A Week In Review - STARWEST Conference -or- A Week in Disneyland

So a couple of weeks ago I went to California for a business conference. The conference was pretty cool…lots of great speakers, tutorials, keynotes, vendors and other work sessions to fill my head (and my bag) with lots of great information and contacts.

As an added bonus, the conference was held in the Disneyland Convention Center in the Disneyland Hotel. While this certainly wasn't my first reason for opting for this particular conference, it didn't hurt.

The conference (STARWEST) is hosted by SQE and they do a number of great conferences each year and also have a good selection of webinars and ongoing resources online. I've followed them and have been wanting to go to one of their conferences for a while. It was well worth it.

Unless I happen to have readers who are in the Software Test and/or QA industry, I won't bore you all too much with the various things I learned at the conference…hit me up after if you're interested. ;)

Instead, I figured I'd give a little recap on the "entertainment" portion of the trip.

How a project comes about...and why it's sometimes 'broken'

Taken from here.  Click through to see in better detail.

One-day-Sale - Cool iPhone/iPod application - Great Work, Great Career

A few weeks ago I read and reviewed the book 'Great Work, Great Career.'

I felt like the book had plenty of great information, suggestions and advice and it came at a very relevant time. The job industry has gone through major upheaval in the past decade…even in the past few years/months. This book really provides some great reading to help work through those changes.

Anyway, in addition to the book, FranklinCovey has developed an iPhone (or iPod Touch) application that builds on the content presented in the book. I know we've all read books like this and made notes or nodded our heads and thought "those are great ideas….someday I'll try to implement them." Well, this iPhone app takes some of these ideas and wraps them into a nice interface where you can begin to put them into practice.

It's a cool application with sections for "Know Your Strength" which includes self assessments to help find your own strengths), "Define Your Contribution" (including tools to help match your strengths to your career prospects), "Build Your Village" (tools and advice for networking your career relationships), and a number of "Resources" and "Action Center" tools to help you along the way. There are also a number of FranklinCovey videos to reinforce the content.

All in all, this is a pretty cool application.

As an added bonus, I just received word that they as an incentive to try and get the word out, FranklinCovey is offering this application at nearly 50% off the standard price.

Today only (April 13, 2010), you can use this link to get more information and purchase the app for only $2.99! Even if you're not job hunting now, the tools and resources can help you improve your skills and reputation at your current job. Feel free to pass the link to friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc….anybody you think may benefit from this.

In addition to the information available from the link above, you can use this link to view a video presentation of some of the features. The video may require installing a plugin to fully view it. I'm looking for an embeddable and/or youtube version of the video.

Whether or not you decide to purchase, you should at least click over to the site and check out the information.

Let me know what you think.

Disaster Recovery...is dead?

I work in the computer industry and provide QA and support for a number of web portals. A few weeks ago, as part of an internal security review one of our clients requested a copy of our Disaster Recovery Plan for one of those web applications. I wasn't terribly surprised to discover that we didn't have a formal plan drafted. About a week prior to that, they had asked for information related to our uptime policies, server redundancy, hosting facilities and backup plan.

With regards to the disaster recovery, I reiterated our backup systems and redundancy plan and let them know that we would handle a disaster the same way we would handle any error on the system…that we would use our code repository, code backups, database backups and redundant virtual servers to get the site back up and running in as short a time as possible with minimal data loss. Naturally, this quick blurb didn't suffice and they wanted a formally drafted plan which eventually included very detailed schema of low level operations in place.

Today, this article came across my email indicating that "disaster recovery is dead." As it states in the first paragraph, that's a rather interesting claim, especially when you consider that it is coming from the director at the International Disaster Recovery Institute.

This article explains what I was trying to get across to our client's security team, but it does so much more eloquently.

A dozen or more years ago, the Internet was still a bit shaky and it was understandable for sites to have outages, be laggy or otherwise have bouts of unreliableness (is that a word?). These blips of instability were not considered disasters. The disasters of the early 90s were more in line with the "natural" disasters one thinks about: floods, earthquakes, terrorism, war, alien invasion, etc.

Over the past dozen+ years, however, the world has shifted significantly such that even a flicker of a site outage is considered a disaster. As such, we are always in a sort of "disaster recovery" mode.

Rather than continuing to call it "disaster recovery", the article suggests we just integrate this policy into the policy of "continuous business operation", and I would tend to agree. In today's world, disaster recovery is now an integral part of the business policy for "100% reliability" provided via constant monitoring, redundant servers and frequent backups.

