The Camaras

The thoughts and lives of the camara family. Ross Camara Nicole Camara

Posts Tagged ‘Work’

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.

Nicole at the Holiday party.

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.

The live band that was pretty good.

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.

A view of the street as we left the party.

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Posted in Work

Tags: food fun holiday party Work

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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Posted in Work

Tags: IBM Work

New Dryer

January 2nd, 2009

One of the things my mother asked us to do when we were back at home for the holidays was to go and pickup a new dryer from costco. I figured this should be easy enough as all my mother needed was for us to physically load the thing into the van and bring it home.

We did that on Christmas eve thinking it would be a fast task. However when we got home and opened the thing up we realized that the dryer didn’t come with a power cable and that we were expected to buy our own and wire it into the machine. On top of that the dryer required a vent which wasn’t included. This required a quick trip out to home depot where we wandered around for a while looking for the vent until a nice lady there helped us out. More importantly while we were buying the vent she told us that although instructions call for a metal based vent we could get away with a plastic one.

Unpacked the dryer and checking out the instruction. Yes we actually read them before we started

Once we got our missing parts home we spent awhile trying to wire the new electrical cord to the dryer since the one we had didn’t quite match the pictures in the instruction manual. After a bit of guess work we think we got it setup right. The next step was to get the vent the installed and connected to the wall. Initially we started with the metal vent that the instructions suggested. Unfortunately due to the location of the existing exhaust pipe this didn’t work so we ended up having to swap to the plastic version.

Got the old dryer out and ready to put the new dryer in and connect the vent.

Scott installing the vent. Good thing he’s skinny

hmm did we get it right? Better switch to the plastic one

Once we finally had it installed we checked with mom that she had paid up her home owners insurance since we weren’t ‘certified’ electricians and when we turned it on it could very well catch fire . Thankfully it seemed to turn on correctly and not start a fire.

Ross doing his best to be kinda useful

Throughout this whole process nicole was laughing at the two of us and our amateur hour of home improvement. It was an interesting experience and thankfully we got the job done but at many points that $100 install fee was looking mighty good.