Sunday, July 25, 2010

Where's Waldo?

The oraclenerd edition.

I think this is the longest stint I have gone without posting since I started, almost 3 weeks now.

It's not that I don't have anything to say...you know better than that. I've actually been super busy.

I've been in Chicago (Rosemont actually) for the past 2 weeks and will be there for the next 4. This follows 8 weeks at home. I guess it all evens out in the end. The client has been awesome in regards to my travel, knowing our situation with Kate, and I'm very appreciative of this...but it's crunch time and I probably should be on-site.

I did 90% of the metadata work, bringing in a colleague late in the game to help offload some of the work. This also means I am at the center of just about every question about the data. I've had a lot of help, especially from some new team members (client side) who came from the DW world. Their research and knowledge of the systems has helped me out tremendously.

Just about any work I do I do at night, when it's quiet. In the office, I am rarely at my desk...which is another reason I have been so quiet here and on Twitter. I do have a cool new phone, the HTC Incredible, but I've hardly learned how to use that thing yet. After lunch on Wednesday...well, actually, during lunch on Wednesday, I was on a conference call on APEX and SSO (yes, outside my current job duties, but I love APEX so want to see it successful) walking back to the office. That led me to hitting up David Peake, the Principal Product Manager for APEX (who lives just 1.5 hours from Chicago) who then pointed me towards Anton Nielsen of C2Consulting for his knowledge in implementing SSO with APEX. I finally passed on Anton's name to the client as I didn't want to be a bottleneck.

The next 3 hours I found myself in meetings or at someone's desk answering questions. I finally sat down at 4. It's fun interacting, but exhausting.

Oh, and the client has definitely learned that they shouldn't let me out of my cage too often. After 8 weeks at home, I was a chatterbox.

Anyway, the initial deployment is on Monday and we will be rolling out fixes shortly after that. Not the ideal of course, but it is what it is.

Hopefully soon, I'll be able to post something informative or at least somewhat interesting. I did finish up my NQQuery.log parser, I just haven't had a chance to do anything with it yet.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good to see you back chet :-)

Jeremy said...

hey welcome to town - you're not far from me either. :) i'm on the north side of the city (straight east of you, about 10 miles down devon ave). do you run on a work/blog/sleep cycle when you travel, or do you try and get away from the computer for a few nights?

Joel Garry said...

My cousin regularly commuted from FL to full time teaching at the University of Illinois at least 6 years that I know of (I'm a bit out of touch with family in your part of the country).

oraclenerd said...

@rnm1978

nice to be back (mostly).

oraclenerd said...

@jeremy

sadly, i haven't been able to get away very much just yet. i'm hoping to, eventually.

i'll hit you up when i get some time.

(and no, I don't get much time away from the computer these days, as sad as that is)

chet

oraclenerd said...

@joel

wow, 6 years? that's a heck of a lot of traveling. not sure I could do that. i need my family close, preferably often too.

admittedly, i work too much as it is so I wasn't "around" as much as I should be. i'm hoping to change that in the future before i get to the point of regrets. :)