Roblog

Today is Donna and my 99-monthiversary (3,014 days). That is, it's been 99 months since we were married. That means that July 1 will mark 100 months of marriage. That should warrant some sort of celebration. At least we'll have 30 days to think about it.

I am nervous to say it's a trend, but my days at work have been a lot more manageable for the past month or so. I've certainly complained quite a bit about the amount of work I have had to do for my job and all the overtime that went along with it. My overtime has dropped dramatically and has stayed down for the past several weeks.

The part that troubles me is I can't precisely say why. I have a few things that I think are contributing factors: I've been delegating more tasks to our offshore team, there has been someone working with me for the past 2 months who's main purpose was to help me with my workload, and our team's increasing experience with the applications we are supporting. But those are all gradual factors, and my workload has changed rather dramatically.

I think it might be a trend. If so, I should be able to continue to work on some of the "continuous improvement" goals that keep me energized at work.

It's common to take a departing employee out to lunch in my group, as recognition for the work they'd done while they were here. In the late 90's when the boom was in full swing, our group had to stop this practice because of the high turnover rates. Having a goodbye lunch every other week was not exactly great for morale.

It does establish a strange sort of dynamic. People who leave appear to be rewarded for leaving. For people in a stressful period at work or in a very active job market, they might see that as a prize to be won.

I wonder if there is there a better way to show the departing employee that you appreciate their hard work without making it seem you get a reward for quitting. Maybe a "private" lunch between the employee and their supervisor so that it's not such a group event, while still allowing the opportunity to honor the employee's hard work?

I don't think it's really a big deal. I don't see people leaving because they will have such an exciting parting event. It just seems to me like it doesn't necessarily send the right message.

I neglected to mention earlier that I indeed got Tiger, that is Mac OS X 10.4.1, while Donna and the girls were up in Dallas. It's been a month now, and so I can provide some first impressions:

• The interface is cleaner. If only all of the OS would standardize on one window style, it would be better.
• Spotlight is not as useful as I thought it would be. Mostly because it does not work very well with iPhoto 4.
• I'm using Dashboard a lot more than I thought I would. It's easy to jump there to track a package or check the weather.
• Mail is not as offensively ugly as I thought it would be. It is definitely more useful, so it's minor loss of attractiveness is not as noticeable.
• It seems slightly faster.

Overall, I'm happy with the purchase. Now if I could just figure out how to get my custom Xcode-developed Automator action to work, I'd be psyched.

Sunday, I thought it would be fun to setup the sprinkler and let the girls play in it. I helped get their bathing suits on and we went to go outside and it was raining! I hadn't even realized it. It was a light summer rain and it hadn't rained for many weeks, so it was quite a shock.

I went out and turned on the sprinkler anyway. Amanda wanted to wear her hat so the water wouldn't get on her face. Elena didn't care as much until it started getting in her eyes. They both enjoyed it, though.

I got some really adorable pictures from the event, so I'll be posting them sometime soon.

Our new digital camera arrived a few weeks ago. After getting the "editor's choice" in the recent MacWorld, we chose to get the Konica Minolta DImage Z5. Our old camera had multiple problems: the battery compartment was cracked and the batteries were held in by rubber bands, it turned off at random times (the power switch was touchy), and there are about 40-50 dead pixels (very obvious in low light situations).

So what follows are my impressions of our new camera:

• Latency (time between pressing the shutter and taking the picture) is much better on the new camera. It still hesitates in low-light situations, but outdoors it is nearly instant.
• Big (2-inch) LCD very nice, 5 MP nice too, but my favorite upgraded spec is the 12X optical zoom. It provides more capabilities when taking pictures, and makes a very pleasant depth-of-field.
• The anti-shake feature works admirably with the large zoom. I took fully-zoomed (12x) pictures an an indoor sports arena with only a little smearing.
• The noise at higher ISO settings is noticeable. This is a little disappointing but only apparent for indoor pictures without a flash.
• It has several other features I have not tried much yet: movie mode with sound, and "progressive drive". Progressive drive mode will take 10 pictures per second (at a reduced resolution) for as long as you hold down the shutter. When you release the shutter, it will save the last 20 pictures taken. This is not good for indoor shots (the flash cannot fire that fast) but is intended for outdoor scenes when you don't know exactly when the picture-worthy event will occur.
• It uses regular AA batteries. the alkaline ones it came with have not been drained yet, but we'll obviously go for rechargeable ones. It will be our first experience with rechargeable AA's, so we'll see how they perform in the camera.

I'm pretty good at anagrams. Whether while playing Huggermugger, Scrabble, or a baby/wedding shower game, I usually do pretty good at unscrambling words. I figured it was just one of my special talents, but I just now realized why: my poor typing skills.

About 85% of my typographical errors are transposition errors. I do the common ones, like "teh" for "the", and my most frequent ones are words with "ld" at the end, like "coudl" for "could". But I also have typos like "estiamet" for "estimate". I have to deal with these errors so often, that I get a lot of practice at looking at mixed-up words.

I knew my horrible typing skills must serve a purpose!