Job Change

Those of you who know me personally probably have heard the news already, but here it goes: I've started a new job!  This time it's for real, unlike last time.  :)

The decision to leave the company that I'd been with for nearly five years was a difficult one.  There have been many frustrations over the years there, but the number one reason that I chose to leave (at least at the start of the process) was travel.  I've been travelling almost constantly for work for five years now.  I've had a couple of slow periods where I would get to stay home for a month or two, but overall, I'd say that I have spent about fifty percent of my time with Wyde on the road.  By itself, travelling isn't that bad.  I do enjoy visiting new places and meeting new people, but with a family (and especially two small children), travelling is very taxing.  Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that my family makes it hard to travel; I'm saying travelling makes it hard on my family.  I just couldn't live with it any longer.

The other thing to understand is that I wasn't looking for a new job.  One of the things that I hate the most in life is job hunting!  When I graduated from college, it took me ten months to find a job in my field!  Ten months!  Granted, that was at a particularly tough part of the recession, but the hardest part is getting your hopes up and then being rejected.  I couldn't count how many times I heard, "we're very interested," or, "we'll be in touch," or any other saying that leaves a candidate with hope just to have it all come to nothing.  A couple of times I had been told that they wouldn't give me a formal offer right away, but that I would get one within the week, but never heard back from them.  Well, I'm getting a little off topic here, so I digress.

My point is that I wasn't looking.  I've been getting a call from headhunters about once a quarter for the past year or two and I would go through the motions, maybe have an interview or two and then not hear anything.  I took it all in stride, not getting my hopes up for any of it.  This last time, about a month ago, I had another head hunter call that went a little differently.  The recruiter handed me right off to the interested company and they wanted to interview me right away and in person.  I was, unfortunately, out of town, but they were cool and we scheduled for the next week.  They acted fast and got me an offer the same week that I had the second interview.  Now, I'm not going to go into the details of what happened next, but there was a counter offer and then a counter-counter offer and I ended up accepting the new company's counter-counter offer.  That's another thing that I wasn't trying to do (get a bidding war over me going), but it's nice to feel wanted!

So, what's different now that wasn't when I'd gotten other interviews?  Well, for one, the new company has a different outlook on what it takes to be a good developer.  They feel, similarly to how I feel, that if you know the theory/concepts of object-oriented programming that a language is easy to learn.  It's surprising to me how most other companies don't grasp that.  I hadn't done Java programming since college and this company was willing to take the risk based on my interview and hire me as a Java developer!  I was amazed!  Another reason is that I am more experienced now than I was out of college.  Duh, right?  Well, I didn't really fully realize that until I started talking to this company and they asked me certain questions that a newbie might not know about.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned the name of my new company.  The reason is that I'm not sure how they would take me writing a blog about this whole thing.  Maybe after I've worked here for some time I'll share with you all that information, but for now I'll keep it quiet.

Another main benefit to switching jobs is that I get to work using Java again.  I've been reading training manuals now for a while and the more I read the more I remember why I liked Java.  It's also made me realize how important a good design is to having a successful product.  I'm just going to leave it at that.

So, it's exciting news!  At the same time that I'm sad about leaving Wyde and leaving the friends that I made there, I'm happy for this new opportunity to return to Java and do something different.  It's a good opportunity to grow my skillset and to see how other companies do this consulting thing.  Also, yay for no travel! :P

PS: It still amazes me that Word likes "travelling", but Firefox wants it to be "traveling".

Do-Over Day

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinaphotography/6912731931/

Today has just been one of those days that you wish you could have a do-over on.  Ever have one of those days?  Of course you have, everybody has.  Well, before I tell you about it, I'll give you a little background since not all of you know me personally.  I travel for work a lot, though normally I leave late on Sunday evening, this week I was supposed to leave on Monday morning to save a couple of hundred dollars on the flight.

