stonetable.org

Home from New York City. Short trips like this are always a little tiring. So much activity crammed into a short period of time. This was my second trip to Ad Tech. I’m a techie at heart and don’t consider myself much of a salesman. That puts me in the minority at a trade show like this.

I’ve always had an eye for business. When I wrote software for the tanning industry, I would often talk to salon owners about what they did and what they needed. I even spent several nights working behind the counter, so I understood how their business worked.

Over the years, I’ve become a little more comfortable stepping out of the technical role. It helps that I’m passionate about the work I do and firmly believe we have a technically superior system. I designed it from the ground up and for the last four and a half years it’s been my baby. As the company grows and I step into more of a management role, I delegate more and slowly put the tools into the capable hands of the team we have built and continue to build.

I met many of my clients/partners at Ad Tech or the after party. It’s always a pleasure to put a face to the name. In some cases, there were people I’ve been working with for nearly five years that I met for the first time yesterday.

A good trip, good food, and good people. I passed Diane Neal from Law & Order: SVU on 7th avenue (I’m such a L&O fanboy). I had my first New York style hot dog. I ate my first (and possibly last) oyster. I celebrated Obama’s win in Times Square.

I made it to New York City with minimal difficulty today. Court went smoothly and traffic was light, so I made it to O’Hare with enough time to catch an earlier flight. One shuttle and subway ride later, I found the Westin and checked-in.

I met my co-workers for dinner at Quality Meats, followed by 40/40, where we co-sponsored a VIP party for the trade show. A fun night, and I got to meet several people I’d only known via email or instant message.

Feeling a little dead tonight. My original flight was canceled and American Airlines decided they needed to call me at 4:15AM and 4:45AM to make sure I knew about it. Between that and the flight I managed about four hours sleep today and tomorrow’s going to be another busy day. Here’s to hoping the beds here are comfortable.

It also looks like I’ll be staying over an extra day, so home again on Wednesday. I’m already missing Andrea and our menagerie of pets. I hear the dogs have been camping out at the front door all day and night, waiting for my return.

I sent in my absentee ballot a couple weeks ago. If you haven’t already, please go vote and make your voice heard. I think we’re on the brink of seeing some real change happen and that makes me feel pretty damn good.

I’m in southern California this week for work. I flew in to San Diego on Sunday and met up with some friends from AbsoluteWrite. We spent the day hiking in the mountains east of the city. Exhausting but fun. That evening, after dining on Tapas, I made the drive up to Orange County, where I’ll be until Wednesday.

I’m working from the corporate office, a pair of rented offices in a business park near the Irvine Spectrum. I’m training someone, showing them how the business works and how they’ll be able to help me manage the workload. Delegation, as I am discovering, is a wonderful thing.

We went to the Yardhouse for an absolutely yummy lunch (Mac and Cheese!). When we returned to the office, I found an e-mail from James Gunn waiting for me. I have officially been accepted into the CSSF Writer’s Workshop! I am extremely excited about the opportunity.

I’ll be flying home on Wednesday and sleeping until Friday (or so I wish). These trips to the home office are always productive but tiring.

One of the disadvantages of being self-employed is that there’s always work to be done. One thing I have a difficult time with is separating work from pleasure. I like what I do, which is both a blessing and a curse. It’s good that I enjoy my work, otherwise I wouldn’t want to do it and it wouldn’t get done. The problem is that it can be difficult to stop working.

When I’m on a normal sleep schedule, my generally looks like this: Wake up, take out the dogs, consume caffeine, work, take the occasional break to eat meals, and then sleep. I can easily work fourteen hours in a day.

Things get more chaotic when I’m under deadline. Eighteen hour days become the norm. Not once do I complain, mind you, because I enjoy what I’m doing, for the most part.

The problem is that I don’t take the time out during the day to do anything other than work. I neglect family and friends (frankly, Dena is eligible for sainthood after putting up with my crazy schedule). I neglect myself, too. The few other interests that I have fall by the wayside.

It’s time to throttle back.

I need to not let work consume every moment of my life. I have too many interests and I firmly believe that those interests are critical to making me a good, well-rounded human being. It’s ironic. In the past when I’ve interviewed potential employees, one of the questions I would ask was about their hobbies. I was more likely to hire someone who had hobbies other than work. It showed me that they were more likely to be an asset to the team by not focusing on only one idea to the exclusion of all others. Hobbies, even unrelated ones, give you perspective that can and often will bleed back into your work.

