New Year

Us at my company's holiday party

The New Year has happened, and I'm already back into the swing of things. The days off were nice, even if our travel was quite eventful (in the bad sort of way). I'm currently about four-and-a-half months into my tenure at my current job as a data analyst at Zynga. I really enjoy my job. It has its ups and downs, but all jobs do. I enjoy my work, the only issue might be that my team just needs another analyst, for which we are currently hiring. My coworkers are quite enjoyable. Even though we're distributed across the company on various teams, I enjoy the company of my fellow analysts at our regular meetings or when we meet for lunch.

Twenty-twelve was quite the eventful year for us. We got married, moved across the country, and I started a new job. All of these are big things on the "Most Stressful Events of Your Life" list, but it's worked out pretty well. We've had to downsize our living space in order to fit into the San Francisco Bay Area residential market, going from a small house to an apartment. Our apartment is nice and so is the complex, but it's definitely just a temporary arrangement.

Being married has been interesting. It hasn't changed who we are or how we interact in any major way, but it's this slight thing that's always there. The plain band on my finger is always there to remind me that there is this amazing woman who loves me, even when I make mistakes. She's wonderful and sometimes I wonder why she puts up with my dumb butt.

This blog has stood neglected due to my lack of time. To be honest much of my blogging I would do at work at my last job because I had the spare time, which I don't now. This just means that I'm not so bored at work any more, which is a good thing.

I take the BART to and from work each day, with roughly one hour and fifteen minutes of total commute each way. I usually spend my time on the train playing a game on my Vita. My current obsession has been Patapon. I used to walk to and from the BART stations but it's been colder so that's fallen a bit to the wayside and I've been taking the shuttle from the station to work. The temperatures here don't vary as much as they did in Arkansas, especially in San Francisco. There's very little temperature variance there. The ocean and the Bay have quite a stabilizing effect.

Life is good. I like where I am and the direction I'm heading. My work is great, I'm learning so many useful skills and people really seem to value my opinions (which is always nice). I'm positive about the future. I think 2013 is going to be a good year.

My Journey: Becoming who I want to be

I really hope you listen to the music in this post.

As anyone who follows me on twitter is well aware, I've been applying to jobs recently. This is due to the fact that, come August 10, my job won't exist anymore as my company did not win our bid for the government contract that we currently work. I've waited until recently to do this because I wanted to get my degree wrapped up and I wanted to wait until we were closer to that last day. I wanted to wait until that last day because I don't want to leave my company high and dry without me, at least not for too long.

You see, the word "Senior" is part of my job title, and it's not because there are a bunch of "Normal' or "Junior" of my position who work below me. It's because I'm the only person with my job title. If I left there would literally be nobody to do the things that I do. There used to be at least three people who did the work that I currently do. My company also used to do Medicare work for more states, so I believe that the job necessitated that many people. However, the number of states that we work went down, and 2 of the people in my position moved on to another company in our umbrella that does private insurance. Then, the last person decided to move on as well.

When I was hired I was to replace the only person still working this job. I also only had three weeks to get up to speed. Fun fact: I had never worked with databases, SQL, or MS Access a day in my life before my first day here. Those three weeks were pretty brutal. A bunch of medical terminology was flying past my head and my predecessor/trainer tried to make sure I was acquainted with all the regular reports and analyses that I would have to perform. We did a pretty good job of it, but I was definitely not fully prepared once I was handed the reins. There was still much that I would have to teach myself, and I did.

Just a couple months into working here I was already a far more capable SQL (specifically SAS/SQL) programmer than any of my predecessors. I know this because I've had to work with all the code that they left behind. Since that's the primary method by which I do my work, that's pretty important. In December a recurring data request came up. I called one of the predecessors to find out where the code that they used to do it was and when I ran it...well, it ran for five hours and then crashed. The error produced seemed to indicate that the database server had run out of memory with which to process the request, a terrible sign indeed (since databases servers are designed to work with massive amounts of data).

So I dug into the code. The code was creating several different (temporary) tables and then writing them each to files at the end. (I would then write those files to a CD and send it off) I changed the code so that it would create one table, write it to a file, and then drop the table to free up the memory for the rest. Instead of getting all the data together and then writing it to files, I'd do it one at a time. Run again, still crash.