So, in order to get to the west coast and be able to work an almost full day, I had to book an early flight.  Now, you might be thinking that a 7:35 AM flight isn't an early flight, but you have to consider that I had to wake up at 5:15 just to get to the airport to fight the long lines at security and get to the gate at the recommended 45 minutes early.  I was able to do this without a hitch, so I should have known that something was up since things were going so smoothly.  I mean, I didn't wake anyone up when I left the house, I found a decent parking spot in the parking ramp and I was running on time.  Of course, I had to go through one of those stupid scanning devices at security, but overall it was good, so far.

The first negative event happened then.  I get to the gate at 6:45 and put in a $5 bill to get a Mountain Dew.  What comes out of the machine?  A Diet Pepsi!  Not really a big deal, but my first pop of the morning ended up costing me $4.50.  At least I was able to gift some random person a free Diet Pepsi.  Pay it forward, or something like that.

So, they start boarding at 7:00 AM and I get on the plane.  It's a 767, so I figure that there will be plenty of room for everything, but I didn't realize that I'm sitting behind a bulkhead.  Oops, no under seat storage for me.  Oh well, I can deal with that.  But, I have an aisle seat, so every third person is hitting me with a backpack as they walk by.  Okay, my patience is wearing thin right about now.

So, we're all boarded and they close the door.  Okay, now I get to sleep, right?  No, wrong.  They stop the plane about one hundred yards from the gate and the captain comes on the PA and announces our pending return to the gate.  All he says is that apparently the tires didn't pass the pre-flight check and although they had gotten the green light before, it had been revoked and we were being recalled to the gate so that someone could inspect the tires.  I've been on planes that have had tire problems before, so I immediately know that they're going to eventually have to take us off the plane if they're going to change it, but they don't let us off.

When we get to the gate they open the door and people start pulling out their phones and calling Delta.  The moment I had my phone on the Delta iPhone app told me that we were delayed until 8:35 AM and it was about 7:45 at this point.  I knew that I was either likely to sit on the plane for an hour or that something else was going to happen like a plane change.

The captain comes on again a few minutes later and explains the situation.  Now, get this because this is the really stupid part.  The plane had had some routine maintenance done the night before and someone had put a tire meant for international flights on the airplane.  Seriously?  They have different tires for international versus domestic planes?  If someone could explain the reason for this, I'm all ears.  Anyway, they don't have any domestic tires for a 767 in MSP, so they're flying one from Atlanta for the plane.

Pretty stupid, right?  Here's my theory.  The maintenance guy reached into the barrel of domestic tires and oops, we're out!  Oh, no one will notice if we put on an international tire, right?  This is a case of poor inventory control.  Why would you schedule maintenance on a plane and not have the right parts around?  Why wouldn't someone realize that they're running out of tires and order some?

So they let us off the plane and announce that the flight is delayed, but they can't give us a definite time of departure.  Now, this really sucks because if they could have told us then that it would have been a 12:35 PM departure, I would have gone home for a couple of hours.  Instead, they strung us on for about an hour and then told us that it would be 12:35 and at a different gate.  By this time it didn't make any sense for me to run home and then come back as I would only be able to stay at home for about half an hour or so and would have paid to get out of the parking ramp.

The silver lining of all of this is that I got a $6 meal voucher* and a $100 travel voucher (which is actually pretty sweet).  Plus, apparently the internet at MSP is free now.  Does anyone know when they started doing that?  It used to be around $7 for a 24-hour period or something like that.  Also, I tweeted about this and @DeltaAssist replied back almost immediately asking if there was anything they could do to help (like rebooking).  That was also pretty sweet.

So, overall, even though the situation really sucked and I ended up spending almost seven hours at the airport this morning, Delta has been really good about admitting their fault and (overall) keeping us informed about the status of the flight.  I know that they've been working on this as a company and I think that this is an improvement over my experiences with mechanical issues in the past.  Now they just need to work on keeping their maintenance and inventory so that preventable issues like this are avoided in the future.

*Meh, wasn't even enough for a foot long at Subway.  I got two $10 vouchers at SEA once for an hour delay.  Why so cheap, Delta?

