He was a nice doctor, aside from depressing the hell out of me

[lokheed]

Ben had an appointment today with a doctor who specializes in treating autistic children.  It is the first time he has been to a specialist in at least two years, and mostly we just wanted to have his medication re-evaluated to be sure we were on the right track.  Dr. Keeley seriously impressed me.  He spent the first twenty minutes talking directly to us, while watching Ben out of the corner of his eye.  He did an excellent job of guaging when Ben was comfortable enough for him to start talking to directly, and he was very good with him.  Over the course of an hour he made some very good observations, and gave us some very good advice.  Of course, he also depressed the hell out of us when we started discussing Ben's future.  It really is an overwhelming task to think about where Ben will be in five or ten years.  I'm still big enough to physically overpower him, but those days are rapidly coming to an end.

Anyway, the doctor adjusted Ben's main prescription to account for how much he has grown since his previous dosage was set.  We have an appointment to check back again in two months to evaluate that again.  The drug has a very slow cumulative effect, so it really can take several months to figure out the correct dosage.  He also gave us a prescription to help with Ben's sleep, which continues to be a problem.  If tonight is any indication, it works like a charm.  Now the only question is will he sleep all night, or will he wake up at 4am revved up and ready to go.  Hopefully not....

I haven't talked about work much lately.  As of this week I am no longer doing maintenance work, and have moved over to one of the main project teams.  This week is my first real taste of our new process, and so far having that 3,000 mile buffer really seems to help the process work better for me than perhaps it does for others.  We'll see how it turns out.  Mostly this week I am fixing stuff of mine that got broken when another developer ported it over to the new page system.  So I guess that's kind of like maintenance work anyway.  I made some real performance improvements today (aside from the parts that turned out to be broken badly, but I'll fix those tomorrow).  Hopefully tomorrow morning I will finish fixing what got broke, and then move on to the next work item.

So that's it.  I'm going to bed now.

Comments

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

This week is my first real taste of our new process, and so far having that 3,000 mile buffer really seems to help the process work better for me than perhaps it does for others.

It will help the process work for you, i think- and in turn, it'll help me. I'll have stuff to do for the first half of the day, rather than waiting for Kurt and Willie to check stuff in and trying to figure out how to ensure coverage when i can't even get a definitive answer as to what 'user stories' they've worked on when they do have stuff checked in.

Now if i can only get Shobha to reliably get the weeks user stories written out in CRs....

[stannius.livejournal.com]

Are you going to be allowed to work all five days of the week? That should make you look like even more of a superstar (compared to the other devs in the co) than you do already.

The NZ outsourcing thing is so half-arsed. They check in code without even trying to compile it; never mind that they don't have any kind of test environment/working copy of vnet set up. But yet they are getting ordered to make sweeping changes to every page on the site.

[lokheed.livejournal.com]

Are you going to be allowed to work all five days of the week?

Well now, "allowed" is an interesting word. As my daddy would have said to me if he had ever given me any useful advice, it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. I intend to write code whenever I need to write code. I am certainly not going to sit on my hands for half the day on Monday just because nobody in Seattle is at work yet so we haven't discussed user stories for the week. I've got things to do, dammit.

[stannius.livejournal.com]

I'm doing the same thing. My project was supposed to be finished (and was over budget) before coding even started. The scope creeps ever onward. If they want me to work 3 days a week, *they* can explain to the business owners why the schedule is doubling.