While all of this makes sense, it also brings to the forefront one of the things that most bothers me about this industry. There is no downtime. Indeed there cannot be any downtime. Which makes for a rather stressful work environment because even with a very robust action plan to provide continuous uptime, there are always times when something will go wrong that wasn't accounted for. And even a very fluid plan can be stressful to put into action. Depending on the number of people affected, even a 5 minute outage can be disastrous and have stakeholders and upper management breathing down your neck to get things fixed.

It's at times like these (like the 'fires' of this past week *grimace* that I long for a slower paced world where it's not the end of the world if a system goes down or has an error. It's bad, yes, but it's understandable and everyone knows that it will be back when it's back and that everyone is doing all they can to get it back up.

*sigh*

Software Testing - Priority Versus Severity

This article was sent to me a few days ago.

It's a good example of why there needs to be good discussion between stakeholders, developers, testers and other members of a product team with regards to bugs/enhancements/features/issues.

I've been on a number of projects where, by the end of the project, the stakeholders/PMs are largely hands-off and just lets the final cycles be "development by bugs." This is great and all, especially as I try to push for high quality. But in terms of making sure the right priorities are met, it doesn't work so well.

After a release like that, I often end up having the stakeholder come to me a day or two later with a "critical bug" that must be fixed asap. The bug is generally something that the dev team and I see as trivial such as a scrollbar where there doesn't need to be one or a missing border around a frame or some other aesthetic issue that does make the project cleaner, but not any more usable. The bug is usually in the database but was prioritized away by the test and/or dev team as being insignificant, especially when compared with data integrity or software functionality.

I try to push for regular bug triage meetings with the stakeholders, especially near the end of a project. But most of the time, the stakeholders are far too involved with trying to negotiate the endgame with the customer (who is usually driving us towards an unrealistic product deadline) and as a result, they don't want to take the 'downtime' to fully understand each bug. Instead, they have me go to them with a list of bugs titles sorted based on the priority set by myself and the developer and in 2 minutes, we scan the list.

I'm not saying I don't strive for aesthetic quality or that I don't fully understand the desires of the stakeholders. However, the stakeholders are more directly involved with the client and thus they have a better feel for what can "make or break" the deal. I, on the other hand, am striving mainly for functional quality and aesthetic acceptability and adherence to form.

To project managers and other stakeholders...please get involved with the defect tracking process and provide input on the issues to be fixed. To test and dev teams, look for input from your stakeholders to make sure you're getting the important things fixed. Otherwise, you'll find yourselves scrambling in the week following a release.

The Skills of a Software Tester

As a manager of a black box test team (with minimal white box testing on occasion), this article was pretty interesting. I agree emphatically with the author's explanation that there are really two main factors to consider Effectiveness and Efficiency, though I think that's fairly simplistic and truly applies to pretty much any job in any industry as a high level comment.

Fortunately, Overbaugh elaborates on this high level claim, defining and expounding on these definitions as they relate to a career in Software Testing. If you're in the testing world, it's worth a read just to make sure you've got your thoughts together concisely. His keeps his suggestions general enough that they should be good advice to anybody in the software testing world...perhaps with slight tweaking at times.

I look forward now to reading his blog and see what else he has to say.

Secure in their insecurities

I'm not going to mention names, but I want to throw this out and get some opinions.

I'm working with a company. We're developing a "rich internet application" (flashy cool web site). We are using FLEX, the cool new Adobe flash tool/language for developing rich internet applications. Flex requires the latest version of Flash Player. Our standard minimum requirements for all of our web tools is: Internet Explorer v6 or v7, Firefox v2+, or Mac Safari.

The year is 2008.

That's the background on our side.

Now for our biggest client so far for this tool. They absolutely love the concept. They love the design and the layout. They love what it will do for their company. This is a multi-million (billion?) dollar nationwide company with over 3000 physical locations.

In a meeting last week, their IT team got the first glance at the tool and our minimum requirements. Here comes the joy.

Of their 3000+ locations, fewer than half of them are on IE6 (running Windows 2003 server). Most are running IE5.5 (running Windows 2000). None of them have any version flash player installed. And they refuse to allow their IE5 users to upgrade to IE6.

Through some strange whim it was promised that we would look into the possibilities of our site running on IE5.5. (For some reason, I thought when you set a "minimum requirement", it was implied that you weren't going to try and support specs less than the minimum).

