totient: (Default)
My boss is back from a two month leave of absence. Lately it has not been a given that people would return from such things, so we were all very excited that he had actually done so. One of his lieutenants organized, and the other provided, some cheesecakes to celebrate. I love cheesecake, but I can't eat the ones you find in most grocery stores. And I had some mascarpone cheese taking up space in my fridge, and (finally) some weather cool enough for baking cheesecake.

At first I thought I was just going to make a little mini cheesecake in one of my 4" springform pans. This would be one egg worth, though the recipe I use is very flexible and fractions other than quarters are quite possible even though it calls for four eggs. Then it was two minis. But ultimately I realized that I didn't have a plausible plan for what to do with the rest of the mascarpone if it didn't all go into cheesecake, so I made a full (or technically very slightly more than full, see above re: flexible) batch in a 9" pan.

I sort of had a plan to get this to work on my bicycle, but only sort of. And I took longer getting out the door than I'd intended. So when [personal profile] miss_chance suggested I drive as she didn't need the car, I realized I could get a bunch of other car related work errands done at the same time and not have to worry about serving delicious cheesecake soup to my coworkers.

Our group recently moved locations in the building and there isn't a collective bookshelf in the new space. I'd offered to bring something in, and in the meantime had found a suitable bookshelf being given away curbside and brought it home for this purpose. Into the back of the car it went.

I have a shredder, but it doesn't do thick items like CDs or credit cards. The shred box at work can handle these no problem. I keep a small pile of things to take to work to shred, and into my backpack that went. We also had some e-waste, and that went into the backpack too. None of this was too big to fit into my panniers, but it was still nice to have it out of my way.

We have a bike cage at work, to encourage people to ride in. Sometimes, though, folks will ride in and then for whatever reason accept a ride home from a coworker. Usually said coworker can't get their bike into their car, so the rider's bike is stuck at work and now they need some other way to get in the next morning. I have a large number of trunk-top bike racks and got permission from the facilities people to put one of these in the bike cage for general use. But these are awkward to carry on a bike, so into the car it went, too.

Speaking of awkward to carry on a bike, a while ago biking to work I came across a large collapsing delivery bag lying in the middle of the bike lane. I moved it out of the way -- and then, not seeing anyone whose bag it might be, folded it up and carried it, rather awkwardly, to work with me. It has been sitting there ever since, waiting for me to come in with a better way to carry it. Now it's in my basement, with a bunch of other (mostly non-folding) packing totes and containers.

I'd hoped that doing all this in a car would also keep me from getting rained on. But as it happens the driving I did wasn't in the rain, or even on particularly wet roads. That's a pity, because we need the rain.
totient: (justice)
We didn't make a big public fuss about it at the time but Akamai was one of many tech companies that quickly jumped on the "we'll pay for travel for people to get abortions" bandwagon. The email to employees said there were some details to work out and today we got those details. And there are two details I like enough that I think everyone should be doing them, and which I'm mentioning here because I think some companies aren't.

First, we're not limiting this to medical care that looks like an abortion. Need gynecological care of some kind and can't get it, even though it's still legal, because people have been harassing gynecologists in your city and they've all left? You're all set, as is your traveling companion. Any care is covered if you can't get it within 100 miles of home.

Second and perhaps more importantly, we're administering this program as part of your medical care, in a way that means Akamai does not get any information about who's using it, and the records that do exist (at the insurance company) are covered by HIPAA. This means they are safe from being subpoenaed to divulge who might have gotten an abortion.

These details are important for themselves, but they also show that HR is paying attention and not just doing what they think they have to because other companies are doing it. Well done.
totient: (Default)
I need to find a longer route to work.

new job!

Aug. 20th, 2011 10:21 am
totient: (Default)
This Monday, I started work at Akamai. New jobs are always awesome and so is this one, but I really like my group and my boss, and the work seems interesting. It's a very thinky kind of place; the algorithms are mostly done but there are always more optimizations to do and there's more creativity and less plumbing here than at some other places. The people here are thinky too, which makes them fun to interact with.

I like to see how quickly I can check in code, as a measure of how agile the company is. This time the answer was Wednesday morning, mostly because access to Perforce is through SSH keys and Akamai is super careful about establishing trust for those. Two days or so isn't bad for a company of this size and I see the need for caution since we're a great big target. My boss was super sweet in saving aside a project for me with a gentle learning curve and not very much schedule pressure. We'll see how the learning curve ramps up in a couple of weeks when I'm done with that and move on to something more complicated.

I asked my boss if I should attend a particular design review next week and she asked if I was going to cause trouble. I responded "I don't know, it depends on whether there's any trouble that needs to be caused. But you guys seem to be pretty good at that". This put a big smile on her face and she said I had chosen the right group.

I keep running into people I know there. It's a pretty big company and even a percent of the employees is a pretty big number. But based on what I have seen so far I think I'm going to have to revise my estimate to two or three percent.

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