Jefflog

It’s my last day at work here at the office. For the past two weeks, I’ve been slaving away trying to get everything wrapped up and documented, but today, on my last day here, apathy has set in. My final paycheck is in the bank, and there’s just not much that an extra couple of hours can do. I’m definitely going home early today.

Mostly, I’ve just been sitting in my cubicle trying to think of anything that’s crucial that I’m forgetting. I’ve added a few paragraphs to my documentation here and there, and had a meeting with some people who will be taking up where I left off, but that’s about the extent of it. Pretty soon, it’ll be time to put all my belongings in a box and head out the door.

Am I sad? No. In fact, it’s been kind of nice to sit down over a good portion of the past two weeks and just write documentation. I say I don’t like to write documentation, and if given the choice between documentation and coding, I’ll always choose coding, but documentation has it’s own easy feel to it as well. It doesn’t take me hours to figure out why something isn’t working, and progress on it is usually steady. I’m not necessarily the best writer out there (I consider Joel Spolsky to be the gold-standard when it comes to writing in technical-yet-accessible terms), but I’d consider myself better than the average computer programmer. Still, you have to twist my arm a little bit to get me to do it, because given the option, I’d rather be doing something else. I know this is the case with other computer programmers as well, because most open-source programs created by unpaid volunteers tend to be poorly documented.

It’s also given me a chance to play with the OpenOffice suite more, which I’m liking more and more as I continue to use it. If you haven’t tried it yet and have access to a broadband connection, download it and give it a shot. All the features of Microsoft Office without the annoying “Clippy the Paperclip”.

And despite OpenOffice being a free product, the documentation is quite decent. No doubt this is aided by the fact that Sun Microsystems paid people to write it for StarOffice, their commercially supported version of the same product.

Two-and-a-half hours to go and I am so outta here.

The Web Developer Mozilla Extension is another amazing piece of software with a bunch of tools useful for any web developer. See table outlines, hidden form fields, ID fields and more on your site with the click of a button, and much more. Very handy stuff.

The Seattle Times: Local News: Woman loses her job over coffins photo

After struggling for two years with a reel mower, I broke down and bought an electric mower. The backyard had always been difficult, but when attempting this spring, I’d find that along the denser parts of the lawn, I’d push the mower as hard as I could, and it would move about two inches. Over the years, I’ve learned how to adjust it so it cuts as well as it can, so I know that’s not the issue.

The mower is not cordless, so I have to mow in a certain pattern to avoid mowing over the cord. It’s not difficult once you get the hang of it, and of course starting an electric mower is much easier than a gas mower would be. Also, it’s somewhat quieter, although still loud, and no gas fumes to breathe.

For the record, the lawn was so tough in places that it even stopped the electric mower cold in a few places. And I may still use the reel mower for the front lawn, since it’s not as hard as the back.

Bonus geek points to myself for buying the lawnmower from Amazon.com (only $139 and free shipping!)

Continuing the string of big announcements here, I can finally announce that I’ll be starting a new job in three weeks. I’ll be working for Decade Software, a company in that I used to work for during the summers as a teenager in Fresno, California. Back then, the firm consisted of the owner working from his home; now he’s got nearly 20 employees in a real office. This time around, I’ll be the one working from home, doing C# coding from Indianapolis and communicating over the Internet.

I’ve known about the position for nearly two months, but it took me a long time to convince me that this is what I wanted to do (and an even longer time for the owner to be convinced that I was absolutely the right guy for the job). There are some advantages of working from home, such as not needing to commute to work and having more flexible hours. On the downside, since my bicycle commute usually gave me 40 minutes of good exercise a day, I now have to try harder to make sure I exercise properly. And even though I don’t socialize at my current job much, I’ll be nearly devoid of company at home. I’ll need to make a more concerted effort to spend time with friends and family during the weekends and evenings.

The new position also carries the burden of increased hours. While the exact number of hours isn’t explicitly stated, it will be more than a 9-to-5 job. Working nights and weekends will be a routine occurrence. I’ll have to work even harder to balance my work responsibilities with my family ones. It will mean more understanding from my wife when I have to work late, and more understanding from me when I’m not paying enough attention to her. On the plus side, I’ll be at home the whole time, which is better than having to work late alone in an office cubicle.

In the end, I know this is the right move to make, not only for the nice increase in pay I’ll be getting, but also to be able to take control of a big project and get it written. I’m looking forward to the rush of those 60-hour weeks of coding. No kidding. It should be a blast.

When Hong and I got married, Hong decided to take on a hyphenated version of our names. “Hong Seifert” perhaps seemed like an odd mixture of Chinese and German naming conventions. Her name is now “Hong Liu-Seifert”.

If you don’t pronounce this the right way, the last name comes out sounding like “Lucifer”. We experienced this first hand on a call last week, when some telemarketer, thinking I was Hong, addressed me as Mr. Lucifer. Yes, I am now Mister Beelzebub.

Time to switch to FreeBSD…

OK, I’ll bite. While I don’t quite understand the why, Burger King’s Subservient Chicken (Flash req.) is a marvelous piece of work. It consists of one man in his chicken suit in his apartment; you type in what you want him to do, and sure enough, he’ll do it.

Does it make me hungry for a chicken sandwich? Not really. But hey, it made me write “Burger King” in my weblog, which works just as well I imagine.

The mornings are still a bit chilly in central Indiana, but the flowers are in bloom, and that means I’m back out on my bike. Joined up with the local bicycling association on Saturday for a 2-hour ride; it really tired me out but I’m definitely energized from it, waking up from bed as easy 20 minutes before the alarm would go off. I can’t wait to get out next weekend too.

We also managed to buy a new car over the weekend. This puts an end to the single-car family we’ve been at so far. We figure with the child on the way, it would get to be too troublesome to pick up the child from childcare on my bike. The new car is for Hong; I’ll be taking the Honda Accord. Mind you, I don’t think I’ll be using it too much, trying to cycle-commute as much as I can, although I’ll probably give up some of my more extreme winter riding. No point in driving when you can bike and get some exercise in the process.

IE6, while good, is still far from perfect, especially when you compare it to Mozilla. There are many CSS rules IE6 gets plain wrong. Today I found a hack that allows me to hide certain rules from IE. Example: let’s say we wanted items with classname “content” to have a right-margin of 20px in IE but 10px in Mozilla. We could say:

.content {
  margin-right: 20px;
  foo: ";
  foo: "";
  margin-right: 10px;
  /*";*/
}

The first rule sets the margin-right to 20px for all browsers. However, to IE6 (and presumably IE5, and maybe other browsers), the second margin-right is interpreted as being within quotes and is not parsed. Mozilla in this case ignores the “foo” and quotes and resets the margin-right to 10px.

No word on what happens in Safari/Konqueror or Opera.

You can quickly test the speed on your typing using TyperA, a nice little Java applet. I won’t tell you my score, except to say it was better than I thought it would be.