Snowman Studios
It's been a while since my last post. Mainly, there has been much celebration and relaxation. The tough part about releasing a product is that afterwards you have to support it. There have been great moments, and frustrating moments. One day, I was the only engineer.
This weekend I was in pheonix. I've gone there for just the weekend before, but this time it really seemed short.
Our first CD of a product we've sold has been burned and is being saved as an artifact of early Incisix history. The second was signed by the dev team and presented to the Chief Technology Officer as the idea for this project and company started in his head 16 years ago.
Today I worked 16 hours. I was full of energy. I managed to be able to drive home even though I had made preparations so that I could sleep on my futon comfortably tonight. So now I'm treating myself to a well-earned drink of scotch.
"Have you been checking for null like a real programmer?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then explain the exceptions in the console."
"No excuse, sir."
"Getting your comp sci degree is one thing, but you've got a long way to prove that you belong here. Your weekend pass is revoked."
He walks to the next guy in line.
"Name?"
"Luz, George."
"Corruptions in the database. Pass revoked."
He looks around for trouble to find.
"When did you splice in this code, Sgt. Lipton?"
"Yesterday, sir."
"Long enough to notice the wait. Revoked."
He turns to the next man.
"Name?"
"Malarkey, Donald G."
"Malarkey? Malarkey's slang for bull****, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Use of ambiguous names, Pvt. Bull****. Revoked."
He spots one more infraction and walks straight to it.
"Name?"
"Liebgot, Joseph D, sir."
"
Deprecated code, Liebgot. You want to kill bugs?"
"Yes, sir."
"Not with this. I wouldn't take this deprecated piece of code to the press, and I will not take your work to the press in this condition. Now thanks to these men and their infractions, every man in the company who had a weekend pass has lost it."
So I took some liberties with this speech. Some of you will recognize it from a certain drill instructor in a certain TV series. Most people will remember the actor as Ross, but I will always remember him as Captain Sobel. But more importantly, I've written this because I get no weekend. The situation is critical enough that we are all going to be there tomorrow and Sunday. The product ships on Wednesday, and it's time to earn my pay.
It's Sunday, so I should post something.
Yesterday I finished adding features to my part of the product. This means that I can now focus on helping people with their features and doing bug fixes.
Today, I went to an event put on by GM to showcase their cars. They had various coned courses through the parking lot: one for SUVs, large SUVs, Trucks, Passenger cars, and Luxury cars. They also had a section specifically to Pontiac, which included the GTO. It has all of that horsepower and it felt slower than my car. But the highlight is the Corvette course where you can drive one of their 400 hp corvettes (with traction control, auto or stick) around a course. It was definately worth going just for that and now I want one.
I reserve such expressions as the following for cases that are in complete excess from what should be considered reasonable.
Utter bullshit.
Fargo's Take.
So I feel like taking a moment to update everyone.
Last week I worked 60 hours. Overall, it went well, but I was definately worn down. One night I got back after 10 PM, and we took advantage of the dinner offer and got vietnamese. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either.
The start of this week was slow as I was still mentally fatigued from last week. It has picked up steam and things are showing signs of coming to a completed state. The weekend after the product is delivered I'll be going on the all mens retreat for church. We'll be going up to the mountains in east San Diego County.
Tonight we're eating a better dinner than vietnamese: Japanese. And I'm not talking about a simple bento box or an entree. We're eating exclusively sushi for dinner. Yum.
