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

Henry is sick!

OMG. Henry is really sick. We had a company meeting postponed from before Labour Day because Henry was sick and this week he finally made it in to talk to us. I was expecting a deep dive on his meetings in New York and Charlotte, NC. He had been super sick for weeks, but as always put the company first and made sure he attended all his meetings (thank god for Henry).

Instead he told us all about how his assistant got a doctor to do a house call. Then he just talked about some super hot leggy brunette (the doctor), how he got her number and has been on a date with and that she is a total babe. How her ex used to play drums in some 80's hair band that I never heard of (Dokken, Motley Crue or something). I'm jealous, she sounded very hot.

So another meeting without a lot of details. I'm sure its building up to something *big* in the next couple of weeks. I'm sure its all going to be great news for the next big internet story.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 (up 1 from last week)
Shots : 6 (up 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
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

Spring is totally evil and must be killed!

Ok, Ok. The title of this weeks post is perhaps overkill. But boy, Spring is totally bogus.

Now you recall that I said Spring was like an Aston Martin, with Spring the Aston knew me, what I liked and ensured that my model girlfriend could not drive. Well it turns out that in fact Spring is some "pansy" scheme.

This is what happens. You take a big messenger bag full of money to the Aston Martin dealer on Van Ness. You hand over the cash and drive home with a huge smile on your face and errr... well you know what else! You park the car in the garage of your cool SOMA or NOHO loft.

Next morning you wake early, you intend to pick up your model girlfriend and then drive down the coast for some lunch at the Moss Beach Distillery. You leave your lovely loft and wake up the the Aston after its snuggly warm sleep in the garage. You make the first stop at your girlfriends condo. You get back in the car, it feels different. You are not sure, perhaps slightly down on power, the turn in a little less sharp. You drive a little further and stop for gas. After jumping back in the car is totally wrong, it has the get up and go of a Prius and some of the interior feels cheap and from a Ford parts bin.

This is Spring. In fact, Spring is worse than that. Instead of opening up the hood to check on the engine with the full complement of tools that you are used to, with Spring you are left with your favorite editor (mine is emacs) and XML to debug the ever changing system.

It was designed by a narcosist, implemented after one too many for the road and used by people who would never normally be left with a sharp instrument within 100ft of them.

I'm not a fan anymore.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 (up 6 from last week)
Shots : 6 (same as last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 182 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

No iPhone!

Bad news at the company meeting. Henry gave an update on the product roadmap meetings. Looks like American City Bank have decided that they don't need an iPhone application but they do want support for Windows ME. Stacy broke the news at the company meeting, you could hear the tears in his voice. Henry kind of pushed him off the stage (with a "sit the f*k down") and quickly changed the subject and then went on to talk at great length about "the scenario".

It goes something like this

• Somebody just like you has a super cool credit card (yes, much better than Platinum)
• You buy some stock, lets say in Washington Mutual
• The analytic component in the platform then whirs it cogs and come us with a suggestion "go take a train to Seattle"
• The train is auto-booked for you, but you decide to "opt in" to the train arrival notices
• As your train arrives in Seattle, a Fax is sent (your preference on the mechanism, fax now SMS later next year) to the local Taxi company
• The Taxi is dispatched and picks you up
• The driver already knows that you have a table booked Spearmint Rhino at 8.45pm, so takes you directly there, no questions asked
  

Now that would be super cool! What Henry is doing is a Vulcan Mind Melt on his how Hank Commerce makes money with this. Its not in the transactions but its the data as he explained to the Asian guy in glasses. He then had to explain it all again to that Indian guy who always falls asleep in company meetings.

How cool is that!

Another first. It was a "dry" week.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : zero (down 2 from last week)
Shots : zero (same as last week)
Dinner : 3 nights (3 x pizza)
Weight : 180 lbs