A year ago today I started my current job. For the first time in a seven years I was a full-time employee rather than a consultant, and for the first time in a decade I was changing jobs without moving cross-country in the process.
It has been an interesting first year. The project I joined as a software architect was canceled only a few weeks after I completed my orientation; my team was re-tasked to various legacy projects. In June one of the other architects left the company. He was followed in July by a second architect. In October the remaining architect left. Finally in December the manager quit and moved on to other pastures. In less than a year I had gone from being the fourth member of a team to being the entire software architecture department.
Along with the canceled project, and the attrition in the architecture ranks, I was faced with some serious doubts about how I was going to fit into the organization. After two and a half years on the team at my previous engagement I struggled quite a bit to find my comfort zone at the new job.
Today I am feeling pretty good about the company, and my place within it. The transition from consultant to employee is complete. Today I see my job as more than the hours between 7:30 and 4:00 every work day; it includes benefits and supports our lifestyle. Most important it is building a future retirement for us. It isn’t a perfect job (no job is) but it is a good job, and I feel like I am making a positive difference.
In the seven or so years that I used Moveable Type as my content management system I managed to create 42 categories. Some were catch-all groupings that ended up holding dozens or even hundreds of postings. Others held just a handful or entries, or, in some cases, only one entry.
Switching to Wordpress allowed me to add tags to my entries; something my antiquated version (2.661) of Moveable Type didn’t allow. As long as I was migrating all 1330 entries, I decided it was time to revamp the category hierarchy, and put some forethought into what tags I wanted to use.
Some of the old categories have gone away, becoming tags within other categories. Several new categories have been created, usually to group together several previous categories. The new taxonomy is still evolving; but for now there are only 11 categories. On the other hand I already have more than 200 tags. It will take some time for me to visit all the postings and tag them, or reassign them to there new categorical home, but I think it will be worthwhile as entries will be easier to find.
Without further ado then, here are the new categories:
While I have completed this process for about two-thirds of all the categories, I still have some of the larger categories (in terms of entry numbers) to visit. I’ve also been updating my htaccess file as I go, ensuring that visits to the old category archives properly forward to either the new category archive or the tag archive.
You can select a category from the drop-down list in the side bar, or you can see all the tags on their page.
Excellent video of the process used to make a camera lens assembly. Makes you want to run out a buy a SLR camera and some lenses right away.
The visual editor provided with Wordpress is actually an implementation of TinyMCE. Contained in the Wordpress implementation is coding that checks the browser type. The coding following at least one of the Safari checks strips out all paragraph tags (<p>). This means that any entry you either edit or create using Safari turns in to one huge block of text the instant you save or publish. Not what you want, believe me.
There are at least two Trac entries on the Wordpress development site detailing this problem, each with a chain of comments about the criticalness of the problem. There are also a couple of threads on the Wordpress forum regarding the issue. It appears that you could edit the tinyMCE code within your Wordpress installation, to remove the offending Safari conditional. The group consensus was uncertain as to any side effects of this hack. Also, you would have to re-apply the hack each time you updated Wordpress.
Hoping to avoid surgery on my installations, I opted to install the Advanced TinyMCE plugin (not the simplest of operations), wondering if it would fix the problem. No such luck.
So I am still forced to edit postings using any browser except Safari 3.
At my eye exam yesterday I learned that my vision does in fact need some help. Moreover, I learned that my astigmatism has returned. Here’s my prescription:
The “Spherical” column shows the refractive correction across both the vertical and horizontal axis. The “Cylindrical” column shows the correction necessary along one axis, vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. The values in the spherical and cylindrical columns are in terms of diopters. The value in the Axis column is in degrees, and shows the axis of the cylindrical correction.
A diopter is the reciprocal of the lens’ focal length in meters. If a lens has a focal length of 1/2 meters, it is a 2 diopter lens. For comparison, a +10 diopter lens (I.e., a focal length of 10 centimeters) would make a excellent magnifying glass. A human eye has a refractive power of about 60 diopters.
The correction can be expressed as a positive or negative number. A positive (like my left eye) correction magnifies, while a negative correction spreads. A magnifying glass, which is a positive lens, concentrates sunlight, while a negative lens would diffuse or spread the light out.
The spherical correction is the main correction, and the cylindrical correction is the fine tuning. In my case the correction is necessary along one axis, rather than across the entire field of view. This is known as an astigmatism. The degrees listed in the Axis column indicate along which axis the correction should occur. In my case the blur is located along the 45 degree axis in my right eye, and along the 10 degree axis in my left eye.
You can read more about this on Wikipedia’s eyeglass prescription article.
I will be getting progressive lenses in new glasses in about ten days. My distance vision is fine, but as the object I am trying to focus on draws nearer, I need some correction.
