Thursday, June 15, 2006

When you've got it, flaunt it

Normally when I post it's to rant about one thing or another. Today I decided I needed to post for the opposite reason. Today was a good day.

This marks my third week at the new job. The learning curve has been steep, but I feel like I have a good understanding of the problems the company faces from a technical level. Now I'm working on learning the business. I'm nice to be excited to go to work in the morning. When I get home, I find I want to pop out the laptop and continue working on whatever project I left at the office. Everyone at my new company has been great. We will actually go out to lunch from time to time which is a departure from what I had come to expect. I show up at 8:30 and no one expects me to work past 5:30. In fact I stayed late the other night working on something that had frustrated me all afternoon and they wondered what I was still doing working at 7:30. The decision to switch definitely wasn't easy, but I'm so glad that I did. I still feel the need to prove myself, but I don't think that part of me will ever go away.

I'm energized on several levels. Work is 12 minutes door-to-door as opposed to 30-45 minutes each way. I have time for myself and I want to work on getting into shape. So far this week I have been to three martial arts classes. I can make the 6:00 classes unlike before. Monday was Mui Thai and Jiu-Jitsu. Tonight was kickboxing with some knife fighting. I was also awarded my green belt this evening. Truthfully the belts don't mean a great deal to me, but it is a nice demonstration that my instructors recognize that I'm progressing.

Not working 80 hours a week means I'm can also pick up side work. One of my old bosses referred me to another business. I wrote up a proposal and sent it to the client along with my hours and rate. He wrote back asking for an address to send the check and that everything looked good.

It's not often that I feel like I'm at the top of my game, but for this brief moment that's how I feel. I'm my own worst critic and that part of my personality is already trying to bring me back to earth. There are things I'd like to work on. I want to feel like I'm being a better husband. I want to find my own spirituality again. I want to get into a shape that doesn't resemble round. I want to... Well the best word I can come up with is grow. I want to grow as a person. I want to continue the risk taking and try new things even when they sometimes scare me.

Today was a good day. Maybe I'll be ready to tackle those tomorrow.

1:16 AM Posted by Big Dave | 0 Thoughts

Saturday, June 03, 2006

First Week

I've wrapped up my first week at the new job. I received my new company issued laptop on Thursday. Just in time to realize my old laptop was dying the slow and painful death of a hard drive failure. I have had time to back it up, but now I'll have to replace it.

It was a confusing couple of days as I tried to wrap my mind around the product and all the changes that where going on. It took me quite a while to get set up started. By Friday I started understanding the system well enough to point out areas that could be improved. I'm working long distance with several people out of Arkansas. They were supposed to be in town this week to train me up on the system. I never heard what happened, but they never showed up. It's just as well it gave me a chance to figure things out. Now when they do come I can ask more intelligent questions.

It's nice that it's only 12 minutes door to door. I don't have my permanent spot yet because the cubicles haven't been built. For the time being, I'm in an office away from all the other developers. The building is quite amusing. It's in a big tin shed that's been built out for office space. Across the street is a field and next door are a bunch of cows. Not exactly where you'd expect to find a thriving software company, but they apparently have more work than they can handle. They have already talked about sending me out to Florida at the end of June to meet with some customers as a technical representative.

It took until Thursday night, but I started getting excited about the new job. I look forward to the possibilities. I come home and now instead of being absolutely wiped out, I want to get back on the computer and work some more. I want to figure out everything that has to do with the project. I'm back to being a dork and excited about it.

1:08 PM Posted by Big Dave | 0 Thoughts