : 8 x Bourbon (6 up from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 165 lbs