Three weeks to go. I can hear the clock ticking now. short-timer disease kicks in (like, playing Civ IV parts of the weekend….).

We’re starting to wind down the training; hopefully have it done by wednesday. I’ve got a few more coding pieces to do as well, but only one of them of any complexity. It’s all over but the, well, the end.

On the work front, we had one of those “uhoh” moments. In one of the training sessions, I was explaining the MySQl replication setup and how it’s maintained and monitored, and of course, one of the slaves had crapped out replication with an error. So I did an on-the-fly debug/diagnose/correct/verify session, and in about 15 minutes, we’d found the table that was out of sync, figured out how it got there, fixed it, got the replication fixed, and taken care of the underlying problem (when we did the first failover to a new master a whiel back, one subsystem didn’t get reconfigured; it updated the OLD master. it only updated a single table, though, so it wasn’t until that subsystem got updated properly when we failed over to the new Tiger database that the replication got hit with a table sync problem. oops).

and when I was done, doing that — from memory — one of the follks I work with asked the question “so, when you’re gone, who does that?” — and I had to say, honestly “I don’t know….”.

That made me sit back and realize that I’ve been lecturing for over 40 hours now; by the time I’m done this week it’ll be over 50. At any time, there are 4-8 people in the room listening to me lecture, plus it’s being videotaped and audio recorded (“chuqui unplugged”) for offline use. And part of me is looking at just how many resources are going into taking up the load caused by me leaving the project, and sometimes I wonder “wouldn’t it have been a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to just have listened to me and done something about my complaints when I was still willing to stick around?”

But that’s also a false statement — I’d decided to leave the project sooner or later. I’d originally thought november or december, they were asking for March. All they really did was convince me to move up the date a few months. In retrospect, I’m happy it worked out this way. And I think I’ll leave it at that for now.

but I’ll defer talking about this in detail until later. Now’s not the time.

Checked the scale this morning, first time in a week. I’m down 4 pounds from having given notice. Six more pounds and I’ll be back at where I was before this final round of stress began.

I must say I’m getting used to the lack of stress; this weekend when I wasn’t playing Civ, I actually got around to a couple of projects in the house taht have been sitting for months because I’ve been such a zombie on the weekends. With even a bit of luck, I’ll have the living room and dining room remodels ready for painting by christmas, after having not touched them since about February.

We’ve pretty much finalized the trip. North to port angeles, across the coho and on to salt spring island. then we’ll work back south hitting victoria and seattle, a drive-by of Powells on the way to the coast, then it looks like Astoria, cannon beach, Newport and Gold Beach, then maybe a day in Fort Bragg. we’ll get home a day or two before opening night for the Sharks — yes, it’s hockey season. and I have a blog to get running… (ahh! someone hide the Civ IV DVD. for a bit….)

The job front continues to bubble. nothing really to comment on — a couple of situations look really promising, and if the both turn into offers, it’d be a tough choice. I continue submitting resumes and talking to folks, and I’ll be doing some informal talks this week with people, and perhaps a phone interview on another position.

My mom is still firmly convinced someone at Apple is going to come to their senses and convince me to not leave, or something like that. Steve seems to be busy with other things, though. Besides, I still feel it’s time to rejoin the real world, and see how the universe does things.

So it’s onward, into the future, whatever that turns out to be. Amazing thing is, it turns out that leaving Apple after almost 18 years and moving on without a new job in hand is — well — a lot less stressful than my current job was. So I wish the person, whoever it is, who has to fix that replication problem when I’m not there all the luck in the world… I’m just glad the answer is no longer “me”. ohwell.

So it’s down to the last four weeks. On the Apple side of the world, we keep trying to turn over responsibilities and do training and making sure stuff is cleaned up and a new coat of paint the like.

The current plan is to spend the week lecturing more, and trying to get some admin scripts written, and whatever else we have time for; Friday will be my last day actively touching the system (in theory) or handling questions or requests. Then next week is an “on call” vacation, where I drop out of sight and we see what breaks (my hope: to get the path to the hot tub landscaped); then I come back one more week to manage that special project the wanted me around for and to go over what the week MIA brought up, and work to get it resolved.

And then I’m gone. And whatever that means. Currently, Laurie and I are planning a “get away from here” trip, and we’re both seriously looking forward to it. One where I don’t check email first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and the cell phone stays in the hotel room. I admit I’m looking forward to some serious quiet.

