White Boy/White Dog Move To Skid Row

Certified Beach Dude Moves To Downtown Los Angeles

Tomorrow morning I start my new contract programming gig- for the past 7 years I have been very spoiled as I have had a contract with Sempra Energy that allowed me to work at home, bill a great hourly rate, and NEVER attend meetings (I think twice I had to go to San Diego to help set up servers- big deal).

For you geeks, I’m working for a large national insurance company, porting a Lotus Notes/Domino Litigation Management System to DB2 and some unknown imaging system that uses the .TIF format. This client is not like my normal “Notes shop”- this is their only Notes application and they intend to get rid of Notes when I am done. At every client I’ve worked at before, I’ve been asked to stay longer than contract (this is 3 month contract), but if I do a good job here, I’ve dug my own grave, as there will be no more for me to do- no big deal, as I should be moving frequently between clients. The one scary part is that they already had a consultant working on this project for 6 weeks, and fired him for his lack of progress; I feel like I may be walking into a hornet’s nest as this project is high-visability now and a political quagmire.

For this project, no option to work at home- client wants “face time”- and I have to attend DAILY Agile Scrum meetings at 9:15 am (who picked that time?) The crew I’m working with (VP of Info Sys and some programmer) start at 5:30 am- I guess they have East Coast concerns, but I don’t care, as I like to get in early and leave early. But this changes my daily schedule by about 180-degrees.

I am mostly worried about White Dog. Since she was 4 weeks old, she has been by my side almost every hour of the day. When I work, she nuzzles into the space between my back and chair and sleeps there for hours as I pound away on the keyboard.

I have hired walkfido.com to take her on 1 hour group walks during the day, and I trust David and his staff to really work White Dog on not only walking with other dogs but behavior problems in general, so this is a big plus. But my hours with her will be cut back substantially.

I will be getting up before 4am for a 3-mile walk with White Dog, then shower and get on Red Line for Universal City, where I will change to bus to take me down Ventura Blvd to Encino. I like to think I’m “green”, and am going to try this for awhile (what the hell, I will at least get some funny blogging stories…).
Then I’ll return around 4pm or so, walk White Dog, and then go to gym where I’ll see an entirely different crowd then I am used to (could be good), and back home for dinner and final White Dog walk. I’m tired typing this…