reesesWeb

As you may guess, something unfortunate has come to pass.

I logged onto continental.com to check in for our flights from IAD->EWR and EWR->DUB, and saw a melange of conflicting flights. From the summary page, it looked as if one of us to fly to Newark Friday, the other to fly to Newark Saturday around noon, and both of us to fly to Dublin Saturday around 8pm. Calling Continental's helpful phone staff (I am perpetually amazed how great Continental, Northwest, and Alaska Airlines customer service reps are, by the way) cleared up the situation -- after Toronto, the FAA wasn't taking any chances with the weather, and cancelled our flight to Newark six hours early because of a thunderstorm. I don't know if the cancellation was intended to soak up slack in other flight schedules or because the storm cell was too large to be gone by then, but regardless, our options were to pack in about thirty minutes and hop the train to Newark and hope that the flight took off, or wait until Saturday.

Since we had a day to kill, we went to see War of The Worlds, and Kat astonished me by coming out afterward and saying that she found the ending odd. Apparently, she was the only person not exposed to the original story in any of its hundred forms. "I'm not into aliens," she dismissed. She was hoping to see people fighting back against the aliens, expecting an ID4 type film.

I planned to think about work during this vacation. Lately, I've been getting close to the point where I may need to disengage with a particular client. Because of a minimum necessary time commitment, they have become my sole client, which is a bad situation to be in at the best of times. However, lately, I've been dealing with rate increase negotiations that have become surreal almost to the point of kafkaesquery, on top of what I can only describe as almost unmeasurable weakness on the part of the project execution teams with whom I've been working.

As I have mentioned before, it pains me to work with people I don't respect. If the only reason I respect them is that they pay me, it's obvious to everyone that it's a sour relationship that can only become less rewarding for everyone. I hate to leave people in the lurch, and have left one project mid-stream only when I could see tremendous unhappiness in the future for all involved. I have already caught myself being more aggressive than usual with this client, in the hope that I will either have all the client staff fired or relocated, or my own engagement terminated, which is like dating that girl you can't quite break up with yourself because she's way too hot, or romps like a beast, or is just too nice.

I've always talked about taking significant time off, either a month, a year, or longer. Lately, I've been joking with Kat (whose professional calling tempts her to places such as Uzbekistan or Tajikistan) that she can go work there for half a year or so, and I'll go to a shaolin temple.

What is more likely, after this current project experience, is that I will take about six months off and create a highly-scalable ecommerce layer on top of a torn-up-and-rebuilt Lucene port just to punish a couple vendors. What is it about companies selling search solutions that are so absurdly misdesigned? None of them can actually scale, or if they can, they can only scale in one axis. Ask them to index huge numbers of documents with huge numbers of parametric attributes, and process huge numbers of updates during the day, while satisfying huge numbers of search requests, in an operationally supportable environment, and every single one of them will tell you that it is possible with their product.

I'll tell you something right now -- they are all liars, every single one. I've been spending too much time lately re-implementing chunks of someone's "search server" in an online commerce engine because they have no idea how to deal with the volume a top-20 commerce site generates. It's absolutely not my job to calculate fuzzy matches based on misspelling, but no one else is capable of doing it as quickly as I can, and if the project has any chance of launching before the retail holiday freeze, I have to get my hands dirty, while keeping everything moving forward because the PMs are too busy omphaloskeptically looking at their GANTT charts. The map is not the terrain, people.

Anyway, I'll probably be noodling this over the next week, but if any of you with significant online commerce experience (preferably at least a number of higher-ranked Internet Retailer 400 sites), very-high-throughput systems experience, or computational linguistics (my weakness in this space) backgrounds are interested in renting a house on the beach in Maui for half a year to surf and hack, drop me a line. Hopefully, I won't read it until I get back from Dublin.

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