today in my life

Today is my birthday. I am 38 years old. How the heck did that happen? I thought it might be interesting to record my day in all its mundane details without any effort to spice it up or make it extra interesting. Just a snapshot...

I woke up at 5:20am because my dog was barking to be let out. I had set my alarm for 6:00am, so I decided to just go ahead and get up early. I started some coffee and had a cup, and waited for it to get a little lighter outside. Then I put my contact lenses in and changed into running clothes, warmed up, stretched, and went out running around 6:30--daybreak.

It snowed yesterday, so there was about 3-4 inches in the driveway. 23 degrees; cold enough for running tights and gloves, but not unbearably cold. I ran through town and up 3 hills for 5.87 miles in 55:50. Not a great time, but much of the road was slush and snow/ice, so that slowed me down, especially on the downhills such as Tower Rd. It was a good run though; cold, but not too cold and the hills always warm me up. There was very little traffic, and I passed probably half a dozen other runners. Lots of folks run in my town.

Back at the house, I cooled down and changed out of my running clothes. Upstairs, my 6-month old daughter had awakened, but she was not unhappy, just lying there awake and content. I changed her diaper and sat her up in her crib while I took a shower. Then I ate a bowl of cereal and left the house at 8:25 to catch the later train in to work. It's about a half-mile walk from my house to the train.

On the way out the door, I grabbed a book to replace the one I had been carrying, because I just finished re-reading Stephen King's The Drawing of the Three yesterday. I selected Blood Orchid, which I read a year ago, but cannot remember. It is a sort of stream of consciousness rant about modern society, and I thought maybe if I read it again, it will make more sense this time around. I read chapter 1 on the way into the city.

Around 9:15, I arrived at my desk, got some coffee, opened my email, and wrote this. It's 9:37 now, so I better get to working. Just for completeness, I will log some of what I do here also...

First thing I noticed was that one of my database copying tasks failed last night, so I re-ran it and scheduled it to run at a different time tomorrow. I think it failed because another task was taking longer and bumped into it.

11:30am. We are working on a database project to keep track of when values to certain fields in the database change. I did some research and have been posting my ideas to our internal discussion page. Our programmer immediately came up with a quick "hack" of a solution that I was very resistant towards. Our CTO got us together to talk it over and it was clear how very different our approaches are. The programmer is coming at it from a programming perspective and created a solution that has the "side effect" of accomplishing what we need. My approach is more direct and procedural/linear, but it requires figuring out a lot more of how to do things in the database. He may very well be correct in thinking that his approach will be better for database performance because it is more of a parallel approach, whereas mine is very linear/hierarchal, but I think my approach is much more direct and easier to understand, whereas his will require us documenting something to the effect that the reason we do this thing is to cause something else to happen. It is hard to describe this kind of stuff out of context.

This is an unusually substantive day so far--I mean I have not had 1 million little requests for random things and have actually had time to think about a single issue for more than 10 minutes.

12:30pm. I did some searches on Google and did not find much. Most people audit their database tables in a simpler, catch-all fashion. I did a little careful reading of MSSQL Books Online and think I understand how to implement it my way. But I'm going to nuke a frozen dinner for lunch now.

After my lunch of a couple of Trader Joe's chicken chimichangas, I moved my desk to the space vacated by our CTO who moved to the office next door. Then we met with our new systems person (started work yesterday) to talk about what she has learned so far in getting oriented to our systems. Then I showed her our systems monitoring software--the stuff that sets off my pager many nights at either 1:30 or 2:30am for no good reason. Carrying that pager (since Christmas) is getting old.

We continue our discussion over how to do the database project. Now the CTO has written some non-functional code from a 3rd perspective and we are all trying to collaborate on this. At 4:30pm, I am starting to think about leaving; there is a train at 4:45 or 5:25. Probably should wait for the 5:25. Around 5pm, CTO shows up and it turns out he has been working on the same idea I was. So he described it and then I said, funny you should say that...Check this out--I have it working. So that was a great way to end the day and still catch the 5:25 train. Most days do not end as well. All in all, it was a pretty good day at the office.

On the train, I read some more of the book. It is kind of hard to get into...it really is a rant about materialism or something. Roland would say that so many of us have "forgotten the faces of our fathers" or that this world has moved on. It is an interesting sociological commentary on American life to followup the fictional Dark Tower books...

Walking home, I ran into my next door neighbor who was on the same train and we talked about work. He's employed by Gillette which is being acquired by Proctor and Gamble, so things there are very uncertain for people and their jobs.

When I got home, we ordered take-out Italian and I ate two huge pieces of birthday cake while listening to the Green Day CD (American Idiot) my wife bought me and watching the video from American Idol on the TV (muted). My mother in law and Mom called to wish me a happy birthday. I got cards from my Mom, my wife, and my daughter :) . We watched some TV and put the baby to bed around 9:20 or so and I came in here to check my email and finish off this blog entry.

It's now 10pm and time to start thinking about going to bed. I'm lucky if I get in bed before 11, so yeah, 6 hours of sleep is typical. And it is not because I am working my ass off or anything. But I keep busy. The plan is to run 5-7 miles every morning this week and do a long (14 miles) run on Sunday. An essay on why I love to run is something for another day...Now, I think I will go take my contact lenses out...

update: 11:50pm, still up. Ended up watching the local news, etc. and the baby woke up. Hope to be in bed and asleep by midnight.