For those of you who really want to know what I look like at 4:30 in the morning after a 19 hour day, you're in luck.  In simulated infrared, here I am.

So I got over my cold from earlier this week enough to make it into work yesterday, and I felt pretty good.  I got up this morning feeling kinda cruddy but bravely decided to make it into the office.  I drove into Walnut Creek to catch BART (I'm trying out going to different stops to optimize my commute a bit), and was about to catch the train, and just felt terrible. I ended up coming straight home.  So I spent almost 2 hours round trip on the road, burned gas, ended up back where I started, but am much more comfortable here (didn't want to be caught with a flu 2 hours from home on public transit).

 It's kind of been a lost week in some regards, I worked in the office on Monday and Thursday,  from home Tuesday and today, and took Wednesday off completely to try to get better (didn't do a terrible lot of good).

Anyway, on another note, see the attached picture (caught on my way home last night). 

Normal life starts up again today!  So far so good, though the morning car defrost was unpleasant (I've got to make a hole in the garage again tonight for my car).  Still I caught a 7:08 train out of North Concord, which means I'll be in the office around 8, which is one of my new year's resolutions.

 I've got a whole lot of work over the next two weeks (I am pushing out a feature at work that is exposing major bugs in existing code and just won't die), but I'm excited to dive back in and get cracking on my TODO list.

 We had a great week and a half at home; I had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time with Stef and the kids, catch up on stuff to do around the house, and from time to time just drop responsibilities and relax.  I'm sore from playing too much Wii Sports though :)

 Anyway, good morning, everyone!

This is one of the many reasons I ride BART instead of driving in to work... yikes!

So, when my company brought our new CTO on board earlier this year, we all noticed that he wears pretty much the exact same blue suit and blue shirt combo every.  single.   day.  And then I noticed that I have a blue suit that's almost exactly the same.  So this year, I showed up to work today (yes, it's Halloween and I can get away with dressing up for work in costume) as Tony.  Gray hair coloring, blue suit, and snazzy (if ridiculously uncomfortable) shoes to match.  Everyone thought it was hilarious (fortunately, including Tony), and really enjoyed it.  Pix forthcoming as soon as I get them from the people carrying cameras today ;)

I just committed code for the project at work I've been working on for a couple of months now into our version control system.  It's not done yet; I've got a bunch of bugs to clean up, but it's a significant step forward.  I'll be happy to be done with this one and on to something else, but for the moment, it feels good :)

 Also, today I broke down and bought a copy of iWork for my Powerbook.  Now I too can make cool Keynote presentations like Ryan :-p  I don't generally like to buy commercial software (too much good free stuff out there), but I really like this suite and it runs much faster on my machine than NeoOffice was.

I haven't posted anything for a while -- I hate continually telling everyone that I'm buried in work, but these days its rather the truth :)  I'm about to wrap 3 of my side projects up over the next couple of weeks; I'll post more about those as they reach completion.

Thanks to everyone who has been praying for my job and especially our software rollout last night. Everything went off very well, and we're very pleased with the results. I'm looking forward to our schedule moving forward at a less frantic pace for the next little bit, and seeing more of my family.

 

Update: Someone at work sent off a link to this relevant comic.

I've had most of the month of December away from work, due to a combination of being sick and having Christmas vacation.

Today it ends; I'm back in the saddle, on my way in to work. I'm thankful to feel much better -- I still feel like I've got a little to go yet in recovering my full strength, but I feel like a normal human being again and am able to do everything that I need to. It was nice to have the time off around Christmas; I got very used to sleeping in again and spending the whole day with Stef and the kids. It was fun to be with Ethan and Rachel so much more than normal, though it gives me a greater appreciation for the work that Stef does with them every day :)

On the other hand, I'm anxious to get back into the office and start making progress again on the projects that we're pushing to finish right now. There is plenty to be done, but it's frustrating to me that I'm still learning how things work, which makes me feel less productive than I'd like to be.

Anyway, this has descended to a ramble -- good morning and happy new year everyone!

 One more thing: I'm still working on the site theme.  If you notice anything odd (the title having different text behind it, things not lining up, etc) please let me know, especially if you are using Internet Explorer.

My group at work is pushing pretty hard right now; we're rolling out some new stuff this weekend, so we're staying late configuring everything to death and getting ready to flip the switch. I'm on the train home right now (a surprising number of people are on BART at 10 PM!). We stayed late enough that my boss went out and grabbed dinner for us; fortunately, the Thai Best restaurant somewhere in the general vicinity of Kearny and Market makes a halfway-decent Pad Thai. I snapped a memento of the evening, unfortunately, my team members seem to have a chronic inability to smile for pictures :) This is dinner in the conference room known as "The Garage".