Recently in Travel Category

Day Five was a short day because I had to leave to catch my flight back home around 3 in the afternoon.

Last night, I watched a couple more training videos in my hotel room. This morning, I watched one more and was all caught up on what I was supposed to watch this week. I talked to one of the business ananlysts with some questions I had come up with from watching the videos. I got all my questions answered.

I spent some time with my team leader going over some more development practices. I’m glad he’s patient with me. :)

Last night, I looked up a few coworkers on Facebook and added them as friends. One of them, a functional architect, accepted my friend invite almost immediately. She admitted to me today that she looks up every new hire on Facebook. It was a little shocking to discover I had been “stalked” before I had “stalked.”

Today, I went to lunch with two of the functional architects, one being my new Facebook friend, to a little “hole in the wall Indian place.” The food was super-tasty.

Now I’m on my way home. It’s been a great week.

Now, our development manager talked to me about my blog posts. He’d heard from the functional architect I went to lunch today that I had written about my previous lunches on my blog and that gave her a good idea of where we were going to go to lunch today.

He expressed concern that I had information about the company in my posts. He acknowledged that I hadn’t published any secrets but that I had discussed names and what could be construed as business practices.

I was devastated. For all my efforts to be a good new employee, I had “caused concern” with what I was doing outside of business hours. My lack, perhaps, of tact, respect for the company, consideration of possible consequences of revealing what I did reveal, was causing friction with at least one person of decision-making capital at the company.

Crap!

I went back and edited each of my blog posts for the week, removing any names, any names of any software, hardware, or services that I may have mentioned by name. The only thing I thing I left was my Apple MacBook Pro. I hope that’s not a problem.

In retrospect, I made a serious miscalculation, which isn’t surprising considering I seem to have a history of miscalculating things of a social nature. Chalk it up, maybe, to my maybe being afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I can see that if I had been an employee with the company for some time, to the point everyone, especially those in decision-making positions, knew who I was, what kind of person I was… Basically, if they knew me well enough to trust me, it probably wouldn’t have been a problem, or as much of a problem. But with me being the new kid on the block, coming in and blogging names and crap, even if I was being careful not to divulge anything that might be a company secret, I understand now why they’d be nervous.

These corporate social dynamics are a real challenge for me. It’s almost like I never know when I’m being appropriate and when I’m not. I guess I should be more careful and just ask more questions about everything.

Day Four. I will be going home tomorrow and will be home for approximately 28-30 hours before hopping on a plane again and heading back to Pittsburgh for the second week of training.

Today was my first development team meeting. As many of our developers work remotely, the meeting was held via a conference call and an online screen-sharing solution . I liked that it was short (about an hour) and to the point.

I closed three issues today. Now, I wouldn’t be so proud of that except that these were all supposed to be very simple issues, like “change the spelling” types of issues. One of them, however, ended up being more complex than anyone thought. I found the problem extended into the database schema data. As a result, what my team leader thought was going to involve minor editing of one, two, maybe a handful of files, ended up being something like 14 files and a new schema change. To fix this issue, I had to go through the process of testing schema changes and writing detailed instructions for testing.

It felt good to get that one done.

The other two were pretty simple. One was just changing the text of a link inside the application. The other was formatting a date from a string that looked like this “YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS” into this “MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS”. Pretty simple stuff, but it still gives me good experience working with the source code management tools, issue management system, and the applications themselves.

Because of all the actual work I’ve been doing, I’m behind a day or so on watching training videos. I’m going to try to catch up on those tonight.

I went out looking for a bookstore last night. Google Maps erroneously told me there was a Barnes and Noble near 6th Street and Wood Avenue. Of course, I didn’t figure that out until I walked over there. A security guard in the building at the address just laughed at me and told me the nearest one was clear out of town.

Bummer.

I went to lunch with two of the system administrators for the company. We had a lot to talk about because of my background doing systems administration.

Day Three was more of the same. More hacking on fairly simple and straightforward problems. More watching training videos. More training on coding practices and standards. More training on time tracking. Another lunch with a couple other people — a business analyst and one of the developers who I interviewed with a couple weeks ago. They took me to Euro Cafe which was decent food and the dining room was refreshingly quiet compared to most places during the lunch hour.

