Ten years ago yesterday, one of my favorite authors passed away.  Douglas Adams wrote the five book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, among other excellent sci-fi series.  He holds a special place in my heart because his work was one of the first things that Tasha and I bonded over when we began dating.  He was a quirky, eccentric guy and while I didn’t subscribe to his beliefs (he referred to himself as a “radical atheist”) I shared his passion for technology and penchant for the weird.

So long, Douglas… and thanks for all the fish.

One of the most frustrating aspects of being a Dad is the relative powerlessness of it all.  The baby spent part of the night curled up happily with me (which was great) but shortly thereafter began screaming all night long.  I changed her, rocked her, fed her, walked her, sang to her, shhh’d her, swaddled her…. all to no avail.  Most of this occurred after Tasha had headed to bed, eventually I had to relent and wake her up.  After a short snuggle session with the baby, she’s now calm.

That’s the frustrating part… it seems there is nothing, short of being Tasha, that I can do to effectively soothe our baby.  That makes me feel like I am bearing a disproportionate amount of the baby-rearing responsibilities, and it makes me feel bad.  To cap it all off, I go downstairs to find that Joe had pooped all over himself so I had to take care of him as well!

Tasha has volunteered to take the monitor for the rest of the night so I can sleep.  I sure hope this gets easier soon.

It was a long day today… spent dutifully refactoring code.  My day ended up quite sourly with a late meeting from 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm… sadly positioned at that time in order to accomodate three remote teams.  It seems those meetings will continue in this fashion twice a month.  Not a major price to pay for progress, but it is frustrating to be made to work outside normal work hours.  We’ll do what we must to get the job done, but I did protest to my manager that we should work to use technology to enable our remote teams instead of inconveniencing everyone.  He agrees to a point, but was quick to say that everyone has to work this way in other global companies.  I don’t know about all that, but I’m going to do my best to minimize this time spent.

Tomorrow is going to be more coding, and I’m looking forward to that.  It’s supposed to be cold and rainy, perhaps even with some snow… so it’ll be a good day to focus on coding.  Now I’m heading to bed, hopefully Eve stays sleepy!

Today was a pretty average day at work… we had a somewhat thorny design problem to work out and after that my day was punctuated with pop-ins.  Normally this gets annoying after awhile, but it helped me get refreshed on a bunch of different topics and it made the day go by quickly.  The 80+ degree weather has caused most of the motivation to fly out of the office, as people’s thoughts turn to outdoor activities, yard maintenance yet undone, and anything but debugging more application code.  (At least my motivation went away in this fashion.)

After I got home from work, the evening was taken caring for Eve.  She’s been fussy lately, Tasha thinks that her nose is clogged up and bothering her.  Right now I’m waiting for her to wake up for her evening feeding.  So yeah… not much going on tonight.  Hopefully tomorrow is more fun.

Today marked Tasha’s first Mother’s Day, and we were pretty busy!  Things started off with 9:30 am Church followed by breakfast at Denny’s (Tasha’s choice).  Surprisingly, it wasn’t as busy in there as we expected so we got right in.  After that, it was back to the house for a bit and then back to the church for Baptism class.  The class was nice enough and the priest kept it short since it was Mother’s Day.  We set Eve’s baptism date for June 12, so everyone mark your calendars. 🙂

We headed back home after that, and Tasha deemed that it was nap time for her and Eve.  I took the opportunity to enjoy the weather and get some yard work done.  I hadn’t raked the back yard recently, so I was met with a 3 inch mat of old pine needles.  This amounted to 4 bags of yard waste and the back yard is only half done.  I grilled chicken for dinner tonight, and the rest of the evening was spent relaxing around the house.  It was a great day!

Today was a truly colossal day of enjoying nerd culture.  I joined Paul Ballew and Teague in a three-phase excursion to get as much nerding as possible done in one day.  We began the day with a noon matinee of Thor, which was much better than I expected.  The effects were great, the storyline enthralling, and it had Natalie Portman in it (much like every other movie this summer).  Phase Two required us to travel to Boulder for Free Comic Book Day, an annual event that I had never attended before.  Teague is friends with the owner of this particular comic shop, so I was happy to get to support his friend’s business a bit.  When we arrived, there was a Batmobile parked in the lot and an Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters pulling out of the parking lot.  This was going to be fun.

The shop itself was buzzing with activity.  Each person got to pick three free comic books from a selection on the counter.  I grabbed a Superman, a Green Lantern, and an Inspector Gadget (mostly for nostalgia).  One of the workers announced that everyone could pick three more free comics from their old stack of previous Free Comic Book Day offerings, so I did that as well.  This time, I just randomly picked.  I noticed a sign “Books and Posters, limit 1 each”, so I grabbed a Robert Aspirin collection for Tasha (again, free).  After that, I turned my attention to some long-deferred purchases and elected to get Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls” graphic novel.  I have heard excellent things about it, and I liked Watchmen so I decided to give it a try.  Lastly, I grabbed a Violet Lantern t-shirt just like Sheldon’s from Big Bang Theory.  When I went to check out, I was told that everything in the store was 10% off today.  Score.