For the first time in a very long time I actually attended my writers group. I’m setting new goals for myself. I want to get back to my original plan of sending out one story per month for publication. That is a completely realistic goal, if I stick to it. If the average short story is 5,000 words and I can easily knock out 500-1,000 words in an hour, there is no reason I shouldn’t be able to write, revise, rewrite, and polish one story a month. Any failure to do so is simply a lack of commitment. One hour a day and in the end I will be happier, the quality of my work will improve because of the mental break writing provides and I’ll have something to show for it.

I’m starting this late in the month, but I will have a draft ready for the group by Thursdays meeting, even if it is a bit rough. In October I will polish one story and send it out somewhere (I have a stack of old stories to pick from and rewrite). November will be an off month, because I am going to have a go at NaNoWriMo again. The cycle will reset in December, once story sent out a month.

I recently had the opportunity to follow up on more non-fiction work, for a popular linux-related website and a publisher of Linux books. While tempting I find it difficult to motivate myself to move in that direction. It’s too similar to what I do when I work, using the same logical, orderly part of my brain. Creative writing stretches the other half in a much-needed way. It’s something I’ve enjoyed doing for longer than I can remember. In fact, I spent a few hours this past week gathering old manuscripts, journals and notebooks where I’d jotted down story ideas. I have drafts dating back more than six years and notebooks with bits of dialog I thought sounded neat, ideas and other assorted story-related fodder going back much further in time.

At the end of the day I have to do what I enjoy. I have never been productive doing otherwise. Stick to what I love doing and the rest will follow. It’s worked well so far.

Technorati Tags: writing

Just a little bit of code I’ve been working on. Call this a proof-of-concept to test the geo-targetting library that I’m using. Taking that (a commercial product) and combining it with the Google Maps API, I’ve come up with something kind of fun:

Where am I?

It’s not 100% accurate and it only goes to the city level but it’s close enough for most purposes I need it for. It’s some pretty interesting technology, too. My next step is extending it to not only target the city you (or your ISP) is in, but other cities around you in a certain mile radius.

I’m writing a new web application using mod_perl 2.0. It’s heavy on network I/O so I’m doing some benchmarking and testing with simulated I/O to see just how many requests/second I can expect a single server to handle. While reading through Practical mod_perl I discovered one of the greatest tools ever: ab.

stone@moradin:~ $ ab -n 5000 -c 10 http://localhost/echo
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev < $Revision: 1.141 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Completed 500 requests
Completed 1000 requests
Completed 1500 requests
Completed 2000 requests
Completed 2500 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Completed 3500 requests
Completed 4000 requests
Completed 4500 requests
Finished 5000 requests

Server Software: Apache/2.0.54
Server Hostname: localhost
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /echo
Document Length: 33 bytes

Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 2.326156 seconds
Complete requests: 5000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1145916 bytes
HTML transferred: 165132 bytes
Requests per second: 2149.47 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4.652 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.465 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 481.05 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 1 0.7 1 8
Processing: 2 2 1.2 3 10
Waiting: 0 1 0.9 2 8
Total: 3 3 1.2 4 11
WARNING: The median and mean for the waiting time are not within a normal deviation
These results are probably not that reliable.

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 4
66% 4
75% 4
80% 4
90% 4
95% 5
98% 7
99% 7
100% 11 (longest request)

This is awesome. Not only does it rock, but it’s included by default with Apache.

Why is this blogworthy, you ask? Because I wrote it. I can’t claim for the design or graphics. I’m not talented in that area. I did, however, build the custom content management system that allows them to manage their catalog of games as well as integrate that with the HTML from the designer to turn it into a full-fledged dynamic site.

Last February I quit my job to pursue other ventures, this being one of them. There were some nervous moments but overall things have gone well. We’re not out of the woods by any means but at least we can see the path widening before us.

I still have a month or so of work left on the contract and by then yet another venture should be doing well enough to keep a roof over my head for a while. For now though, it’s time to catch up on my sleep. It’s been a long three weeks pre-launch.

