Work

Ever have a moment where you suddenly stop and ask yourself: how did I get here, to this exact moment in time? For me it’s almost an out of body experience where I look [down] at myself in a particular instant and I try to work backwards to the events that led up to it. It seems to be happening a lot, of late, and it always comes back to the same question. Two weeks ago, I was sitting in the domestic terminal at the Bombay airport, reading a book of no consequence and listening to my iPod while waiting for my flight to Pune when I suddenly looked up and thought to myself, “what the fuck am I doing here? How the hell did I get here?” ...

My boss asked me a question recently, which really got me thinking: would it make any difference if I [my boss] wore slacks and a shirt every day? That is, do outward appearances at the office really matter that much? Could dressing a little better mean being taken more seriously? It took me a really long time to answer the question, because to me it doesn’t affect how I judge a person’s performance, and it was difficult for me to look at the question objectively and realize that not everyone thinks the way I do. Everyone has their own criteria for judging performance or value. Which got me thinking about meritocracies and why they don’t work in business. ...

Fun day. A gas main broke on Austin st., just a block away from the office. I noticed when the lights started flickering and the UPS showed power fluctuations. It took more than an hour for ConEd to get on the scene and repair the damage so we took down the servers and sent everyone home early (6pm!). I’m hoping tomorrow will be uneventful..

Putting in some time at Dad’s office this week, now that I’m Stateside again. Among the many software related issues I’m dealing with, I’m finally upgrading to Firefox 2 (thanks to FrontMotion) and rolling out Thunderbird (thanks to ZettaServe) for the first time. Still not giving out IMAP access, but switching from Outlook or Outlook Express to Thunderbird is a huge step towards easily moving a user to a new machine and brining all their mail along for the ride. Now if I could just get some freaking ADMs so I could automagically configure their email accounts without going over to their machine… ...

A large part of my job here at ICAR has been wrestling with various so-called content management systems (CMS). In an effort to build various applications I’ve been evaluating many popular opensource CMS projects and I’ve run into the same basic problem with just about all of them: I don’t want a blog, I want content management. They all claim to be flexible systems with all the latest doodads but in the end, they’re just glorified blogs. Case in point, almost every system sets itself up as a blog out of the box, and, in general, that’s the most complete part of the system. Other areas are sorely lacking.

I’m going to Rome tomorrow for Christmas break. Why Rome? Winter is underway and it’s pretty cold here now, averaging in the low 30s most days. Europe has fairly cold winters and traveling can be less than pleasant so heading south is the best option. From what I ready, my best choices were either Spain or Italy so I opted for Italy. As much as I’d like to put what’s left of my Spanish to a test, it’ll have to wait for another day. ...

So I’ve been here in Basel for a little over a month now. Five weeks and a day to be exact. Pretty crazy, actually. This project has been in the works for something like a year and a half and now here I am sitting in my apartment in Switzerland! Wild.