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.

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.

Well, I Won't Be Working There Much Longer

Piggy

Probably. Yesterday, I found out that my work had approved me to work full-time instead of as a contractor. Same pay, and I'll get benefits and time off. There's a problem though. Today at 3:00 we had a company-wide meeting. At the meeting we found out that we had lost the bid for the Medicare contracts we have. So by July at the earliest, we won't have that work any more. The process may be delayed a bit, but it will eventually happen.

I'm still going to be picked up for full-time. There was actually an ulterior motive to making me full-time. As a full-time employee I'll have first dibs on any jobs that show up at Blue Cross. Even still, the company isn't necessarily going away. They are, and have been, looking into new business that they can take on. So the company isn't dead, they may not need me in the future, but they aren't dead. Like I said before, I'll still be doing this particular job at least until July.

Aside from that, if I'm let go around then that opens up the possibility of moving somewhere and doing something else. I have experience under my belt now and could probably get a real job much easier now than it was for me before.

Overall, I'm not at all bummed about this. It's a weird thing to say, but I'm very fine with it. Medicare wasn't something that I wanted to spend my life doing. I see this as a way to transition to bigger and better things. Also, as compensation, we get to wear jeans for the rest of our time. Casual Friday is now everyday! YAY.

In a final bit of potpourri news, we got a rice cooker, and it's awesome.

I love me some rice.

Work Frustration + 3 videos!

Calamity? Check.

Hilarious Dr. Who parodies on Community? Check

Pokemon fart jokes? Check.

Hilarious Tweets? You betcha.

Four things I didn't create? What is this? Tumblr? Let's get started.

I had one of those hard-on-the-brain kind of days at work today. All I needed to do was adapt some SQL code so that it would do something slightly different, right? Well, that would have been too easy. I started to read into the code before I tried to do it and it was the weirdest and seemingly dumbest thing ever.

(Don't worry, this doesn't get very technical.)

One of the most basic things you do with SQL is say, "I want to make a new table with the lines from this table, but only the ones that meet this certain criteria." After you do that, whenever you work with your new table, you don't have to re-specify those criteria. So why was this happening ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE IN THIS CODE.

There are very is ways to say, "I want all the lines that DON'T fall into these categories." So why did the person who wrote this do it in THE MOST CONFUSING WAY POSSIBLE. Allow me to explain. He made a table of all the thing that he doesn't want, left joined it with the original table under the criterion original.(unique identifier)=(stuff I don't want).(unique identifier) and then specified the criteria that he only wanted the lines where original.(unique identifier)!=(stuff I don't want).(unique identifier). I know most of you are confused by that and you think it's just because you don't know SQL. Well guess what, it's confusing to people who do know SQL also. It works, it's just bad.

And none of this is commented, none of it at all. To make sense of it, I had to PRINT IT OUT and WRITE ON IT WITH A PENCIL. I had to summarize sections of code so I knew what they meant. He created tables that he literally never used at all. They were just dropped at the end of the code. Which, by the way, isn't supposed to be done as

DROP TABLE1; DROP TABLE2; DROP TABLE3; ... 

It's supposed to be done as

 DROP TABLE1, TABLE2, TABLE3...;

Lastly, the names of the tables that were created were not helpful. Such tables were "BASE9", "BASE8", "BASE81", "BASE181", "BASE281",  and so on. Using the suffix 'BASE' is ok, but why not number them with 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. It would work tons better for me.

It wasn't very fun. And, of course, none of it was commented. I just don't get it. Tomorrow, I'm going to rewrite the shit out of that code.

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.

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.

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.

The 360 and Work

As I've already mentioned on my social networks, we bought an XBox 360. We got the 250 gigabyte one with Kinect. We also got Dance Central. Dance Central is really fun, but when we put it back in there today, it made a horrible noise. We tried out other discs and nothing else made that noise, so we're going to have to take back Dance Central and get another one.

To compensate we played Kinect Adventures, which is a collection of some very stupid games that actually turned out to be quite fun. Now I just need to find out and get the great 360 exclusives that I've missed out on, particularly downloadable titles.

Work is getting better, I'm really settling in and figuring out what I need to do. All that's left is for me to be able to do it. I still don't have the permissions set up for me to do work independently. Heck, it was only just today that we got me able to do my time card. All things in due time though. When I'm not being trained I've been reading manuals for the various software and things that I'm not familiar with.

Hopefully I'll be able to do work by the end of the week.

LULZ.

