• I graduated from college (finally).
  
• We got married.
  
• I got a hot job at a company where I've always wanted to work.
  
• Shannon bought a new car, her first since 1993.
  
• I bought a new car, my first new car ever, after not having a car of my own for four years. (We shared that car Shannon bought 1n 1993 until she sold it last summer.)
  
• We moved to Seattle, a place we'd both said we'd like to live before.
  

[	Current Mood	|	happy	]
[	Current Music	|	Comedy Central	]

Today was my first day of work in almost a year. It was amazing how natural it all was, how easy it was to fall into things. Of course, it helps that when I showed up there were two brand new 3.2GHz Pentium 4 (dual core, I believe!) machines, still in the box, waiting explicitly for me. My last job it was all hand-me-down stuff--if your manager had time and cared enough, he could scrounge something up. Actually, after being there a while you were better off scavenging on your own; as soon as somebody left, the first person to their cube (well, with enough seniority) could take any good hardware they had. Which wasn't much. But a 17" CRT beats a 15", and a 750MHz box beats a 300. Oh, and you never know when you might find a memory module that will fit in your machine. Pretty sad stuff for developers, though it gave me a lot of time to surf the web waiting for stuff to compile. ;)

So I got my two new boxes, plus I inherited one from the previous tenant of my desk, along with her ergonomic keyboard, wireless mouse, speakers, chair, and a 17" CRT. Ok, not too bad. Not thrilled with the CRT, but the hardware is nice, so I'll deal, hopefully only until we move (my team is scheduled to move to a new location in about a month). Lo and behold, my manager brings--with nary a hint from me--a brand new 19" flatscreen, also in the box, 'to save room on your desk.' Oh, and a KVM switch and more memory for one of my boxes have already been ordered. At my last job, even getting another 256MB of memory meant a requisition and months of waiting. One of my colleagues just went to Best Buy and bought it himself because it was so cheap, and so much faster than waiting for the company. I held out, because it pissed me off that a company expense should have to come out of our paycheck. Anyway, the lack of memory meant even longer compiles, and more time to surf the web. If they want to save money by cutting stupid corners, I'll make up for it. ;)

At any rate, the whole thing just went so smoothly, I felt totally comfortable there. No hand holding, but people there to solve problems as they arise. Resources for hardware, software, books, whatever I need. God it's nice working for a place where they have their shit together, or at least seem to so far. Oh--and the programming guidelines document I read today about project stages was a fucking riot--I'll have to see if I can put some of it up. And I think I might have actually exclaimed 'right on!' a few times while reading the programming style document; every bit of it, formatting, organization, and advice was something I agreed with and pretty much matched my style already. At my last job it was kind of a losing battle to get anybody else to write standardized code. Oh--and source control was another battle I had to fight, but won because it was important enough for me to rock the boat. And my boss was happy to have somebody backing him up finally. ;)

There's still the small detail that I haven't actually started working on the project itself; today was all standard preparatory stuff, and I'll have more of it tomorrow. But by later this week I should actually be diving into the project and learning more about it. I'm still pretty excited, though there are some warning signs for sure. Still, nothing like my last job, and as far as I'm concerned, all the hardest stuff--what it took to get here--is already over.