This time I decided to really look at the code of each query to see what it was doing. The program begins by importing some tables that will be used in the processing of all the data. Then it loads data from our tables and joins the information together. The tables that were imported at the beginning had claim information, and they were being joined with our data not on the claim number, as is typical, but on the procedure code. The problem is that procedure codes are by no means unique for each record, so this was creating a tremendous amount of duplicate information. Then the code would use the GROUP statement (by grouping on all the variables) to remove duplicates instead of the DISTINCT modifier, as one should.

I had to rewrite all these queries so that they weren't horrible. I started by writing a new query to figure out what all the procedure codes in the loaded tables were and then added a condition to the original queries that states "Only pull claims that have one of these procedure codes". Then I got rid of the imported tables completely; they weren't necessary anymore. Then I touched some things up, removed the check for duplicates since it was no longer needed, fixed syntax problems, and then I ran it. Instead of the 5 hour failure that it was before, it was a 5 minute success.

That's just one story. I'll spare you the story of the code that I literally had to print out and mark up with a pen so that I could figure out what it did and then rewrote to be at 20%-25% of its original length.

I guess this is all really about my resume, which is really weird. I just received my Masters, which took me 4 years to get, but I've been working for a year already, in a "Senior" position? It seems like all of that would raise a ton of red flags for someone looking at my resume, not to mention the two typos that I keep beating myself up over. I hate all of this because I know--I KNOW--that even though I have skill gaps and only have one year of job experience I could pick up the skills that I need very quickly on the job, and that once I had I'd be an incredibly valuable employee. This is something that I would love to be able to communicate in my cover letter but doing so would require acknowledging and pointing out a weakness that I have, which seems like a bad idea.

Over the past week I've applied at tons of places. I currently have 25 outstanding applications (those which I don't know the status of) at many different companies. Some of them I'm definitely qualified for. Some of them are a bit of stretch. I really hope that I hear back from some of these. I'm ready to move on to a more stable position in my life. Earlier, I felt stable but I still didn't have my degree, which was keeping me from feeling at peace with myself. There was still so much guilt wrapped up in that. Then I learn that I'm losing my job but now I have my degree. Fortunately, people don't really tend to lose degrees so once I get a stable job I'll feel secure.


I'm tired of being lazy and making the easy/only remaining choice. I'm done with that. So much of my life has been dictated by that. A couple months ago I was notified of a position at our parent company that my skill set applied to and I probably could have gotten easily. But I'm just not interested in working in medical insurance anymore. I could have taken it, but I decided to go the hard way and that I would try to get a position at a company that I truly wanted to work at.When we play games, we're usually playing a hero. Heroes aren't the people who make the easy decision. Heroes aren't lazy. Heroes don't wait until the last minute. Damn it, I want to be a hero. I don't necessarily want to be a hero to the world or even to a large number of people, but I want to be able to see myself as a hero. I want to be one to the children that I one day hope to have. I want to be able to look at myself and my actions and be proud. It's time for me to become the person that I want to be.

I'm going to keep applying to jobs until I get one. I'm going to keep improving on my resumes and cover letters. I'm going to start looking into filling those skill gaps that I have. I'm going to do every thing that I can to get the best damn job that I can. This way I can't look at myself and beat myself up for not trying hard enough.

I've added a new link to the top of my page. It goes to an anonymized version of my resume. I encourage you to take a look at it. If there's somewhere you think I should apply--even where you work--I am enthusiastically accepting all recommendations. My email is on it if you want to email me. You can also pass it along if you want.

Friends, if there's something that you want to accomplish, I heartily encourage that you go for it. There is not one of you that I don't wholeheartedly believe in. You may not think much of yourself, but I do. Each and every one of you has skills for which I envy you. Go for it. Why not? You deserve only the best.

An Update on Me

I talked on twitter a while back about a presentation that I had to do that you may have been able to surmise involved World of Warcraft. However, I didn't say what it was for. It was for my Masters program. I needed to do that presentation to graduate. The real truth is that it's taken me forever to do it. For comparison, the last class I took for my degree program ended in December 2010 and for the past year and a half I have been fighting myself to do that presentation.

It all started with my biggest flaw, sloth. I didn't work on the presentation because I was worried about the cumulative exams that I have to take and whether I'd pass those. I figured I would work on it after I got past that hurdle. I got past that hurdle and there wasn't enough time left in the semester to finish the project and present it. So I planned on doing it at the beginning of the next semester.

