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Plateau Holiday Party

January 4th, 2010

Soon after joining Plateau I got an email announcing the Plateau Holiday Party.  I was very excited about this since I haven’t been to a holiday party since my first year working when Chesapeake had a party in January. It’s a shame IBM never did one since I think they are a great time for workers to hang out outside of work and a chance for our spouses to meet some of the people we work with.

The holiday party was at the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria. We decided to take the metro to Alexandria and then hop the free shuttle from the metro to Old Town that way neither of us were driving and we could enjoy ourselves. When we arrived at the party it was clear Plateau had gone all out for the holiday party and everything looked fantastic. There was a wide selection of some fancy looking food. We made a point of trying almost everything and most of it was quite yummy. Also a good portion of my division was in attendance so Nicole was able to meet quite a few of the people that I work with on a daily basis.

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Nicole at the Holiday party.
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Some of the desserts we tried. Most of that plate was very yummy.

One thing that blew me away at the party was that they were having door prizes. Initially they started small with $100 gift cards to area restaurants. But as the night progressed they went on to give away things like $1,000  gift certificates to skiing resort, a mac book pro, and even a 42″ TV. I even managed to win the second door prize given away which was a $100 gift card to Fogo de Chao. It was quite funny because I was at the bar trying to get a new drink and when they were announcing the prize all I heard was “all you can eat meat”. The next thing I know they were calling my name out and I went up to collect my gift. I’m excited to go to Fogo especially since we can now justify it since most of the meal will be on the company.

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The live band that was pretty good.
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Ross with some of the other developers that I work with.

Overall I had a really good time at the holiday party and was really impressed by the company. Luckily we managed to snag a cab home after the party as it was really starting to snow and was the start of what I later would call Snowpocalypse but that’s for another post.

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A view of the street as we left the party.

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New Jobs

December 31st, 2009

So it’s been a few months since I last posted. I hadn’t forgotten about this blog but we had a lot of big things happen and we got busy. I hope add a bunch of new posts with new pictures over the holiday weekend.The biggest news that we’ve had since we last posted was changes in our job situation.

Nicole had kicked her job search into high gear after we moved to Ballston. However thanks to the poor economy she was having a hard time getting any kind of response from the places she was applying to. In October nicole made contact with a small market research firm called BioInformatics. They needed a scientist to help with some of the work they were doing but weren’t in a position to hire a full time person. Instead they asked Nicole if she would be interested in working for them on a contract basis. Nicole was a little hesitant at first since it wasn’t full time and the pay wasn’t great but she opted to go ahead and take the contract work since it would give her some real experience on her resume. We kinda looked at it as a paid internship that would help nicole get some much needed experience and so she wasn’t just sitting at home banging her head against the computer trying to get a response from companies. After working for them for a month their work load continued to pick up and she was working more frequently 4 or 5 days a week instead of the original 3 they contracted for. Also we think nicole made a great impression with the people at BioInformatics and by the middile of November they had offered her a full time position. Although their offer wasn’t ideally what Nicole was looking for she was thrilled to get the offer and loves working with the people there.  So as of the middle of Nicole is gainfully employed and happy to not be sending resumes into black holes of job postings. Considering the economy and the number of people out of work with work experience nicole did a great job getting her career jump started.

Nicole wasn’t the only one who got a new job in the past couple of months. At the end of October after 4 years with IBM I left the company. I was sad to be leaving IBM after so long but it was the right thing for me to do since I had become increasingly frustrated over the course of the year. The biggest thing I learned about keep myself happy at work was that I require a team atmosphere.  Over my time at IBM I saw my immediate team shrink from a local 8 person team to a local team of 3. I was still a part of a larger team but it was very distributed (5+ other sites) and I found I didn’t work as well with a distributed team. Also the new product I was working on had such unrealistic deadlines and goals that I found myself not motivated to even attempting to meet the deadlines. With those things in mind I decided it was time for me to look for a new opportunity.

After a surprisingly short job search I accepted a new Senior UI Developer position at a place called Plateau Systems. I think they will be a good fit for me as the majority of their development staff is located  at the same place. Also their strategy is to move their product over to Flex which I believe will be the future of web application. So i’m excited to be working with a team again and on new technology again. For those of you wondering what Plateau Systems does is they write HR software for large corporations/organizations. They software is primarily used to manage people’s performance/compensation reviews and to track professional development. The product may not be flashy or sexy but its complex enough to provide some real challenges in working on.