Fortunately, our site doesn't do anything fancy that caused it not to work with IE5.5. Even more fortunate, the latest version of Flash Player still supports IE5.5.

However, their IT team adamantly refuses to install flash player on their systems. We are still trying to get at the true reason for this, but the current thinking is that they fear it as a security risk. The company is looking into the possibility of setting up "kiosk" machines which will exist on completely isolated networks on which they will install flash player. Each location will have one of these kiosks setup in a corner of the office somewhere for each user to go to and logon to the system. However, the logistics of them doing this means that no one in their company will actually be able to use this system until ~4 months after we deliver it to them.

*********

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OK....now that you've read this story, please let me know....am I off the mark in thinking this is just a little bit ludicrous? I know not a lot of people are fans of Vista, and for a business infrastructure and server environment, Vista doesn't make sense. I don't fully understand the network/IT logistics and architecture of this business. However, it seems crazy to me that their primary business machines are Server boxes. Having half of the servers on 2k and the others 2k3 isn't awful, but not allowing the 2k systems to upgrade to IE6 (and thus receive better stability and security) seems absolutely ridiculous.

Is it just me, or should this company be more concerned about running outdated and unsupported (or at least, less supported) software than they should be about installing Flash Player to access a web site? Let me add the caveat that security is a huge concern on our development site because we will be storing some personal data on this site...not a lot, but enough that we are taking security very seriously and will be making all necessary precautions in our code and on our servers.

Please, let me know your thoughts.

Is Flash Player really so insecure that a company should be terrified of installing it (and to taint the question, keep in mind that the company is running Win2K and IE5.5).

QA Automation Article

Perfect automation...one of many holy grails in the QA world. Before posting the link to the article, here's my history with automation.

During my many years in the QA world of video game development, we had automation goals every year I was there. For the first ~3-5 years, the goal was quite simply to 'find a solution.' And during the beginnings of those years, we were developing for a Windows PC platform. We eventually got some basic scripts to build, install and launch or product. Our tools repository was growing as our QA group matured...we began using virtual images to allow for fresh installs and more effective config testing...we had tools to throttle bandwidth and manipulate packet drops for multiplayer games...but we still had very little in terms of true "automation testing."

Then we moved to the console testing world and we spent the next year or two getting our heads around a new batch of tools and procedures. The Xbox team and Microsoft provided numerous sample snippets of code that showed that game automation was possible, even within the big black box (or at that time, silver towers).

We had some testers on the team with some dev backgrounds and we began developing our own tools. One of our testers developed a great tool that helped us test with confidence the Xbox certification requirements. Our automated build system evolved into a custom build tool that also deployed builds to specified boxes in the building. Another tester built a framework that ran javascript commands against the game code to navigate the UI and start AI-only games. Our first internal gameplay automation was underway.

The next couple of years, and with growing support from the dev team to open up code and hooks for us, we eventually had a test automation framework within our game code that was actually accessible. We had testers on our team with the job to write and maintain automation code. We had automated BVTs run against our automated builds. We had suites of automated test cases run against banks of consoles in a bay as well as "checked in" idle boxes throughout the building. We were truly underway.

And then, the current phase of products shipped. Our SDETs were either promoted to developers (without resources to continue automation support) or fired. Shortly thereafter, our test team was completely dissolved with only 2 survivors who were transfered out of QA. And then a month later, the studio was closed completely.

Despite potential opportunities in the game world, I moved into the web applications world (work/life balance is much easier outside of games). I've worked for two different companies since then. In neither company has there been a robust automation toolset. The primary/initial desire for automated scripts in the web world seems to be stress testing. I've become familiar with JMeter and used that tool to write very simple scripts to navigate a website which I then scale up to a massive load. I've also glanced at a couple of other free/open-source tools.

And yet, the scripts I've written/run are not things I would call "automation testing." These stress tests are indeed run by software and they are vital, but my experience with these tools and the scripts does not put me in a position to expand these stress tests to an automation suite. Not only that, but the reporting I have from these reports does not provide me with a sense of the stability of the product except as how the load was handled. I don't know if a particular link is failing because there's bad code there or because the load caused the database to hang up (which is a bug just the same, but a different style).

So, for the past few months, I'm back to where I was near the beginning of my QA life....searching for the right tool. I'm not a "developer in QA"...my dev/coding knowledge is minimal. I can read debug output...I can parse code...I can even write some code...but I'm not the guy who's going to write an automation tool or framework in my spare time and 'wow' the team. Which means I turn to friends, colleagues and articles on the web.