Well, I didn't work on it because, "Hey, I have plenty of time, at worst I can just present it later in the semester." Laziness compounded on laziness and I didn't get it done by the end of the semester. This turned into me being afraid to contact my professors. What if they would judge me for my tardiness? What if they told me it's too late? Then guilt set in. I was letting down so many people by not having done this already. I couldn't even think about it without feeling bad about it, so I would avoid thinking about it, and therefore would avoid working on it.

Laziness, forgetfulness, and avoidance due to guilt built on top of each other, turning a 2 year degree into a 4 year degree.

I'm glad I don't have this kind of work ethic when I'm at a job. It somehow just seems to apply to my personal life

Finally I kicked myself in the butt and it's done. There was some judgement from my professors about the delay, but not much and everything went fine, and now I feel so much better. It damn-near literally feels like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. The question now is: "What now?"

I still have to look for a job (due to my impending unemployment), that hasn't changed. I don't feel like I'm done learning. I don't have any immediate desire to pursue a doctorate, that's for sure, but there are still things that I would like to learn. To begin, I didn't know that there are SAS (statistical software) certifications. I wasn't surprised that they exists, I just didn't know. So I'm going to be pursuing some of those.

I'd also like to get a deeper understanding of R. Right now I've been taking a "try and find solutions on the internet to your immediate goals" and I'd like to take a more structured approach. Maybe I'll buy a book, because right now I basically just now data manipulation and basic operations. I don't know how to do actual statistics with it.

I think I'll look through MIT's OpenCourseWare for mathematics/statistics courses that I could self-teach. I'm also interested in various computer science courses that relate to internet programming. I'm not interested in server stuff, but I am interested in webpage programming (in case you can't tell from previous blog posts).

Now that I'm free from the pursuit of degrees, I think I could actually enjoy taking courses. Perhaps I could take some computer science courses and fill out knowledge there that I don't have. I could make a serious effort at learning a foreign language. That is, once I find out where I'm going to be living/how employed am I going to be.

I wrote most of this about a month or even more ago. Yesterday (6/6/2012) I actually received confirmation from the office of records that I would be graduating. The request for graduation had been "pending" for so long and I was worried that it would fail to go through because of some clerical error. I'm very relieved to have this confirmation. I've been applying for jobs but I need to apply for more. I only have two months left here. There's one job application that I'm particularly excited for, but I won't say what it is (at least, not in such a public space). 

There is something that I've also been thinking about lately, which is tattoos. I've kinda been wanting one for a while. I even created a Google Docs spreadsheet of ideas. I think I may have settled on what I would get, if I ever get up the nerve to do so. I would get a lowercase tau. I've been using it long enough as part of an identity that I've really grown quite fond of it and attached to it.

I'm officially have my Master's now, and I feel pretty good about that.

Minipost: My 2012 Sex Life

I saw this meme on tumblr, and since I don't have a tumblr (I subscribe via RSS) I'm doing it here. I hope it spreads in the WoW blogging community. The meme is as foloows

Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

Alright then. Let's do this. The closest book to me was Starcraft: Ghost - Spectres by Nate Kenyon. The first sentence (that begins) on page 45 is

Its alien rage ate away at her brain, a nearly mindless urge to destroy.

We'll have to see how 2012 plays out, but I'm definitely excited. What about you? If you do this, try and leave a comment below and tweet about it. If you're an adamant tumblrer, here's a link to where I saw it.

It hasn't been a good week.

The only thing keeping me going.

This week has been a pretty bad week. The first bad thing is that on Wednesday, Sarah got into a car wreck when she was leaving work. Someone was coming but they had their blinker on and were slowing down like they were going to turn in. She went out but they kept going straight. They told the officer that they were slowing down to turn in down the road, despite the fact that the next turn in was at least 150 feet down the road and it would have been irresponsible to turn on their blinker and slow down that early. She is fortunately completely fine despite the fact that, even at the slow speed the accident occurred at, this is what happened to her car

The door is ruined, the frame where the door latches to the car is bent, nothing forms a seal to keep out the elements, the door doesn't open, and the inside is a bit squished too. The paramedics and the officer were very surprised that she was okay. They would look at the car and then back at her and ask, "Are you sure you're okay." We went to the doctor the next day just to make sure and yeah, she's okay.