The best part about my new job though is nothing to do with the work but where the work is. My new office is two buildings over from our apartment. That means I get walk to work. It’s unbelievable to me that in a span of a couple of months I’ve gone from a commute of 55 miles each way to get to work to one that is a couple of hundred feet. It’s amazing to have so much time back and my stress level is so much lower without having to deal with DC traffic. Also with the apartment so close I can go home for lunch which is fantastic. So for right now i’m really enjoy my new job and hope it will stay that way for quite awhile.

Ross

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Going to the office…

June 3rd, 2008

As gas prices continue to rise I’m definitely starting to feel the pinch. When gas hit $4 a gallon I figured out that it cost me about $15 to go to work and drive back home. That’s a pretty respectable amount of money spent on just going to the office especially considering that my job offers me the flexibility to work from home.

Lately I’ve been hit with the delema of if its really worth it to go to work. By me working at home more often I can effective give myself a raise by cutting down on expenses. I used to follow the rule that unless I had a good reason not to go to the office I would just go into the office. However I kinda fell like that is shifting the other way, where i’ll go into the office if i have a reason to. It seems like such a waste if I’m going to spend all that money on gas and the time it takes me to drive in if I’m only going to be sitting at my desk and not speaking with anyone else.

I’m not the only person in the office that is starting to take this approach either. Some of the other guys are increasingly starting to work from home. Although I have the longest drive some of my other coworkers have a pretty respectable commute also. As gas prices continue to rise I think our office dynamic might start changing more. One of my coworkers has taken to biking into work more often as a way to cut down on his gas bill.

PS: I saw a tank on the beltway on my way into work today.

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Vista 64

May 11th, 2008

So when mom’s laptop temporarily died and she got a new laptop I talked her into just getting windows vista instead of paying extra for windows xp. When i was working on her laptop to get it setup I thought it looked interesting. Then when scott had me go looking for parts for his new computer it got me thinking that maybe it was time to make some changes with my computer. Also I had noticed that my computer was being a bit sluggish especially with all the new cruise pictures that I was working on. I decided it was an opportunity for me to upgrade to the newest OS from microsoft and to make the jump from 32 bit to a 64 bit OS.

By switching to the new 64bit OS I would finally be able to unlock the full power of my processor and it would allow me to go past the 4 GB barrier on RAM as well as some other things. I had read online that 64 bit support had improved a lot from the past and most hardware had 64 bit drivers now. Since my computer had just been put together back in September all the parts should be new enough that I should be good. Unfortunately I forgot that wireless card was not new and I had that since graduating from college. This increased my upgrade costs as I had to run out and buy a new wireless card :oops: .

After installing the new Vista x64 and getting acquainted with the system I’m pretty happy with how much faster my system seems to be responding. Not sure if it’s all the extra memory and/or the new OS or just the fact that I’m starting fresh and don’t have as much crap installed. Some of the new features that Vista has are pretty cool. The one that seems pretty useful is the alternative to alt-tab thats on the start bar which allows me to see small thumbnails of each running application.

One thing that I was disappointed with was that the availability of 64 bit applications is pretty wimpy. Specifically I couldn’t use a 64 bit version of firefox. This really wasn’t firefox’s fault but more a problem with the fact there isn’t a working 64 bit flash plugin which is a deal breaker since a lot of websites use flash. Anyway in most cases I was able to just make use of the 32 bit versions of a lot of apps which still runs better now since although they individually can’t exceed 4 gb of memory they can collectively use more. Overall I’m pretty happy with how my computer is running now. Maybe I’ll also look into running linux on this machine too.

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Posted in Thoughts, Work

Paper Proofs

February 3rd, 2008

My first paper is finally ready for publication! It’s scheduled to be in the Feb 12th edition of Developmental Cell. It’s been a long, long process….and I’m so happy it’s done. We got the publication proofs this week. This is where they’ve formatted the paper for publication, and the editors have gone through and fixed any small errors. We still found a few mistakes in the proofs, but it’s close enough.

I started working on this paper last June when we found out that another lab was in close competition, so we wanted to ‘rush’ out the progress I had made on one of my projects. With the review process it wasn’t very fast – but at least it’s coming out before we’ve seen anything from the other lab. Tony has been waiting for this paper to be published for about 2 years — so I’m sure he’s even more excited to be done with it!

I’m attaching a PDF copy of the proofs in case anyone wants to try reading it =)

Hopefully in the next few months I’ll be able to finish up experiments for my next paper and start writing.

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