Tomorrow morning, I’m providing a urine specimen to fulfill the mandatory drug test requirement. They were going to work with the drug testing offices in Utah to get this done before I came out, but the offices in Utah apparently don’t use any of the barcodes or identification numbers that the offices in Pennsylvania do.

I’ve been warned that the drug testing facility is very strict and, to prevent fraud, they have removed sinks from the rooms and a nurse must be present while you… provide you specimen. That has a lot of potential to be embarrassing, don’t you think? Perhaps I’ll ask the nurse if he or she would mind if I took a picture of them while I was providing my specimen? Hah hah.

Google Maps told me there was a Barnes and Noble near my hotel, so I walked to the address given and found no bookstore. Stupid Google Maps.

Lots of stuff downtown closes in the late afternoon. It’s odd, but I guess the bulk of their business is the white-collar crowd that evacuate the city at 5pm.

I was tired on Day Two because I only got about six hours of sleep between getting home from the Porcupine Tree show and getting up for work. It rained most of the day in Pittsburgh. I didn’t have an umbrella, so I wore my new Porcupine Tree hoodie as I walked to the office. It worked nicely.

At the office, I finished watching a training video I started watching the day before. I also met with another telecommuter via an online screen sharing solution and a phone call to get some training on the internal issue tracking system.

I set up MacFUSE and sshfs on my Mac laptop so that I could remotely access, via SSH, files from the main development server from my laptop. This way, I could use a graphical text editor like MacVim (gvim for OS X) to do my code edits. My officemate — the manager of all software development — suggested I blog about it on the internal developer blog. I did and that stirred up some conversation in the developer chat room.

I went to lunch with one of my co-developers and a business analyst today at a place called Storms. It was alright. The developer asked me what life was like in “semi-rural Utah,” using the words I had included in my introduction e-mail message sent to everyone yesterday. I told him about Herriman- how the population has just exploded over the last decade or so, and how there’s very little sales tax revenue because it’s mostly homes, but that’s changing, and how there are still a few farms and planted fields.

This afternoon, I attended a training meeting with several others and found it to be very educational. Also this afternoon, I committed my first changeset and submitted it to my team leader for code review.

It’s been three and a half years since I was privileged to see Porcupine Tree play at The Fillmore in San Francisco (See my blog post about it. They’ve never played anywhere in Utah and may never play anywhere in Utah, so my only option is to travel to see them. I was very lucky to be in Pittsburgh on business at the same time PT was playing a show!

First, the venue. Mr. Smalls Theater is much smaller than the Fillmore, and quite a different place. The building itself is a renovated 18th century catholic church. The inside has a cathedral-like shape with a tall, 40-foot arched ceiling. A small stage elevated three feet off the rest of the floor is at one end. A couple bars for food and drink line the exterior walls in the rear of the room. The stated capacity of the room is 650 people and I’m pretty sure it was close to full. Standing room only.

Porcupine Tree was preceded by Bigelf, a band I’d never heard of. I was impressed with lead-man Damon Fox’s showmanship and his ability to multitask between four or five ancient keyboarding instruments and singing, but I didn’t find the music itself very interesting.

Bigelf looked like they either walked in through a time portal from a midwest heavy metal show circa 1971 or from the set of a Geico “caveman” TV commercial. The long, unkempt hair and the beards were… too much.

The music itself was not terribly complex. It was, if nothing else and especially compared to Porcupine Tree, analog. That’s one word that can, in my opinion, summarize Bigelf. The guitarist and the bassist both played through a tube stack. According to the Bigelf website, Fox’s rig consists of some of the following: Hammond C3 & Leslie 122, Mellotron MKII & M400, EMS Synthi AKS, Chamberlin M-1D, Moog 3C & 2P Modulars, Minimoog, Memorymoog, Korg MS-20 & MS-50, Arp 2600, Freeman String Machine, Baldwin Electric Harpsichord, and Hohner Pianet. Basically, old, analog stuff… amplified and sometimes distorted.