Right now we're in the how-much-would-this-cost-to-fix-and-would-it-be-better-just-to-sell-it-for-parts-and-buy-something-else phase. We're looking around and will hopefully have that cleared up in the next week or so. We're going to start by trying the maybe-we-can-just-use-one-vehicle strategy, with our schedules it will probably work, even if it may trap her at home when I'm at work (unless she wants to take me to work <wink>).

It gets worse
At work on Friday we learned that the medicare contract that we work is (finally) going to be awarded to another company. This means that at some point in the next (roughly) three months I won't have a job there anymore. They're looking for work to do once the contract expires, but everything that's been talked about essentially wouldn't include me.

This contract bidding process has apparently been going on for five years, and was something that I knew about when I accepted the job. I accepted the job because, well, I hadn't had a 'real job' doing statistics before and I definitely needed the experience/recommendation/everything so that I could leverage it for a job that I really wanted. I even knew that we would be hearing about the contract this week or next and I knew that we probably wouldn't get it, but actually having it happen really hits hard.

So now begins the process of looking for a new job. Although I'm certainly going to be checking local (central Arkansas) places for jobs, I'm not optimistic of the prospects. So I'm definitely going to be checking other states (mostly more northern states) for places to work. I'll also be doing online searches and other things. You'll probably hear more about this in the future from me. I have literally drawn up a document that I have called my "Action Plan" for how I'm going to deal with this.

If I had to describe everything in a picture, it would be this:

OH, and Fred broke my watch last week, also. It wasn't intentional, since he's a cat and I don't think he harbors ill will against my watch, but it is no less frustrating. It's just the band and I'm 99% sure it can be fixed, but UGH.

There are some other things going on now, but they aren't definite so I won't talk about it yet. This would be something very positive that I'm quite excited about. It's a reaction to what has happened above and would make me very happy.

Valentines Day!

Yesterday was Valentine's day. My day began like any other, since I wasn't going to present Sarah with anything while she was asleep/waking up. I went to work, where I was asked by my female coworkers repeatedly if I had done anything for Sarah that day. When I went home for lunch, however, I presented her with Valentines.

At first, I presented her with a joke card. One of those ones that tries to be sexy. It said, "You+Me+Naked+Chocolate Sauce =" then on the inside "Happy Valentines Day." I changed it to, "Naked Ice Cream Eating, YEAH!". This card was accompanied by some candy. THEN, I went and got another card, this one was another funny one about how I'm not sick of her yet, blah blah blah. It was presented alongside a serious gift, a blu-ray of The Princess Bride. THEN, I went and got another card, a serious, pretty, lovey card. After she finished reading it I gave her the final gift: The blu-ray deluxe edition of Twilight. I was worried she was going to die from laughing as much as she was at this gift. I bought it for her because we'll periodically rent it so we can laugh at it and watch the RiffTrax for it.

She is going to get me the golden bananadragon. I say going to because the queue was too long to get it for me yesterday. We then had a lovely dinner at Jimmy Johns (because we're classy, damnit) and then we watched TV together. Happy Valentine's Day.

In WoW news, I keep forgetting to do my daily dungeon for the holiday. Oh well, what are you going to do. I doubt I'll get anything cool out of it anyway.

Dinner Tonight

We went to IHOP for dinner tonight, because I owed Sarah breakfast for dinner, and some really interesting stuff was going on at the tables near us. At the table behind Sarah, the guy spent the whole time talking about Coke, as in Coca Cola. First he talked about the Coke Freestyle machines and how they're super cool and how they were designed by Ferrari (I don't actually know if that's true). Then he spent an inordinate amount of time talking about New Coke and about where it was a great or terrible business decision. He has apparently written at least 3 papers about Coke and, from what I could observe, was drinking a Coke during the meal. He was with a woman. I presume they were on a date, since I'd think that if you were in a relationship with someone you would have already released your Coke craziness on them before you managed to make it to that point.

At another table nearby, I first noticed that the guy was just staring at his phone and completely ignoring the woman he was with. As I paid more attention, things started to seem more unfortunate to me. I could tell that she was talking to him, but that he was hardly saying anything, if anything at all. She was leaned forward, staring at him directly, really trying to engage with him but he continued to ignore her. She was even holding his free hand across the table as she was trying to engage him in conversation. I only saw him make eye contact with her briefly. Even when their food came, phone.

