Family

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday, so no second technical post from me today.  I’m out with friends having a blast.

(I’m actually at home with my wife playing video games, as most of these blog posts are written well in advance, but it sounds good to say that I logged in to day and wrote this.)

Denny

Happy New Year!!

Have a happy New Year. Go spend the night with family.

That’s what I’m doing tonight.

Denny

Its time for a code freeze again

Its the holidays again, and that means its time for a code freeze. Code freeze’s are handy for a few reasons.

1. People like to take vacations this time of year for some reasons. With a code freeze in place everyone can spend the holidays with family rather than with the servers.
2. With everyone taking time off, if new code has a problem finding the people who actually wrote the code may be an issue.
3. It boosts staff moral to not have to worry about pushing new features into production on a skeleton staff.
4. It keeps the families of the staff happy to have them home around this time of year.

While it doesn’t help make the company and money to freeze code, it simply makes everyone happy, and isn’t that what this time of year is really all about.

Denny

EMC World 2008 Day 0

Today is the check-in and welcome party for EMC World.  EMC and Brocade had the Goo Goo Dolls perform at the welcome party.  The party and show were fantastic.

Funniest comment of the concert would have to be “This is the first all you can eat buffet rock show I’ve ever been to.”

The video was taken by my wife (who also had a great time, thanks for coming with me).  What you don’t see (but you can here) is John Rzeznik talking to one of the people serving the food about 2 feet from the front of the stage.  If anyone has better shots or video please post them and links to them.

Here are some stills which my wife took. She takes all the photos. I can’t take a picture to save my life.  (Click the image to see the bigger version.)
  

I’ll continue to post from the conference as best I can.

Denny

****UPDATE****

I’ve added another picture so the group.

Happy Birthday to me!!!

Well today is my birthday.  Since it’s a regular posting day I figured I’d skip the technical posting and just say hi.  (I’ve got this thing against working on my birthday.  I’d much rather spend the day with family and friends.  It’s my day and I’ll do what I want, as long as it’s ok with the wife at least :-).)

 Denny

Have a Happy New Year

This will by the last blog entry for the year (this being new years eve and all). 

I hope that everyone has a happy new year and that no one needs to have to work tonight.

Don’t forget to spend tonight with family and friends, and not your computer working.

Denny

A well timed code freeze is critical to keeping your sanity.

Doing a code freeze at this time of year can be crucial to keeping your sanity this time of year.  Often times the business unit likes to push out last minute changes before the year end.  This often means pushing last minute code (which as everyone knows isn’t always perfect) which can lead to unpleasant little phone calls from the business or the NOC in the middle of holiday festivities.

Do your self and your family a favor, push for a code freeze until after the new year.  The developers will thank you, the business with hate you (but really what else is new).  I like about a three week code freeze (emergency bug fixes are except, but they have to actually be bug fixes, and they have to be an emergency) starting about December 15 ending about January 3 (depending on when the weekends fall).

It can be tough to get a code freeze implemented at first.  But after the first year with the code freeze everyone will want to go it the next year.

Denny

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, spend the day with family.

I know that this is normally a technical blog, but with the US Thanksgiving day holiday coming tomorrow I wanted to be sure to point out that time needs to be made out of our busy work schedules to make sure that we spend time with our families.  It’s very important that we find a good balance between work and family.

Denny

Making time for the family.

Working in IT can be a fun and exciting career, however it can also be an extremely demanding one.  When working in IT you have to find a balance between work and family.  Without finding that balance you’ll end up with either a very unhappy employer or a very unhappy family.

Myself I am very lucky that my wife works in IT and is very understanding about the occasional long hours.  Not everyone is as lucky as I am to have someone at home who works in the field.  I can’t give advise on how to find the balance, mostly because it will be different for everyone.  I just know that it is very important to find this balance because without it, in time the work will not seam important.

Denny