Ladybug is into the final trimester now. The kid is big. Bigger than the last one. Almost as big as the first one. And showing no signs of slowing down. Sciatica has taken hold, and it's all sort of a mess, really. She's planning on working until the end of July, but, frankly, I don't know if she'll be able to make it that long. I'd rather she didn't. If her doc puts her on bed rest, she can pretty well tell her company that she's not coming to the office any longer. It probably won't come to that.
I'm getting ready for a nice month long break from work. Lotus starts kindergarten right in the middle of all of that, so that'll be an adventure. Tesla will be happy to have a baby in the house, I'm sure. At least right up until she discovers it means less attention from Mommy. She's sort of a Mommy hog.
My parents are really looking forward to it as well. We'll all be home, so they can come over whenever, and play with the older kids while Ladybug deals with the bambino.
It's all scary as well, of course. We're going to a single income for at least a year. We'll have financial support, of course, but there's other issues to focus on. We'll be looking for ways to economize around the house, and try to budget ourselves better. We're stuck with the cars we have, of course, but I may be able to start taking the bus or something, if I don't have to worry about getting the kids from daycare.
Then there's the fact that no one on my side if the family has any idea what the dynamics of three kids are like. I hear stories. Plus, the parents are officially out numbered now.
Anyway, getting ready is half the battle right?
On Saturday morning (yes, I work 6 days a week now), I got this e-mail (replicated here in full) from the project's director, in response to an e-mail I sent out detailing some issues with our project:
We need to get the issues in Train resolved first. Who is working on these issues from the dev team?
Excuse me? Who's the director here? Me or you? I suppose the question could have been directed at his counterpart on the contractors team, but he sent this fantastic one line note to me an hour later (with a CC back to original director):
I am going out now so please follow-up with [Team Lead A] & [Team Lead B].
Again, I have to ask, who is running this project? Me? Because if it is, where's the fucking money? And why can't I fire the 3/4 of the dev team who consistently fuck up? The ones who contribute little or nothing to the project? The ones who actually cause more issues than they resolve? The ones who wrapped perfectly good checked exceptions inside of useless unchecked exception because it was "easier" (for you non-programmers, it's like wrapping a hammer in a feather pillow - completely ruins the tool for what it's supposed to be used for)? Why can't I impose process? Why can't I demand the "A game" from the other teams?
Why am I the one getting yelled at for being unprofessional?
Why am I the one being criticized for not taking ownership?
More rope?
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I think I have an ingrowing toenail. Going to see doc.
To assuage my pain, I bought an iPod Touch.
OK, yes, I finally saw Cloverfield.
It sucks.
Didn't I see this movie already? Whiny 20-something idiots running around getting lost with a video camera? I'm sure I did. I think it might have been called the Blair Witch Project.
For the entire movie, Ladybug and I were hoping Hog, or Hap, or Hud, or whatever the camera guy's name was would be killed just so we wouldn't have to listen to his moronic voice-over any more. Yes, we all have emotionally stunted, needy, jerkoff friends like that who are good for little more than getting us all killed with their incompetence. I stopped calling mine some years ago. And then you kill the only character I gave a crap about, Milena, or whatever, the one who told Haphudhog he's a fucking idiot with his Superman commentary.
And you want to talk about an idiot plot? Here's a dollar's worth of free advice, hipsters: when the rats are running from something, you don't fucking stop to figure out what it is. All you're doing is proving that you're dumber than a rat. If you've just been attacked by a large bug, and have found refuge behind a stout door with a viable water and air supply, what do you do? Go back out into the dark? Or hold up until morning? I guess if you're a love-struck moron, you go back out in the dark. Miranda, or whatever her name was, the cool one, she was dead anyway from that bite, with no real medical attention (and you didn't even think to try to get her some - even after you ran into the military). Just freaking stick it out. Hell, you were underground as well. If we've learned anything from recent history, it's that bombs, however huge, don't kill people hiding in caves very effectively.
When Hoghaphud turned the camera on himself and said, "If this is the last thing you see . . .", I said, "then thank your lucky stars the moron is dead!" I cheered when he got eaten.
And this magic camera of theirs. Night vision? A floodlight? And with a battery and casing that will last for hours of recording and being knocked around, dropped, chewed and still record? Yes, please, sign me up for one of them. I can't get a battery for a video camera that lasts for 12 hours sitting in the camera doing nothing. You're running a near IR sensor and a floodlight and recording all night long and into the morning. Suspension of disbelief indeed. We were waiting for them to engage the "alien blood trail detector," or "damsel in distress sensor," or, my personal preference, the "turn-this-into-a-movie-I-want-to-watch-o-meter."
