And you don't have a reason to leave your house you start to go
crazy.
Our DBAs both work from home full time and they're both quite nuts.
Obligatory cartoon from The Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home
Time for the periodic review of my security clearance. Full addresses and timelines (down to the month, at least) of every place I've lived in the last 10 years, including deployment overseas and any temporary assignment longer than 90 days. Addresses, phone numbers, and supervisor name/address/number for every job held during that same period. I finally gave up for the night trying to track down a street address for the job I worked 3 weeks just prior to going to Afghanistan in 2005. E-mail archives are very useful for this purpose; I wish I'd switched to gmail earlier.
Could be worse. Last time I did this, we had to have a different person to verify each residence and job, in addition to personal references, etc. None could be related to you by blood or marriage. I was running out of people that I even knew and had to resort to vague acquaintances from church. This time, I only have to have them for all jobs and residences going back three years.
Our new lunchroom is now officially open and with REAL COFFEE!! FINALLY!!
YAHOOOOOOO!!!
yea, that was a real delight over here too, when we got a real espresso full automaton that pulverizes the beans first...
The company I work for recently bought a building roughly 15x the current building's total sqft area.... We're moving to the new building here in about a half hour... both exciting and nerve wrecking at the same time.
Did I mention the new building can only be decribed as MASSIVE?.... My new office will be roughly 4x the current size... dunno what I'll do with the new-found open space.
:D
Old computers, data acquisition systems, cables you *might* need
someday, parts drawers full of screws/bolts/washers...
That's what flat surfaces at my desk see.
Holy crap, the new place is more massive than I previously thought!
You'll never guess what the previous owners of this building left!!
BlueArc Titan 3200: http://bit.ly/gVG0Id
:D and not just the single rack, it's in the full cabinet! (6 racks, 14 drives/rack, 2x gigabit lan/rack)
--
Stephen D King
Network Admin
Blurred Vizion Studios
outsider@blurredvizionstudios.com
I visited my former workplace over Christmas. 32 acres of wrecked textile mill. There's just 2 usable things left. A nice indoor a/c chiller and the Lawer Rotacolor and Silomat. The a/c unit is good. The Lawer runs on MS-DoS and is stupid. Dye storage, weighing and mixing robot is what it is. I guess nobody needed good software, so I had to think in DOS terms when working with it. Now if someone has 99 different varieties of coffee and wants a machine to serve the kitchens of say, a place the size of Ft. Bragg or Nellis, the Lawer would be good for that.
Toronto in the middle of winter - bah.
IG, hide your snowblower till I get back on Thursday!
You'll never guess what the previous owners of this building left!!
Ah, but it is CURSED.
(But you get a coupon for a free frogurt!)
I was supposed to be flying out to Toronto tomorrow morning. Needless to say, my presentation's being postponed...until Valentine's Day.
How do you deal with the PM who still wants a nice gantt chart plan?
Speaking as a PM who's had to adapt to and run SCRUMs:
Best way to handle your PM is to give him adaptive milestone level dates/tasks and let him/her update the revolving gant chart. Understand that in all likliehood your PM is in one of 2 situations:
1) He/She has not used a pure scrum before (and/or doesn't really understand it) and thus is having a little trouble adapting
or more likely:
2) His/Her managment gets SCRUM from the perspective of reduced cost and increased agility - but not so much from a reporting impact and thus is still requiring exactly the same type, mode, and format of reporting as before....even when the futility of said practice has been explained.
Responding as above will create a ton of work for the PM (which they will hate), but if the situation is #1, they'll start to understand your reluctance quickly and if it's #2 then they don't have much choice anyway. You'd be surprised how many PMO's in SCRUM shops find themselves in this position. Thankfully, most SCRUM shops run a modified version of the process vs pure SCRUM, but those that don't quite often run into this problem.
I think I figured out what I needed to present the hardware PMs in terms of milestones/goals. I'm finding the role of Product Owner stressful when the hardware guys want hard dates to build hardware.
Hardware guys tend to like firm dates because those dates can have an impact on the overall development cost. Parts availability, scheduling time with a manufacturing group (easier when it's not outsourced), having resources available to do design, schematics, layout, signal integrity, and, when prototypes become available, device verification testing (DVT). If a date is too early, an integral part may not be ready in time, forcing the choice of a more expensive or substandard part from another vendor (which may require pre-qualification to meet your company's standards). If the date is too late, hardware may be ready early, but that's wasted cycles that could've been spent working on another project.
In situations like these, it can be helpful to contact the hardware vendors and ask them if they can supply reference samples. For example, you can get reference evaluation boards from CPU vendors. It may not match the target hardware, but it may be enough to allow you to do early code bring-up before prototypes become available. Emulation tools can also be very handy for early coding and simple functional verification.
Another possibility, though it may difficult, depending on your company's standards, vendor agreements, etc, is to go with a vendor that has already done some of the software legwork by providing an SDK. This will be more true of chipset vendors than it will be for discrete parts, but it never hurts to ask.
Hardware Binder