Dec 312013
 

Work anywhere long enough, and you’re going to become the <something> person. From that point on, all questions, advice, etc. on that topic by default go to you. In my experience, this isn’t usually the result of some deliberate action to make a person the <something> “expert”, it’s the result of the work they get assigned and end up doing. The bigger questions are, what are your areas of expertise, what would you like your areas of expertise to be, and what are you doing to make the 2 previous answers line up?

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 Posted by at 4:10 PM
Dec 022013
 

Apparently, there’s some managerial best practice out there that says managers and the employees that work under them should meet once a month 1-on-1. I think the goal is to have some sort of fairly informal time set aside for anything the employee might want to talk about – concerns about management, workplace issues, problems with co-workers, etc. My biggest problem of these things is that I never know just what there is to talk about. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 2:54 AM
Nov 012013
 

1 of the things I work on regularly was originally created with a fairly consistent data set. We had a very good idea of what fields were going to be in the data. As a result, we thought we knew where exactly we needed to check for null data, and when we didn’t need to know. Then the data set expanded, and the new data wasn’t nearly as consistent as what we started with. That’s when we realized that we were very much wrong in thinking we knew what needed null checks. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 3:02 AM
Oct 012013
 

I’ll admit to being guilty of making this joke. You know, somebody questions why things work or function a certain way, and then there’s that snarky little line, “you’re hunting logic”. It seems hilarious, until you realize just what you’re pointing out. Namely, “Yes, this is stupid, and yes this doesn’t make any sort of discernible sense, but we’re going to keep doing it anyways.” Not so funny now is it? Being told that “you’re hunting logic” is basically an admission that you’re right, but that nobody wants to take on the hordes of people who put things into this situation.  Continue reading »

 Posted by at 1:28 AM
Sep 102013
 

Not to be a shill in this series, but there are vendors that will print addresses on the outer set of wedding invitation envelopes when you place an order (the one the post office uses to deliver mail). Well, at least David’s Bridal does, which is who we happened to use. I’m not going to go so far as to say you should spend money on this kind of thing, just that we decided the convenience was worth it for us, and this is how it played out on our end. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 2:16 AM
Aug 302013
 

As I mentioned earlier, I noticed a few things during my wedding planning process that I thought were worth sharing now that all is said and done on that front. While I mentioned having a Google Drive spreadsheet in my last post, I wanted to discuss it some more because we managed to get some neat uses out of it that are worth documenting and reusing. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 1:46 AM
Aug 252013
 

Whodunnit has been my guilty pleasure show all summer. It had a cool premise, 12 “guests” went to a mansion to play a murder mystery game, only to find a guest “murdered,” and be told that 1 of them is the “killer” (obviously a TV show isn’t going to actually kill people, but if you suspend the disbelief, it was a fascinating concept). It was reminiscent of another “reality” show that was also a guilty pleasure of mine, Murder in Small Town X (same basic idea, except the suspects were all a separate group of actors and not the contestants).  The finale just aired not long ago, and when it was all said and done…my wife and I spent a solid hour and a half, ranting, raving, and coming up with a better version of that type of show.

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 Posted by at 7:34 PM