The Net Monkey

I spent the majority of my day on Sunday in my hotel room. It was just rainy and wet all around the city, so I wasn’t motivated to do much of anything.

Met up with my friend Orme who I met online a few months ago. Had a good time hanging out with him. He’s a very swell guy who reminds me so much of how I like the attitudes and disposition of the people around here.

Today, on Monday, Greg and I met downstairs in the lobby of the hotel so we could catch the Caltrain down to San Carlos.

Title: 02272006

Uploaded By: mattbarton77

We met up with the guys at StrongMail who picked us up from the train station and brought us to their office. Had a nice long meeting going over product roadmaps and some of our needs and desires for their product.

Afterwards, we came back to the San Francisco and went to a sender authentication meeting hosted by Cloudmark and run by Meng Wong. Met several other players in the industry who I will be seeing throughout the conference this week.

Following the meeting we proceeded over to a really excellent Thai restaurant near the meeting site. I can’t remember the name of the place, but it was delicious.

So now I am back at the hotel and I am absolutely wiped. I think I am going to crash HARD on the bed and get some sleep. I’ve got a 7:00 AM conference call that I need to attend (damn time differences). Ugh.

Will update more tomorrow.

Things in San Francisco are pretty good. Greg and I arrived yesterday, after two flights and very little sleep, and took the BART in to the city. We arrived at the SW Hotel in Chinatown at around Noon. The weather was fabulous and welcoming, but, unfortunately, it looks like it is going to be overcast and rainy for the rest of the trip. Oh well. I can’t have my cake and eat it, too, can I?

Title: Funderal Procession

Uploaded By: mattbarton77

So, anyway, we got to the hotel and found some restaurant with English menus in Chinatown. Fabulous. We went back to the hotel and crashed for a few hours, which we really needed since Greg and I had very little sleep the night before.

In the evening, we found a good Thai restaurant up Columbus Avenue and ate some dinner. We then threw down a few beers at this little bar nearby. Turns out the owner is from Pennsylvania, which explains all of the Pirates and Steelers memorabilia on the walls. There was also a blue/rock band there playing some familiar music. This drunk guy kept going up to the band, trying to sing in to the microphone, but the guitar player/singer told him to leave or he would “kick his ass.” Nice!

So, after getting a little drunk, Greg went to the strip clubs nearby (he’s a straight guy) and I proceeded to the Castro. I made some quick stops at The Edge and Daddy’s, but not much was happening. I got hit on by this Latin guy who told me that he wanted me (and he was alright himself — can’t say I wasn’t necessarily interested), but I said that I wasn’t going home with anyone. I have to admit, I am a bit paranoid about men out here. Anyway, after telling him I wasn’t interested in having sex, he immediately stopped talking to me and started hitting on the guy right next to me, as if I didn’t exist. I got a bit of a chuckle about that.

Title: The View From the Mark Hopkins

Uploaded By: mattbarton77

This morning we had to check out of the hotel Chinatown and then check in to the conference hotel, which is the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins in Nob Hill. These email guys sure like their hotels. The only other four star hotel where I’ve stayed is the W Hotel Lakeshore in Chicago.

Not sure what I’m doing for the rest of the day. It’s raining outside and I have yet to meet up with friends out here, so I may just end up spending the rest of the afternoon watching Celebrity Fit Club.

Tomorrow we’re heading down to visit a vendor. I’ll update in the next day or two.

Things did calm down following the major outage we experienced at work a few weeks ago, but now there have been some shake-ups on the technology side, resulting in two announcements.

The first came on Wednesday when we found out that our boss was leaving the company. My new manager, Brad, had decided to go back to the company from whence he came, which is starting back up, after having been bought by another company which subsequently went bankrupt. He and some other people bought the assets of the old, original company and now they’re ready to re-hire him. Good for Brad. I know that I wouldn’t pass up such an opportunity, so I don’t think anyone will blame him for doing it. He’ll surely be missed because I think he’s a good manager and certainly made me start to enjoy my job again.

On th next day, Thursday, we had a large meeting with our CEO who announced that our VP of Technology was leaving the company — and that both the technology and product teams were being unified under one manager, which I think is excellent idea.

At the end of the meeting, I was left wondering who was going to be my new boss. Turns out everyone on the infrastructure group will report directly to the new VP. I have mixed feelings about it. When we used to report to the old VP, I often felt neglected. He wasn’t available as much as I would have liked and he never set any goals for our team.

