It’s amazing how much easier it is to drag yourself to work in the morning when you are dreading a 30 mile commute and 8 hours of work you are totally disinterested in. The first week and change of work have been great, and while all “honeymoon period” disclaimers apply, the new environment seems much more conducive to happiness and productivity than my previous situation. Things weren’t horrible at Goodrich, but they weren’t great either, and that commute started each day on a pretty down note.

I walked to and from work the last three days of this week… I drove on Monday and Tuesday, partly because I had packages to pick up from UPS and partly because it’s tough to break out of the car commute mindset. Now that I’ve walked a few times, I’ve found a pretty good route, turning a 3 mile commute according to Google Maps to a 2.25 mile commute. It takes about 40 minutes at my current pace, but that will improve a bit once I get a bit more in shape.

The actual work is great, some of my code is already in customer hands (or at least, will be real soon now). So far they have me cleaning up the sample apps built upon our RasterMaster SDK, all of which were created some time ago and hadn’t been maintained in awhile. So I’ve been giving them some TLC, updating several of them to the Java 1.1 event model as well as letting Eclipse loose on them reformatting them and making them conform to the style of the rest of Snowbound’s Java code. I have a few new sample to write before I really start digging into my “primary” work, the FlexSnap code. I’m starting to finally remember why I got into programming initially, which is a very, very good thing.

I had to exchange my RAZR for the second time this week. The first phone I got shut itself off randomly, and I swapped that one out about a month after receiving it in April. The replacement for that one had this annoying static noise, similar to when you have a cell too close to a computer speaker, but it was ignorable at first, and I figured it was a tower problem. But when I went to Jersey recently, it still kept at it, and seemed to be getting worse, so I called Cingular this week. They overnighted me a replacement for free, and the new phone seems to be good so far. The customer service rep asked me if I wanted to swap it for a different phone, and I considered it, but I am giving the RAZR one more shot. If this one acts up, it is gonna get the boot.