The last phase of the day was back to my house for D&D.  The session went slowly and was spent more in socializing than playing the game, but it was much needed since our group hadn’t been together for several months due to Eve’s arrival.  What a great day, but boy am I beat!

Tonight was the last Jam Night at Walton Manor for awhile.  Paul and Kara are two weeks away from welcoming their own bundle of joy into the world, but that didn’t keep us from getting together and playing some music.  I was pleasantly surprised that Tasha wanted to come along, so the family piled into the CR-V and we headed over.  Tonight we played a little “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana and a few other songs… I enjoyed hearing the Les Paul through Paul’s Marshall half-stack.  So sweet.

Tomorrow we have a really busy day planned, so I’d best get to bed soon!

We had a doctor’s check-up for Tasha (everything’s fine!) and after that she asked to have the evening to get some shopping done and spend a little non-baby time.  So Eve and I were left to fend for ourselves for a few hours tonight.  She had a bottle and then quickly conked out, sleeping in her Pack & Play for almost the entire time that Tasha was gone.  She woke up just before Tasha got home, so I had just started to feed her again.  Tasha had gone shopping, getting herself and Eve some clothes and had a nice dinner out.

In the meantime, I caught up with some online projects and got my iPad synched up with all the latest baby pictures to show around the office.  That’s all from me for now!

In my career, I have found that I have increasingly edged toward the need to people-please.  This becomes increasingly difficult as I fill a role that requires me to consider technical guidelines, hoping to enforce code quality.  With a job like that, you’re bound to ruffle feathers and have differences of opinion with others.  Even though it is possible to talk a tough game, if you’re like me you internalize little pieces of the hurt feelings and the strong emotion that comes with disagreement.  Over time, it becomes easy to let those dictate the way you interact with others.  I’ve become aware in the last few months how pervasive this is becoming with me.  This leads to a desire to build consensus for fear of upsetting others, failure to decide on something or take a strong stance, and general nervousness and weirdness.

I came across this article tonight, which deals very bluntly with precisely this problem and how to break this tenacious icy grip on one’s self-respect.  I have to say the content is very thought-provoking and I am adjusting to the idea that I don’t need everyone to like me at the office, I just need to do my job well and trust the opinion of those few valued individuals that matter to me.  (Tip: if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably one of them.)

I have met a few people in my career (I work with one now) that happily don’t care about asserting their opinions to those around him.  One of my previous superiors exhibited this behavior to an absolute art-form, and I respected him for that.  People either hated his guts or loved him, but he got results and I bet he sleeps pretty damned well at night.

So that’s what I’m striving for: getting comfortable about having my own opinion and not caring about what others think about it.

The first C# tool that I’ve been looking at is NCover, a very popular piece of software intended to do static code analysis and integrate with a build system.  NCover primarily focuses on calculating unit test coverage and cyclomatic complexity, two undeniably good metrics to drive test driven development and build maintainable code.  NCover has an analysis tool called NCover Explorer, which allows you to view the results of the test run, reports and visualizations on each execution, and trending when analyzing multiple test runs.

The Good

NCover is easy to set up and integrates as an external tool in Visual Studio, which makes kicking off the process of code analysis easy.  The Explorer allows some fairly flexible views of each code execution, which lines of code are not covered, and cyclomatic complexity at each method level.  This is also configurable so you can few complexity on each branch or symbol, but I’ve not messed with that much yet.  NCover allows you to exclude certain assemblies and provides roll-ups and reports of your coverage and what has changed in between runs.  I find this valuable in my daily work, and these reports also integrate with build systems (which I should get to play with relatively soon.)

The Bad

The structure of your unit test solutions matter.  We have a large codebase with a large set of unit tests, so it takes several minutes for the NCover report to run.  There is some strangeness with the External Tool configuration as well, it requires you to have your Unit Test project highlighted or else it can’t kick off the assembly correctly and errors. The way that trending is handled is clunky and not as useful in the Explorer as they would hope.  Our solution gets incremental improvements in each class, and the resolution of the graph on the NCover Explorer is not as helpful.  Also, the trend analysis counts failed runs as zero coverage which really makes the trending less useful if you accidentally fat finger the External Tool or don’t highlight the project properly.

The searching capabilities within the Explorer are clunky and take too long to execute, and the reports are a bit difficult to comprehend.  This could just be a limitation of my ability to interpret them though.  I don’t know if there’s a plug-in for Visual Studio to provide in-IDE highlighting of uncovered lines of code, I will have to look into this further.  It would be nice if this exists, since I know other tools provide this feature.

More on this soon, I suspect I will have more write once I try to integrate this with a build server and explore the features more closely.