The final piece of news I got in the exam is that I have the beginnings of age appropriate cataracts on both eyes. As you age, the lens in each of your eyeballs begins to harden and become opaque. The doctor feels that my eyes are perfectly health, and that I shouldn’t worry about the cataracts for 10 or 15 years yet. In the meantime, she wants me to talk a daily multivitamin and to wear good UV sunglasses when I’m outdoors.
Almost two years ago, in March 2006, I had LASIK surgery done to my eyes to eliminate the need to wear bifocal glasses any more. The goal was to allow me to see without corrective lens whether I was reading a book, looking at a computer monitor, or driving the car. Given my age at the time (45) the LASIK option that sounded best was “mono-vision.” As we age our eyes lose some of their focal range. You might be able to see fine up close, but not far away. Or the other way around, but not both ends of the scale. By adjusting, surgically, one eye to see up close and the other to see distance, you can increase the range of unaided vision.
Unfortunately this has not worked out for me. Following the first surgery my near eye was able to focus out to about 8 inches. The doctor explained that it had “healed too strong.” After waiting three months for the eye to heal, I under went a second surgery to adjust that eye. It now focuses about 24 inches from my face, but no closer. It had, again, healed differently than the doctor expected.
The doctor is reluctant to operate on that eye again, feeling that (a) two surgeries is enough, and (b) that there is no guarantee how it will heal the third time. His option was to adjust the distance eye - something I am not going to risk.
I’ve tried living with the quirks of my new vision, but I am frustrated on a daily basis by not being able to see up close anymore. Prior to the surgeries, I was able to see, read, and do things inside of arm’s reach. Today I have to hold books at arm’s length in order to focus on the words.
The last post-operative exam, a little more than one year ago, was also highly dissatisfying. My near vision wasn’t measured at all. It seemed that the clinic was more interested in seeing what my overall vision “score” was, than measuring the absolute parameters of its range. My combined vision is 20-20, but I can’t read or focus on objects inside of two feet.
So today I am seeing a new doctor, to get a complete evaluation of my eyesight. I expect that I will need some form of correction in order to regain the near vision I miss and desire. Whether that will be in the form of glasses or contacts, I don’t know yet. After the dilation wears off, I will post the results here.
Recently at work I added all the conference room calendars, for the building I work in, to my “Other Calendar” list in Outlook. This way I can click on the checkbox for a conference room and see its availability quickly; something useful when trying to schedule a meeting.
Today I wanted to add all the conference rooms for our other building (and the one I am moving to in three weeks) to the same list. I’ll be heading up a project team whose members all live in the other building, so it only makes sense to schedule meetings there. Easier for one of me to walk five blocks that it would be for eight of them.
Try as I might I could not remember how to added calendars to the list. The only hit on Google that was even halfway close was one of those “you must be a member and signed in to read the rest of the article” sites that I refuse to use. I even tried Microsoft’s support site and learned all the neat things I could do with a calendar once it was in my other list, but not how to actually put it there.
Finally I stumbled across the solution, which had been staring me in the face the whole time. Below the “Other Calendars” portion of the navigation panel in the Calendar view in Outlook, there is a link titled, “Open a Shared Calendar.” Turns out by “shared” they mean “other.”
Now I’ll go bang my head against the desk so I’ll remember this trick in the future.
The uptime command, in the UNIX world, displays how long a particular machine has been “up” or running. Recently I have been applying that term to my daily lower back exercises. After reading a getting things done article that talked about Jerry Seinfeld, I have been working on better uptime for my exercises.
I’ll explain.
Jerry said he gets things done by getting a large year-at-a-glance calendar, and by putting a mark on each consecutive day he works on new material. He said that seeing a continuous string of marks is a powerful motivator for not breaking the chain. When I first read this I thought to myself, “it is so simple it would probably work.”
I weigh myself every day, and record the weight on a chart on our bureau in the bedroom. At night I do my exercises in that room, and I’ve started putting a little plus sign next to the date on my chart, to indicate a successful completion of my exercises for the day. A chain of one or two pluses is easy to break. Longer chains are much harder to ignore.
Presently I’m at 16 days in a row. Knowing that a miss now would mean starting all over again at 1 is a surprisingly powerful motivator. To use the UNIX term, I’ve got a 16 day uptime.
In the previous two Presidential Election cycles I made good use of the resources found at Project Vote Smart, especially the “political courage test.” Over the weekend I took some time to poke around the biographies of the major candidates for 2008 and was dismayed to discover that none of them have completed the test. C’mon candidates, be grown-up and provide us some answers already. Otherwise I’ll be forced to cast my vote based on your favorite food.
And since there is one candidate whom I like, who lists chili as his/her favorite food, I guess I’m all set for November.