Celebrity Sightings

Stan Lee

Normally, I'm not much of a fan of Hollywood. It seems to me that the film and TV industry is full of large egos, bad attitudes and crappy role models for youngsters. Now, I know that this is a generalization and that there are many stars who stand out as shining beacons of kindness and humility in a sea of condescension and callousness. This post, however isn't about my perception of Hollywood. It's about my short brushes with a few of the people that I've actually run into from this world during my project that was in Los Angeles.

I wanted to wait until that project was over to write this post, and so I have. The project ended, for me at least, a couple of weeks ago and I've moved on to a project based in Seattle. During my travels to LA, I've encountered five celebrities that I recognized. Oddly, though our project was in Woodland Hills (apparently where a lot of stars lived), all of my encounters were at the airport or on airplanes.

My first celebrity encounter was Stan Lee. I saw him when I was sitting at PDX for a layover. He got off of a plane and I was too stunned to even approach him. It was cool seeing such a geek icon up close. I've been a fan of his since I was a kid.

The next was about a month later. A coworker and I were heading home and we saw Henry Rollins (or a guy who looked EXACTLY like him) riding a plane back to MSP from LAX. Several others near us whispered about it, but no one ever spoke to him to ask him, that I heard anyway. My wife and I watched "The Chase" the other day and although he looked a lot older on the plane, I'm sure it was him.

A few months later I saw John Cho and his family get off of a flight from Detroit. No one else seemed to notice who he was. I was tempted to shout out "Sulu" or "Harold", but I refrained.

Then, a few months later several coworkers and I saw Danny Trejo on a flight from MSP to LAX. He must have been promoting one of his movies in Minneapolis as he was wearing a hat with the movie logo and had a bag with the logo as well. He's a lot shorter in person than I thought he would be, but still looks very intimidating.

The very next week I sat directly behind Wilmer Valderrama in first class going from MSP to LAX. The two of us actually spoke and all I remember about it was that I handed him his bag from the storage bin and told him that my daughter was a fan of Handy Manny. He smiled and said, "Thanks."

Henry Rollins

There are a few celebrities that, if I saw them, I would totally geek out and rush to say hi. If I'd had the presence of mind, I would have so done that when I saw Stan Lee. Otherwise, I think that they are just people too and unless they're purposely inviting people over to say hi, they have a right to being left alone just like everyone else.

A coworker of mine met John DeLancie on a flight from LAX to MSP and got his picture taken with him. I was jealous of that and definitely would have gotten my picture taken too if I'd been on that flight.


Have you ever met any celebrities? Were they cool with you coming up an saying hi?

Flying Etiquette

I do a lot of traveling for my job. As such, I’ve noticed a lot of behavior of other travelers that I have come to despise or find annoying. I’ve been contemplating writing this blog post for quite a while, but I am a generally easy going person and I don’t want to ruffle any feathers. My annoyances have finally gotten to the point where I feel that I either need to vent or let other people know what I find annoying in the hopes that they think, “Oh, yeah, I bet that is annoying to other people” in the hopes that they cease this behavior.

Most of the complaints below are just things that I think should be common courtesy in everyday life, but that many other travelers ignore when in the airport for some reason. I don’t particularly understand that. People who are normally pleasant to everyone seem to think that just because they’re in an airport that they suddenly have permission to be a dick. Like my idol, Wil Wheaton, says, “Don’t be a dick”.

Let’s start this off with some annoyances that derive from people waiting at the gate before they even get on the plane. Prepare for /rant.

