The Daily Lemmonite

Working with Tonja the last couple of days we have updated this site to include a calendar of events (see right-hand column) that will help keep track of who is staying with mom each night.

Simply mouse over the red colored days to see the schedule. Clicking will provide more info when more is included. If you want to be able to add events to the calendar you will need to be a subscriber to the site. The best way to become a subscriber is to send an email request to me at jlemmon@rocketmail.com.

After server 4 years as the Elder’s Quorum president, i finally received my release, which was a bittersweet day for me. I fully support the new president, even though he has a very different approach to things than I.

My rest period did not last very long though, I was immediately called to the the Scoutmaster.

Now i have never been an advocate of the scouting program, but i love the outdoors, working with kids, and sharing what i know. This should be fun….

And to think, one year ago I was writing algorithms to model radiation dispersement with calculated shielding and cumulative bounce, and 3-D simulations of nuclear reprocessing plant anti-proliferation scenarios. I sure hope we drum up other work besides tools’-based development because I think this kind of work makes your brain lazy and you forget how to truly engineer software. Here’s my $5, enough whining already!

Anyway, I was able to be a little productive on Doc Center today. They had a SSL issue that I looked into and found. I didn’t actually change any code, because I am not sure where, and I am not comfortable with making changes in this environment.

I did, however, take in a Rockies game. It was a little rainy, but nothing too serious. It is supposed to snow later tonight. My daughters sent me pictures of the snow in IF. The home team won 12-5. The Braves’ pitcher had a rough third inning wherein he beaned two batters and gave up 6 runs, three of them coming in one swing of the bat. Not much of a fan of the NL, but there is just something about the atmosphere in a MLB park.

Hmmm. I guess I didn’t really understand the intention of my trip down here. Not surprising, given the lack of clear communication from which so many of us suffer. I was choosing to believe I was coming down here to be a major contributor on the PMIS project. Jude thought I was for the architect role, but what they want is someone to maintain (i.e. work defects) one small module of the overall dashboard backend. In fact, this module, while containing vital functionality, is very minimal in the overall scheme of things.

The sub contractor John Amason remains the architect for the changes intended for PMIS, and I agree with his design. However, and I think this is a product of the environment, I bore at the implementation strategies for developing anything in this manner. He is using tools (a.k.a. wizards) to write most of the code, which is fine and dandy, if you have people that know the tools, you want to surrender all design control to the authors of the tools, and you have lower-skilled people maintaining the code base (ref The Perils of Java School).

Maybe this is a me problem because it sure seems like this is how things are done in the business software development world.

The thing that always kills me is that whenever you use *tools* to build an app you are surrendering your control over the way things work. Doesn’t seem to bother people in this world, but it drives me freaking nuts!

When you use tools to generate your database, then more tools to generate your accesses to the database, you are losing normalization of the data. Doesn’t seem to bother people in this world, but it drives me freaking nuts!

When you use tools to generate your business objects and tools to generate your interface code, you are losing control over the OOD. Doesn’t seem to bother people in this world, but it drives me freaking nuts!

Anyway, I am not happy working in this environment, but it seems as if that is where I am stuck…

The fog in IF was a little thick this morning, so the plane took off a little late, but no big deal. The weather in Denver is overcast with rain and snow showers all day long. Getting from the office to my hotel was very easy at early-afternoon — took maybe 10 minutes. But at 5:00, rush hour (something we do not have in IF), it took over 40 minutes.

The hotel is a very nice hotel. I am staying at the Candlewood Suites and it is a very nice room.

As for the project, the PMIS Document Center, I am still familiarizing myself with it. I have some documentation but have yet to access the source code. I spent the day in the office hearing about the project from a bird’s-eye level, and even got a walk-thru from Jodi.

However, late in the day I got an email from Mieka from the DNA project needing a few things changed in the eComments database. So, after getting back to my hotel room I connected and made the changes, coordinating with Ty, who is also on travel in Seattle at the moment. This was all supposed to be complete last Thursday, but we did what we could for them because they needed it done. Consequently, I did not see any of Denver other than the 6 mile stretch between the office and my hotel.

