It’s been a few weeks since I last posted (why does that sound like “since my last confession?”). I was talking about changes and how I was dealing with them. First, I want to discuss a few of those changes and then talk about more changes that are coming.

I signed up for SugarStats.com the other day and manually put in all of my blood sugar readings from the Accu-chek website. Note to the people at Accu-chek: Love your blood glucose meter, but your website is incredibly hard to use. SugarStats has Twitter integration! How cool is that? So, I can use twitter (via SMS or IM) to post readings (“d ss1 bg xxx”) or medication I have taken. You can also track doctor visits, keep notes for each day, track lab results (A1C). The premium version lets you track of food that you eat and exercise. The only thing I would add is a place to track blood pressure.

Here are some interesting statistics:

• First reading was 7/10 at 327.
• Average for July was 250.
• Highest for July was 345 (7/13).
• Lowest for July was 174.
• Highest for August so far has been 292 (8/4).
• Lowest for August so far has been 153.
• Average for August for far has been 195.

These numbers are certainly no where near as low as they should be, but it helps my motivation to know that I am making a difference with the medication, exercise, and changes in what I eat. I will confess that the past week or so I haven’t felt much like exercising due to severe congestion from allergies or a cold. I am committing to getting back on track this coming week.

It’s been a few weeks since I started my new position and I feel that I am doing very well. I think I have gotten into issues and worked to get them resolved in a way that everyone is happy with. I hope my employees feel that I listen to their needs, help them accomplish their tasks, and stay out of their way when they don’t need me. My manager has been out of the office on vacation, so I’m curious what his appraisal of my performance in his absence will be once he’s had a change to catch up on e-mail.

I’ve been reading Stephen Covey’s The 8th Habit and I’ve really gained a lot more insight than I did when I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People back in college. This book really is the next step for the 7 Habits and I’ve found numerous opportunities to apply its teachings.

In gaming news, the latest expansion of Guild Wars called Eye of the North will be released on August 31st. I was able to get in on the sneak peak weekend and I must say that I’m impressed. I’m totally prepared to buy when it comes out. I don’t own Nightfall, so this was my first time to use heroes. Plus, the storyline is very engaging and the art is superb.

On to upcoming events. Tomorrow marks my son’s first day of third grade. It’s hard to believe that it’s here already. My third grade was the year we came back from Germany and I always thought of it as a pivotal year for me. I met his teacher on Friday and I think he is the kind of teacher he needs. In just another week, I will be heading back to class after taking the summer off myself. I will really need to apply myself if I hope to graduate next May.

Over the Labor day weekend, we are planning to meet my parents at a lake between Austin and Dallas for a three-day fishing and camping trip. This will be our first family trip since I left home and will be my wife’s camping trip since she left the farm. My son and I did a father-son camping trip two years and we had a lot of fun with the other fathers and sons. I hope to get lots of pictures and I hope I can keep the bugs and sunburn at bay.

When I get pictures, I’ll post them here on Flikr.

As I take the day to mentally and physically recharge my batteries, I’ve been reflecting on some of the recent changes in my life and what they mean.

Yesterday I spent most of the day at a Diabetes education class to learn more about the disease, how to manage it, and what it means in the long term. I think the most optimistic outlook is that if I do everything as I’m supposed to (manage my blood sugars, eat right, exercise, and lose weight) then I should be able to hold off most if not all of the complications (blindness, kidney damage, nerve damage, and amputation). I was also given a personalized nutrition plan which actually seems pretty reasonable.

This past week my doctor doubled the dosage of metformin to 2000mg per day and added Amaryl since my fasting blood sugar after three weeks was still over 200. I think the larger concern at the moment for him, though, is that my blood pressure is still too high and the medication has not adequately controlled it. So, he’s asked me to participate in a study for a new medication that might help. The good news is that the medication will be provided at no charge.

A month ago I took only one medication whenever I felt my acid reflux acting up. Now I’m taking 4 different kinds of medication in the morning and another in the evening. A month ago I could eat whatever I want and now I’m reading food labels and counting carbs. A month ago I was pretty sedentary and now I’m exercising at least 30 minutes 3 times a week on the treadmill we bought a few years ago as a coat rack and dust collector.

This week, though a rather bizarre (at least in my opinion) set of circumstances, my career took a sudden unexpected change. I think it’s a very positive change, but it was still pretty unexpected. During a reorganization of the group I was in, I found that the position I had no longer really existed. Instead, I was given some options as to where I wanted to go. I ended up in a management position with a team of 2 employees, 2 contractors, and 2 unfilled positions reporting to me. This was something that was always on my ‘roadmap’, but it certainly something I wasn’t expecting to happen right now. I always thought it was something I would pursue once I finished my master’s degree (May 2008).

