Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

For better or for worse I resigned from my job yesterday. Alright, for better; I’ll hopefully never quit for something worse obviously. I joined a company of about a dozen people and ended up working at a massive place with tens of thousands of employees, and attached with that was all the expected ramifications. I “toughed it out” for a while (including a brutal commute) but enough is enough. It actually had zero to do with my earlier mention of becoming a team leader. I’ve done that role before and felt comfortable with it at my last job and this job. I’d basically just like to move onto something that engages and interests me on a personal level.

Goddamnit that sounds really formal, but I assure you it’s true. So now Chie and I are gonna extend our early November trip to Japan for at least a few weeks (probably three for me) so that’s pretty cool. This week and weekend I’ve got to dust off my resume and update it - it’s been two years now since I’ve needed it, and I don’t have any plans for the future yet but I’ll be spamming that thing to everywhere I can pretty soon.

Good times!

Everybody’s pal Matt quit his job at Indigo/Chapters. For some reason they required an actual resignation letter instead of him just signing something. Here’s that letter, I thought it was funny enough to share:

Dear Starship Indigo,

This letter is to inform you of that which you already know. I am no
longer working for you! My heart weeps a thousand tears to leave the store
of many books, but my infinitesimal ninja skills are required for galactic
battle and can no longer be used to alphabetize oversized picture books.
If someday you enter the cosmic plane of non minimum wage we will join
forces anew and yet again crush indecisiveness towards book purchases.

My your battle for book selling glory be a victorious one.

Sincerely..
…………

a.k.a Cosmic Ninja Master of Time … but not money

So I just made it through the first day of my new job; it went quite well. Salesdriver seems to have a really good environment to work with, and there’s a ton of technologies involved that I’ve wanted to dig my hands into for quite some time. Good stuff!

Though I’m officially done with this job, I’m awake right now (4AM local time), helping with a remote installation. Yeah, that’s great.

Yes, that’s right. I quit. Handed in the resignation letter, and I’m done. Work has continuously spiraled into a kind of hell that I couldn’t even imagine, and the proverbial shit finally hit the fan today. I’ll give more details later.

And I hope I can reach my parents soon (I think they’re camping). I’d rather I told them on the phone than on my blog.

Also - don’t (obviously) e-mail my work address anymore. Use the Neurotech one.

So on the 8th floor of this building we have like a big cafeteria place where there’s pretty good food at lunch. But during the time surrounding the lunch hour, it’s the smoking and break room. I just went down there and it’s amazing; there’s between 50 and 60 men and women in professional clothes sitting around and smoking with “Cause I Got High” playing from the speakers in the ceiling. That’s awesome.

After a painfully long struggle with this buildings I.T. people in London, I finally have access to the T1 in the office. They block all outgoing ports except 80 and 443, so I had to make a special request to get 22 allowed.

Unfortunately this means I can no longer work in my underwear. Or can I?

Up late as hell… Just got finished coding some Java. Working with a team in Japan means really goddamned late nights occasionally, but that’s life.

And I was thinking - all the things I use to develop are totally free. I’m using a Debian GNU/Linux system, with X-Windows on top, running Enlightenment, running X terminals, running Vim, compiling Java. The compilation involves Ant, Xalan, Xerces, and so on, as well as (of course) the standard Java APIs. And of course, I’m browsing and reading my mail with Mozilla. And the other projects I work on use Perl, PHP, and GNU GCC compiler chain. All of which is free. I shudder at the cost of developing the Windows way, where you pay for Windows, you pay for Visual Studio, and you have no choice about the tools realistically. No, this isn’t really an anti-Microsoft rant, it’s a pro-free-IDE rant. Hand a coder a Linux system with the usual suite of compilers and scripting languages and it’s a pretty nice, self-contained system.

Or maybe I’m up too late. Nah, it’s only one A.M.

I’ve been fairly low-key here for a bit, nothing bad is happening - I’m just busy as hell with work and what not, so here’s a few updates.

• I got an advance copy of Stephen Baxter’s new book “Coalescent” from eBay. It is absolutely phenomenal. I’m still not sure what genre it is… At first I was hoping it was hard science fiction, but it reads more like historical fiction. It’s split between a girl’s story during the fall of the Roman empire and the story of one of her distant relatives in modern times. I’m probably a third of the way in and the only thing science fiction related is a tantalizing mention of the “Kuiper Anomaly”. I have the feeling he’s preparing me for a big mind-fuck.
• I’ve been totally obsessed with two Playstation 2 games: Frequency and it’s successor Amplitude. They’re both music/rythmn games, and they both kick a lot of ass. Frequency is way better than Amplitude. Amplitude seems like they decided the first was too hard and complex and decided to tone it down, but it’s still good. These fuckers are giving me carpal-tunnel syndrome in a bad way as I work my way to “being Asian” at them.
• Work is cool. I’m actually coding a lot these days in C, which is forcing me to think about pointers and memory management - it makes me feel old-school again. Java does so much of the gruntwork in application building that you don’t really appreciate it until you go back to something totally low-level.

Finally, we setup an RSS feed for my company.