snousle

Things have gone pretty smoothly for this latest Florida venture. Got in late, as usual, and proceeded to a friends' house in Ft Lauderdale, where they have offered me regular use of their travel trailer to sleep in. Perfect, I really don't care for motels. Very pleasant place, with a lovely garden, a mango tree heavy with fruit, a cranky parrot, a giant staghorn fern, and other tropical amenities. Such as beer. ;-)

Did some work on site on Thursday and spent some time barhopping in the evening. Lots of bars down here have Thursday specials so it was surprisingly festive. Met up with two of the hottest guys I've seen so far down here - unfortunately they're a couple and one of them seems kind of jealous. But... woof. One is short and stout and tight with a stern little moustache and a LOT of thick fur, while the other is a big lanky daddybear with a thick gray beard. They were quite friendly and plied me with somewhat more than I had intended to drink.

Friday was the marathon 8-hour session with my client and their other consultant. Unfortunately there has not been adequate communication on development plans - to the point where the other consultant didn't even know what I had been doing for the past year and had set off creating a wholly redundant analytic database until I informed him this task had already been completed. We come from very different coding cultures; he's an academic, piously platform-independent guy while I am very keen on .NET stuff in corporate settings, so it is very vexing to have to listen yet again to the petty and irrelevant politics surrounding platform choices. I particularly dislike the spinning of implausible FUD scenarios and will not stoop to them myself. Ptttpt.

It was very civil but I think we both have good reasons to feel slighted. For pragmatic reasons my boss has suggested that in the near term we adapt a "two-state solution" and see where things are in a few months. I hope by then to have crushed his feeble ambitions with the weight of my superior architecture. :-P

The whole ordeal really flattened me and has left me fatigued. The transition from cold and wet California to stale airplane air followed by alternating tropical humidity and air conditioning has played hell with my whole respiratory system. Makes me feel like shit, actually, particularly since the fancy hotel the company puts me up in has sealed windows that cannot be opened. Lack of fresh air when I'm sleeping is a real problem.

Having fun nonetheless, and will be returning to CA tomorrow morning.