So, I have a new position which I have to learn about the systems and procedures for a critical function of the business. I know the high-level stuff, but now I have to dive into the nitty-gritty. I will also be managing employees which are experts in their field that happens to be different than my expertise. I’ve spent 6 years as a system administrator and capacity planner. Now I’ll be managing a team that is responsible for the operational aspects of a data warehouse and reporting environment. That means DBAs, ETL administrators, and reporting administrators. I hope I will be able to get my head around this stuff without increasing my stress level too much. More stress means higher blood pressure.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I wrote a paper for CMG (Computer Measurement Group) and it was accepted for publication. I have been asked to present that paper at their conference in December. I will need to spend time over the next month editing and finalizing the paper for publication as well as preparing the presentation itself. Piece of cake, right?

In just under a month, I will be returned to classes and grind another semester towards finishing that degree. Ironically enough, both are management classes dealing with organizational performance and managing technical people. So, I’m excited about where things are headed but I know I must have a handle on the most recent changes before I throw more stress into the mix.

I recently started reading Stephen Covey’s book entitled The 8th Habit in which he talks about making the leap from effectiveness to greatness. The first part of the book talks about the pain many successful and effective people feel. They are accomplishing things, but don’t really feel like what they are doing matters. I wouldn’t say I’ve been feeling that way, but I do identify with the feeling. I hope Mr. Covey’s book will give me some further enlightenment and help me with these changes.

So, I’m grateful for the time I’ve had to reflect on these changes and share them with you. They are mostly positive changes, but I do tend to feel overwhelmed when I’m faced with lots of changes of any kind in a short amount of time.

Finally, we’re now going to get to the reason I posted all of that stuff about my history with programming. In recent months, I’ve been doing a lot of work with web services and helping to define an SOA architecture. As a result, I’ve had to learn a bit about the different products which inevitably led me to doing some coding for one proof-of-concept project or another.

I’ve made several attempts to learn Java to the extent that my knowledge of other languages such as Pascal, C/C++, PHP, and Perl should have carried me through. For some reason, though, I always hit a brick wall and it didn’t quite click for me. Well, the moons and stars aligned for me a couple of weeks ago and I think I finally got it. I went back through several Java books I had picked up before and wouldn’t you know… Suddenly it makes sense.

Let’s change gears for a second. I came up with an idea for an online game several years ago after playing a few so-called ‘hacking simulator’ games. They seemed kind of fun, but lacked the excitement a multi-player version could bring. However, since programming and I were not on speaking terms I let it lie and we didn’t speak of it again.

Enter Project Darkstar. I ran across it totally by accident and I must say it is very cool. It’s really just another name for the “Sun Game Server” which is cooler than it sounds. It lets online game developers focus on game design and logic rather than spend so much time on infrastructure, database coding, and net code. The SGS takes care of most of the hard work for you by handling network communications, persistence, and scheduling tasks. Essentially, the coder writes single-threaded, event-driven code and the server figures out object contention and schedules tasks as separate threads or queues them as necessary.

The project was open-sourced very recently with the limitation that it can only run on a single game server app. I’m not sure if the multi-server version will be commercial or just open-sourced later, but either way the code that you write doesn’t change. The server takes care of clustering and persistence across whatever size infrastructure the application needs.

So, I’ve started working on a project which I’m calling Versions which is written for SGS. I’ve even registered the domain versionsonline.net, but there’s nothing there yet. I imagine this is going to be slow and painful to begin with. I’m new to Java, I’m rusty at programming in general, and I have no experience at game programming. However, I think it will be fun to learn as I go.

Obviously I’ve put more thought into this than what I’ve posted here. I’ve setup a super-secret wiki and code repository to host this until the game website is ready. I’m planning for several different clients to make the game multi-platform and I want to incorporate continuous gameplay through event notifications (sms, e-mail, IM, etc). The server code would be closed, but I want the server API to be documented and the client open source. The client could be a simple text-based client, a 3D graphical client, a mobile phone client, or even a web-based client.

If anyone would be interested in finding out more about the game or the project, I would be glad to discuss it with you. I would be grateful to get help with game design concepts, programming, or even web design/development.

I hope you weren’t holding your breath for this…if you haven’t already, go read Part 1.

As I prepared to go to college, I took and passed the Advanced Placement (AP) test in Computer Science. I thought this would mean I could skip the “Intro to Computer Science” classes. Unfortunately, the Computer Science AP test wasn’t honored by the college I chose, so I couldn’t get credit (which I earned.. dang it). However, I was able to skip the first two CS classes and take advanced electives instead.

