In memory of Stephen Shepard
I found out earlier today that a coworker of mine, Stephen Shepard, passed away earlier this morning. He was 54 years old.
A few weeks ago I posted that I was not feeling well. On that same day Steve was not feeling well and had decided to work from home. A few days later I came back to work, dragassing as usual after not feeling well to find out that Steve was in the hospital.
I am not going to go into any details here because I think that would not be in the interest of Steve's family. Needless to say, he went into ICU on that day. He was showing signs of improvement, albeit minor signs, and was schedule to be transferred from hospital he was in to another hospital. That transfer took place this morning.
And shortly after that Steve died.
It was a rather shocking piece of news to get today. It was shocking enough to find out that he was in the hospital a few weeks ago, but to find out that he passed away after hearing that he was doing better floored my entire department at work. It is a hard thing to have to go through.
My heart goes out to his wife and kids. They were all able to spend his last days with him which is something that I would certainly be grateful for. I am still just reeling a little bit from the entire experience. I know how hard it is to lose a loved one at such a young age. Makes me want to go home and hug my kids really big.
Am I keeping my options open?
From time to time (almost every day, sometimes more than once a day) I get contacted either by email or by phone from recruiters that all seem to be asking the same question: Robert Gonzalez, are you keeping your employment options open? Well, rather than repeat myself I think it would be best to write it down for all to see.
In order for me to even consider a change right now a prospective employer would have to meet, at a minimum, these criteria:
- Salary: $110K per year base, not including bonuses
- Bonus: 10% of base, preferably quarterly
- Full health insurance for me and my dependents
- At least two weeks of vacation per year
NOTE: If the job is in San Francisco and it is not within a few blocks from a BART station I will be asking for more salary.
Things that would sweeten the deal:
- Any kind of a signing bonus, but cash and Macbooks speak the loudest
- Telecommuting options
Please understand that I am putting this out here not to try to be an arrogant ass or to try to pump you for money. I ask for these things because A) I am very spoiled in my current position and it would take something this significant to lure me away; and B) the current job market will bear these criteria.
The need for seasoned PHP developers is growing daily as just about every startup is looking toward the LAMP stack for cost savings, scalability and transportability. More and more companies are looking for PHP developers (or programmers that can learn quick) to fill these roles.
Unfortunately developers in Silicon Valley have appeared to either not taken an interest in PHP as a language or have abandoned it in favor of Python or Ruby. The pool from which to scout PHP talent is ever dwindling. There are plenty of good programmers in our area (think Java, C++, C#, .net, etc) that can learn the language fast enough. But there aren't nearly enough developers that have well rounded, solid experience with the language. I do. So I can ask for more.
That said, if you are not totally frightened but what you see here in terms of my requirements feel free to send me your requirements or those of your client. I am open to looking at just about anything. But rest assured I am not jumping ship for just anything.
And the TV says to the Robert “Ha!”
I may have spoke too soon when I said that my TV was healed. I thought it was. It turned on the last time I pushed the power button. It turned off too. But not when I pushed the button. No, it turned off because it wanted to.
After some research I found that this is a common problem with older TV. Basically every TV (tube based TV I believe) has something in them that accumulates voltage. The voltage that is accumulated in the TV is eventually dispersed either through a resistor or through being powered down. If the resistor goes then the TV can accumulate so much voltage that it can shut itself down due to short circuiting.
When this happens the only thing that really lets the TV off the hook is unplugging it. Apparently unplugging it allows the pent up voltage to disperse, slowly, until the circuit can actually close itself based on the voltage levels. And I believe that is what happened in my case.
I think the reason my TV "came back to life" when it did the other day was because my wife was thinking ahead and unplugged to minimize power usage by it. So when I plugged it in the other day the voltage that had shut it down the last time was completely dispersed and it allowed the TV to turn on.
What I am finding out now (I have spent some time researching this) is that if the TV ever decides to just shut down all by itself all I need to do is unplug it for about an hour and then plug it back in and turn it on. And you know what? It works.
So now I feel a little better about my TV. No, it isn't healed. But at least I know how to medicate it when it decided to be cranky with me.
My name is Robert and I like to do drawerings
I am faced with a learning experience. An experience that includes drawings, diagrams, UML and, unfortunately, Microsoft. I am a huge proponent of learning. However I am teh sux0r when it comes to drawing. And I am a savage Microsoft hater.
So it seems only natural that I would be totally against the concept of learning something that I suck at within the context of a Microsoft application environment. But I have some amount of motivation to do this. See, I have a client that is a recovering engineer and relies heavily on visual aids for planning, structure and architecture. His tool of choice for handling diagramming is Microsoft Visio.
