Wednesday, February 28, 2001 Yes. Yes! Yes!!! muttered around 12:43 PM

Sunday, February 11, 2001 Business Cards A while ago, I mentioned that I ordered cards from www.businesscards.com. I received them a couple of weeks ago. The quality is pretty good. The printing isn't as precise as I might have liked, but considering I did the layout online, and the total cost was about $40, I'm satisfied. My old roommate from college, Mark, who's now a very successful indepdendent commercial designer may be working on an official logo/card/letterhead for me as a favor (you rock, Mark). That'll be great, but these simple cards will do for now. Motorola T900 Talkabout Pager I'm very happy with this email-enabled pager, which replaces the RIM 850 with Yahoo services that I tried out earlier this year. This pager does everything I need, and is lighter, has better coverage and penetration, and has much better battery life than the RIM unit. Plus, I get feeds from AP, and voice mail that beeps me to let me know that I have a new message. Pretty nice! muttered around 10:02 PM

I'm just now getting over a flu-like cold I had last week. I missed 2.5 days of work, and over a week of workouts. Missing work really sucks now, because it goes straight to my bottom line -- I don't work, I don't get paid; simple as that. Anyway, work goes OK. Even though the project is actually going pretty well, missed dates early in the project have made everyone at the top very nervous about future dates. Therefore, everything is being ultra-documented and micro-managed to the hilt. Funny thing is, I think the project is now hitting its stride (as most do) regardless of the management practices used. Since the project is hitting its stride, things will go much more smoothly from here on out. The bummer is that the micro-management will get credit, rather than the normal acceleration that occurs as a project converts from a new project to a going project. Sigh. I worked on Saturday, in order to ensure that our code is deployed to the system testing environment successfully. There were a few configuration SNAFUs that had to be cleared up before our stuff actually ran in the test environment. It was no fun to work on Saturday, but at least I made back some of the hours I lost due to sick time earlier in the week. When I worked out tonight, I expected to feel pretty darn good given I've had a break from weight training (I've missed two sessions due to my illness). On the contrary, I suffered a bit. I felt pretty weak, even when doing lighter weight than normal. Guess I'm not really back to full health yet. Yesterday's spinning session went well, but likely because I kept it fairly low-intensity. I'm skipping spinning tomorrow, to give my body a chance to bounce back until Wednesday's spinning session. muttered around 9:52 PM

Friday, February 02, 2001 I haven't posted in some time now. I used to post in the mornings, from work, as I ate my breakfast. But now that I'm on the clock all the time, I'm not very liable to spend any time (even just 10-15 minutes) posting. Then at night, I don't much feel like writing. Training I'm still doing spinning and weight training. I'm on a very set schedule now, and vary from it very little. Two weight training sessions and three spinning sessions per week seem to be keeping me pretty fit, if not thin. I've gained about 7 pounds since my lightest point last summer. Of course, last summer I was riding many miles per week, and not weight training. My guess is I've added maybe 2-3 pounds in muscle weight, and the rest is fat. My clothes aren't fitting much tighter, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it ;-). Work Work is going OK now. I've hit my stride and have a decent project. It's not an exciting project, but it's better than not having one. The project is essentially a batch job that accesses WebLogic to retrieve XML documents, translates them into another format using XSL, and writes the documents to a set of files. The rules for what document goes into what file are a little tricky, and each file can contain only up to 20,000 "pages" before "rolling over" to a new file. So it's interesting, but not exciting. I'm mainly concerned about the runtime of this job once volumes get to production levels. I've raised "yellow flags" over this, but haven't been able to get anyone too concerned about it. The way I look at it, I've done my job in raising the flag. Etc I'm catching a cold. MB has had one (or two) since Christmas, and I somehow escaped. But something's going around at work, and I've succumbed to it. This one is weird because it started with a cough (my colds usually end with that). muttered around 5:01 PM