Resignation still stands

Yup, I got to talk to this managing consultant yesterday. He described some of the projects their teams are working on. They all sound good. I’m not really picky with whatever projects I’m given to work on.

But.

I’m still standing with my resignation.

Why? It’s a job. Java, J2EE (or Java EE nowadays), technology in general, is only a job. I get paid to code, and I code. While I may draw the line at touching VB, and doing  the clerical work of manual data updates for 300+ records, coding is just a job for me. It’s something I do to make an honest living. There really is no compelling reason for me to stay on now, even if they offer me a project that’ll get me to the US or whatever. I could just as well code in the new job waiting for me, as code in my current company.

So why leave in the first place? Long story. Basically I got stuck with no-brainer production support stuff, like bug fixes I can do in one day. And the bug fixes don’t come often either. That and I’m also left to do clerical work, like cleaning up the aforementioned 300+ records.

Besides, all other things being equal, money still talks — and I’m already looking forward to that new and greener pasture I’m set to go to in a few weeks!

Resignation blues: offer and counter-offer

I filed my resignation last Friday. I stated that I was given a chance to work with really technical and challenging projects, and that I’d accepted this offer. My boss was caught off-guard. He asked me to see him anytime at his office, and I did so late afternoon yesterday.

He was really grasping for the right words to say to me. In the end, he offered to give me a chance to work with another team, a team that handles US-based projects, and that would give me travel opportunities to the US. He set me up with a meeting this coming Monday with the manager for that team. My boss asked me to give me a chance to “fight for me”, so I agreed to the meeting.

I hate it when some manager dangles that “US travel opportunity” in front of me, thinking that I’d bite. I don’t know about other Filipino geeks, but money and travel (even if it’s to the US) have never been very high on my priorities. Modesty aside, I’m already earning what would be management-level pay in other companies, and just saying that I’ll “have a chance to work in the US” just doesn’t appeal to me anymore.

To a geek, what matters is the technology. Now unless the offer is to work on some military project that requires top-secret clearance, I doubt if any US company uses that much different tech from whatever companies are using here in the Philippines. I mean, Java is Java wherever you work, whether it’s in the US or in the Philippines or in Singapore or whatever. Solaris is Solaris, wherever it’s being used. Oracle is Oracle, whether it’s installed on US servers or RP servers. Besides, with US companies outsourcing to the Philippines, there’s practically no difference whatsoever with the technology, whether you work in the US or just here, locally.

So. I’ll ride along with the meeting on Monday, just to give my boss a “chance to fight for me”. But I doubt I’ll be convinced.

30-minute muscle workouts

No, it isn’t some [insert favorite expletive here] aerobic or pilates or whatever kind of thing. I’m talking about weight training, to build muscle and strength.
I’d been thinking of a way I could work out during the week, even while having to go to work everyday. Just to give a brief background of my situation, I work in Makati, and I live in Project 8, Quezon City. It takes me 1 and 1/2 hours to drive to the office, making a total of three whole hours on the road each day, just going to and from work. So I spend 9 hours at the office, and three hours travelling every day. It doesn’t really leave much room for working out.

Actually you could probably squeeze in an hour of gym time either before going to work or after office hours. I know some guys who do that. However, I’m one of those people who probably think too much and find a hard time sleeping early, so finding time to rest and start heading off to sleep is at a premium for me. Also, I’m familiar enough with my mind and body to know that if I work out at night, I’d probably be too hyper to get a good night’s sleep then.

So until now, I’ve only had time to work out on weekends. I haven’t been able to figure out how to squeeze in a good workout during weekdays — until I came upon the October issue of Muscle and Fitness! They had a really great article about 30-minute workouts, and I chose to adapt my own workout to one of their training programs.

What I got now is a whole body barbell workout that incorporates really heavy weights, five exercises (six if you count the abs exercise), two sets per exercise — with the first set consisting only of six reps, while the second set has 8 reps — and 30-second rest intervals between sets and only the time it takes to set up the next exercise after each body part exercise. I tried it over the last weekend, and I’ve been able to clock in exactly 30 minutes, and that includes warm-ups at the start and cooling down at the end.

The really heavy weights involved, makes the whole workout really intense, even if it only lasts 30 minutes. Enough to make your whole body sore a few days afterwards. Using this particular training program, I can now see myself working out during the week, in addtion to working out on weekends. I’ll start trying out weekday workouts after I’ve settled in, in my new geek job.