And what was the point of the first half hour? If this is suppsed to be a military recovery, why are we subjected to 30 minutes of MTV's The Real World? Apart from making me loathe Hudhaphog and wanting him to die in the first attack. And explaining why the main idiot wants to get all his friends killed to save some bit of tail he had a one day fling with.
OK, yes, I'd go back in to save my kids or my wife. But I wouldn't take a video camera. I'd take weapons. Loot an electronics store for a phone battery? Hell no, loot a gun store for some bad ass shotguns or automatic rifles. And then steal a car.
Lily got out (amazingly, the ethnic minority survived), so at least we have a surviving character for Book of Idiots: Cloverfield 2.
Anyone who's been reading this for the last couple of months knows that I work with, and let's be polite, Gumbies. Here are my coworkers in action:
Not so for Gumby Team Lead. She told her team members that the 19th probably wasn't going to be the date. Oh, sure, officially, it is, but it probably won't be, she said. She took pains to stress that. So now, her team doesn't think they have to meet the deadline. This dev I went to lunch with was confident that the 19th wasn't the date. It's not surprising, really, since Gumby's team has the largest number of chronic deadline flaunters on the project. Most of her devs couldn't meet a deadline if you threatened them with a chainsaw. And now we know why: deadlines mean nothing to them, because their Gumby Team Lead has made it clear that there are absolutely no consequences for missing a deadline, whether it's a daily schedule or a project timeline. The 19th? Don't worry about it, it doesn't really matter.
We need to send her for brain surgery. And I really want to be the anesthetician.
Try my kitteh litter, it's warm and sssshticky.
Friday was another banner day for me. I got yelled at again. This time for having the gall to say the production environment was ready. Well, it is. I really can't help it if the data in the DB is wrong, or the ESB service hasn't been properly maintained. The connections work. Thus, the environment is ready. The code and the data, maybe not so much, but that's not what I'm supposed to be concerning myself about.
My favorite part was where I was accused of not taking ownership. That I had been, up to the end of March, but since then, not so much. Let's see. What happened that the end of March that might have made me think that getting the production environment working wasn't worth the effort? Oh, yeah, right, being told that we weren't going to production in April. Guess what? The environment hasn't changed at all. Everything that worked in March works now. Once again, it's not my environment that's failing, it's the code and the data, and I'm not going to be held responsible for that. Period.
Tonight, I am taking Lotus for registration at school. Kindergarten. For me it was a big step, because I was at home with mom until then. Lotus has been going to daycare, and is excited to be going to kindergarten. I think she'll do really well.
For me, though, it'll be an adventure. Daycare, to me, is sort of like glorified babysitting. I know they teach her things there, and she gets a lot of socialization skills. But kindergarten is the first step on the road that will eventually lead my daughter to college, possibly in some other state, and then on to her own life in the bigger, wider, wonderful world. It's a long road, I know. But she's my first kid, so it's new for me, and, well, there are emotions involved.
I remember crying a lot my first day of kindergarten, because I didn't want to leave mommy. It had only been 6 months or so since my little sister had come in to the house, so I was still adjusting to the whole "not the most important thing anymore" syndrome that all first children have to go through. I went to preschool, but it was a co-op and Mom was there. And it wasn't for nearly as long as I was expected to be at kindergarten. Hours and hours! By the end of the first day, I was happy as a clam of course. And taking Lotus to registration will be a good thing for her, so she can learn about where the school is, in relation to our house, and where all the stuff like bathrooms are. I'm sure she'll be fine.
It's me I'm worried about.
Vito and I were laughing so hard yesterday, I started having a coughing fit.
Why?
More rope.
See, the development team "leadership" decided that Vito and I, who used to be called build managers, would now be more like build lackeys. They had a meeting on Monday, with no build managers present, where they decided to not have a build schedule. They'd just ask for builds whenever, and, well, Vito and I would simply have to do them. After my less than useful meeting last Friday, and Vito's experiences with attempting to enforce any kind of process, we decided, what the hell, let's just do it and see how long it takes to seriously screw something up.
You know how in those pirate movies there's always that one scene where the captain is fighting the wheel in a storm? And then something happens and he lets go of the wheel? And the wheel just starts spinning out of control and the ship sinks? Well, we're not sunk yet, but that wheel could power lower Manhattan for a month.
