super-structure

Well, it has been a really rough past couple of months. We’ve been passing around who-knows-how-many viruses. We had several holiday get-together with friends and family here at our house (not including tonight’s NYE party¹. Wyatt has learned to crawl, so our lives have only become that much more insane as we attempt to keep him out of trouble. I’ve also been in a beard-growing contest and while you might think not shaving would only save me some trouble, the efforts to do some creative photo documentation have taken up a not-so-small chunk of my dwindling free time. To top it all off, of the four products² I’m writing for at work, all of them attempted to have releases in the same week (immediately before Christmas).

So, excuses aside, I really wanted to look back on the goals I set out back in January on this site to see just how far I got, in terms of my plan.

• Write More In terms of blogging, this is already looking bad. I think I had even fewer blog posts here and for Bentley than I did last year. I still wrote a lot (did I mention all those work projects?), but I can only say I’m disappointed in the lack of online writings.

• Take More Photographs and Video – This one fared a good bit better. I don’t know that I took many more general photos than last year, but I will say that between a new baby boy and doing Whiskerino, I’ve spent a lot more time trying to take better photos.

  Given that the amount of video I shot in previous years amounted to almost nothing, this was a pretty low hurdle to clear. I did shoot a good bit more video and even shared some clips this year. I managed to capture some very wonderful moments with both kids and even with some family members. Most special to me was that I got to record one of my Grandfather’s stories during his visit back at the beginning of November. I certainly want to share that with my family and children (who are far too young to appreciate that sort of thing). I only regret not doing some more of that.

  If nothing else, though, I very proud of this video birth announcement we did for Wyatt:

  The Birth of Wyatt Paul from Jason Coleman on Vimeo.

• Learn an Object Oriented Programming Language – This one stalled out pretty early on, I must confess. It was always something of a low priority and this simply wasn’t a year to get around to anything that didn’t have flashing sirens and flames shooting out of its openings. It is certainly still something I’d love to pick up again and my O’Reilly book isn’t going anywhere.

• Learn to use Regular Expressions- I really did get into the meat of this one, though. Two of my work projects involved taking a lot of legacy content and updating or integrating it into new documentation of my own. I simply couldn’t have done the amount of work I accomplished without a tool like RegEx and the utility software I used to learn/apply³ it.

  In the coming year, I’m going to be getting into structuring legacy content (both my own and that from others) even more. I’ll be forging a lot of my own path in developing document conversions with RegEx and spending some hours learning even the fundamentals is going to pay off.

• Take Ainsley Swimming – We did take Ainsley swimming in our neighborhood a few times. What’s more, we dedicated a large portion of time this summer to taking to a swim safety course. The results were nothing short of amazing and I recommend this to anyone with small children. We fully plan on taking Wyatt in the next year.

  Ainsley’s Swim Class from Jason Coleman on Vimeo.

• Finally Get Something Out of Twitter – I really ramped up using Twitter this year. I purchased Tweetie for both the mac and the iPhone and began to follow loads of folks, both near and far. Twitter also went entirely mainstream this past year, which didn’t hurt in finding people of interest to follow.

  However, Twitter has become a double-edged sword. It makes finding and following so much easier, it has supplanted blogging and feed-reading a great deal. It seems I’m not the only person who has noticed this, too. Were blogs used to be filled with comments and trackbacks, now we just get shortened links via Twitter. Link blogs are all but dead now (though fortunately some are still strong, such as Gruber or Kottke, and other old-timers) as we constantly are fed a diet of bit.ly links inside of 140 character chunks. I’m not arguing that one is really better than the other and certainly blogging can be a time consuming hobby. But it is important to acknowledge that the way we use Twitter can actually diminish other activities.

• Run One Short Road Race Per Month – Oh, God, no. That just didn’t happen. I barely ran at all. That’s not to say I’ve not at least made some effort into getting a bit healthier (I’m already down about 12 pounds from just three months ago). I ran a couple of races, true, but nothing like one a month.

So, there you have it. I’m not disappointed in how things went this year on the whole. I do think I came closer my family, friends, and colleagues; which as I said back in January, was really the ultimate goal here. Two-thousand nine was a tough year, but in a far better way that its immediate predecessor. It was difficult because of the new challenges of a second baby, new work projects, learning to use (or get more out of) the tools I have. In fact, looking back, those are best kind of challenges I think anyone can hope to be up against.

Happy New Year and may twenty ten be a wonderful year for all of us.

1. Tonight’s party is actually going to be kind of a early event, as we’re getting together to watch Virginia Tech play and, hopefully beat, the Univ. of Tennessee. There will be food and drink, but I suspect we won’t last much past midnight.↵
2. I inherited a huge responsibility in the form of STAAD.Pro’s documentation. I made some great strides in updating it over the past three months but I still have a long road ahead of me. Other than that, I worked on the documentation for our soon-to-be released structural modeling integration toolset as well as the two STAAD(X) Tower products.↵
3. I purchased RegEx Buddy about 6 months ago. Even though it was at my own expense, it saved my bacon ten times over and was worth every penny.↵

We’ve been in Spring cleaning mode here around the house. Angela went through our old file cabinet, combing over records for the past decade plus. We also both chucked most of our papers and files from college. That alone ended up being ten boxes to take to the document shredding & recycling place.