Now I am not one to tell anyone how to do anything. If you want to work in a Microsoft environment that is between you and your capacity to handle the frustration of working with any software from Microsoft. But I was assured that Visio was outside the norm for Microsoft in that it was originally developed by a company that was eventually bought by Microsoft for the purpose of their Visio application.
So I am confident that this learning experience will not be nearly as bad as I thought it was originally going to be. I sure hope that I am right about this.
Standing up to the enemy
A few nights ago I held a little mini bible study with the kids in regards to something that is very close to my heart right now: spiritual warfare and battling in the spirit. If you are not a Christian what I am about to share might not have any meaning to you. If you are a Christian then this is, I believe, the type of thing you should be doing everyday. I say this as someone who does this, not your all too typical Christian that says you should do one thing and turns around and does something else (of which I am guilty but not in the area of spiritual warfare).
A great place to start is the 12th chapter of the book of Revelation. This chapter describes John's vision of the birth of Christ and the battle that was raging as Mary delivered Jesus. It also describes the fall of Satan, his subsequent casting to the Earth and his rage with those that choose to follow Christ:
And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.
Revelation 12:17
It is my belief that Christians face a very real enemy. Yes, I believe we are the product of a Creator and that we, each person ever born, is part of His plan for glory. I also believe in angels, the warriors that battle on your behalf and intercede for you daily. No, I do not believe that angels are cute little fat babes with wings and red cheeks. Nor do I believe that angels are female in form. No, I believe angels are huge beings that bring fear and astonishment with them where ever they go. Why else would the first words out of their mouths always be "Fear not."?
To that end I also believe our enemy, satan, has a plan as well. When he was cast to the Earth a third of those big scary warrior angels went with him and seek after the same thing he seeks:
The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.
John 10:10
Christians then are embroiled in a way every day as satan tries to look for ways to attack and best us. Demons, fallen angels, are dispatched according to his plan and take their jobs very seriously. But God also has a plan for use. One that involves victory, glory and success. To that end God ha made us a few promises that we can live our lives out daily in:
No weapon formed against you shall prosper, And every tongue which rises against you in judgment You shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, And their righteousness is from Me," Says the LORD.
Isaiah 54:17
And my God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:19
In addition to our supply and our overall stability Jesus gives us authority in His name to do the things He can do (I also believe this stems from us being created in the image and likeness of God) through the use of our mouths:
Then the seventy returned with joy, saying, "Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name."
And He said to them, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.
Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven."Luke 10:17
For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, "Be removed and be cast into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.
Mark 11:23
So Jesus answered and said to them, "Assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but also if you say to this mountain, "Be removed and be cast into the sea,' it will be done.
Matthew 21:21
So putting this all together you can come up with the notion that if you are a Christian there is an enemy that will attack you on the regular and he will come after you with everything he has. But he will not be successful in his attempts to snafu you because he has no authority over you. In fact, you have authority over him. And you can exercise that authority just by opening your mouth and commanding him to be bound. We have that ability because demons and even satan himself are subject to us. They must do as they are commanded.
So my lesson concluded with me teaching my kids that when we are at battle, every day we are at battle, that we speak to our enemy directly and with purpose, not mincing words or feelings, and commanding the enemy to return what he has stolen from use and to keep his hands off of anything that he might think adequate to touch. We speak to our mountains, broken cars, broken TVs, bare bank accounts, collection calls and tell them to recover. We speak to our physical bodies, our minds, our feelings of anxiety, depression, anger, wrath, contention, discontent and we command those feelings to be bound.
Rebuking the enemy is the fastest, easiest spiritual battle you can fight. "if you say to this"... It sometimes requires more than just that to work your enemy over, but we must keep trying and keep fighting. We have been given authority so that we might use it to the glory of God. The enemy is trying to take that authority from you or at least make you believe you have none. Because he comes to kill, steal and destroy.
But if I am reading my God right I know he has come so that not only will I not lose what I have I would have more and plenty of it. This is very reassuring, especially in this time when it seems like the enemy is consuming me and my possessions. I think, no, I know he needs to be stopped and I know I have to the equipment to do it.
"if you say to this"... I just pray that I continue to fight the good fight everyday and that in all things God gets the Glory. And I will continue to speak to these mountains.
ZendCon 2008 – Day 3
Sometimes you can pick them well and sometimes you can't. That was the story of my day.
After missing the morning session that I wanted to go to (Elizabeth Smith's talk on Architecting for PHP5 happened to be in the smallest room and was full 10 minutes before the start) Jason and I made our way to the big room where we learned about several lesser known security vulnerabilities in PHP. Stefan Essar has a knack for finding security issues in PHP and moving the fixes into production rapidly (his technique is a little, well, cutting edge but gets the job done with a minimum of carnage).