We did 10 builds and/or deployments between 11 AM and 7 PM. Every build got worse, because no one knew what was supposed to be fixed by what time. We had complaints from the developers because every time we do a build, they have to update their copy of the code from our code management tool. Each update can take up to 20 minutes, depending on how busy the server is. Considering the build load, I expect it was pretty busy. Updates block all other activities. So that's, let's see, 20 minutes times 10 . . . heck let's just call it three hours per developer of lost productivity. Yesterday. Not over a whole week. In one day.
More rope.
And the builds? Are they even being tested? How can they be? A deployment takes time. The servers have to come back on line. In one instance, Vito finished the automated test scripts and was asked, before he was able to send out the results, to do another build. There's no way that was actually tested to confirm the supposed fixes were working.
More rope.
Almost every build we did had to be done twice because some developer had some extra code to check in. Why? How can we blame them now? There's no schedule for them to even try to adhere to, even if, for the most part, they didn't adhere to it when we had one.
More.
Rope.
We got a suggestion from one of the team leads to put up a sign with the build schedule, because all the e-mails we were sending out were confusing (we announce the build, the deployment and the test resutls - that's at least 30 messages every person on the development team got from us in 8 hours). First of all, what schedule? Second of all, half the devs are on the other side of the building, and won't see the sign. Our counter proposal was for me to hold the sign above my head and walk around like one of those girls at a boxing match announcing the round number. I even offered to wear a bikini. The other counter proposal was to have one of those scrolling LED signs to announce the build schedule like a stock ticker. I'm actually working on that now, to put it on our build SharePoint site. It's required me to get Visual Studio and learn how to make Web Parts. It's a waste of time, because no one is ever going to bother looking at it. But, let's remember, I'm a build lackey now: they ask, I do, that's my role.
More.
The crowning achievement in the world of absurdity was this: Vito, very slowly, very carefully, very clearly, explained that each build was getting worse because there was no coordination, and no one could tell when anything was going to happen, or what fixes were supposed to go in which build. Case in point, one of the introduced failures was because of some updates that went in without the knowledge of any of the team leads because the team leads spent all day asking for builds, rather than LEADING their TEAMS. The team lead's response? "Why is it like this?" My jaw very nearly dropped right off my face. Vito just explained it to you. Do you want pictures? A pop-up book? 101 Ways to Fuck a Project in the Ass? Perhaps a copy of Listening Skills for Fucking Retards?
Rope.
Vito and I were literally falling out of our chairs laughing about this.
The best part? I worked 15 hours yesterday. Fat load of OT. And we accomplished exactly nothing. And today looks like it's going to be another side-splitter.
Over the weekend, I made a run to Ikea with Lotus. We purchased some good quality shelving for Ladybug for Mother's Day. Now, I know that plenty of people have been to Ikea, and many of them have taken advantage of the cafe, and all those sample rooms. This was the first time I was able to take advantage of Småland, which is where you can deposit your children while you shop. It was great! I had to get some rather hefty items out of the self-serve furniture warehouse, and doing so without having to monitor a kid, or risk dropping a 400 ton (artistic license) crate of bookshelf parts on her, well, that was the best part of all. I was even able to go out an load all this stuff into my car before extracting her forcibly from the ball pit. She didn't want to leave. Well, she never does.
Shopping with small kids is a royal pain in the ass. There is no two ways about that. They're always running around, and the risk of them getting lost is high. In a store like Ikea it's even higher, since it's laid out like a maze with a thousand corners where a kid could hide. Honestly, they should have a midnight game of laser tag (or possibly låser tåg) in there some night. How cool would that be? Anyway, of course, every parent knows exactly why Ikea provides a service like this: it's so the parents have the time to slow down, and look a the stuff, rather than looking for the kids. And if you're looking at the stuff, you soon realized that, well, those watering cans would really solve that issue with the kids fighting over who gets the watering can. And then you end up leaving with two bookshelves (which you came in for), a pair of garbage cans, a hanging shelf for the kid's room, two watering cans and a blue egg chair. For the cost of paying three girls to watch my kid for 30 minutes (I had up to 90 minutes), Ikea sold me an extra $100 worth of stuff. This was, except for the watering cans, all stuff we needed. It was not my intention to get them at Ikea, mostly because I wasn't thinking about anything except the bookshelves. But by eliminating the need for me to think about monitoring Lotus while I got the bookshelves, I was able to think, hey, those garbage cans are just what we need. Oh, right, and Ladybug wanted the blue egg chair for the nursery. And that shelf, yes, that will go nicely in the kid's room for their non-play-thing-knick-knacks (they have music box snow globes from Disneyland that really shouldn't be accessible to them all the time).
Very clever, Ikea. Very clever.