Personal - Up & Down

The previous post was down. This is up.

I've had a perfectly good time this past weekend. Got to talk at length with a guy I had known for two years whom I've never taken the time to really talk to before. He turned out to be the kind of fellow I can pleasantly disagree with. He's a religious nationalist, a rather rare thing in military high-tech. Talking to him made me more conscious of the needs of the observant minority in service (with whom I sympathize) and of my own beliefs (which today I can formulate at best as "I'm pro separation of morality from religion"). We've agreed to continue the conversation through the mail.

The most recent batch of IT-girls, or at least the sample I got to talk to, was really sub-par. I got a very strong feeling of channeling Prof. Snape. Extreme mediocrity, incompetence and professed complete lack of interest in the subject matter is infuriating. How am I expected to work with those? Sure hope for some responsibility from the people handling their assignments.

Last week got stressed out because of some "legacy" blunder at work. Legacy systems/code/support is a terrible thing and I fully intend to do everything in my power to modernize the things and ditch the ball and chain, ASAP (meaning "in the next three years"). Thankfully, I have my CO's complete support.

Have been working on an unusual skunkworks project. This time it's educational, and most of the work-hours went into a PowerPoint presentation (a first for me). It's highly technical and is intended to get my colleagues to think about certain technicalities I believe code monkeys should be aware of, but was astonished to find out nearly none are. I tried to make it less boring by appealing to their competitive spirit. I hope to find out this week if I succeeded. The general theme is "contemporary microprocessor and compiler technologies", and full disclosure will follow presentation at work.