amanda_lodden

One of the hardest part about the coding that I need to get done is that it's a live system. Sometimes, I can copy a live page, edit it, and then put it back into place when I've finished, but any time I'm changing the framework code, it gets more difficult.

Unfortunately, the framework is really crappy code. The good news is that I've gotten a lot better at programming since I started. The bad news is that there's a LOT of structural work that needs to be done before I can do a lot of the upgrades that need doing.

The best way around this, of course, is to clean up the old code when no one else is using the system-- evenings and weekends. I bet you can guess how thrilled I am about that.

Today, however, I got a good six hours of effort in, and some serious progress made on the structural code. It's still a bit of a house of cards, but it's getting better and better.

I have a longstanding rant about documentation; specifically that it should be done.

What is apparently not as obvious to everyone else as it is to me is what "documentation" entails, because after a two month absence I've come back to find everything a hodge-podge. None of it is "wrong", exactly, but it's clear that my habits of putting in "extra" information have not been picked up by... roughly anyone else.

A while back, allanh made a post about how when he was ill and had particularly bad memory problems, he used to treat everything he did as "leaving notes to his future self". I thought it was an excellent practice, and since then I've taken to putting not just "flight to California" in my calendar, but "American Flight 123 DTW to SJC via DFW lands at 9:55pm" in my calendar (with the start date being the takeoff time; if it's odd, I'll note that as well), and been happier for it, especially now that I own a Blackberry that syncs to the same calendar. It certainly makes it easier to tell someone when to pick me up, or when I'll be at Enterprise renting a car, or whether I'll be there in time for dinner.

What I hadn't fully realized was that I already did that to a lesser degree: when I pay commissions, I don't lump them all into one "Sales:Commissions Paid" entry in QuickBooks, but rather I split them off into one line per month (all of which are still "Sales:Commissions Paid") and note which month it is, which matches up with a spreadsheet, which cross-references the check number within it. For the salesperson it's still one check, and at the end of the year it's still one category in the P&L statement, but day-to-day if you want to go back and figure out what's been paid and what hasn't, it's simple. Similarly, when I pay a consultant, I don't just put "22 hours" in the memo field, I put "22 hours 4/10 - 4/25" so that I can match it up with an email containing the hours I'm paying for.

This did not happen while I was gone, and now I'm staring at a QuickBooks file that I have no idea how things got to where they are. I like it not.

While my first priority is to get it back to something I can deal with, I have determined that if this system is going to work at all, I'm going to need to document not just how I do things, but why I do them that way. Yay, more work.

I'm in Denver on an 11-hour layover.

It was SUPPOSED to be a 1-hour layover, just enough time to use the restroom and stretch my legs before boarding the next flight. That flight, however, was oversold, and Frontier was offering a $200 voucher if you were willing to wait for a 2:30 flight on United.

Now, as it happens, I had gotten screwed on this flight arrangement-- since John and I are not flying home the same day, I had to make separate reservations through Expedia, and by the time I finished the process for his flight, the price had jumped and it would have cost me an extra $150 to put myself on the same flight. Er, no. I ended up on an earlier flight with the exact same layover path, which would have had me getting into San Jose a full 9 hours ahead of John.

So, I asked Frontier if, instead of the 2:30 United flight, I could switch to the 6:00 Frontier flight that John is on out of Denver. They agreed, and were probably ecstatic to not have to work out the inter-carrier compensation with United. They also gave me an upgrade to first-class on the 6:00 flight, which I will probably give to John since his long legs don't fit well into airplane seats.

However, this does mean that I have a LOT of time to kill in Denver, preferably without having to pass through TSA again (which means I have a LOT of time to kill in the airport). I sprang for the day-pass for the President's Club in the airport (run by Continental/British Air), and let me assure you, it's not worth the price. I had gone for it because I was always told that the executive lounges are quieter than the rest of the airport. This is patently untrue. I can live with the folks on their cell phone, but for about two hours there were a half-dozen children in here, all bored, all wandering around and then calling for their mommy. There's a bar in the back which is nice but loud, and "free snacks" (one hour out of every three, as near as I can tell). Seven laptop cubbyholes, and two other tables that are tall enough to use a laptop at, which does not really suit the 20 people trying to use laptops. Overall, I think I would have been further ahead to camp out at the food court. Live and learn.

In the meantime, it seems like as good a time as any to post random updates.

