Save Ducky

Or watch him die, your choice.

Story:

I came home the other day and my wife informed me that the downstairs toilet was stopped up. This was strange to me because I had just remodeled the downstairs bathroom and put a 3″ pipe from the toilet to the sewer so I had never anticipated it becoming stopped up. Curiously I went at the toilet with a plunger and after about 30minutes had no success. Now we have been potty training my son Daniel and he is fascinated by the toilet we have caught him trying to play in it and even trying to wash things in it but he has yet to master the art of the potty. So instinctively I started to assume that he had throne a rag down in the toilet and that must be what is causing the stop-up. I told my wife my thoughts and she agreed so the next day I went to my Mom’s to retrieve my arsenal of toilet tools including a 25′ snake and a plunger that looks more like a bicycle pump that is supposed to build up pressure and push objects through. The snake would only go a little ways down and would stop dead and the special plunger was no help either so I decided that the problem must lie further down the pipe and took the toilet up from the floor. I continued to try and snake the pipe itself and it went through it just fine… So now my curiosity was up and I turned the toilet on its side and was shocked when I saw a rubber ducky staring at me from the S-bend in the toilet. now mind you this is in the porcelain part of the toilet and was further back than my hand could reach. I tried everything snake, plunger, electric cable, close-hanger, knife, praying, water, and even dismantled the top of the toilet in the hopes it might give me better access. Nothing worked, nothing would even budge the ducky he was wedged in there. So after about three hours I gave up and tonight we have went and bought a new toilet to replace the one in our bathroom.

The Challenge to You:

Since I have no other possible ways to get the duck out and I am no longer concerned about the toilet itself I am starting to entertain very destructive ideas for the duck. They include items such as gas, M-80′s, Lead (propelled by a gun), and very large hammers as I said at the start of my post the ducks fate is in your hands you have 36 hours from the time I post this until I either dismantle the toilet gently saving the duck or he meets a of an unsavory flavor. I would like you to comment on this post or send tweets to @davidbates telling me if the duck should be saved or how he should die.

Update:
Ducky is now Dead See http://dlbates.com/DuckyDies for videos of his demise

A Day in a Web-Devs Life-2010

Today my post will be a bit different. I normally don’t talk much about work on my personal blog for various reasons. One of which being that I live in a right to hire state and include a link to my blog in my email signature. I also link to this blog’s RSS feed from several locations within our companies intranet. So you can see why I am leery to post about anything work related. I must apologize for its length and lack of direction but I felt that it needed to be documented since I use this blog as a journal of sorts. With that out of the way I would like to give you a taste of my work life.

I start my days around 5:00 each morning the first thing I reach for is my Iphone to check on emails and tweets that may have happened throughout the night. I then head downstairs and get ready for the workday so I don’t wake the wife and Daniel (They are not morning people). Once ready I check my phone again as I am about to leave Wi-Fi access for at least a 30 minute drive. I live in Madison, NC and work in Greensboro. My drive depends heavily on traffic and weather, leaving at 5:30 or 6:00AM normally get’s me to work in about 30 minutes.

Once I arrive at work I grab for a MT. Dew and unlock my machine… I never reboot my machine unless there are windows updates so it is always ready to go and set to where I left off the day before. My programs that are running upon startup normally consist of Chrome, Tweetdeck, Outlook, Flash, and Visual Studio… depending on my work the day before I may have SQL or a spreadsheet open.

Again I check email and twitter to see if anything has gone on during my drive that I need to react to. I then check my task list which is a SharePoint calendar with some extra columns for priority, comments, and requestor to see what task I need to work on next. I switch between my task list and my dry-erase board depending on my workload as I have found under heavy loads the dry-erase board made me more productive. I normally use my task list however. Having just checked my task list I can see that I have 11 High’s for both external and internal development so I jump on one and start coding.

Since I work in MarComm and not IT I find that sometimes respect as a true developer is hard to come by and I am new to the group so I still have yet to earn some of the respect. However this affects how I have to approach certain tasks and can sometimes either help or hinder a situation. I have to be very careful to put on the bully face when needed but also have to be uber-friendly which I inherently am anyway.

So while coding I will normally have to attend around 2 meetings per day sometimes this is a waste and I continue to code on my Ipone but other times I find the meetings enlightening especially the ones that decide who owns what or who controls what process.