It really seemed like she was trying to talk to him about something important. Sarah said it seemed like he felt guilty about something. I felt really bad for her. I wanted to go up to her and say something like, "Are you okay?" when he went to the bathroom. I wanted to tell her that he would probably always be a dick and that she shouldn't be with him, but I felt if I did so it wouldn't be well received and would be an incredibly awkward gesture. Now I kinda with I had said something to her. She deserves better.

The last weird thing was that at one point our waiter asked us if we would like to make a donation to the Arkansas Children's Hospital, which we did take the time to do. The weird part was that he told us that his manager isn't only making them ask patrons to do this, but that if they don't perform successfully at soliciting these donations from people that they will lose shifts, since the donations are a big tax writeoff for the company. I just thought that was horrible. I'm not at all surprised that a manager would do that, but I'm very disappointed that they would do that. I left a fairly nice tip for our waiter for having to put up with that kind of shit.

20 Days of WoW Blogging: Day 12 - A day in the life

Going to work.

For me a weekday starts at 6:35 AM, which is when my alarm goes off. I'll lay in bed and read twitter so that I can wake up my brain without getting out of bed. The amount of time spent doing so is highly variable, and depends on how much everyone that I follow's insomnia was acting up. I'm generally out of bed somewhere between 6:50 and 7:00 AM. The first thing I do is shower. After showering, I brush my teeth and shave before I return to the bedroom to get dressed. Once I'm dressed and have everything I need, I'm out the door to work somewhere around 7:30.

Work is nearby so I'm generally there, upstairs, and at my desk in 10 minutes. First, I check my work email and begin another day. My work consists of pulling reports for people out of our databases as well as fulfilling certain daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. I spend a good amount of time waiting for SQL queries to run, which affords me time to do things such as check the internet and twitter.  I have a one hour lunch that I usually take at 11:00 and I leave work between 4:00 and 4:30, depending on when I arrived and if I really want to finish something before I leave that day.

Fred and George

When I get home I greet my cats and then I get to fully check my internet. There are many things that get blocked by our work filter that I can't check while I'm there. On some days, Sarah works until 8:00 so I'll spend that time writing blog posts and whatnot so I can spend time with her once she gets home. Throw in chores and dinner and TV watching and that's usually all I have time for in a day. I usually go to bed between 10:30 and 11:00.

I don't usually find time to play WoW on weekdays, but I'm finding more time to do so. In my free time I'll also do some statistics work for my upcoming blog posts. If I'm really in the mood, then I'll do some Java coding on various projects that I'm working on. I do spend most of my time relaxing.

Over the weekend, I try to get ahead of my blogging for the week, writing posts to be scheduled during the week. I'll also try to catch up on my WoW playing and my playing of other video games. Sometimes there will be other things on the internet that I'd previously failed to read, so I'll read those too. The weekend is mostly for relaxing. I finally get to sleep in, and that's wonderful.

The Graduate Assistants' Office

Graduate school was a very weird time for me. I wasn't really sure if it was what I wanted to be doing, but I didn't really have anywhere else to go. So to grad school I went. I started by going for the Applied Mathematics program but after the first year I changed to Statistics and have not one regretted the decision even once. It was a happy time because I was with Sarah, but also not because I was separated from all my other friends. My friends in college were all either a year ahead of me or a year behind me. My two best high school friends that were in my grade went to different, far away schools. My college didn't have a grad school, so I went elsewhere.


The Door
If you didn't know what it was, you would think it was a closet. A single door between two side hallways that came off of the main hallway, you'd might never consider it as being anything of importance. The door contained no markers to indicate its belonging to the graduate students and no window so that you may peer at its contents. Once inside the locked door, you'd find a narrow, somewhat long room containing eight desks along it's long walls, a whiteboard on the wall facing the hallway, two high, narrow windows on the exterior wall, and shelves of mathematics texts from a time long past. There was also a filing cabinet, a refrigerator that was long overdue for a cleaning, and a single phone.

On each desk was a computer. These computers were the leftovers, the ones cast aside when professors or classrooms received upgrades. Their installations, programs, 'speed', and peripherals varied widely. There were 'good' computers and 'bad' computers, with the designation as to which was which changing as time went on. They were shit to the point of not being usable.

The room was so narrow that if the chairs weren't pushed in to the desks you couldn't traverse it. I surmise it was once a server closet that was re-purposed when the computer science department changed floors when they separated from the mathematics department.