Work is the obvious one. I'm still unemployed, and happily so, but the strain is beginning to show on John. We've settled on a compromise, and starting in May I'll go in one day a week to handle the little stuff that either requires executive decisions coupled with inherent knowledge of the systems or is too in-flux to properly document how to do it. And, as I had sort of planned from about two days after the hissy fit when I'd calmed down, I'll also quietly work from home on the job I was SUPPOSED to be doing before I got bogged down in distractions, which is fixing and standardizing the underlying systems. I'm not going to try going into the office for that part, since being in the office just invites those distractions again.

The pond is still a huge hole in the ground, but I have pieces to turn it into something pretty finally, so I have high hopes for that. With luck, I'll get it up and running before the live game.

We put in a new patio door and one new window, and I love it. The difference in the heat loss is significant-- I may have to accelerate the plan to replace more windows. As an added benefit, Inky can't push out the new screen on the patio door and run off. This has frustrated him no end. He also managed to get himself trapped between the patio door and the screen once, which was hysterically funny.

I haven't forgotten that I still have 22 of the 25 Things meme to go. I also haven't forgotten that I did not promise a particular timeframe. :-)

The guest bedroom hasn't changed much since the Great Rearranging Spree, which is to say that there's still piles and piles of crap to sort out and find homes for. But it's getting better, and Jacob is happy with having his own space instead of having to take pieces of mine.

I am slowly making progress on the stack of old projects that have been hanging over my head for the past two years. It's discouraging, though-- every time I finish one thing up, I discover that there's another one hiding underneath it.

It's probably not a surprise to much of anyone who has heard me complain lately that I do not have a lot of job satisfaction.

It's an inherent danger to being the spouse of the owner-- you end up being the one who handles all the crap jobs that no one else wants to do, and those jobs grow in size and scope until you no longer have the time and energy to do anything but try to keep your head above water. You can't fix the systemic problems because you're so swamped with the things those systemic problems cause. Owners get that too, but they typically have more options for passing things off to others.

The other fun part is that oftentimes, you don't get all the information you need to fix a problem, and a five-minute task takes an hour to track down all the pieces. Sometimes I didn't even know that I HAD a particular task to deal with until a customer inquired about its status or complained about it not being done. Yay!

What made me even less happy is the attitude that most of my requests generated. Often, when I identified a systemic problem, I was told that it wasn't really that big of a problem, or that I didn't have the capability to fix it so I may as well just deal with it, or both. Asking for information to actually complete a task is often met with a sigh and a "why are you bothering me?" attitude.

Wednesday, several things annoyed me, and while the items themselves weren't all that big of a deal, they were each the result of a pervasive problem. I complained, and got the usual "I didn't do it, it's not my fault, why do you even care, go away and leave me alone." And I snapped.

I quit.

I'd like to say that I gave two weeks notice and a detailed explanation of why I'd had enough, but that's not how these sorts of things go, is it? Besides, I've already said that I "snapped".

So, now I am unemployed. I spent today running around and getting some personal things done that have been bothering me for some time, and for now I am quite happy to be unemployed. Should that change, or an excellent opportunity drop into my lap, I'll reconsider. (Cash-wise, nothing has really changed, because my paycheck is actually John's paycheck, so that taxes can be withheld rather than having to pay estimates every quarter.)

[Amendment, because I know how he'll blame himself if I don't say it: Shane2 is a consistent exception to all of the above, and has always, ALWAYS been happy to give me any assistance he could. I feel a bit guilty leaving him holding the bag on some of the crap jobs, since John's already said he picked up a couple of them.]

Me: "Are we aware that [Customer Name] included a number that ported to AT&T in January on their latest order?"

John: "It's a typo."

Me: "Huh?"

John: "They don't want it with us."

Me: "Did they say this? Where or when did they say this?"

John: "It's their fax line. They don't want it with us."

Me: .... *gritting my teeth* "I will ask them about it and let THEM decide."

This habit of guessing for our customers will get him beaten to death one of these days. It's bad enough that I have to hunt down information when I see something that does not jive with my version of reality, but to then be given information that is pulled out of someone's ass instead of actually confirmed with the customer... even if he's right, I want it in writing. I want something to show the customer later on when they say "Hey, AT&T is till billing us for this number" so I can say "But here on this date, you sent an email confirming that you wanted to leave that number on AT&T."

No. Just. No.

Actual, measurable progress! Towards a defined goal! Towards a *long-term* goal, even!