I’m still getting used to working at home, for myself. It’s really nice to be able to set my own hours. I find myself working harder now than ever before but I’m also able to make the time to do quality things; taking walks, playing in the park with the dog, having lunch with Dena.

Time management has never been my strong suit but I’m definitely getting better at it. Time is money, especially now, so the better I manage my available time the more work I can do, the more hours I can bill, and the better the payout. It also means that I’ve been able to fit in time for other things that I’ve been struggling to make time for: writing.

I’m getting back into the writing groove. I’ve started carrying around my journal where I jot down thoughts, ideas, and observations that might be interesting. I also found two useful services tonight: The Writer’s Database, a submission tracker and market database, and The Writer’s Hat, an idea-generating exercise. I’ll going to my writers group this week — the first time in a year. God I’ve missed that.

I’m normally not one to rant publicly. It’s kind of long and might be confusing in parts but the gist is there, somewhere. I’ve kept this bottled up for far too long and need an outlet.

Background:

I started at this little dot com startup in early 2000. Two years later, the investors backed out and tasked me and two others to shut down the company. We did so, and life moved on. I collected my severance and found a new job.

The night before I start the new job, I get a call from the original owner of the company. He wants to meet with me the following weekend. Shit, nice timing, but okay. I meet with him. Apparently he managed to negotiate a deal where he got the hardware and intellectual property of the former company, so he wanted to restart the business. He (and his partner, also a former part of the old business) wanted to bring me on as employee #1 to get everything back up and help build this new business.

Same salary, less benefits, but lots of promises of stock options, raises, and the like. It couldn’t be worse than my new job (another dot com that didn’t survive long after I left), so I agreed.

Mistake #1: I accepted their excuse that it was too expensive to put things in writing, and their promise that, once things were more stable, they would make things ‘proper’.

So, over the years, things had their ups and downs. I worked lots of long hours. I’d seen a friend of mine (who originally got me hired at the company in the first place) hired and forced out by one particular co-worker who used to be the VP of Development at the old company. Still, I stuck things out, chasing that carrot that they kept dangling in front of me (aka stock options).

Despite this, I still thought I was just being a dedicated employee, doing my job to make the company successful. Still working long hours (occasionally pulling 24-hour shifts to meet deadlines) and putting up with the endless stream of bullshit.

July of 2003, things were busy. Business was looking good and we had lots of work to do. I thought the company was stable and on the right track. We needed to hire another person to keep up, and I suggested Kurt (my fellow moderator) and he got the job. Life was good.

As the months dragged on, things weren’t feeling quite right, but I kept on doing my thing. I had never gotten along with my other co-worker (the former VP) but the tension seemed to be getting worse.

Fast forward to the present, almost a year and a half later.

Kurt was basically forced to quit by the former VP. Every request for hardware is denied arbitrarily, unless it comes from the former VP. I’m back at square one, the only technically competent person at a tech company. I’m not looking forward to these prospects. Throw into that mix a non-compete, non-disclosure, and intellectual property agreement that they’re trying to force me to sign — one that I have serious issues with and we’re playing with fire, baby.

Yesterday, I have a meeting with my two bosses. It started out going over a project I’m working on (one, I might add, that I initiated, and is increasing revenue yet again). We finish discussing that, but they’re still sitting there, looking at me. Uh-oh. Something else is up.

They ask me where I’m at on the contract, and I tell them again that I’m having someone look over it and that I haven’t heard back yet. Then they launch into I can only describe as an inquisition.

They say my refusal to sign the contract has thrown up “big red flags” about my commitment to making the company successful. I never refused to sign their contract. I told them that I had reservations about certain things in it, and I wanted to make sure that my rights were protected. I do contract work at home, after hours, unrelated to the business but under the terms of their contract, they would own the intellectual property of everything I do while employed by them.

Second, they’re trying to make me sign an agreement that’s retroactive to the beginning of my employment without any kind of compensation which, as I understand it, is against the law. When I met with them about it, I told them I wanted my own benefits in writing, such as my stock options, any 401k or profit sharing (which I apparently have, but they are listed as trustees on). They refused, claiming it would cost them $25,000 to have lawyers draw up the papers for it. Well, I smell bullshit right there. He did explain to me how the options would work, though. I have X options. If my employment is terminated, voluntarily or not, the options revert back to the company with no option to execute them on my part. In other words, the only way I can execute my supposed options is if the company sells.