While I don’t regret the decision to extend out — it was good for the project and good for my finances — I’m starting to feel some serous short-timer disease. I can see the end, I wish it’d hurry. We keep plugging away, closing action items or handing them off. My only real regret is that it prevented me from getting to Vancouver for that Haida art display before it closed; but it was worth it. I think.

Looking for what’s next continues; I spent five hours Friday interviewing with one group; I came away feeling good both about the situation and about how I presented myself; we’ll see how they think. That makes two companies where there seem to be solid possibilities that have gone beyond “let’s talk and see if this makes sense” — both really good technical situations for me, both very different environments that’ll make for an interesting challenge in deciding should it come to that (one company is large, one is really a startup; one is joining a team, the other being the team, but with a chance of building one over time). A couple of other situations. A couple of other situations are at the “talk at lunch/talk on the phone” stage, and we’ll see how it develops. One is — really intriguing but complicated.

The one thing I’ve committed to myself is to not hurry into a new situations; I’m not going to remotely worry about “finding a job” until January or later; on the other hand, if I think the situation is right (job, package, commute, stress levels, people) I’d love to settle this sooner than later.

If there’s one thing extending at Apple has hurt, it’s building a portfolio (and working on sharpening skills); It hasn’t hurt (much), but I think it’d be very useful to have non-trivial sample code pieces for people to evaluate, and — look at www.plaidworks.com — and tell me that’s a worthy site to show folks as an example of web programming and web design (hint: not remotely). Artists and designers and photographers have done portfolios for years; I think programmers, especially where there are user-facing aspects to the code, should have one, too. This is one way being involved with open source projects can serve multiple masters, too — return to the community AND create samples for people to look at.

Right now, I think it’s 60-40 that the search will be settled before the trip. that puts me much further along the path than I expected to be, even without the extension at Apple. Given what I’ve seen others go through in job searches, I’ll count my blessings and be happy.

(update: imagine my amusement when is at down and looked at a calendar and realized it’s not three weeks, it’s four. TWO weeks to Labor Day, the labor day week off, then the week back for the special project and final cleanup… Well, having two weeks to clean up my todo list actually makes me a lot more comfortable, but on the other hand…. sigh… and have I mentioned that monday morning’s suck, especially when you wake up early with pounding sinuses?)

Sorry for the relative quiet. The good news is, I survived the product launch of the Mac Pro that happened at WWDC. The bad news is, it took a bunch of really long days because we were crunching to be ready right down to the hairy nubs. It’s that perfect spot, where you can’t quite decide if you love the adrenalin more than you hate the stress. (hint: I’ve finally voted on hating the stress).

I was pretty much a zombie by thursday, but I took most of the weekend off and life looks a lot better. Even better, my new mini arrived, so I spent part of the weekend rewiring the office to replace the G5 tower with the new box (Intel, of course).

(what, you think I’d suddenly run off and start buying Dell?)

The Job search continues. Four more weeks at Mama Apple (although I hope to ake one of them as vacation); Laurie and I are now planning on heading out of town once that’s over for a couple of weeks or so; it’ll be nice to not have to heavily structure a trip around “be back by” dates, or even whether here’s wi-fi in the hotel. We’re going to do something we’ve wanted to do for a while, which is head off onto the islands (probably salt spring) for a few days to explore. the current plan is to spend time in Victoria and Seattle, and skip Vancouver (sigh. by extending my time to mid-september, I’m going to miss out on Raven Travelling; I did get the book, however, and it’s quite good — if you’re going to be in vancouver, see the exhibition!), and head home via the coast spending some time in cannon beach; I might put a night in in Astoria, since it’s a town I want to explore a bit. we’ll see.

Depending on how work (or non-work) goes, I’m going to try to get a week in at Yellowstone before it snows to get some serious photography in. and I’d love to get back to yosemite for the fall colors. we’ll see.

A couple of company’s I’ve talked to have really intrigued me; my intent wasn’t to take something unless it seemed perfect until January, but I’m finding I”m tempted by a couple of options that are in the mix.

this search has had me thinking — I took my first job at age 12, delivering newspapers. Since that time, the longest I’ve been unemployed is six weeks. Even in high school, I did something; many times, I had a couple of gigs, plus school, plus athletics, plus other school stuff (school newspaper, speech, theater, whatever). Great training for my current life…

Best line in any of the interviews in the last week: “you’ve been at Apple for 18 years? That’s like 4 lifetimes in silicon valley time”.

