Oh, and the best part about working here? We make up codenames and stupid words for things and then don’t tell anyone what they are. So, if you go to a meeting with another group, they have their own codenames and stupid words. It’s so like speaking another language that the first thirty minutes of the meeting is spent coming up with translations for each group’s terms and agreeing on what to call them for the second thirty minutes of the meeting, at which point everyone forgets the new words and confuses the living hell out of everyone for the rest of the meeting. After the meeting, we send out e-mails with the new glossary and translation charts, which everyone then prints multiple copies of, binds and then stick on a shelf – because we’re a technology company, and that’s how we store information.

You know what I love about our industry? We make up words. We make up stupid words. At AOL, we make up stupid acronyms and codenames for things. The other day, I was in a meeting about a project to add dynamic content to a currently static product. It was me and a bunch of uber-geeks and we were struggling to describe the process of taking this static content and making it dynamic. That’s when I made up Dynamicize. So, this is how the rest of the meeting went, with frowns from the guy with no sense of humor:

Me: So, it gets dynamitated after it leaves System X and before it gets to System Y or does it happen somewhere else?

Other Guy With Sense of Humor: No, the dynamicization happens between System Y and System Z, as you can clearly see in my squiggly lined illustration on the white board.

Guy With No Sense of Humor: Ok, the process to create this dynamic content happens here (points to white board, frowns, head explodes).

and… scene.

Whenever I wonder why I don’t have a PDA, I try to think of this. That’s what a handheld should do. And yes, I don’t have a cell either. I just have my lovely work-provided two-way pager. I don’t want an electronic calendar. I want a phone, browser and organizer all in one. Soon, it will be possible, and then I’ll think about getting one. I’ve held out this long, I can wait. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

I know I’ve been slacking about posting, but I have perfectly valid reasons. Like anything with life, stuff runs hot and cold. Work is hot right now. Blogging – eh – not so hot. I’ll still post daily, but probably not the deluge I had been offering. Also, life is hot. Max has decided that sleeping is not his ‘thing’ at the moment, and that means everyone at the Lawver house is doing a little adjusting. Jen’s not getting her normal nap because Max isn’t taking his. We’re staying up later because Max is. We’re getting up earlier, cuz, yet again, Max is. So, we’re making due with Carry-Out and lots of help from my family (and moral support from her parents in Tucson). Once I wake up, I’m sure I’ll be all chatty and sharing again.

In the sharing vein (which, kids, you should never do. Remember, sharing veins is for foreigners and weirdos. If you share veins, the terrorists have already won! Ok, you can ignore me now.), I’ve rediscovered iTunes radio tuner feature, and am totally addicted to Groove Salad. It’s trancey, groovy and conducive to half-awake coding.

In good work news, my new LogCrunching machine should be here in the next week or so. It will be berry berry nice:

• Dual Xeon 1.7ghz

• 1gb Rambus RAM

• 2 36gb SCSI hard drive

• nVidia Quadro2 video card w/ 64 mb

• dual NICS

• RedHat 7.2

• Sweet free mouse pad

What will I be doing with this machine? I’ll be crunching lots of files and extracting numbers from them like a SuperJuicer. How? I can’t post the code or anything, but I’ll be using AOLserver because it does a great job of scheduling jobs and I already know it. I’ll use Postgres to dump the numbers into. It will be lots and lots of fun and give me my desktop machine back so I don’t have to run the numbers I run now on it. A winner all around.