Software Consulting - MichaelCrawford: Best wishes with your job seeking. I have known a number of folks who have been in consulting and then went into corporate jobs... and then in some cases have gone back to consulting. I've considered consulting in the past, but for the reasons you outline have chosen to go for the regular paycheck (and less money) instead. Best wishes with the choices.
LinTraining - Still haven't had a chance to clean out all the dead entries we found in our great cleanout the other week, but in the meantime, I approved new submissions to the site from the following areas:
- Brazil
- Germany
- Italy
- Pakistan
- Panama
- California, USA
- Maryland, USA
Also received a note from someone frustrated by all the dead weight in the database... he sent messages to 15 centers and all but 5 bounced back as undeliverable. I did say it was time to purge the database, didn't I? :-( I must find the time to clean it out...
ClearQuest - murrayc: I haven't used ClearCase, but have had similar dissatisfaction with ClearQuest, the companion bug-tracking tool. Within our group we use Bugzilla and, warts and all, it has worked quite well for us. However, other groups use ClearQuest and through my interaction with those groups I have needed to use it. I have been amazed at how incredibly clunky and cumbersome the Web interface to CQ is! It's been stunning, really. I'm looking forward to trying the "thick" client, but have so far run into issues getting it installed on RH 7.3. (Watching others use the Windows client, though, hasn't overly impressed me.) It's quite interesting to see that Bugzilla so outclasses CQ so far.
Now, in fairness, BZ doesn't have the integration with a code management system that ClearQuest does with ClearCase. (Yes, I know there are ways you can integrate it... they're just not as easy as CQ/CC.) And I've also been using Bugzilla for years and am at this point extremely comfortable with it... so I'm just really learning CQ. We'll see.
Curling - the Brier - The Nokia Brier continues to provide some amazing curling to watch. Randy Ferbey's rink from Alberta continues to steamroll the competition with a 9-0 record going into the 4th day of the round-robin competition. They've locked a berth in the 1-2 playoff game tomorrow and, we would expect, should wind up in the final on Sunday. They have been absolutely incredible to watch. So have the other teams, of course, but the Ferbey rink just stands out so far above the others.
Curling - NOT the Brier - Then you have our team that will play in about an hour over at the Nepean Sportsplex. Despite ourselves, we now find our team incredibly in fourth place going into the last night of regular play. Tonight's games will determine the final standings and determine who goes into which playoff bracket. The top six teams will compete in the next couple of weeks, as will the bottom six. We'll see... the competition is heavy... :-)
The Chloe Journals, part one - sickness - The poor little girl has spent much of the week with fluid coming out of both ends... she seems to have caught a stomach virus that we've been told seems to be going around the area. Quite nasty and she is very uncomfortable (and by extension, so are we). Went to the pediatrician last night, though, and he said everything else seemed fine with her and he thought she should be over it within the next day or so. We definitely hope so! It has been a VERY rough week!
The Chloe Journals, part two - all your keyboards are ours - For the past several months, I have successfully been able to sit at my home office desk with the wee one on my lap and with a spare (disconnected) keyboard in front of me. She bangs on the spare keyboard. I reach around her and type on the "real" keyboard. It has worked well (outside of her constantly wanting to reach up and remove my glasses! ;-) but no longer... the smart little kid has figured out that Daddy's keyboard is the one that actually does something, so now she wants to use *that one*.... and Daddy's mouse is so much cooler because it has a red light coming out from underneath it...
I knew the spare keyboard trick had a limited lifetime, I just thought (hoped?) it might last a bit longer! :-)