Changes

Friday was my last day at Sun Microsystems. I had a very hard time walking out the door at the end of the day. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but I think I’ve figured it out. I worked for Sun for eight years. I’ve been working with a lot of the same folks there for a good part of that time. I really liked working for Sun.

So why leave? I don’t want to get into the exact details. The place changed a lot recently, and so did my job. I found myself working for someone who didn’t know me at all, and had no interest in that changing. I wasn’t even a person I was Jay Penney and the Interns (yes, great band name). That pretty much decided it for me. This does, of course, show that the interns had it worse than me, but at least they were doing the job they were hired for (sort of)

I wasn’t concerned about finding another job. I’ve had offers before. More than once I’ve had people I worked with in the past call and try and hire me away. This time I went looking. I found something much more in line with what I want to do, with what seems like a great group of people.

The last few weeks have been hard. I have a terminal case of nice-guy-itis. Even thought I really didn’t know how to do the job they shoved me into, I worked damn hard to ensure things were in the best shape possible before leaving. I even pulled a few 11-12 hour days. A lot of my friends said, “screw em,” but I couldn’t. Not because I’m a pushover. I don’t let people walk all over me. Good people would have had to bear the brunt of it, and I couldn’t leave things like that. The best thing about that time was working with Matt (one of the interns). Matt had been there for a while, but we didn’t interact much. Since I was given the Paul’s job (Paul was our boss, and one of my best friends), I ended up getting to know him a lot better. Great guy.

So anyway, tomorrow I turn thirty and Tuesday I’ll start my new job. Changes are afoot and I’m pretty excited.

1-Pass Day 15: (12485/99973)

Type in
12485/99973

Today didn’t go at all to plan. We had a pile of places to be today, but Rachel isn’t feeling herself, so we ended up staying home. On the plus side Denise was kind enough to give me time to work on the book (thank you!), so here I am posting an update. Some of the chapters look a bit shorter that I want them, but I’m going to finish the type in and think about what to do afterwards (if anything).

Not Happy

Things haven’t been going well lately. Not in any way. So far, today continues that trend.

I got up early to work on my type in. My current speed is about ten minutes per page to get it done. I’ve got over 500 pages left, so that’s well over 80 hours of work left if I don’t manage to speed up somehow. So I don’t need additional setbacks.

I mentioned before that I started doing revisions in WriteWay Pro. It’s pretty good in a lot of ways. After finishing two scenes this morning I thought I should do a global search and replace on a changed character name. Now I’m used to working in OpenOffice.org where this same type of activity on this same size document is fairly speedy. Also I have OpenOffice.org set up to auto-save a copy of the file every few minutes. I do this because when I get working I loose track of things like real life. I’m sure you can see where this is going. After watching the simple Search & Replace peg my CPU usage at 100% for about 20 minutes and error came up. When I clicked “OK” WriteWay Pro just went away. Not good.

I opened WriteWay back up, looked at where my edits left off and mourned the last hour of my life which was a complete and utter waste of time. Now I have to go to work, so here’s to yet another day with no writing progress.

‘Dursin the Firestarter’ Hits the Net

The first time I saw YouTube I knew this day would come. It was only a matter of time. Dursin the Firestarter is online (well, so far just the first scene).

"Dursin the Firestarter" movie poster

“What is Dursin the Firestarter?”, you ask. Back when I was in high school Dursin and John used to make a lot of movies. The greatest of these was Dursin the Firestarter, a feature length remake of the original trilogy of earlier shorts (Matt Dursin the Incredible Firestarter, Dursin the Firestarter Part 2, and Dursin the Firestarter Part 3). It may not be a great film, but it is amusing. I have a small roll in there somewhere (in fact you can see me in the movie poster), and I provided some of the sound effects in the latter half of the film. Check it out. Be warned that the film would definitely get an R rating for language, so it may not be work safe.

1-Pass Day 13: Starting the Type-in

There’s a ton going on, and I don’t have the time to go into it now. The important thing is I started the Type-in finally. I’ve migrated from OpenOffice.org to WriteWay Pro. It has it’s good and bad, but I’m going to give it some more time before going into it.

Anyway, tracking progress should be interesting, since the total word count will fluctuate as I go. So here’s where I started:

Type in
0/106270

And here’s where I finished for the day:

Type in
2006/101995

The beginning is mostly cuts and rewording to make things tighter. Hopefully I’ll get some momentum and be able to move faster.