It was so loud that many in the audience were plugging their ears when Bigelf started playing. Fox said, “Oh, is it too loud? (Expletive) you! It’s a rock show!” and started another song.

The following photo, not from this show, is a good representation of what Fox was doing for most of their performance (and is a good look at his rig.)

And then, Porcupine Tree. They started the show by playing the entire album The Incident, taking a 10 minute break, and then coming back to play older pieces.

I’ve listened to The Incident a lot, but I still enjoy just about every album before it more. After this concert, however, I have a lot more appreciation for The Incident. One thing that won me over was the harmonies sung by John Wesley and Steven Wilson. They were perfect and beautiful.

I just ran a half-marathon a couple of weeks ago and I listened to songs by Porcupine Tree the whole 13.1 miles. I wondered how many of those songs I would hear live. They played “The Sound Of Muzak,” “Blackest Eyes,” and “Trains” in the second set, all of which I had in my running playlist. Unfortunately, they didn’t play anything from the Deadwing album. That was a bit of a dissapointment to me.

The second set went like this:

• Hatesong
• Russia On Ice - Anesthetize
• Stars Die
• Way Out Of Here
• Blackest Eyes

Then, the encore:

• The Sound of Muzak
• Trains

The band started playing Hatesong without John Wesley on stage. He walked out in the middle to sing harmonies with Steven and then walked offstage again. When a part for a second guitar was needed, a pre-recorded track was used.

I was a little bummed that they didn’t finish playing Russia On Ice. Instead, after the second chorus, they went into Anesthetize after the guitar solo performed on the album by Alex Lifeson. Steven Wilson noodled on the keyboard at the front of the stage for a bit before going back to playing guitar and then singing “The dust in my soul…”

Stars Die was an interesting move. There were definitely some hardcore fans there as they erupted with cheers as soon as John Wesley played the opening bit for it.

When the video for Way Out Of Here started, I became very emotional, probably because I’ve been repeatedly watching the video on YouTube of the song that’s appearing on the Anesthetize DVD coming out in the next month and because I learned of the band dedicating the song to Arielle Daniel, a young fan who was killed by a train in 2005 (read about it here). It was an awesome performance of an awesome song. John Wesley and Gavin Harrison (drums) are simply fantastic during the song.

At one point during the show, Steven Wilson surprisingly remarked that he could see lots of “chicks” in the audience. It’s true, there were a lot more women in the audience than you’d expect at a Porcupine Tree show. That being said, the audience was 90% guys in their 20s to 50s. A lot of us seemed out of the mainstream, socially, which also wasn’t surprising.

All in all, great show, as always. I picked up almost $100 in merchandise while I was there too.

I have arrived in Pittsburgh for my first of two weeks of training for my new job at Grant Street Group.

When I flew out here a couple of weeks ago for my interviews with the company, I flew on US Airways on a connecting flight through Phoenix. What was nice about that was that I got to lunch with my good friend Dave during my two-hour layover. What was not nice about that was that it was US Airways. The onboard service was just lacking all around.

I asked if I could fly on a direct flight or a different airline for this trip. Grant Street was very accomodating. In the end, I gave them the flight numbers of the Delta Airlines flights I wanted to take (I researched and found inexpensive flights that resulted in a minimum amount of travel time).

There were no direct flights available, that I could find, but one of the shorter flights went through Detroit. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about laying over in Detroit, but now that I’ve been there, I must say the Detroit Metro Airport is actually pretty nice. I expected portions of the airport to be on fire and people gathered for warmth around 55-gallon drums with burning debris in them, but it wasn’t like that at all.

I didn’t leave the airport, so I have no idea how the environment outside the airport is, but the environment inside the airport was pretty nice.

I grabbed some lunch at one of the restaurants in the airport and was a little taken back by how ambivalent and disinterested the young lady was that took my order. I mean, I’m used to that to an extent from service people at airports, but this ambivalence was cranked up (or down, as the case may be) a couple notches.

A short flight (35 minutes) from Detroit and I’m in Pittsburgh. It’s a little windy, but there’s a baseball game going on across the river from my hotel.

More to come as my stay here unfolds.