jducoeur

Friday was formally my last day at Memento, but I count it as yesterday. Way back in March, I gave a sort-of four months' notice, saying that I would likely be leaving "at the middle of the year". At their request I left that squishy, but the acquisition by FIS did nothing to change my feelings there, and I decided to take myself literally, with myself ending on June 30th. Part of why I was leaving is that I'm a small-company guy at heart, preferring fast, agile organizations that get results quickly, and for all that FIS seems more clueful than the average big company, there has to be more bureaucracy as a result.

That said -- it *is* a good company, at least the group-formerly-known-as-Memento part of it, and they're hiring like gangbusters. If you're looking, and you like a more stable environment than I do, it's worth checking out. The FIS job-search page is here. (Yes, it totally fails in Chrome, and yes, that says something about the fact that this is a big finanicial firm that hasn't managed to keep up with these newfangled browsers. Don't hold it against the Memento group -- I don't even know what *state* is responsible for the stupid job-search site.) Look under US / MA / Burlington for the Memento listings: they're looking for everything from a UI Architect (that is, someone to replace me) to an administrative assistant.

Anyway, my head is starting to adjust to me moving on. This afternoon, I started my ToDoList of tasks in the House and Estate projects: that got to 40 tasks in the first half hour and I suspect that I got less than half of what actually needs doing. So it's going to be a busy summer of getting my life in order.

In the meantime, I'm gearing up my programming. The nice thing about programming for fun, instead of working for someone, is that I'll likely get more done in 2 hours/day that I've typically been doing in an entire day. First up is The Great OP Compiler Project, as I attempt to take all the data in the existing Order of Precedence site (many, many hand-maintained HTML files, slightly grungy and inconsistent, with much of the semantics implicit in the formatting), and literally write a compiler from that into a nice clean SQL format. It should be an entertaining project, and will limber up my Scala skillls. The objective is to have that ready before Pennsic, so we can begin the actual port to the new site sometime after. And in the meantime, I'll be gearing up the Querki project in the background, to start in earnest in August.

And on the relationship front, things are going well. We ordered the ring yesterday, after much discussion of what we were looking for in a diamond. It's going to be very pretty.

Expect lots of diarizing and stuff, especially in the next month. There are no less than three major Jane anniversaries, starting tomorrow, and I've got a lot to process. I'm holding it together, but there are going to be some rocky days during July...