In the process, I ended up with a rather large pile of 3.5″ floppy disks to get rid of. I decided to go through them and copy any files before we had them destroyed. Of course, we actually don’t own anything with a 3.5″ floppy drive! Even my old linux box in the garage only has a optical drive. Fortunately, Angela’s dad has a USB floppy drive he was able to loan us.

So, in the process of going through some of the disks (many of which included programs for obsolete operating systems), I managed to find a few gems:

• Lots of photos from around 1998-99, when Angela and were first dating and she was going off to pharmacy school in VA. It probably goes without saying, but we’ve aged a bit in the past decade.
  
  

  Our first ever big date, almost 11 years ago.

• The first help document I ever wrote for software. It was for a DOS program called Plane Frame & Truss (PFT, for short, because filenames back then couldn’t exceed 8 bytes). It is written in a very snarky voice; probably not something I’d try and reproduce in my current writing (okay, maybe here):
  

  How to use Dr. Noel Tolbert’s Plane-Frame-Truss Program (PFT)
  By Jason Coleman

  First of all, PFT is not user-friendly, regardless of what Big-Daddy-Tolbert may say about it. However, if you are using PFGTAB (the quasi-graphical version), simply read everything it tells you until you are more comfortable with the program. The questions the program asks are not always clear at first, so take your time with them.

  How PFT works: (This is more-or-less from the horse’s mouth)

  This will cover, for the most part, how to use the graphical interface, PFGTAB. You have to be at an MSDOS prompt, and not simply in a Windows Shell. In a windows shell, you can only run a program once, and then the shell more-or-less quits, and when using PFT, you actually have to run two programs consecutively. That’s one of the many non-user-friendly features of PFT.

• The first program I ever wrote in Visual Basic (or anything that had a GUI, for that matter). It was a program for Advanced Mechanics of Materials grad. level course which would determine the stresses in a curved beam member under a specific loading. It wasn’t exactly anything very useful (unless you need to design clamps for a living), but it also didn’t look too bad for a first attempt:
  
  

  Curvbeam.exe's screen.

So we found a few nerdy treasures from our past lives. That’s one of the fun things about cleaning out so much of that sort of stuff: you find the things that really mean something and can put them somewhere you can access, instead of buried in a tomb of junk.

It’s a tired cliché of blogging: apologizing for not posting in so long. The excuses are always the same, and this is no different. There has simply been too much going on here take any time to write down [or type - ed.].

The Job

I started my new job at the beginning of January (before the move, for those keeping track of such things). I received a warm welcome (mostly all by e-mail) and did my best to get right into things. My position is sort of a new thing, though, and not personally knowing people I was working with made getting much traction difficult at first. I did fly out to Southern California¹ to meet a number of my co-workers and higher-up types. That proved to be a very good trip and I really enjoyed getting to meet all the people there. I feel confident that I made the right choice in this career.

Flying home through Chicago in the dead of winter, however, was incredibly dumb. In my defense, it was also not my choice to do so. I sincerely wish I was able to make my own business travel arrangements again.

The Move

As soon as I got back, it was time to try to finish packing the house, get a U-Haul van, and let the movers do their work. Of course, moving is never simple. This was off the scale, though. Despite the best efforts of many of our friends² and all of Angela’s hard work boxing stuff in my absence, we simply were not prepared for moving when the time came to do it.

I’ll keep it sob stories short, but after renting a second truck plus tow-dolly for Angela’s car and putting all of our gardening and power-tools on a mobile storage unit left in Richmond and not finishing doing touch-up paint in the house before leaving, we were still a day late in getting out of there. Fortunately, everything worked out just fine (as life does more than not, thank God). However, the last night laying on an inflatable mattress in our house I was so sick to my stomach I just couldn’t sleep. To be honest here, I think that night I got more planning for the remainder of the move than I had done in the weeks and months up until that point.

When we finally got it all packed up and were ready to leave, a sense of relief swept over me. That really seemed to pick up my spirits for days to come. I needed it, because it was a truly sad moment when we left our keys inside and locked the door of our old home one last time. We loved that house very much and had put a great deal of time and effort into it. In yet another bout of poor planning, I had packed my camera away somewhere in our SUV and never got a chance to take one last photo. I’ll make it up during our next trip up there, but I don’t think it’ll mean as much to me.

Then again, as painful as some of the other photos we did take there recently have been to look through, it may be just as well. It really feels like a part of us is gone. Angela and I hadn’t lived in a place for that long since our childhood homes (both of which are no longer in the family, either). Despite all of us being content where we’re at now, thinking about what we gave up — having those friends close by, a home we loved to be at, just living in Virginia — kind of hurts.

…The New Place

Though it’s taken us about three weeks, we finally feel like we have a nice home in our apartment. Though going from a home of your own to an apartment kind of sucks, it was nice to just call up someone to come fix leaky kitchen faucet — and not have to pay them. Ainsley made out great, with her new room being more than twice the size of her old one. It feels like most of that square footage came out of our bedroom, though! The best part though has to be the closets.