Then came Brad and suddenly I had a manager who talked to me everyday and helped me out with stuff. Now I am heading back to working for a VP who has greater responsibilities than the old guy. While he has told me directly that he looks forward to working with us, I feel nervous about it. I’m just going to have to wait it out and see what happens.

I’m heading to San Francisco this coming Saturday to attend MAAWG with some colleagues of mine, as well as pay a visit to a vendor of ours out in Redwood City.

Of course, while in the city, I have every intention of having some fun, which is also why I’m traveling a bit early. My buddy Greg is coming with me and we’re going to check things out before we get down to business at the conference.

I was hoping to see the Jasons while out there, but it looks like Jason S. is going to be out of town for the entirity of my visit. I heard from Jason M. (a.k.a. Jason 2) today, so we should be spending a little bit of time together, for sure.

Warm weather here I come! Weee!

Last week was absolute hell!

We had a major outage in our production environment a couple of weekends ago, resulting in major data loss. Through a series of unfortunate events, our SAN lost power, resulting in data corruption in our 2 TB database.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we weren’t able to revert to a recent snapshot of our database, but instead one taken during the previous day, in the morning, resulting in a data loss of about 36 hours. Fortunately, we’ve been able to reconstruct a lot of it, but we have some angry customers and we’ll certainly loose business because of this disaster.

I’m thankful for not being anywhere near the frying pan on this one, but I dread the thought of us loosing a team member. While the offending parties may deservingly be terminated for what happened, I don’t want to see anyone loose their job and I definitely don’t want to be forced to pick up the resulting slack.

The company was very responsive to the stress level amongst the employees. Food was provided by either ordering in for us or allowing us to get, for free, up to two items from the chocolate shop on the first floor. They also had a massage therapist in the building helping out.

We’re certainly over the hump, in my opinion, but I don’t think we’ll see the fall-out from this crisis for some time to come, unfortunately.

I’ve been tagged to do this meme. So, okay, here you go.

7 Things To Do Before I Die

1. Pay off all of my debts.
2. Live somewhere bigger and more liberal than Indianapolis.
3. Get my shit organized.
4. Visit all habitable continents of the world, more than once.
5. Maybe loose a little fat and gain some muscle?
6. Be able to make global telephone calls for a flat, monthly fee. (PC-to-PC calls on Skype don’t count.)

7 Things I Can’t Do

1. Stop worrying about growing old and alone.
2. Eat anything made of squid.
3. Go to work early.
4. Practice religion, of any kind
5. Seemingly relax.
6. Fall asleep before midnight.
7. Women.

7 Things That Attract Me to Europe

1. It seems clean, but also dirty.
2. The history!
3. The food!
4. The accents!
5. Those wacky German people!
6. Nice cars!
7. The BBJ.

7 Things I Say

1. “Oh. My. God.”
2. “So, okay.”
3. “Eh, shit-balls!”
4. “You be sleeping with other peoples’ husbands — and you are wrong for that.”
5. “however”
6. “As long as I have a face, you’ll always have a place to sit.”
7. “Aww.”

7 Good Books

1. Umm …

7 Good Films

1. Sneakers
2. Contact
3. Doctor Zhivago
4. Clue
5. Pulp Fiction
6. Borstal Boy
7. Black Spankmaster 3

7 Blogs To Tag

1. Jason C.
2. Jason G.
3. Tony
4. Todd
5. Steph
6. Bob
7. Bryan

Dear Lamers,

By all means cease and desist the production of “music videos” by making your character in your favorite video game dance, recording it, and uploading it to Google — unless you can make it do something like this.

Sincerely,
Matt B.

I had my annual performance review here at work and things went very well. I have a nice raise coming and received some good feedback. I was very nervous, actually, because I always tend to expect the worst, but it worked out well and I’m relieved to have it done.

I was reading BBC News about the violent protests in Beirut and Damascus regarding a cartoon published in a Danish newspaper, depcting Mohammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban, and found this quote in the feedback section.

I find the violence shown by the Muslim protestors to be far more offensive than a cartoon could ever be. A cartoon is a drawing on a piece of paper. Slogans demanding people be beheaded in revenge and setting fire to buildings is outrageous. It seems to me that the Muslim protestors are behaving in a way that was satirised by the cartoon. — Lesley Morgan, Coventry, UK

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Anyone out there want to be Netflix Friends? Let me know your email address you use with Netflix and I’ll add you. Yay!