Today, I moved two servers behind a firewall that had been built for that purpose (there's two more to go, one of which isn't actively in use yet and one of which isn't actually built yet). I've wanted a proper firewall-with-VPN for years. I bought the hardware for the firewall... I'm too lazy to look for the receipts, but I'm sure it was sometime last spring.

But! It's up. It's tested, and proven to be working. And it's a puzzle-piece in the over-arching goal of being able to work from anywhere I damned well please.

"Week" is stretching it a bit, since I remember very little of the early week. I remember saying "F*ck this, I'm going home" at least once and maybe twice.

Things starting getting better by mid-week. One of the days was fairly productive, and I'm going to call that "Wednesday" even though I'm not 100% sure that's correct. On Thursday, Carol (who is a real accountant, rather than someone who got handed the bookkeeping job because no one else wanted it) came over to the office to help me figure out the Quickbooks problem, which had blossomed into a situation where my gross income went DOWN by $60 but my net profit went UP by $1000 when I went through and deleted a bunch of credits that existed only to adjust the accrual balance (and, again, I can't stress enough that we're cash-basis). She agreed that it was weird and told me that it would be perfectly fine for me to go back to the system I used to use, which got rid of all these damned problems but that our paid-accountant[*] didn't like. I'll move heaven and earth when it's an issue of making something correct, but it turns out that there's nothing incorrect about the way I was doing it, it just doesn't match the accountant's preferences. So, either he'll deal with doing it my way, or I'll get a new accountant.

A sinus headache interrupted Thursday. I took a nap, which helped the headache but left me wide-awake until pretty late, which was okay with me because I got quite a bit done in the evening so at least it wasn't a completely wasted day. John had gone to bed, but a call on his cell phone woke him-- a customer calling to report that they were out of service. He started downstairs to his laptop, and fell down the stairs. Fortunately, he didn't fall head-first, and he fell on the top section before the stairs turn, so he went down four steps instead of a dozen. His back and hips are still a little sore, and he landed on the cell phone. It still worked, but it developed a pretty severe crack in the casing. After he tracked down the problem, he came upstairs to tell me that he was going back to bed. On his way out of the office, he shut the door rather suddenly and said "This night just isn't going to end, is it?" Then he steadied himself, went out into the hallway, and chased the bat in the hallway out of one of the windows while I cowered in the office. That brings the bat count up to four in the last twelve months. I'm not sure exactly what changed, but it needs to change back.

Friday I ran a bunch of errands, starting with taking my laptop to Best Buy to have it fixed. It runs fine, but the case has cracked open near the hinge and makes it difficult to open it if it's closed all the way. With a house full of cats and the electronics being exposed via the crack, I foresaw that becoming a bigger and bigger problem as time went on. I couldn't remember if the extended warranty that I sprang for was for two years or three, though, so I was a little nervous about what the cost would end up being. It turned out that the warranty was for three years, so the cost will be nil. Then I went to the office to have lunch with John, and we went over to All-Star Wireless to get his cell phone fixed. We ended up getting new phones for each of us, since his is pretty old (and would require a replacement rather than a fix anyway) and I hate mine.

Saturday I got into a mood and cleaned out some of Mom's stuff from the basement, clearing out a corner so that some of the furniture could be re-arranged into a more sensible layout that got in the way less. I also worked on sewing some of the curtains I promised to Brian & Julianna (*sigh* more than a month ago), and finished up that set on Sunday. We went over to their house for dinner and dropped off the curtains, so I've got that much less guilt over how long it's been taking now. I rounded the week out by finishing up organizing my mp3s, which will make it easier to actually make the four CDs I've promised to people.

[*] I asked Carol, but she doesn't want the job, or I'd just pay her.

Shamelessly stolen from Wondermark

As a policy, I don't make New Year's Resolutions. It seems like such a waste of time, what with the whole "broken in the first week" cliche, and I generally feel that someone worth doing is worth doing whenever you realize you should do it-- why wait for an arbitrary date? And if it's not worth doing, why bother setting yourself up for failure by turning it into a resolution?

However, one of my goals is to reduce the amount of paper surrounding me, and from a business perspective, it is best to use the same system consistently throughout a given tax year. So I've been patiently using the paper system throughout 2008, with the intent of switching to electronic receipt storage in 2009. (This only applies to business paperwork; I've been slowly migrating personal stuff to digital copies.)

[My AIM Id]: AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!
[My AIM Id]: I have no fucking clue what I'm doing.
[Kevin's AIM Id]: complaining? :P


Nothing like a dose of perspective...