After Stefan's talk we attended the "State of Ajax" keynote given by Ben Galbraith of Ajaxian. All I can say about this talk is WOW. I did not know that the web was headed in the direction it is headed and I am so excited to be a web developer right now because what is going to be produced over the next few years is going to be butt-kicking goodness. I am just plain excited and looking forward to tapping into this technology. Plus Ben was using his iPhone as a remote to control his presentation on his Mac, and he showed how to use a Wii with Javascript to make a dart game for your computer.
From there things went a little downhill. Instead of hitting up Terry Chay's talk about "Making your frameworks suck less" in his uncon session I decided to listen to Chris Shiflett talk about security centered design. I think this was not the wisest choice I could have made. Terry Chay was running the gauntlet on foul language and involving his attendees while Shiflett, as much as I love this dude, just talked about, well, to be honest, I'm not really sure. It lulled me a tad and it was actually more entertaining to watch Terry Chay's talk on the #zendcon Twitter stream than it was listening to Chris (sorry Chris, I give you mad props for security but the talk was a little boring).
Thinking that I wanted to hit up Andrei Zmievsky's "VIM for PHP Programmers" talk next we headed up there to find that there were no tables in his class room. This made following in VIM very difficult so instead I changed gears and hit up Sebastian Bergmann's "Quickstart to Continuous Integration" talk. That, I think, was my first mistake. I totally misunderstood continuous integration I believe since I was not really able to follow along in that talk at all.
It got better though when I went to Eli White's talk on "High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques". His talk, while covering some high level ideas and principles, was easy to follow and offered a lot of good information to the listeners. If I ever get to the point where I get to deploy several servers I will be sure to dig up the slides from this talk because it was awesome for those that are interested in scaling applications to a large degree.
After Eli's talk we headed to dinner where we hung out a bit more with Brad Vernon over beers and snacks. And though I really, really wanted to go to the Yahoo! party, Jason, who was acting as my chauffeur for the evening had to hit the road so we took off and headed home. But the day was not a total loss. I was able to meet Andi Gutmans (the "nd" part of Zend) and Keith Casey. So overall it was an awesome day of learning, networking and meeting people I have really wanted to meet. I cannot almost not wait until tomorrow.
Catching up – Finally
Man oh man has it been a long couple of weeks of blogging. I have so wanted to write so much. And if you are reading this now it means that I have finally caught up to this point on my blog. What that means is that three weeks of daily blogs have been added to my blog because I could not find the time to handle them as they happened.
My blog so needed love I could not give it. Glad it can't divorce me because it would so have grounds.
Anyway, I am going to try to stay on top of things around here. Not saying I am going to. Just saying that I will try.
A call out to single, working parents
I am not exactly single. In fact, I am nowhere near that. No no, I am very married. But my wife, unfortunately, has been hit with a rather debilitating illness that renders her pretty much incapable of performing tasks that she used to perform regularly in the course of day.
What that means is that my workload has increased dramatically over the last few months. No longer can my wife spend time during the day doing laundry, washing dishes, teaching the kids, running errands, planning for and preparing meals, managing the finances and scheduling the calendar of events that is always exceedingly large in our house. And with these things being not done the onus falls on me to get them done.
Except I am not really in a position to take all of these things on in a given day. The reason is that in addition to taking care of all of the things that a stay at home parent (SAHP) would normally do I still have to work my regular day job (roughly 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM) in addition to client work I do on the side (which I usually work between 9:00 PM and 11:00 PM weekdays). Where in all of this do I get to take care of my home? Weekends? Not exactly, since I have to schedule client work for Saturdays as well. Sundays maybe, but only after about 1:00 PM since we usually go to church until then (unless my kids have a wicked strain of undying headlice).
All this leads me to one enormous question: how the bloody gripes do single working parents actually go about parenting their children while still managing the responsibilities of the home? I am finding this to be quite difficult and extremely frustrating as I watch my house get thrashed daily, my dishes get used but not washed daily, the laundry pile up daily and my kids go unparented daily. What is a parent supposed to do?
I am seriously feeling wholly inadequate to be a father right now. I feel like I am letting my kids down so bad. They hardly get to do anything. They never really get to go anywhere. They are almost as imprisoned in our home as I am. I feel guilty and I feel as though they deserve so much more than what I am giving them. All the while I am feeling less and less adequate as a provider as I watch my finances spiral out of control and continue to avoid certain telephone calls from certain 1-800 numbers that I am certain I don't know. 
If you are a single parent would you mind sharing some of your tips with me? I am fairly certain I am going to be into this situation for a while and would love to hear how some of the pros do it. I am at a loss to be perfectly honest. This is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life and everyday it gets harder. So any words of wisdom are much coveted and appreciated.
And if you can't spare that, could you spare some babysitting time? 
