One year on

[davidn]

For the first time, there are a couple of anniversaries at this time of year. Even though it really doesn't seem like it, it's now exactly one year since I started my new job (which I should stop calling my "new" job, seeing as it feels perfectly normal now). Going into a company with some semblance of hierarchical organization was a completely new experience to me, as small as everyone else thinks it is, but I seem to have found a secure place and even feel like one of the older people there as others come and go.

I still miss having an office with a door, but now that I'm sitting in an open-plan room next to the corridor where people come in, I feel that I get much more conversation with people. We're moving across the road to a bigger space in about a month, so perhaps I'll manage to get myself a window seat - the only seating plan anyone has put forward so far is just all arriving as early on moving day as they can possibly manage and camping out in the best spots.

The car has also had its first birthday - over the last twelve months it's taken us 4,907 miles that would otherwise have been covered (far more slowly) by buses, and by my estimation, we've spent about $500 on fuel for it (compared to $1400 for the total cost of MBTA passes for us for a year).

The occasion was marked by having to go and have the Massachusetts inspection sticker renewed - it's a test that's done on several aspects of the car to make sure it's safe and within acceptable bounds of emissions, though I'm told that all they actually have to do is to connect the car's computer up to a different computer and ask if it's reporting any problems. This was the first time I'd had to take the car to anybody who wasn't our actual dealership - the whole process was done in about fifteen minutes by the most monosyllabic man that I've ever met. I've owned goldfish that had attempted to exchange longer dialogues than he did, with his entire contribution to the conversation being "Keys? Sit. ... Okay. Cash? Mastercard. Keys on the front seat."

So now I have a new green sticker instead of an old orange one. Quite by coincidence I met my driving instructor this evening, so I could say that his teaching had led me to having no incidents at all for a full year.

Comments

[premchaia_pre4]

Hmm! I can't see the old entry. Is it safe to request a summary?

[davidn]

I can add you! Although I'd have to ask where we know each other from, first - I'm just careful to limit my entries about my actual work to... less than the entire Internet.

[premchaia_pre4]

I saw you on Kjorteo's journal first, I believe, when he made that one post about ZZT and it inspired me to mechano-arithmetical madness that reminded you of circuit diagrams. Also, twenties aren't comically large in the US, I still need to go back and finish Crystal Towers 2 despite still being mildly irritated at you on principle for losing my save that one time due to the naïve file overwrite sequencing, and I still wouldn't mind a chance at Running Free on Android.

The name is because I was now the seventeenth Drake (yes, it's sort of like the Doctor) though now the counter is at eighteen (thus the et sequentes).

(I've temporarily given up on getting OpenID to work properly on my new domain, partly for reasons that are not particularly good and partly because LiveJournal seems very insistent on treating them as second-class and to be kicked into sewer grates and laughed at at the slightest provocation. Spinning up a new first-class account is something of an uneasy compromise. I haven't resolved the question of what to do with my "friends list" yet; since I'm not actively posting (yet), there's nothing for it to grant access to, and since I'm still avoiding using LJ as an aggregator, there's nothing for it to target reading, so I'm deferring attaching anything there until it becomes useful to do so…)

[davidn]

You have provided more credentials than I ever thought necessary :) Thanks, I had thought it might be you - you can now read about the work side of my life!

Also, blame the author of the object that handles saving! I'll certainly be switching to a different one, for my next large project - assuming that I have one, after that.

[premchaia_pre4]

I don't blame you per se! I was mostly joking. The problem with trying to get everything right is that it takes forever. :-) I've been very, very gradually designing a large game of my own… and being prone to perfectionism and a certain amount of NIH syndrome plus other constraints, there are times when I think things like “well, I could use differential vector fields for UI layout” and then I think “but that doesn't mean I should”. Though I'm sort of curious whether the MF2 third-party library/object ecosystem is prone to unfortunate shortcuts in general—I'm tempted to prejudicially assume it would be like PHP in that regard, but maybe not, I don't know, don't lick that, you don't know where it's been.

Er, right. c.c

[davidn]

Yes, my own problem was that I would write a particular feature, go off and do something else, and eventually come back and realize how dreadful what I wrote was and get a million ideas to improve it - then after I'd finished reworking it, realize that the next thing I'd done was looking similarly decayed and go back to improve that... I tell everyone else to stick to the rule of finishing things all the way through first before starting the improvement phase, but it rarely really works like that.

I think PHP is a shockingly good comparison, actually... in an environment where you've got so many people writing extensions with no standardization, every one of them will name their functions in a different way, some people choose to index from 0 and others from 1... half the job becomes finding the objects that do what you want in the way that's most consistent and useful.