By this point, I’m frustrated. I’ve had verbal promise after promise made and broken or had their terms ‘modified’ at their whim. The only real benefit I have is that they pay half of my health insurance, which I had to get on my own.

Next, they tell me that they question my dedication to the company, because I haven’t responded to their emails after 5pm or on weekends lately. They claim I’m not making my deliverables. They say I’m not “taking ownership” and “making things happen”.

I’m normally a quiet, mild-mannered guy but I’ve been dealing with this shit for way too long.

I start to call them on their bullshit.

If I’m not answering an email after 5pm or on the weekends, it’s because it’s not something I consider high priority, meaning it can wait til the next business day or there’s nothing I can do about it until then. If it’s an emergency, I’ve always put my life on hold to take care of it.

The reason my supposed deadlines haven’t been met is because they have either a) changed the priority of said deadlines or b) refuse to produce the necessary hardware to complete them. Right now, the only pieces of hardware that they’ve supplied me to work is an LCD (after the old piece of crap CRT finally died) and a hard drive to replace the failing one in my personal machine that I use for development. Every single piece of work I’ve done for this company has been on hardware bought and paid for by yours truly.

They challenged my claims of not having enough hardware. I should “find a way to make it happen”. I flat out told them I refuse to use any more of my personal hardware for them.

They weren’t happy being stood up to. I flat out told them that I felt the stock options they’ve been using to hold me were invalid. That they’ve repeatedly made promises to me that they’ve not lived up to. And then to top it all off, they question my commitment and dedication. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m a fucking workaholic. I’m good at what I do, and I do it all the time, day or night. I’ve spent way too many nights and weekends monitoring servers or writing code than I’ll ever be able to recoop.

I was getting angry to the point of being emotional, so I told them that we needed to break until the next day. They pushed that off, and now we’re meeting on Friday, the magical day where employers feel it’s safer to fire people. I’m supposed to come with a list of issues that I want addressed, and I’m assuming they want a signed contract, which I’m still not prepared to sign. The point they kept making about the meeting is that “We need to either fix the issues and move on, or not fix them and not move on.” In other words, I don’t think I’ll have a job after tomorrow.

I’ve already attempted to negotiate changes to their contract. They were willing to change one (which I later discovered language to the same effect elsewhere), and refused to make any other changes. Based on my past experience, I don’t see them being willing to make the changes I need in order to sign it and I don’t see them fixing the problems that I see, because they don’t see them as problems at all.

Christmas is approaching fast, I don’t have a new job lined up (although I am in the process of interviewing now), I’m both nervous and excited. I’m going to be happy to be out of this place once and for all, but I don’t look forward to waking up Monday morning and not having a job lined up and ready to go. I started looking for contract work again, hoping to fill in the gaps, but that kind of thing takes time to land.

Thanks for listening. I feel better now.

After a long day of writing image filters (detecting diagonal lines embedded in an image is more complex than it seems), I finally decided to take a break and install the newest OS release from Apple, Panther.
My 12″ iBook, an 800Mhz G3, is a nice little machine, a bit slow but reliable and great for writing. It’s easy to throw it in my bag and sling it around my shoulder and the battery life is great. Still, the minor but noticable sluggishness always bothered me a bit. I listened carefully to reviews by the early adopters when Panther was first released a few weeks ago. The reports of increased performance filled me with anticipation.
The installation process went as smooth as could be expected, which is always a good thing. Copy new files, optimize, reboot and it was done. Perfectly.
I ran the upgraded system through my normal pattern of usage: listen to music with iTunes, chat via iChat and XChat and write via Word. Those early reports I had read were more accurate than I expected. Everything seemed to run smoother. Even iTunes, which is arguably the most intensive application I run on OS X, ran smooth. All in all, a very pleasant upgrade experience. With previous complaints about sluggish behavior gone and the extended battery life of the iBook (around 5 hours per charge), I expect to enjoy my mobile computing experience while abroad in New Zealand. I plan on keeping a daily journal of our travels and experiences while overseas and I can’t bring myself to bust out the pen and paper again.