Data Day: FGM Stats

I kept rigorous logs of the hours I worked while full-time, right down to the specific time I started each day (between 5:30 and 6:30 AM throughout the years). From the data, here's how many hours I worked overtime or used as paid time off over the past 13 years:

Among the highlights that I remember:

• When I was hired full-time after grad school, there was no work to do for the first few weeks, so I spent the days learning how to create Warcraft 3 custom maps. I then spent 4 months doing a project with the Vignette Content Management System which was ultimately scrapped because it was an inappropriate abomination for the intended use case.


• I used to play poker, soccer, and basketball with FGMers, but I was bad at everything but poker, and didn't want to be in the office at 5 PM on a Friday to play poker. I organized many intern events back when I was rich and single and looking for love.


• Over the years, I taught two separate courses in Java, gave three lunchtime seminars (How to Read Music, History of Western Music, and History of Jazz), and taught a course in AWS. I also joined the FGM Volleyball team for a single season before being beaten by the traffic on the Fairfax County Parkway. Never join a volleyball team that practices and plays 45 minutes from the office.


• My office mates included Richard Albright, Noah Klemm, Eric Fox, Tammy Hale, Marquis Parker, Gary Monroe, Carla Rogers, Jack Wilmer, Tim Suh, and Tina Hsu. I've mainly had a single office for the past six years.


• The Metadata Registry crashed during Larry's wedding, and I went straight to the office from there to sit on the phone with the government system administrators all night long. With no progress by 5 AM, I tried restarting the web server and that fixed the issue. All in all, I spent about 7 nights in the office.


• When I first moved to Sterling in 2004, I briefly had a 2 mile commute to work. Two days later, the office moved to Reston where it's been ever since. The hardest part of getting a new job may be turning off the muscle memory to drive to Reston.


• I spent a year working in data standards where my primary coup was getting two warring ontologists to agree on a compromise definition of the term, "Physical Entity": An entity that is part of physical reality, such as a physical object, an environment, a geographic feature, or a region of physical reality. This had stalled talks for several months before I arrived to add the italicized text.


• The farthest I ever had to travel for work was Virginia Beach. The places I went most often beyond Reston were Fort Meade, Bailey's Crossroad, and MITRE.

Final Grade: I would give my tenure a solid A-