So enough of the ambiguitis stuff and onto the meat. When I say coding I normally am required to design, build, or correct errors in XSLT/XML, SQL/VB, SQL/C#, Flash, or Java. The changes can range from making a color change to full-blown design of new collections of data. I find myself working most in SQL/VB and XML/XSLT as that is what my predecessor chose to use. I am a C# guy myself as I started programming in C and then moved into Cocoa on the Mac before becoming a web-dev.

My current biggest project is the addition of video at work both internal and external. So my Flash skills have come into play there. I hope to write up so good material for deployment in an enterprise and even develop some best practices for video.

However what gets me the most praise at work is my ability to solve problems, not always solving coding problems but by taking a look at the whole picture and be able to develop a system that works for the environment it is in. I find it odd when I solve a problem and they say no one else has thought of that… it’s so simple. I love it.

I leave my work around 4 each day but most times I don’t actually get to leave until about 5 as I get caught up in a project and don’t know when to quite or something breaks last minute in the day. Either way I reverse my morning routing where I check my Iphone when I leave and when I get home. I then try and spend time with Daniel and wife until around 9 when it is time for me and Daniel to watch some youtube and go to sleep.

So that is what I do as a web-dev, I code, I listen, and I fix problems. What a better way to work than that. I really feal that I am doing what makes me happy as I can’t get enough of it. Right now I am at home on a friday night writing this post about work when I should be asleep… What can I say I am a true G33K and there is no place like 127.0.0.1

Goodnight
David Bates

My Trip to Denver, CO

Earlier this week you may have noticed that I did not post much or tweet a whole lot. This is because I was actually in Denver, CO touring RFMD’s Broomfield facility. I was accompanied by my Colleague

I started my journey on Tuesday at 4am and flew to Atlanta we stayed in ATL just long enough to huff it across the terminal and catch our flight to Denver. The flight to Denver was over 3 hours long and we flew over 500MPH. The coolest part of the trip was watching the GPS while we flew. Cities flew by as though they were street names, it was very cool. We landed at about 11 our time and we grabbed our rental car and headed for the hotel.

It is about a 20 minute drive from the Airport in Denver to the hotel in Broomfield. While driving to the Hotel we both noticed that there where no mountains. In fact we both looked at each other and said “Where are the friggin Mountains?” There was not a single mountain in site for the entire drive and me and Kim both were disappointed that we would not see any. So we got to the hotel and checked in.

Pictures of trip to Denver from Airplaine:

Once we got settled at the hotel we then drove to work. We were told before we left that there would be a cookout at the facility at 2:00 so we rushed over so not to miss it. We got there at the perfect time I went straight through the line being sure to meet the people that was supposed to show us around. The menu was hamburgers and sausages… yes sausages and they were delicious. They even had put Jalapeño’s on the line. While I was stuffing the sausage into my mouth we met the main guy we came to see, he asked how our trip was and if we liked Broomfield. I said the food was great but that we were disappointed because we couldn’t see the rockies. Surprised he exclaimed… What do you mean you can’t see the mountains? I then asked if he had a place close by that we could go to see them and he said sure just turn left out of the parking lot. Now I gave him a strange look because I had just drove from that way and I figured that if there had been a mountain there I would have seen it… Right? So I agreed to follow his direction once we got out of the office. We spent several hours then touring the facility and video taping several areas of the building. The office had a meeting at 4:00 though and after that all of the workers were dismissed so me and Kim took off to find some mountains, and mountains we did find.
This is the view just to the left of the parking lot for RFMD Broomfield:

It turned out that it was just foggy when we drove in and the mountains were covered. I guess it was God’s way of giving the mountains a majestic reveal.

That night we had the most amazing dinner at Carraba’s and I went back to the hotel and got in the Jacuzzi… Wonderful

Day 2:
On day 2 we got up and drove quite a ways to the nearest IHOP and as we were telling each other that we had traveled to far we noticed this great spot to film the mountains from… take a look below and see if you agree:

we then ate at IHOP and went in to work. we filmed until about 2 and then headed for the airport.
This time we were routed through Cincinnati to get back to Greensboro but it was a fun flight.
A Pic of the flight back:

All in all it was a great trip and I had a great time.

Thanks for reading:
David Bates