Which led to me finding this article. I now have a few new products/tools/links to check out. I'm intrigued with the idea of 'automatically automating.' That concept seems to be the holy grail of holy grail...but the article seems to suggest that it's not only possible, but it's already happening.

With two products on the horizon, each planning to have thousands of concurrent users, load testing is critical. Beyond that, these systems are huge in scope and are largely different from other products we've already done. Which means a suite of well defined test cases is vital. Having tools to help automatically generate those test cases and to automate those test cases will provide me with a much less stressful summer.

I'm off to find the holy grail.

Miles to go before I sleep

The last couple of lines of Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening have been rolling through my head for the last couple of weeks. As I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, it felt like a good day to post the poem. Enjoy.

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Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

--Robert Frost

Wanna hear a funny joke?

xq

ok...so it's NOT funny at all... :(

Considering relocating for a new job

The allure of Europe has been a huge draw all my life. I've mentioned to Lynette a few times that I'd love to live in the UK. She's not as big a fan...says she doesn't want to live in a soggy, bleak, dreary country. Speaking Spanish, I've thought about Spain before...just never sure what I'd do there. So instead we've just playfully said we'll move to an island or a tropical beach somewhere and run some little business and hang on the beach all day.

Then I see this article today and the dream of Spain sparks in my mind again. Hmmmm....the possibilities. ;)

Movin' on Up...a 'new' job

Well, as some of you know already and now the rest of you will too...I just recently changed my work status.

Since January, I've been doing contract work for FranklinCovey. A couple of weeks ago, my manager accepted a new job and has moved on to work as Director of Web Development at BookWise. His leaving opened up a permanent position at FranklinCovey and I have stepped into the role of QA Manager following in the well defined footsteps he has established. Thanks Kevin for helping set the foundation for a very smooth transition.

The past couple of weeks have been extra busy. In addition to making the transition for "individual contributor" to managing a team, I've also started fall semester at school and picked up some additional QA contracts on an independent contracting business that I've been working on...Okie Enterprises. As long as I can keep on top of everything, the opportunities there should only grow as well. :)

Family life has been busy and exciting as well...with a second grader going back, a Kindergartener starting up and a princess starting a dance class, our house has been hecticly fun.

Anyway, I'll try to update again before long (it's been a while). I'm also hoping/planning to make some progress on my story this weekend.

TTYL.

Ex-Take Two CEO guilty of stock option backdating

Here's an article about how T2's old CEO adjusted stock option dates illegally for financial gain.

I've largely gotten over my angst about T2 shutting us down because we "weren't profitable enough" or some such nonsense. But seeing this sort of money grubbing going on at the top makes me shake my head in wonder and feel like a scapegoat. Grrr.

A new year....a new job

I feel bad that it took me this long to finally post this. For the past little while, I wasn't terribly satisfied at my old job. So I started casually looking around. By the time December came, I was even less satisfied and actually "made public" my resume on Monster and was in touch with a couple recruiters.

By mid-December, I had a couple of job offers and ended up taking one of them. I gave my notice and left my old job at the end of the year and started a new one just after the new year (January 4th was my first day). The work itself is fairly similar to what I was doing before, but the environment seems quite a bit better. I'm excited to be working under a manager I worked with before who I'd enjoyed working with in the past...and there was a very nice pay increase which never (well, almost never) hurts when trying to make a place bearable. And...they still work with my school schedule so I started classes again this week (should be an interesting semester).

Anyway, that's the super quick lowdown...I hope to post more details in a bit but basically I wanted to get a post out before I forgot again. :)

The blind leading the sighted

So, I've decided it's time to start up a business. I think I'll set up a playground equipment business...one where we envision and design the playgrounds, develop them for different parks and schools, set them up at the different locations, and then maintain them.

I know a little bit about business in general (I've worked for businesses after all). Plus I've played on playgrounds before...so this should be a piece of cake.

I'm going to hire myself a team of architects, engineers, designers, foremen and contractors to get the system underway.

I'll set up initial contacts with some schools and park departments and then hire some managers and sales teams to keep the ball rolling.

Then, I'll stick my nose into everyone's work and make sure they're doing it right.

