Relentless Inquiry

The Savage Project of Doom is finally winding down. I am sharply ambivalent about the recent news that there may actually BE a follow-on project. I'd considered that outcome thankfully unlikely given some of the quality issues encountered in the remote team deliverables, but we have been tracing those to process rather than talent. Short form– mainframe programmers Think Different than Oracle/SQL programmers. Shorter form: data-driven vs table-driven.

But the era of 7:30am project calls has been blissfully superseded by a kinder, gentler spacetime of merely monitoring email and doing weekly site visits.

Meanwhile, at Client B, we are still tracking some issues with pre-emption in the LSF queues, but the guy from Platform is extremely sharp & helpful, and as long as we don't do The Bad Thing (a certain style of job submit into the highest pri queue), we get several hundred jobs through in a 24-hour period. Last night we diddled a particular queue's jobslot settings to get something done overnight and nothing broke. Highwater mark of 480 jobs, drained nicely to 94 jobs by the 8:53am queue report. I'll still run my little hourly queue-mailing script for a while, though, until I can link the queue reports into nagent, the pre-existing site choice for monitoring (hmpf).

The above may not sound like much, but at one point it was the kiss of death for more than a hundred jobs or so to be enqueued. We've had queue buildups since the main fixing of over 1200 jobs, all eventually draining in processing without human intervention. So it's *very* squee that this thing is finally working.

Progress on personal fronts? Um, I don't have the flu anymore. Didn't realize it was the flu when I had it, but post-illness research suggests it. Have one or two schemes incubating, but won't be able to give details on them for another week or two. Mostly work has taken all my personal time for a while. Dropping back to 5 – 10 hours a week for Client A, and 30-ish for Client B will be a major relief. I'll have all kinds of free time! Like this morning, when I should repot things and/or help Mike sort the laundry.

Oh yeah, and after an extra week of waiting while various hoops were jumped through (interestingly described by HR as post-Enron accountability practices), Mike received and signed his offer letter from Molecular Devices and starts this Monday, Feb 7. They're really excited about him, it's mutual, and they offered him more than the position was technically listed at because of his experience and education level. How cool is that?! They're a whopping 1.3 miles away, too.

I am hoping their insurance is non-sucky, since we are spending $150 more monthly on insurance (via COBRA) than we are on rent!