Everything seemed to be fine. The CS program was transitioning from focusing on a wide variety of programming languages (Fortran/Pascal/Assembly/Cobol) to focusing primarily C/C++ with some emphasis on specialty areas such as Assembly and Cobol (pre-Y2K). This meant I was able to jump right into learning all about C from my very first class until I hit the upper-level classes where the curriculum tried to broaden your horizons into different areas (aka weed out the weak ones).

Then it happened. I learned to hate programming. IBM 360/370 Assembly programming taught me how to hate programming. The second semester of Assembly was centered around writing an assembler, a linker, and a loader. In assembly language. On a mainframe. The professor was one who never compiled or ran your program. He just read the source code and knew if it worked or not. Seriously. The class was setup that if you finished the assembler you got a C. If you finished the linker you got a B. If you finished the loader, you got an A. I believe I got a D. That’s right, I never got the assembler to work correctly. The D was a gimme, I should have failed I think.

It was at this point I decided that maybe programming as a career wasn’t for me. I told myself, “who wants to sit in a cubicle for 12 hours a day anyway?”. Besides, I was exposed to Unix in my summer job and Linux was in its early stages of development (I spent weeks downloading it onto dozens of 3.5″ floppy disks to install on my 386 PC). So, my new goal was to work as a Unix System Administrator and lucky for me the dot com boom would later create tons of sysadmin (short-lived) jobs.

Unfortunately, my remaining classes didn’t help to change my mind. Let’s see.. Cobol. Yeah, we all hated Cobol and our professor used to say, “everyone of you who is complaining about Cobol will be the ones who have no other job offers at graduation but a Cobol job”. Turns out she was right. More on that in a minute. Next was a compilers class. Nope, too much like writing an assembler (summer classes are easier to get good grades). Windows programming in C.. Not too bad, but hard to keep everything straight in my head. Really, I think the only classes I did enjoy was an elective hardware class and an Operating Systems class.

As I was preparing to graduate, I was working as a “tape ape” for a large insurance company whose disaster recovery data center was in this small west Texas town. Instead of using robots to retrieve tapes from the library and load them into a tape drive we had an LED display which told us the tape number and the tape drive to mount it in. This was on the night shift so several hours would go by with nothing and then the board would completely fill up within seconds as a particular job kicked off. Statistics were kept on how many tapes we loaded as well as how long it took us. The point is that this was obviously a temporary job until my post-graduation ship came in.

So, graduation comes and goes. I get married. Go on the honeymoon. Come back to the tape ape job. I seriously need a real job. I get a call from a trucking company in a nearby, larger town and they are interested in converting their computer systems and need someone to maintain their old system while their current staff does the conversion. Guess what the old system is written in? Cobol. Yep, my Cobol professor was right. I had to tell them, “Can I have until Monday to think about it?”. Mostly it meant we’d have to move and they weren’t offering much more than the tape ape job paid.

Fortunately, I received another call Friday morning as I got off of the night shift. Drive 6 hours to Dallas, interview, and drive back same day with no sleep? Sure! Sign me up. The job paid a lot more, we didn’t have to move, and it wasn’t Cobol programming. Not quite as bad, but almost. Level 2 PC support. Desktop Support. Whatever you want to call it, it’s fixing computers for whiny users who never know as much as they think they do.

I spent 2 1/2 years doing Desktop Support and did such a good job that I was no longer needed. Towards the end, I had one call a week for a six-story building full of users. It mostly involved LARTing anyone who tried to change anything they weren’t supposed to. So, off to the big city and a bigger client with bigger PC problems.

Another 2 1/2 years later, I finally get the opportunity to realize my goal of becoming a Unix System Administrator. The only problem was the hours and the pager going off at 3am. You can only take so much of it before you need a break. Fortunately, I had quite a bit of interest in the performance and capacity planning aspect of managing the systems and an opportunity as a full-time capacity planner came up.

What I find most amazing is how much of the work I’ve done over the years (desktop support, sysadmin, capacity planning, and system architecture/design) is how much of it is translating between what the business people want and what the developers/technical teams can deliver. So there you go. Full Circle. The technology has changed, but we’re still either programmers, electronics engineers, or systems analysts.

I’m in a happy place. I hope to graduate in 2008 with a Master’s degree in Information Technology. I was informed that a paper I wrote for the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) was accepted and I’ve been invited to present at CMG 2007 in San Diego in December. At the same time there have been a few changes and reorganizations that may open up new opportunities for me.

The real point of this trip down memory lane was to help me get back to my roots. I’ve avoided programming like the plague based on a bad experience over 10 years ago with a dead programming language on a dead piece of iron. I will save the details for another post, but I’ve started an exciting new project which I hope will not only help me satisfy an idea I’ve had rattling around my head for a few years but which will rekindle my interest in programming. Well, if not professionally then maybe as a hobby.