Jeff Billimek’s Journal

The past few days it’s been very crappy weather. This morning was no different. In fact it was raining so hard this morning that I hit a traffic jam on the south-bound lanes on the west-wall of I-285, something that never happens. A couple of times during my drive into work I hit a deep patch of water on the highway and started to hydroplane. That’s definitely something I don’t enjoy doing - especially when traveling at 75mph.

At 9:30am Jegan and I attended the “1.2″ managers meeting in 11East. Once again it was a learning experience. I was worried that the topic of our performance testing would come up. Fortunately when it was brought up, Alonzo glossed over it and didn’t press us for any numbers. Our performance test yesterday was inconclusive so we didn’t want to publish the performance numbers. In addition to that, the initial numbers we saw were so horrible that we didn’t want to publish them to a large audience until we can discuss them among ourselves.

After the meeting Jegan, Rajiv, and I had a frank discussion about the performance testing results we’ve seen so far. We shared with Rajiv some of the results and he agreed that the numbers appear to be pretty grim. We asked him what he thought about our proposal to combine all of the engines into one large controller. He also seemed receptive to that idea. He suggested that we call a meeting with him and Gus to go over the specific results.

For lunch today a large group of us went to Buckhead to a small place called the Taco Stand. We’ve been there once before and the tacos are really good. The two girls working the front counter were very cute too. The whole day it has been raining. When we were about to leave the restaurant, we ran from the front door to the car. When I started my sprint, I slipped (I was wearing dress shoes so there was no traction) in the water and went sprawling on my back. I managed to recover quite quickly and didn’t even spill any of my lemonade I was carrying. My back and pockets got quite wet though. My iPAQ was in one of my front pockets and I examined it for damage. Unfortunately it did not escape harm. The top portion of the PDA had a crack in it. It still works fine and the damage is purely cosmetic but I regret that it got damaged. I also have a quarter-sized scrape on my elbow.

After lunch a few of us attended a meeting called by Scott to discuss the 1.3 Official Proration engine. The requirements are pretty simple and it seemed straight-forward to me. During the meeting Casey suggested that we create a boolean indicator on the coupon proration entity to indicate if this prorate is official or not. The requirements call for us to duplicate the entire entity and just call it a new type. This made a lot of sense and we decided to go down this route. What bothers me is that I didn’t even consider that possibility. I take pride in being able to come up with ideas like that but I completely missed it here.

The drive home today was in heavy rain. I hit traffic resistance going along I-285 northbound on the west wall due to rubbernecking in two locations. When I was near I-20, Jenn called me and asked if I wanted to join her for dinner at Lenox. She gets off work at 6pm. I agreed and continued along 285 towards route 400. Fortunately I was going against the heavy flow of traffic so it wasn’t that bad.

Jenn and I had dinner in the mall at California Pizza Kitchen.

I brought my spare HD home with me to dump everything on it and plan on taking it back to work. This is part of my backup strategy. I do quarterly backups of everything to a spare HD and store it in my desk at the office. This satisfies my need for an ‘offsite backup solution’.

Because it’s a new month, I looked through my web server usage statistics. I made note of the top five google search hits for my site for the month of June:

[code]96 - Chicago Skyline Photos
49 - Sojourn
36 - the server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool
23 - Chattahoochee River
20 - Amicalola River[/code]