First, I'll make sure my sales team and managers bend to every whim of our clients and never tell them no...whether it be about some cool new design they'd like to see implemented, or about the timeframe for completing the project. After all, if they want a space themed playground and they need it open and running within two weeks because that's when they're planning their party, that's what we have to do.

Second, I'll be sure that my designers don't get any chance to interact with the school/park designers too much...because they could just end up throwing artistic differences around and not get any work done.

Third, I'll jump in and reprioritize my engineers, architects and contractors any time I notice something close to me that seems to be more visible....after all, why should they start with a foundation or supports...those aren't where the kids will be playing. They need to work on the upper deck and the slides...that's where the real thrill will be.

Fourth, I'll make sure we're building at least 10-12 playgrounds (all with varying designs and depth) simultaneously for outrageous sums of money. I'll also be sure that we only put forth any real worthwhile effort on the prestigious schools that are paying us even more money...and the school I went to as a kid of course (even though it's not paying us hardly anything).

Fifth, when we deliver playgrounds that seem to be a bit unsturdy or missing some of the design we talked about, I'll have my managers and sales force make up some ridiculous excuse about the economy forcing us to cut corners on steel or something like that. That way, we can buy a few extra days to put on some "band-aid" fixes on the broken things.

Sixth, I'll sit back and watch the money come in and proclaim myself the best in the industry.

Seventh, I'll pretend to listen to the feedback of the "experts" I've hired...they think they know so much just because they've built lots of playgrounds before. Hah...I'll succeed in building ten times as many playgrounds in less time than they built one...what do they know? I'm the boss.

Finally...I'll retire, knowing I've built the best software development playground business ever. Anybody want me to build a playground for them?

Video Game industry burns out talent...ya think?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5202236.stm

A new article on an old subject...I wonder how many years it will take of seeing the same article again and again before work conditions really change in the game industry? It sadly might never change...new blood keeps coming in to replace those burned out and the new blood just accepts the long hours as the norm and burns themselves out while they prep the industry for the next batch of new blood.

Another article just a few weeks ago on gamasutra talked about the same sort of thing as they said "Enthusiastic young people join the business; the hours and working conditions burn them out; they leave to find a more sane occupation, and a new crop shows up all ready for the flames. Apart from the waste of life and talent this represents, it means that game companies have no institutional memory, and that's partly why we keep making design errors"

Oh well, as long as we occassionally get a handful of decent games among the flood of garbage and we don't drive too many people to suicide (I know that may sound off the cuff...but I'm being serious as I send my condolences to the family of an ex-co-worker who recently did just that *frown*)...it's alright.

Smiling on....

--Okie

About the world of Video Game Testing

(Before you start reading, please accept my apologies...this turned into a sort of a rant and is quite lengthy...maybe I'll break it out into smaller blogs later to explore different points)

This article is actually a pretty good representation of what it's like in the video game testing world. They get opinions and quotes from a handful of different testers, each sharing their views.

I must say, I honestly enjoyed my time doing games QA. A lot of the process and situations were frustrating, but the people were (usually) great to work with and the job itself was very enjoyable to me. QA outside of games (as I've been learning for the past ~month) is a different world, but a lot of things are still similar. The instincts and basics of the job are the same. The "crunch time" mentality may still exist, but deadlines are generally different outside of the game world and the mentality overall seems a little different. Case in point, even thinking of working more than a 40 hour week here is taboo...the idea happens from time to time but it's definitely not the norm and not expected on a project.

One thing I definitely agree with from the article (which can be applied to all QA jobs...and actually can be applied outside of QA too) is the blurb talking about staffing. They talk about publishers bringing on a hundred "kids" to "test" the game in the last weeks/months of the project. This actually seems to be the route a lot of the big studios are looking at. The comments that they can do BETTER with 20 skilled testers over the life of the project than with 100 ad hoc junkies at the end of a project "should" be common sense, but sadly it's not.

Just look at the real world and compare Amped 3 & Top Spin 2 with the 2K Sports lineup for the same time frame....Amped & Top Spin were each tested with test teams of 6-10 VERY skilled testers over the life of the project (team size grew as the project neared release) while receiving "help" from a resource QA force from 2K sports...the other 2K games were tested by HUGE teams of ~40 people for only the last few weeks of the project. 2K games had tons of reports of hard locks, crashes, corrupt data and other issues at launch. Amped & Top Spin had reports of a handful of collision issues or bad looking textures...miniscule by comparison. The 2K games had to deal with the bad rep of having games that crashed...and then had to devote dev time to release "patches" for the issues they decided they could fix. Yet strangely, the "shared resource" testing methodology won out and they decided to give QA responsibility for all the projects to the same team that put out shoddy games last fall.

