Christopher Schmidt

Time to go back to work today. Luckily, I think that 3 days is about the right amount of recovery time for this kind of trip: I actually feel relatively rested (thank goodness for small favors). So, back to the office I go.

Luckily, it seems like not much fell apart during my absence. Also, that word looks totally wrong.

I'm in DC on Wednesday morning for a meeting: Flying in tonight, arriving around 6, staying at the Holiday Inn in Reston. If there's anyone who I should be stopping over and having a beer with tonight, let me know: at the moment, my plan is just to wander around DC monuments for a couple hours tomorrow night, since I Haven't been able to find anyone I should be meeting. (I'm booked until my plane leaves on Wednesday; the trip is not about seeing DC, just a quick hop down for work.)

Haven't been posting -- have been turned into a twitter addict instead. Will try to think in sentences more than 140 characters long.

I've been working with my camera again. It's been a long time since I was regularly using it. I'm also going to start working on tools to make posting pictures easier, so I spend more time taking pictures and less time adding metadata to them after the fact. It's ridiculous that even with all the technology I carry, uploading and tagging photos is still such a pain in the ass.

I think we may finally be rid of our wedding guests. Roy has had a hell of a time getting out of here:

• Tried to fly out Monday night. Storms in Connecticut blocked his flight until he would have missed his last connection.
• Tried to fly out Tuesday night. Storms over Charlotte were blocking flights until they couldn't fly back due to noise curfews in Charlotte (or something like that.)
• Got rescheduled to what they said was a 5pm flight... that he discovered at 10am was actually a 5 *am* flight.
• Finally left this morning, and may actually get out today.

Schuyler actually got a LiveJournal account, which amuses me. (sderle)

My status at $work may be changing at some point in the future. Had a conversation with $boss yesterday. We'll see what happens soon.

There. That was more than 140 characters.

Drove to NH last night, got the girls sneakers, which they left at their dad's house. Kristna came with me and kept me awake. Stopped by her place, chilled out there for an hour or so, came home, passed out.

OpenLayers is close to a 2.4 release -- if only the damn people didn't keep bringing up bugs ;) We have one or two release-critical issues, so far as I can tell -- unfortunately, they're a bitch to debug, as they are Firefox + Windows only, and they lock up the browser for five minutes for no discernible reason.

Should be able to do a full hack day with Schuyler today. Looking forward to that.

So, I was talking to a coworker the other day, explaining what it's like to work for my current boss.

For those of you who don't know, I work in the "Office of the CTO" at MetaCarta. That means, basically, that I work directly for the CTO. The CTO (also the founder of the company) is astoundingly bright, and typically about 6-12 months ahead of the game in understanding what people are going to want from the company in the near future. This is an extremely good thing to have, especially if you can execute on it, and one of the things that it's my job to do is to execute on it.

However, because The Boss is always thinking ahead, it's very hard to get anything done. When we do get something done, it's typically attached with a list of 12 or 14 other things that depend on it... or the priority list has changed so that it was no longer important to get done anyway.

Apparently, this is kind of like grad school. You work hard -- scramble, even -- to get to someplace, then find out your adviser has changed his or her mind on what you should be doing. Your praise is limited, and when given, usually only with caveats. You keep an odd schedule, but always make sure to show up at the meetings for the free food.

There are differences. Even when the priorities are vastly changing from hour to hour, I still absolutely love my job. I love the people I work with, where I work, and even the way that we do things. I wouldn't give it up for the world. It's also a *job*, not an academic position, which has its benefits as far as compensation goes.

All in all, I'm just really happy to be where I am. I was mostly just interested to find out that I'm essentially experiencing a situation that's similar to what people experience in grad school, since I'd never been exposed to that environment. Having left in my sophmore year of the UIUC undergrad program, I didn't have the context.

So, work is kind of like grad school. With a better environment, better pay, and more friendly people around you. I think I'll stick with work.

I love my job. No real reason why today, I just do.

I do get the CTO office to myself today, so maybe that's part of it ;)

Easy like Saturday morning.

Julie slept in Jess+my bed last night. I have no idea why, as I don't remember when she came into our bed, but it means that I couldn't chill out in bed this morning - not enough room. So, I'm downstairs, chilling out, and watching the very quiet world as it starts to wake up.

Snow yesterday was weird. There was an inch or two of snow, but then the snow started turning into sleet/rain. This actually made it so that most sidewalks were clear of snow if they'd been shovelled at all, or were melted to slush otherwise. I went out around 1/1:30, and at that point the rain started turning into hail. When I was walking back towards the house around 3pm, about 4 inches of snow were on the ground again, and traffic everywhere had pretty much ground to a halt.

How rain turned to sleet turned to hail turned to 4 inches of snow in two hours, I'm not quite sure, but it definitely made walking home more difficult.

Signed on for another 3 months with Ning. That job is so great for me, I hope they want to keep me forever. After this, all "real jobs" are going to suck :) I have been keeping an eye on what's in the area for when we do have to part ways, and I don't think getting a job will be too terrible - the tech field around here is good, and although I hope that I'd be able to make it on my own doing web development, I know that's pretty unlikely.

I'm thinking about learning Lisp.