Like I always say, there’s nothing wrong with being a smart tech geek and still being a strong and fit musclehead.

Disturbance in the (work) force

Well now, I haven’t been able to blog as much as I want to lately. The reason being, I’m about to change jobs and I needed to tie up some loose ends before moving on.

It’s still a Java dev job, but the projects sound lots more interesting than what I’m working on now (or not working on, depending on how you look at things), and the pay is definitely way better.

The project I’m set to work on when I start with the new company is really cool, tech-wise. I’d blog about it, but it’s one of those ‘if I told you, I’d have to kill you’ kind of deals. No, seriously!

Yes. Seriously.

Headbanging

I always was a headbanger, what with my taste in punk and indie rock, but I never thought I’d ever bang my head literally!

Yesterday on the way out of an office, while looking down to my shirt pocket and reaching for my ID tag, I ran headlong into a freakin’ glass wall. I banged my head and my knee and made a loud “thud”. I’m sure everyone in the vicinity heard that and I could feel their eyes on my back as I hurriedly went out the door and ducked into the elevator hallway, muttering under my breath, ow ow ow ow.

Man, that hurt!

I actually got a bit dizzy from the impact and I had to take the rest of the day off. It would’ve been really funny, if it weren’t for the pain and the dizziness. Actually, as time goes on, it does seem funnier now, but yesterday I was really out of it. I had to lie down and I only started feeling ‘normal’ later that evening, sometime after dinner.

The big lump on my head is now practically gone, but it was only towards the later part of the day that I realized I’d banged my knee even harder than my head. My knee still has some swelling now. Hopefully though, by Saturday my knee should be fine, so I can work out without any problems.

Blogging from Writely

So I’m checking out Writely right now. UI looks alright, even if the icons are a bit big, almost cartoony. They say you can publish to your blog with this, and the drop-down list you get when choosing which blog to publish to, lists a lot of blogging services, including Blogger (naturally!), LiveJournal, and WordPress. I don’t care much about the others, but I want to try out posting to WP.

Before posting, however, I want to check out a couple of things first….

1. The quick brown fox jumps over the
2. lazy

• dog, er bear

The bear ate the fox. Wasn’t quick enough!

Saving to Word document format…. Cool, it works! Well, that’s not really much of a test, but for basic writing and exporting to MS Word format, it works just fine.

There’s options to tag a document, but these don’t have any counterpart in Word, so they really aren’t saved to a Word document. They’ll be used in posting to a blog, though.

So far writely seems cool. It’s still in beta so I’m sure there must be some bugs somewhere that I haven’t encountered yet. But for now, I’m happy with it and I think I’ll use it more.

Update: will try to update this post on WP from writely….. Hmmmm. Apparently, you can republish your post from writely, but the date will be changed to the current date instead of the original date of the post. Not quite I had in mind for a re-post; I was hoping it’ll allow me to edit my post without changing the original post date. Ah well.

Dodging workplace bullets with Workfriendly.net

I’m currently reading Google news via workfriendly.net. Workfriendly.net is cool — it’s a web proxy that opens a browser window that is so… “Web 2.0-ed” or “AJAXified” that it looks like an MS Word window! It allows a user to look like he’s reading a word document instead of reading some website. Of course, the site’s original formatting is lost in favor of a more Word-document-ish appearance, but all the content remains intact. It’s great for uhm, pretending appearing to work during a very well-deserved break.

Standard forms still work on the Workfriendly MS-Word-lookalike renedered webpage, but so far I haven’t been able to login to my WP account and post from there. Must be something with the WP login UI not really being a standard form, but some fancy-shmancy AJAX thing.

I haven’t been able to use Yahoo! Mail or gmail via Workfriendly either. Too bad. Still a good effort though!

There’s also a “Boss Key” at the upper left of the Workfriendly MS-Word disguise window. Putting the mousepointer over it instantly replaces the page you are viewing with some HR motivational mumbo-jumbo that talks about time management and how to overcome procrastination. What boss doesn’t want his peon reading up on stuff like that? Heheh. And when it’s finally safe to read your web content of choice once more, just mouse over the “Read” key, again on the upper left, where the “Boss key” used to be. At which point you can resume reading your google news or whatnot to your heart’s content.

Now if only they’ll let people log into their mail or blog accounts, that would be just perfect! I know, it would probably be a coder’s nightmare to do (assuming it is at all possible in the first place), but still….