I do need to back up just a little bit and apologize a touch...because I do also agree with the painful truth brought out in the article that QA is blamed for EVERY problem with the game, regardless of whether or not it was entirely their fault. Ideally, a QA team WILL catch all major and minor issues. Admitedly, we miss some things. However, sometimes some of the minor (and even some of the major) issues we DO find are allowed to ship because of deadlines, resources and other considerations. The decission is usually made by a committee and QA (sadly) agrees, knowing all along that it will reflect on them. So, I do apologize if it sounds like I'm ignorantly ranting against the QA team that will be taking over for all of 2K Games testing. I'm sure there were some issues that were beyond their control and shipped despite their efforts.

That said, I am dubious of their efforts and the efforts of ANY consolidated/shared test team...including (and based mainly on knowledge of) the 2K games shared team (a lot of the issues I did see come through were laughable...though admitedly, some of the drudgerous tasks they took on were very relieving for me, since it meant I could devote my team to more important tasks). [Two examples: 1) Allowing resource QA to test collision/level issues opened up chances for my team to do deep abuse testing against they code while feeling like the levels would get a good looking at. 2) On a different note, there was some testing going on where internal and external test teams were doing the same tests...their team of 20, our team of 2...their team reporting 100% success over the course of 4-5 attempts, our team reporting 75% failure (all different high profile issues) over 50+ attempts]

Their lack of knowledge with the product...their lack of knowledge and training for their job...their lack of good supervision and interaction with the dev team....their lack of ability...their lack of instinct...their lack of adequate tools/resources/time...ALL of these lead to the same result...a bunch of monkeys sitting in a room, banging on controllers and telling the dev team things they already know or don't care about...if they tell them anything at all (as in the case above where they found NO PROBLEMS while we found dozens in the same area).

I cringe at the thought of most major publishers going with this idealogy...because it is far from ideal and means that we will likely see decreased quality in future releases. Sad...

Spare change mister? ;)

Ok...so somebody jokingly suggested this and for those who know me, I'm one who usually takes things (especially jokes) to their full conclusion...often going "too far". So here it is: In light of recent employment activities, I introduce you to the Paypal donation button for Okie's "Spare Change" fund. This is NOT an official charity and as such has no real method for me to provide any tax deduction information or any of that...this is just you handing some spare change to a fellow soul...not much more too it than that. If you have some spare virtual paypal change you want to toss into the bucket, use the button below to do so. Thanks. ;) lol

RIP...greetings from the dearly departed

Well, the writing has been on the wall and many of us have discussed it, but we all seemed to think it was still a ways off and still within the realm of being saved or at least postponing death. Sadly, a mafia style assassin proved us wrong.

Thursday evening, a corporate big wig walked into my place of employment for what was supposed to be a spot check style meeting with the pres of the company. Abruptly and without warning, he instead informed our prez that the studio was closed, took his entry badge, changed the locks, locked down the servers and shut everybody out. News went out to us employees quickly and urgently...there was much shock and people are still reeling.

Even though I had recently brushed off my resume and started handing it out (even had received a couple of job offers prior to this news), I'm still in a daze and trying to figure things out and determine where to go from here. My plan was that when I left it would be on my own terms...Despite my comments over the years that I just planned to "ride this wave out and see where it takes me."

Well, the wave has crashed down hard on a corral reef and 70 some-odd employees are in the lurch, getting churned around in the undertow. We had a very talented group and I have no doubt that everyone will be alright...but it's always odd when things like this happen, and more crazy when they happen the way they did.

Oh well, life goes on....right?

Faster than a speeding bullet

Well, once again, I dodged the layoff bullet. Some days I'm wondering if it's worth it to have dodged the bullet...things are so strange now and if it hit me, it would be the impetus for change. But at the same time, there's a bunch of bills to pay that should all be paid off by next spring, so I'm happy to be where I am at least until then...

Still, overall, the corporate world is a mess. I don't know that any job would be better than any other as far as office politics and the whole work game goes...and my job can be pretty entertaining. I am still excited for that day when I get those novels sold and can spend my days writing away in my home office...or on a laptop at the beach.

But alas, until those days come, I live day to day under the whim of "the man" wondering what will happen next...such is life.