• Know where your liquids are packed. It’s been a rule long enough that you shouldn’t be surprised anymore when the TSA asks you to pull out your liquids in a Ziploc bag and put them on the x-ray conveyor belt. You slow everybody up because you didn’t think to keep all your liquids in a single place and have to practically repack while in the security line.
• Same goes with your laptop. Two weeks ago I was behind a guy that had packed his laptop at the bottom of his rollerbag and had to take out most of the contents to get at it. Plan ahead, people.
• Don’t argue with the TSA guys. Not only are they then going to choose you for a “random” screening, but you’re not going to change their minds. They don’t care if you have to walk through the metal detector barefoot or have to throw away a half full bottle of water. You need to follow the rules just like everyone else. Once again, you should have planned ahead better.
• Don’t take up more than one seat when the gate area is getting full. On Sunday, the gate area was very full because there were three gates all boarding within twenty minutes of each other, so there were a lot of people milling about. I noticed one particular person who was laying across three seats. Seriously? I gave up my seat to an elderly gentleman and sat on the floor, but you get three seats for yourself? Wow, dude.
• Don’t crowd the boarding area before it’s your turn to board. Nowadays, most of the airlines have a zone boarding scheme or go row by row. If you’re in Zone 4 or in the back of the plane, don’t stand around the boarding area. You’re just in everyone’s way and you’re slowing down the already slow paced boarding process. Also, don’t try to board in earlier zones. Sure, you might slip through, but chances are the gate person isn’t going to let you pass and will send you back to wait some more.
• Don’t be rude to anyone working in the airport or on the airplane. These people are responsible for maintaining a safe and comfortable way for the rest of us to travel. Most of them have tough jobs that I personally wouldn’t want to do. Plus, if you’re rude to them, you’re just being a jerk. Knock it off.
• When boarding the plane, don’t try to fit huge ass bags into the overhead area. Also, don’t put it in there sideways. You’re taking up room that another person might have been able to use. If it’s too big, check it. Or, better yet, pack your stuff in a smaller bag to begin with so that you can fit it in the overhead bin.
• Related to that is: Don’t put two bags in the overhead area. I don’t care how much foot room you want. When you put two bags up there, you’re taking up space that someone else could have used. If you’re bringing enough stuff to fit into two small rollerbags, you should probably have just put it all in one larger one and checked it.
• Stand up whenever someone is entering or exiting your row. Even in the exit row. I don’t want to stick my ass in your face anymore than you want it there. Quit being lazy and have some consideration for others.
• Don’t tattle on someone on the phone or listening to headphones after they close the door. This isn’t Soviet Russia, no matter how controlling the flight attendants are. The flight attendants will tell that person off, and if they don’t it’s not your job to do so anyways. Plus, I personally feel that it’s 100% bull that I have to turn my iPod off during takeoff and landing. Is the meager radiation that my iPod puts out going to crash the airplane? No, the person next to me wouldn’t even be able to detect it with the right instrumentation, much less get through all the stuff between me and the cockpit.
• Don’t watch raunchy or scary movies on a laptop or any player that others might see. Chances are there are children on your flight and they might see.
• Same applies to websites that you might visit. Go to the public library for that stuff.
• This one isn’t so much an annoyance as it should be common sense: don’t talk about your confidential business practices/information on an airplane. 1. You never know who is listening; 2. You probably shouldn’t be sharing that information with random strangers anyways when it’s supposed to be confidential. I doubt your boss/shareholders/etc. would like to hear that you were sharing that information.
• Never recline your chair. Everybody hates that. I really wish that none of the chairs ever reclined. I originally wrote this as the person in front of me reclined their chair back as far as it will go. I could literally rest my head on their head without being that uncomfortable. Amendment: when you recline your chair back so far you can see up my nose, don’t turn around and complain that my knees are sticking into your back. Quit being a jerk. I’m six feet tall, my knees touched your chair before you leaned the damn thing back. It isn’t exactly comfortable for me either.
• If you’re in the aisle seat, stand up when the plane gets to the gate. That way at least one of the other people in your row can stand too. I’m mildly claustrophobic and always pretty eager to get off the plane and I hate when the aisle person waits to the last moment to stand up.
• Don’t wait for the last moment to get your stuff together when everyone is getting off the plane. You’re holding everyone up. See the point above this for more information.

I try to follow all of these suggestions whenever I’m traveling (which is twice a week at this point). You’d be amazed at the behavior that I’ve seen that I haven’t even posted here since I’ve only seen it once or twice, or extreme examples of any of the above points. /Endrant

On a lighter note, most people do follow a lot of these suggestions. It’s just the jerks who stand out to me, I think. If you have seen some behavior that appalls you, or you have some additions to my suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment.

And, now it’s time for my favorite song of the moment: Beefy – I’m No Superman