I have often felt that gift cards are virtually worthless. Gift certificates just say that you don’t really want to spend any time thinking about the person, so here’s your card. I mean, rather than giving me a gift certificate to Bath and Body Works or Walmart or where ever, just give me the cash so I can spend it where I want. Much better.

That being said, there are times when they are good: if you are giving to a large group of people and cannot possibly individualize the gift, then they are great. If you are giving to someone who it would be inappropriate to individualize — like last year I gave a gift card to Walmart the girl who cleans my office because I felt she needed something, but it wasn’t right for me to give her a personal gift.

Well, I came across this article this morning that further illustrates my point:

According to Consumer Reports, more than a quarter of gift-card recipients don’t use all of them. About $8 billion went unredeemed last year, TowerGroup estimates, which was almost 10 percent of the amount given.

BTW: On the right is a photo of my elk trip this year. It was not a successful trip. First time in six years, and only the second in the nine years I have hunted elk here, that I did not tag one. I am not looking forward to buying beef….

Monday, and for all of next week, I will be in the mountains hunting elk. And after what happened over the weekend, I need to go run around in the hills and kill something: at 3:00 Monday morning I was woke up by my dogs barking, went into the living room to see what was going on – they have often barked at cats in the yard or the guy delivering the newspaper to the neighbors.

We have a lace curtain in the living room, so you can see thru them pretty good, and when I got into the living room I saw the dome light in our van in the driveway on and a man standing in the open door. Pure adrenalin, no thought, me and my dog busted out of the house and chased him – in my underwear – down the road and around the corner. When they resurface the roads out there they just tar them, drop the gravel, and let the cars pack it down, so it is pretty rough. Well, I slipped on the snow that was still there slamming my hands and knees on the pavement, which I didn’t feel till later, then I got up and chased more, but that roughed-in pavement really hurts the bare feet.

If I would have been wearing shoes I would have caught him. A couple more steps and I would still be beating him. I couldn’t calm down after that, never got back to sleep. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t catch him because I was out of my mind and you husband would probably have to arrest me for killing him. I couldn’t even form words. I wanted to threaten him and tell my dog to kill him, but all that came out was: AHH! YAH! GRAH! BAH!

Many, many hours later I started thinking that is was just some punk kid – I have a pretty good idea who – looking for CDs or loose change when all of the sudden some half naked crazy guy comes flying out of the door with his dog chasing the kid down the road. He probably didn’t get back to sleep either.

So, you remember the last year or so that I worked at the INL running SESAME and SINEMA, I was really liking running the show, and that was one of the hesitations I had for taking this job. Well, looks like I have that in spades now. I am excited about the possibilities that lay before me. That being said, I remain in a state of persistent reluctance as to my future; I have been burned by my hope in the past. But I have no regret in taking this job, and looks like the timing was finally on my side.

So I took Cortez up into the mountains with me to find an old dead deer. Two years ago I came across a dead deer, a fairly good sized buck, at the top of a mountain. Someone had shot it a day or two earlier and never found it, so I GPSed it and tried to find the head the next year. But, when I came back, it was all covered with snow and I had no luck. This time I went earlier, but the forest creatures must have held a funeral and buried it ’cause there is no trace of a dead animal on that mountain now!

But, we did jump some elk. We heard them, but never saw them. Still, the area stirs great things within me…

Hard to believe the summer is nearly over — for the kids anyway, they go back to school in less than two weeks. Woohoo!

The garden is producing like mad, and we are eating and bottling as much of it as we can keep up with. We’re gonna try to get one more camping trip in next weekend, hopefully to a place I took the boys last year above Palisades Lake called Bear Creek. But I hear there is very little water up there right now, plus the site was nothing like Loon Lake.

So last year at Bear Creek, in the very early hours of the morning, I heard a little creature in our camp digging thru the S’Mores makings we had left out so, thinking it was a raccoon, I unzipped the tent, shined the light on it, and stuck my head out ready to scare it away. But, ends up it was a skunk, so I just let it eat the Graham crackers and be on its merry little way, ’cause being sprayed by a skunk is not fun!