My God! Closets! Apparently, usable closets weren’t invented until sometime after our old house was built.

Even though the drive down was on a nice sunny day, the day we ended up unloading the moving vans into our apartment (and garage and storage unit…) was cold, wet, and windy. The movers were great, though; and Dave even drove down to help out for a bit. We got it all moved in and mostly all in the right places. Angela’s parent’s came down the next day and stayed with us for the rest of the week. That helped out tremendously. Angela and I were able to work while they watched Ainsley and we were able to unpack bit by bit in the evenings.

We’ve been unpacking ever since, it seems. However, at this point there is just one last small box of engineering books by the door that is waiting to make its way down to the garage. Otherwise, there’s little evidence of all the recent turmoil around our lives.

We’ve got some paperwork still to fill out and make it all official, but we’re Tennesseans again.

1. Orange County probably isn’t the most scenic part of California, to tell the truth. However, it did make a number of Arrested Development jokes suddenly make sense, so I’d say it was worth it.↵
2. I would be completely remiss if I didn’t give a huge thanks to Jason J. for driving that 26′ U-Haul giant down to TN for us. Just to tell you how much we trust him, we never gave a second though to the well being of most of our Earthly possession being in the hands of a guy whose never driven anything bigger than a family van. Also, Michelle and Robert P. were absolutely tireless. They gave up their whole weekend to help out and were in a good mood the entire time, which is probably what kept us sane. Kushal S. also came over to help pack things up. Thanks, guys.↵

As a result of our moving, I have taken a position of Senior Technical Writer with Bentley Systems, Inc. Specifically, I’ll be working with software in the structures group. In the past three years, Bentley has acquired several big names in structural engineering software: REI (STAAD), RAM International, and more recently TDV GmbH (RM). I think that a number of engineers were surprised to see this move by Bentley (at least I was), particularly given the perception that STAAD and RAM were major competitors. However, as I’ve learned a bit more about the company and what the direction of the structures group appears to be in, it has become clear that they have in place a remarkable suite of structural applications. What’s more, they are position themselves to provide software for virtually any structure type or size. Along the way of polishing the elements to build this toolbox, they are integrating all of them so they are better equipped to work in the future world of Building Information Modeling, which is the new hotness in the construction and engineering world.

So, let me back up a bit and explain how I got here.

Though I have to admit it felt at first like taking a long shot at the time, I sent out some resumes to some engineering software firms to gauge their interest in hiring a structural engineer to work remotely. I was pleased when two companies, including Bentley, were interested. I did my best to learn all I could about the positions and products of both (I have been a career user of the products now in Bentley’s line, though). After learning more about what they had in mind for both their software and this position, I realized that this was indeed the correct career path for me. To put another way, I believe that while both are excellent positions, I wanted the job I felt was not just a good fit for me but a great one.

It is a bit daunting to leave behind a career in design, but at this point it really feels like the natural background for the work I’ll be doing in the future, rather than a total career change. The knowledge in design and working in a consulting office will be indispensable as a technical writer as well as to serve as a liaison between engineering clients and software programmers; getting to talk to them about what they’d like our software to do and present to them how they can achieve that.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about being so apprehensive about total life changes. Well, when this job came together, something inside me clicked and everything just felt right. It’s not most people’s idea of a dream job to work mostly at home writing and talking about engineering software, but it kind of is mine. I’m genuinely excited about the work I’ll be doing as well as the company I’ll be doing it for; one that really seems to be providing a great set of applications and is moving the industry forward in terms of technology and how to benefit designers.

Also, for the first time in my life, being a nerd isn’t a social drawback; it’s a lifestyle and a marketable skill set.

First of all, let me announce what is probably the worst kept secret since we announced we were pregnant: Angela and I have made the decision to move to Franklin, TN (that’s near Nashville for you non-Tennesseans). We had been discussing the idea of doing so since July. When I say discussing, I mean Angela kept trying to convince me we should move and I kept trying to convince her we should stay in Richmond.

I caved.

Then, just a couple of days before she moved back to work, her company posted openings for her position in Franklin. She saw this when she returned from maternity leave and they said a transfer was possible. Instead of waiting until next year, as I had finally agreed to do, we would be moving at the end of this year. I felt like there was no way we would be able to move sooner and that this was the least I could do for my employer (I work for a fairly small branch office of a relatively small company, so it just seemed the right thing to give them as much notice as possible).

We’ve put our beloved Colonial up for sale here and found some nice temporary housing in Franklin, very close to Angela’s work. Angela of course has her job lined up to change over, although the application process for her to get a license in a different state is very long and complicated. It’s all in place now, though.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure about what I’d be doing for work. I’ll expand on that more next week, though. I haven’t posted in quite a while and I wouldn’t want to sprain a thumb or something writing too much. For now, though, I’ll just say that it has been an exciting turn and it’s got me looking forward to all this change after all…

Ainsley? Oh, she seems to be growing by the hour. Of course, that was the one bit of change we were expecting.