As a graduate assistant who taught classes, I was supposed to keep office hours. I did for a while. After realizing that even if I specifically asked someone to come see me during my office hours they wouldn't come I stopped keeping them. Nobody ever complained about my absence.

Other people used the office, of course, so it was never lonely. Yet these were people I hardly knew at all, and scarcely associated with. We were on polite terms at the best. Most of them hailed from foreign countries, and their English, while serviceable, was flawed. They clung to each other, strangers in a strange land, which made me the outcast.

That single room was like a distillation of much that I felt while I was there. It was a place, with things, but being of incredibly little worth. I hated being there and felt like I didn't belong. Really, I shouldn't have been there. I should have been somewhere better, but due to my own inaction (my greatest flaw) I was there. In retrospect, though, I'm glad I was where I was. It seems unlikely I would still be with Sarah had I not gone there.

Fun fact: part of the reason that I decided to change to statistics was because of a response Ghostcrawler had to a hunter forum thread. He talked about the analysis they did when balancing classes. It really struck me. I'm very thankful for that thread to this day. Also, Vi Hart is super cool. Watch this:

The Symphony

Today, Sarah and I went to the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's John Williams concert. We got good tickets for incredibly cheap because my place of work is a major corporate sponsor. The conductor for this year (and last year) is the very noteworthy, up-and-coming Philip Mann.

It was an incredible show, covering a great range of John Williams's music. It began with the Jaws theme, then played a march from 1941, then did music from Schindler's List, and moved into a Star Wars suite. Darth Vader came out and force choked Philip. Two storm troopers dragged him off the stage and Darth Vader conducted the Imperial March by staring down the orchestra, it was awesome.

After the intermission they played music from Fiddler on the Roof, the Olympics Theme, the NBC News theme, and wrapped up the show with the Indiana Jones theme and the Jurassic Park theme (which, according to Philips is noted to be played "Reverentially."). We were a little upset that there wasn't any Harry Potter on the program, but they gave it to us in an encore, which competely made up for it.

It was a truly fantastic show and we definitely plan on attending more this season. We'll probably be attending Happy Holidays, Russian Winter, Valentines in New York, People's Choice, and Wicked Divas.

Stories from the Past: The Nintendo Website at Summer Camp

Why did you forsake me!?

It was the summer between 5th and 6th grade. I was at a summer camp at UCA called Summer Discovery. It was the kind of summer camp where you take classes. One of the classes I took was on computers and the internet. We had a project we had to do where we had to pick and present a website to everyone else in the class. 

For my website, I had chosen the Nintendo website. So I spent the few class periods before getting ready, navigating around and making sure that I knew where everything was. Except I was really anxious about presenting the Nintendo website. 

Why was I anxious?

I didn't want people to think I was a geek/nerd/dork. Yes, I was very self-conscious about my video game playing habits, especially around girls. And, seeing as the girl-that-I-liked-at-summer-camp was also in the class with me, this gave me great anxiety. I remember trying to think of or find a different website that I could do, but nothing seemed good and it was too late.

Then the day of the presentations came, and I remember going up to the computer that was having its contents projected onto the screen and typing in the url. 

http://web.archive.org/web/19970606094131/http://www.nintendo.com/hallway/index.html

Enter

Oh no. What? This is wrong. This is all wrong.

They had redesigned their website so that it was different that day! Now, not only would I seem like a terrible NERD, but I'd seem like a terribly unprepared NERD. I fumbled around the site for a while, having trouble with it's newer, sleeker design. Fortunately, the words that showed different categories still meant the same thing. 

Then I wanted to die. I just wanted to die. I went to the back of the classroom and just tried to not be noticed. Honestly, nobody probably realized that I had no idea what was going on. Nobody probably thought I was a dork either. My self-esteem was pretty low back then, and I was really self-conscious. 

Death

An elderly friend of mine died yesterday. She fell in her kitchen, where she laid for seven hours before she could reach her lifealert button (which she kept in her pocket, instead of around her neck) and the paramedics could come. She received great emergency care and surgery to fix the broken bones, but succumbed to infection a couple days later. We had time to see the inevitable end coming, which dampened the effect that it had on us.