First Day on the Job

I was 3/4 of the way to work and I realized that I forgot my badge. So I turned around and started driving home, calling Sarah on my phone to try and get her to find my badge and get it to me. At first my thought was, "Ok, if she picks up she can just bring it to me in the parking lot since I left super early for work and she'd be able to get there in time." Then it became, "Ok, she can meet me at the gas station just off the interstate." Then it was, "Ok, she can have it for me at the door." Twenty times I called her and she never picked it up because it was in another room, the ringtone is quiet and she was asleep.

I got home and was freaking out. I got my badge and started driving back to work. I called work to let my boss know that I'd be 10-15 minutes late. She explained that it was ok and that on her first day she got in a wreck. After that call, I called Sarah and apologized for freaking out in her direction. I got to work, was shown around (there's a ping pong table!) and settled in to begin orientation/training.

None of my passwords or permissions were set up yet. So I began training with the senior statistician. There's SO much to learn. There are so many acronyms to learn that I made a vocabulary list. My group went to lunch at Larry's Pizza. Even by the end of the day my stuff wasn't set up, so I did some reading on paper that I could do. Then at five o'clock I went home. I changed clothes and went to go tutor.

It was a pretty long day.

Parents Gone = Work Party

The events in question took place between high school and college, if I remember correctly. But that's not important.

I was working at the movie theater at the time and the manager (whose butt I had slapped once) was actually fairly young, in his mid 20s or so. I managed to let slip that my parents were going to be away one weekend. Now, what happens when you do this, kids? That's right, everyone decides that there needs to be a party at my place.

And a party there was. It was mostly just people hanging out and stuff. The manager did buy some alcohol for everyone (keep in mind that the employees were between the ages of 16 to 18). I honestly don't remember much. I didn't do much if any drinking, since I was worried about keeping the place in order. Eventually everybody left and I tidied up the place.

The next day I finished off the Smirnoff Ices that the 16 year old fellow employee left behind, for obvious reasons. Then in the evening I gathered up all the trash, loaded it into my car and dumped it in the dumpster at my other place of employment, a Mexican restaurant.

It was as if nothing had happened. Not like the time my parents left my brother home alone and came back to the beer cans everywhere and him passed out on his bed.

Summer Projects

Summer is nearly upon us, and I've decided that I should take upon myself some summer projects.  These will vary in scope and in discipline and will hopefully give me something to do while I'm not taking any classes.

Project the first:  Statistics Project
I don't know what the topic of the project will be, it's scope, or what.  But I feel that I should do some sort of statistics research this summer.  I could expand upon my WoW project, or the 'Cars of Little Rock' project that I did for last semester, or I could do something entirely new.

Project the second:  Finish/Update This

Project the third: Program a mathematical drawing program
The program would empower the user to create mathematically defined shapes/pictures.  Plotting points, connecting them with lines, drawing circles of defined radii, etc.  The program should automatically detect where lines and circles intercept each other, and allow the user to place a point there.

It's basically a program that I've wanted in the past, and I feel that I could program.  It would also do me well to help retain why programming skills.

Images should be exportable to either an image format, or offer a text interpretation that would be usable in TeX.

Project the fourth: A gaming marathon for charity
You see lots of people doing gaming marathons to collect donations for charity (specifically Child's Play).  I'd like to do one of these, but instead of playing several games from the same series.  I would play several 2D platformers from different series.  Some of the games could be newer releases, some of them older releases.  I think it could be really fun. 

Project the fifth: Viking RPG
After I saw "How to Train Your Dragon" I was inspired to create a simple RPG system that was suited around Vikings and Dragons.  Since having the original idea, it has deviated quite a bit from "How to Train Your Dragon," so thinking of it as being related to the movie isn't the best analogy.

Outline:

• Vikings
• Dragons
• d10 system
• 4 classes
• Defender - a brute force warrior.  Hearty, and skilled with shields.  Can even use them as weapons.  Has defensive and shield related magic.
• Fighter - skilled with all manner and configuration of weapons.  Can use special attacks and buff type magic.
• Archer - especially skilled with ranged weapons.  Can use special attacks and debuff type magic.
• Mage - skilled in a wide array of magical abilities.  Most vulnerable when unprotected, but most deadly when left alone.

Undetermined:

• Stat/Combat System details
• Spell details
• etc.

 Project the sixh: Algebra Book
I've spent the better part of a few years now teaching Algebra to all types of people.  This one is a big maybe, but I might work on an Algebra book typeset in TeX.  None of this pretty pictures and fancy schmancy charts and graph stuff.  I feel that much of what they put in Algebra books these days is a distraction, and only serves to increase the cost and size of the books.

Project the seventh: Secure employment
Pretty straightforward. 

Project the eigth: Find some way to make money from the internet
Also self explanatory

I bet all of this could easily keep me busy.  I'll clearly not get all of it done, but it's nice to have goals.