Monday, January 28, 2002

shockme on 2002-01-28T22:14:21

It is absolutely amazing how little I accomplished today. First, we had a meeting from 11:00 - 12:00 about how to improve the workflow in our area. Having been on the job for less than a month, I had previous little to contribute. The main gripes of the group seemed to be

1. Importance - the web programmer's group got 4 new programmers and we got 20 new severs to maintain. Much to my shocked dismay, we (4 of us) now support in excess of 60 servers; and
2. Training - every year we have a training budget that mysteriously gets spent on something else. Every year it is the same story: Training is important and management supports it - however, it never happens.

The "trainer" guy who was brought in to lead our discussion stated that management was really behind this and that our input was very important. My response (privately to one of my teammates) was that if management supported this movement with the same commitment that they supported training, then we were wasting our time.

Then, I spent the afternoon ensuring the mGen system was installed correctly and speaking with the mGen technical support group on the telephone. The only things I accomplished were

1. tweaking a perl script;
2. writing a short perl script to reformat a few output files;
3. installing apache and mod_perl on my workstation; and
4. chasing a bug in my diary.pl script

Pretty depressing, especially when you consider that my number one priority for the day was beginning the migration of our email server.....

It's funny how new things tend to freak me out. Sure, I'm fine with most stuff. New car payment? No problem. New job? Let's go. More beer? Line 'em up, baby - I'll knock 'em down. But when it comes to programming, I tend to tense up. For the longest time, I've avoided using ( ? ) in my SQL statements. And it's so stupid, because implementing it was so easy....I need to losen up.