This is the first personal death that's happened to me as an adult. The last one was my maternal grandfather when I was 12 or 13 (I think) and before that my paternal grandfather before I can remember. It's certainly been a unique event. It hasn't really been sad for me yet, but I suspect that will come.

The experience so far has been more contemplative really, causing me to think about my own future death, as well as other things.

I don't have a good conclusion for this. It's just going to end.

1:44

One day, a about two weeks ago, I saw a post it note on the handrail in the stairwell. The note read "1:44." I have no idea what it was about, who put it there, or what happened/happens at 1:44. What I do know, is that every day, for at least a week the note would be in a different position. 

At first it seemed like it was slowly moving up the rail. Then one day it was on the wall. I kept thinking that I should go to the stairs at 1:44, just to see if anything would happen. I could never remember to, thought; I'd always get wrapped up in my work.

Then one day last week, it was gone. I looked far and wide for it. After all, maybe it had just gone somewhere hard to see. Every day I look for it as I ascend the stairs to the fourth floor, and every day I don't see it. What was it? What happened at 1:44? Now I'll never now. What did I miss? Was it somehow my chance to be transported to a magical world? Did I miss the portal to Narnia, Fillory, or Hogwarts?

Now I feel a sort of emptiness when I walk up the stairs, their barrenness a reminder of what I missed. I ponder placing my own sticky note there to see if anyone comes to meet me. I wonder who, if anyone, will.

No Internet :-(

We won't be able to get our internet hooked up until the 28th at the new place. For a small time, we are still able to check it at the old place, because we have plenty of time to finish moving out. Until then, things will be infrequent/nonexistent. I'll just be using my phone in the meantime.

I know, you're going to hate not having my weird twitter messages and blog spam. I'm sorry...........

PICTURES!

That is a picture of the front of the house we're moving to. We started to move stuff in there today and we'll continue to do so over the weekend. There are more pictures here. Some rooms didn't get pictures uploaded because they were unremarkable, fyi.

There is a hot tub in the back yard (EXCITE). It needs a professional cleaning and inspection, but it's there. Many of the baseboards need to be touched up with paint (which is in the garage) and the front door hardware could stand to be changed, especially since the door cannot be opened from the outside since the outside handle doesn't work (we weren't made aware of that feature).

We also got a new bookcase and an office organizer thing that was WAY heavier than it seems like it should be. Seriously, I hurt my wrist trying to lift it. I'm worried that when we open it up to build it there will just be a bunch of rocks and a note that says, "HAHAHA, try explaining THIS to Target customer service!"

The floorplan makes a circle, in which out bedroom is kitchen-adjacent. So now instead of running up and down the hall, our cats can just run circles around the house.

I'm infinitely sad that there isn't a webpage where I can upload images and superimpose the crack in time from Dr. Who Season 5. I would have made a funny joke for the internet. I would have posted a bunch of pictures but the last one would have a crack in the wall and I would have been like, "OH NO!", BUT I GUESS I DON'T GET TO DO THAT.

Turning Points and New Beginnings

Today begins a new chapter in our lives. Today, Sarah and I start to move to the new house. So many things will be different now. I have a full-time job. We won't be living somewhere that is owned by my parents. We can start planning our wedding. We'll be living there when we get married. It's where we'll come home to. Although we won't live there forever, it certainly represents a new beginning.

A new beginning, that just struck me. I need to remember to do something.

Sarah and I finished season 5 of Dr. Who. That was pretty dang crazy, you know. Big Stuff. We're still very much enjoying the show and can't wait to catch up on season 6.

Work has been pretty crazy lately. Between the 45 minutes SQL code runs (which would have taken longer if I hadn't had the foresight to create an index) and the projects that were due quite suddenly there's been simultaneously much and not much to do. Since tomorrow begins a new month, there will be plenty of things for me to do. I've been finding myself dressing up and creating documentation for all the code that my predecessors left me. Just like a good Boy Scout (which I was, briefly).

I feel like I had more to say here, but I guess I don't. Sleep time is now (since I composed this last night and scheduled it for today). I'll make sure and post pictures of the new place later.

A Disturbing Trend or How I Started Watching Dr. Who.

There's a pattern that has emerged in my life. It goes like this:

1. Henry's friends, loved one, or the internet expresses an interest in or love of something.
2. Henry dismisses this thing as stupid and definitely not cool or awesome.
3. Somehow, after a great period of time, Henry is convinced to try it.
4. Henry loves this thing.

