Fairly Symmetrical

Sorry about the lack of updates. I got busy again. Or got lazy again--take your pick. ;)

I won't recap the games individually, but our last 3 games have been a loss (a really bad loss; our captain got injured and one of our players got ejected for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty), a tie (0-0; our first shutout), and a win (in which I played like crap; see below) respectively. Aside from the really bad loss (which wasn't fun for reasons other than losing the game), the season so far has been lots of fun. I feel like I'm learning something every time I'm on the ice; I feel more confident every game, and I feel like every game I find some way to make a good contribution, even if it's not scoring (and it's not; I have 0 goals/0 assists on the season--but 0 penalty minutes, too ;). I actually kind of love blocking shots, partially because I find it incredibly frustrating when other people block my shots, and turning that around is very satisfying.

Anyway, I got really, really sick last weekend. I played hockey Sunday afternoon, felt great, had a great game (the tie, which we really should have won but for their substitute goalie playing like a pro), came home, had dinner, and then spent much of the night throwing up. Oh, and massively delirious. Apparently I was a real pain in the ass; I don't remember much of it. Monday morning I felt slightly better but was weak as a half-drowned kitten and still shaky, so I stayed in bed all day. Wednesday, we played our next game, and I was very obviously still tired. I couldn't seem to stand up on the ice at all; I fell down even more than usual (and usual is fairly often--my teammates call me the "Tasmanian Devil" for my signature spin-around-and-fall-down routine). Fortunately I don't seem to have relapsed, and we have a 10-day layoff to the next game, so I have time to recover.

We just finished a major milestone at work. The project that's been taking up the time of the majority of our developers for the last 3-1/2 years has finally come to a closure point, and from here on out we're going to be starting to pull that code into our existing applications and actually shipping it to customers. This isn't really new for me, because the stuff I've been working on has been the actual shipping applications, up until the last 3-4 months. Lately I've been getting things in place to significantly improve our infrastructure to make that migration easier; after Monday that will all be done (we'll be using .Net 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and Team Foundation Server--all really cutting edge stuff) and I'll be back working on actual code, which will be nice. I'm really a code monkey at heart. :-D

Some of the stuff I've been working on (and will be working on) is really cool; I'll be helping present some of it at one of our annual conferences, aimed at our resellers and other people who customize our application. That's very exciting for me; I often envy the situation of the various Microsoft developers who blog about their work and have very active, engaged communities, and this is kind of a similar situation for me. Although I've worked on applications for end-users at other jobs, this is the first time that I'm really starting to get directly connected to users/developers who aren't actually on my team or working for my company, and that's pretty cool.