And I don’t regret any of it — but some days, I sure feel like I’m that old..

oh, boy, 1AM. off to sleep… hopefully, this week is a week to catch up on blogging, since I sure didn’t last week… Lots to talk about, and maybe even stuff worth the electrons to publish with…

Chuqui 3.0: Reality sets in…:

And on the new job front: one interview this week, which I thought went pretty well (I’m a bit rusty….); intriguing opportunity, so we’ll see how it goes. had a couple of other folks want to talk, but they were all at OSCON (and I wasn’t! whine), so it was hard to get things started.

End of another week, start of the next.

One big thing that happened was I sat down with my management and we talked over my leaving and the transition of what I do (and know) to the rest of the team and the new teams being brought in to help shoulder the load and move things forward. We both agreed that my original term date made things tight, and they had a couple of special projects they really wanted me involved in, and so with a little persuasion, I agreed to extend my time @ Apple a bit longer. The current term date is now 9/15, but I expect to be able to take a week (maybe 2) of vacation during that time, and come back for a special project the week of 9/11 that I can’t say anything about now…. This actually is a change that wins for everyone, because the teams and I have more time to make sure the landing is soft and everything transfers cleanly, and I don’t have to eat vacation and savings and etc looking for a job, so it wasn’t TOO hard to convince me. And we all agree that the work schedule I’m keeping is working, so my stress levels are happy, too (well, not today; woke up to a bunch of pre-WWDC stuff I’m trying to untangle, but we’ll get there). Hey, how often can you go public that you’re looking for a job, and your director thinks he got a great bargain out of the arrangement? (heh).

I gotta say everyone’s been very positive and professional and pro-active, and it’s made it easy to want to help make this transition a success. I’m a little surprised at how quiet things have been from elsewhere @ Apple about possible positions (I know my current group wants me to get over all this and come home, but I just don’t think that’s in my best interest, or even, frankly, the project. I’ve been very impressed with how the architect who’s taking over has been taking a fresh look at things and coming up with new ideas and options; never underestimate the potential advantage of having a fresh set of eyes look at things). I continue to wander the halls of Apple with a signboard saying “will work for food”, but so far, it’s been quiet. I have to admit, part of me is ready to join the real world, anyway, so I’m not really pushing it too hard, either. But there’s been a lot of “don’t know what we’ll do without you”, but very little “so let me convince you to stay”, other than out of my current group… but while I appreciate what my management’s doing, I still think it’s best to follow the course already set….). there are definitely areas I’d enjoy working (Aperture, say, and I’ve always said I wanted to be a product manager/evangelist some day…)

In any event, I had a second interview this week (also through a direct contact by a friend who works there; folks, if there’s one thing you need to realize about the industry, it’s that contacts and networking matters; The more you let your company stuff you in a cave, the more they load you with extra work so you stop spending time with friends and getting out and meeting people, the harder it’ll be for you to find that Next Job. And don’t think companies aren’t more than happy to encourage you to cloister yourself and “go monk” for them; just don’t expect them to pay you extra to do it.

A second thing I’m realizing: if you don’t keep working on updating and improving your skill set, you’re dead. I’ve always been serious about figuring out the next stuff and getting my hands in it, and despite that, I feel a bit behind the 8-ball on some stuff. I’m working to pick it up again. This is another place where companies can really screw you over if you aren’t careful; if they aren’t willing to help you develop your career, make sure you do it yourself — if you can’t justify to them going to conferences, and can’t afford the time or money to go on your own, then commit to putting time into studying things on your own. Buy books on things and study them; or sit down and spend time with places like Yahoo Developer Network. A few samples can make a big difference.

This is especially true in the web space, where things are moving very fast. If you’re in the web space at all — you need to have a portfolio, just like a graphic designer or a tech writer might; and that portfolio should show off your ability to do page building and web techniques. I don’t (that’s going to change), and I feel like it’s a big missing piece; saying you can deal with javascript and/or ajax and/or css is one thing, having pages you’ve built they can look at is a huge advantage. All the stuff I have easily visible is so 2000, and I think that hurts. If you do this over time; when you decide it’s time, you can have it, or you can stop to build it. I’d rather have it.

And it’s important to remember: the stuff you do for your current employer may not be usable as a portfolio. And increasingly on the web space, it’s about good code and usability and interactivity (both javascript and ajax), so screen dumps of stuff inside someone else’s firewall aren’t that useful, and may violate your company IP rules to boot. So build yourself stuff you’re proud of that people can poke at, even if they’re a set of one page samples.