It's mostly a pattern relating to television shows, but other things have certainly followed in this pattern. The list includes Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show which cannot be named (it is far too shameful), Harry Potter, books (in general), Gilmore Girls, cats, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, World of Warcraft and, most recently, Dr. Who. 

I've been resistant to Dr. Who for quite some time. I'd even watched some episodes one Christmas while at Sarah's parent's house and felt no attraction. We had tried some on Netflix before and felt no pull. Then, Sarah tried the Matt Smith series. She found it to be much better and more interesting than any that we had watched before. It consumed her, drawing in her free time. 

She asked me to try it.

I didn't want to, but she really wanted me to. She swore it was much better than what we had seen before.

And damnit...

It was.

I/We have currently watched five episodes of season 5 (as it is labeled on Netflix) and are looking forward to catching up to the current stuff and the archive of seasons gone by. Why does this keep happening to me? What will be next? I fear for myself.

My First Week Flying Solo

My first week of work without my trainer there is over. It went much better than I thought it would go, honestly. Despite being unsure initially how to do several things, I worked through it all and got all my work done. There were some hiccups, and there is one project that is yet to be done, but I'm not sure if I currently have access to the requisite databases for it.

This week has been a crash course in SQL. It's a wonderfully simple language. I found myself confused and frustrated with it at several points, but I overcame them all. At one point, I couldn't get the data sorted in quite the way I wanted, but I was able to find a work-around. I created a new data field, made it use that field to sort, and then dropped the field and it worked. It's amazing what you can accomplish algorithmically by using data creation/manipulation.

I spent approximately nine to ten of my hours this week typing in the last day of each month of the year time upon time again in order to extract particular data for a request. I had never really memorized them before. It wouldn't suffice to say that now I do. They have now become ingrained in my head, not just the numbers, but the shape, the feeling of it all. I can't unknow them.

Moving efforts can begin on Thursday. We should really start packing in earnest.

Henry Phillips and the 77 GB file

So today at work SAS wasn't functioning. It was giving an error that it was out of memory. After some investigation by some people, we found that the problem was a 77 gigabyte file that belonged to me. You may be wondering, "Henry, how the hell did you make a 77 GB file?"

Well.....I screwed up some SQL code that I was writing which gave back a very large amount of data. So large, in fact, that the process was taking far longer than it should have. So I told it to stop. When it wouldn't stop, I tried to cancel the process on the server. When that didn't work, I just canceled the SAS process on my own computer.

Normally, when you shut down SAS, any temporary data that hasn't been exported gets deleted. It won't get deleted, however, if you don't properly shut down SAS. By canceling my local SAS process, the server never got the signal to delete the temporary data, and thus it remained on the server, leaving a 77 gigabyte file that prevented people from doing their work.

Other than that, my first day operating solo went very well. I completed two data requests and got some more training in. Whoopee!

Autobiographical update: Work and Life

Work has been going pretty well. Last week was somewhat stressful dealing with a couple issues and getting ready for the guy who trained me leaving. It appears that the majority of the job is going to entail SQL (which I'm only just learning now, but it's easy) and Microsoft Access usage and debugging. The main challenge will be figuring out where things are, which files to look in, and if they've been done before in a way that I can adapt to what I'm asked to do. I think everything will be fine though.

The director of my division wants me to bring in anyone I know that could help, and I'd love to and certainly plan to. What's holding me back is that I don't feel like I could/should train someone right now. Maybe in 6 months or around the end of the school year I'll see if I can bring some people in. I'll probably contact my statistics professor at UALR to see if any of the graduating students are interested.

In other news, Sarah and I have signed a lease for a new place (Google Maps). It's 2 bedrooms, 1 bath and is super cute on the inside. It has plenty of room for everything we need/want. It's in North Little Rock in the Park Hill neighborhood, which will be so much nicer to live in than where we are now and we won't have kids walking through our lawn all the time. It has a nice screened in porch on the front and fireplace in the living room. The walls are actually colors, they aren't all off-white, it's awesome.

I'll be much closer to my work, but Sarah will be much further away from hers. However, she's applied for a full-time position at the main branch in downtown Little Rock which if she got would make her commute so much nicer.

Lastly, since I finally have a full-time job. Wedding planning can begin in earnest. We're currently looking at Spring of 2012.

Overall, we're both very happy right now.