I’ve wrapped up my first week at the new Job, working on process control and automation for our research and development labs. I spent most of my week getting up to speed, as is the case with most new jobs. I have been able to make at least some contributions in my first week, but it will be some time until I feel like I’ve made a real impact. The lab team was recently brought under the umbrella of IT, like in the past 2-3 months, and it is obviously making waves, and causing some slow down, but in my opinion it will be a change for the good as they will be able to benefit more from the IT side tools and people more than they would have before, but as with any major change it is slowing things down initially as people adjust.

Well we had a house party this last weekend and it all went very well, Whitney and I are now engaged and she is rocking on the wedding plans. We’re not even engaged for a week and she has already setup the venue, dates, and we have the wedding party planned, things are a movin! It was nice to have most of our friends and some of our family around for the event, I managed to keep it a secret from basically everyone.

Well is has been a fun week, and more fun to come. I did several phone screens last week that have landed me face-to-face interviews. It is some exciting stuff and there are two places that I am really, really hoping work out. I had to kick my JavaEE application server administration knowledge into high gear though. In the past I have done some basic administration on Tomcat and Glassfish servers, but never any really deep dives into the tech.

Well, it’s Friday! Yay! We’ve had an interesting week here in our new home. Last week our kitchen lights decided to go out, all at the same time, so electrical issue not bulb issues. We called out the electrician who ran some new circuits to the office for us, and he came out almost immediately and gave us a temporary fix (as this was Friday night at like 6pm) so we had lights until he came back on Wednesday.

Some time back I lent a friend a book on Java programming, with the hopes that he would pick it up and eventually lend us a hand with our games. He did enjoy it, went through the standard hazings that you do as a programmer, getting SDKs setup, environmental variables registered, learning how important a semicolon is, and so on. Not too long after my manager started talking about that we wanted to open a Junior position on the team.