PolarLava::Blog

I hate April fools day.  Every now and then somebody will come up with something witty, but for the most part it's all just obvious bullshit.  I haven't the time or patients for it.  Sorry.

I discovered yesterday that Paul Henning died last Friday.  You may not recognize Paul by his name, but it's quite likely you know his work.  Particularly if you are in the 35+ crowd…can you say "The Beverly Hillbillies", "Petticoat Junction" or "Green Acres"?

These are shows I have fond memories of and still catch in reruns early in the morning while working out.  As part of The Beverly Hillbillies, Paul penned "The Ballad of Jed Clampett", which I used as the basis of The Ballad of Joe Barbie for the SFFL trophy.

Thanks for all the laughs Paul.

If this is truly the case, it's incredibly shortsighted.  Are there really people out there that believe that only teaching abstinence is going to stop teens from having sex?  This might work in some parts of the country, but do you really believe this is going to work in most urban areas, particularly inner-cities?  Get real.  Last I checked, telling people —children and adults alike, to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" does nothing but to cause them to look.

Oh, and it's good to see that as this bus rolls down the highway it's next stop will be to pick up "intelligent design".  This will be necessary after running over evolution in textbooks because it's "just a theory".  That may be true, but creationism or "intelligent design" has no more solid evidence than evolution in my book.

Regardless of what you believe, whatever happened to critical thinking?

Well…I've taken the quiz and I've learned I'm more demented than I ever imagined…

If i was a serial killer i would be Albert Fish. "Albert Fish was a masochistic, pedophile obsessed with religious themes such as sin, sacrifice, and redemption through pain. It is believed that he would force his own children to beat him with a nail studded paddle until he bled. He would also stick nails underneath his finger nails,into his groin, his scrotum and his anus. He forced himself to eat feces and would stick alcohol soaked cotton balls up his anus and set them on fire." "Fish believed that God wanted him to castrate boys, which he would do over the course of many years, finally to be caught for kidnapping, murdering and eating a 10 year old girl. Fish claims to have molested over four hundred children. Police charged him with eight but suspect him on fifteen." Kill count: unconfirmed Find what serial killer you would be, take the Serial Killer Quiz now!

As you may have noticed, my blogging has become a bit less consistent in both quantity and quality.  Although quality probably wasn't one of it's strong points in the first place!  Anyhow, what follows might explain the situation…

I generally don't blog about my professional life much largely to avoid any potential hassles.  I don't recall if I mentioned it or not, but back in November I changed jobs.  I was very happy with my job at ChoiceOne and was not even looking for a new job.  But along came an unsolicited opportunity that proved to be an offer that was "too good to pass up".  And I have to say in hindsight it was a very good decision on my part to pursue it.

My job at Synacor is wonderful, but it's kind of hard to explain it all.  I was initially hired as a Code Review Engineer.  My primary function is to review the work that others do and make sure they aren't doing dangerous or computationally expensive things in their code.  In short, their code must meet certain standards.  Documenting these standards based on existing guidelines they had and industry standard best practices is also my job.  I am the gatekeeper.  If you want your code added to the the project it has to be approved by me before you can commit it to the version control system.  When I started I was to spend 3 months working with the Platform Development group who develop new features for our product and then 3 months with the Client Deployment group who do customization to meet each customers needs.  After that I would begin to do some code reviews.  But due to the our rapid growth, it hasn't quite worked out that way.  Basically I spent about 6 weeks —including a week off with the Platform Development group and then started doing some code reviews.  Within about a week of that I was then doing virtually all code reviews!

So I was chugging along doing "CR" when in early February the Technology Department underwent a minor restructuring.  For me that meant a change in my role/additional responsibility —I was made a manager of initially, "Development Operations" and later called "a department to be named later" when my boss comes up with a better name for it.  So in addition I now am responsible for bug fixes in our existing live product.  It's a very small department consisting of me and Tony a very good QA Engineer who does the bug fixing.  Additional people will be added as we identify what other responsibilities will be under my group and the workload increases.

At the time of my accent to a management role I was also informed that I would be becoming the backup to the Release Manager.  Cool.  Fast forward to last week when due to multiple priorities and the Release Engineer's unavailability, Kevin was informed he would be doing an "rsync" release the next day.  Okay.  With a good deal of assistance this baptism by fire went off without a hitch and I've since done a couple more with a major one coming up next week.

Although it can be somewhat hectic at times, anyone who knows me or has read my resume should realize it is really nice to be working for a wildly successful company for a change.  After working for a number of failing entities it's quite refreshing.  Thus my previous casual surfing at lunchtime and doing some blogging has begun to be overrun by my work demands.  But that's okay because I love this job.