Now, having said all that… the second interview had some plusses and minuses. I thought I did pretty well on the technical and general market strategy of the company, but I also sat down with their VP of marketing for a while, and that may have been one of the worst interviews I’ve had in my life — we got off into customer targets and web designs and the such, and while I’d looked into the company and what it was doing well enough, I didn’t know the overall market well enough for my tastes, and I felt many of many answers were either too simplistic or plain old wrong. really not happy with that one, and it was a lack of research into the space the company lived in, as opposed to the work the company was doing. Goes to show you never can do too much research, and you never know what they may be interested in knowing. Now, for the position I was talking to them about, that might not be fatal, but I don’t think I gave the impression I wanted to.

Have one phone interview going next week, and two others pending being scheduled. Other stuff seems to be bubbling, also. When I sat down and started thinking thinking about this, I made a list of companies that I wanted to target (“I want to work for YOU!”), and it’s nice that a number of those are responding with some interest.

(What are those companies? While I’m being discrete on who I’m talking to, I don’t mind saying that the companies on my original “A” list were Flickr, Yahoo, O’Reilly and Associates, Netflix, and Six Apart; they all were doing interesting things, seemed to have a positive work culture, and used technologies that my skill set seemed compatible with.. I realize, typing this, that one other company I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while should have been on that list: Socialtext. and I’ll remedy that later today…. None of these, if you read my blog, are probably huge surprises. )

There are other companies I’d put on that “A” list, but they’re java shops and I’m just digging in, so for programming oriented things, I’m not a good candidate (yet). And I have a list of companies I’m not pursuing right now, either, but it’s short. One is Adobe, both because of the way they treated Laurie before she left and the noise I keep hearing about how well the Macromedia merger is going from the people we know there (the phrase that pays: door to door). The other is Google; that might warrant it’s own blog post at some point, but for now, I’ll just say that I’ve talked to enough folks who are working there or who’ve interviewed there to feel that it’s culture just isn’t one I’m compatible with. and I’ll leave it there). One company I had on that list, Sun, I’ve decided to pull off, and I”ll talk about THAT when I have a chance, too, but there are some signs that maybe the worst of the pain is over and they aren’t going to be the next SGI…. more later.

What am I applying for? that’s been an interesting question I’m still figuring out, beyond “looks interesting. I think I’m qualified” — but it’s included everything from really serious PHP/Perl Geek type positions to MySQL/DBA positions to operations type work to engineering manager, and occasionally off into product manager, and a few resumes into marketing-oriented positions where I think my background is particularly strong. I’ve had some people ask me if I was interested in professional services, which I’m honestly just starting to think through. It might be an interesting shift in focus. I might have to start wearing Dockers more often…

I’m trying to stay south-bay local right now, with Caltrain and city-based jobs for the right situation; some of that is preference, some of that is the logistics of life. had some feelers from other places (portland, for one. I expect if we do take a trip, I might wander up and talk to them a bit further). The only real reason we’re hesitating on relocation is that we’re just finishing up landscaping (and trying to push the internal remodelling forward) on the house, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get to live and ENJOY what we’ve done here. I don’t want to be someone who moves as soon as it’s finished to start on the next house (but I will, for the right offer).

Work has been a combination of trying to push key projects forward to points where I can disconnect from them; finished up one key special project (I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill myself); afternoons have generally been in a room with the teams lecturing on the project. the 30,000 foot view took about 7 hours, and we’re now going through in more detail about all of the functionality (and what I see as warts, things to improve, areas I’ve flagged for future features and improvements, etc…) — as well as getting all of that in the bug database. I dunno about you, but four hours of lecture a day is draining, not leaving a lot of energy for blogging or stuff, so the imaging reality blog got put on hold, as did the stuff I’m doing after that. Hopefully, this week will be a bit easier, since I think we’ll be mostly done with the long lecture sessions towards the end of the week.

So, things are moving, in generally positive ways. It’s nice to know I can attract an interview, and nobody’s outright rejected me yet (and I haven’t rejected anyone, either). The stress is down a bunch, the weight is down a bit, and it looks like we’ve got a good chance at a soft landing for the project, which was something I was really hoping to achieve.

of course, I haven’t touched the camera in about two weeks, and I think I’m going to get the hell away from the computer for a bit and remedy that…. back later.