Guus Bosman

I am writing this from the office, with the arms and shoulders of my shirt totally wet.

Puerto Rico has a beautiful climate, but can have rather unexpected rainfall. I went for lunch with five colleagues in a shopping center about 10 minutes walking from the office. When we wanted to go back it started raining. We had only three umbrella's and six people, so we shared them but the Puerto Rican rain is very, very strong. It should try quick enough, with the airconditioning in the office.

Yesterday was my first working day at the customer. I met many people that I spoke with only over the phone in the last months, as well as many new people. In fact, we have a few people of our company on-site all the time, and it was nice to see them again. Yesterday was a day off for the customer, this was the first working day of the week.

For lunch we went to a place with typical Puerto Rican food. I had rice, with beans and chicken with a nice sauce. A side-dish that I had was fried bananas (or a fruit that looks suspiciously like bananas); very nice.

The coffee here is outstanding! Even the coffee from the vending machines is very acceptable.

We stayed till late in the office, there were a lot of things to arrange and set up. It is extremely convenient to be so close to the customer; many questions and issues that we'd typically process by e-mail followed by a lot of phone calls can now be resolved by simply walking to another desk. The people here in the office, and for that matter, on the entire island have been very friendly.

Today I'm preparing for my journey Monday. Last week I prepared my laptop, business cards and PowerPoint slides, today it's time for shorts, sunblock and other things.

I'll go to San Juan, Puerto Rico to visit our customer there. I'll do requirement analysis and discovery for new phases of our project, something I'm really looking forward to. I'll stay at least a week, but probably longer.

Yesterday I went for lunch with a colleague to an Afghan restaurant around the corner. The food was very nice; somewhat similar to the Middle Eastern and Arabic cuisine.

There's a huge variety of restaurants in this area, from all over the world. In general people go much more often for dinner or lunch to a restaurant than I was used to in the Netherlands. Our company for example, doesn't have a cafeteria, instead people go to places outside to have lunch or bring back lunch from there to eat in the office.

For coffee it works the same: Starbucks and other coffee places here are triving on all the office workers around. This morning when I was crossing the street towards Starbucks, a group of school kids entered just in front of me. It didn't take that long however, the guys working there know how keep moving and I got my morning coffee ("a grande coffee") quickly.

Monday morning is an important deadline for the project I am working on. We want to deliver a new release of our software, with a lot of new features, that is ready to be tested by the customer.

Our company has a strict quality process for such a release that includes a separate, professional testing team and 'certification' of the software to determine whether is good-to-go or not. It's been quite busy the last day, but we've made very good progress. This is the first release that will contain functionality that I've designed, and it's exciting to see it getting ready for its interaction with end users.

Sasha left to New York this morning; of course I'd rather be with her and her family in NJ but there's no way I could leave this weekend.

Tonight I was home earlier than the previous few days, and it's great to have some time off. It's the first night I'm alone in a long time. I'm assembling the furniture, which is very rewarding to do, with a glass of triple beer, incense (wierrook) burning, and while listening to relaxing music.

I am used to drinking a lot of water during the day. Especially when I'm at work I tend to basically drink non-stop.

I've always had the habit of drinking a lot of water when I'm working at the computer. I think it started in Middenmeer. My brand new 386 computer was installed in my bedroom where I also had a sink. To get water was as easy as pushing the chair to the other side of the room and fill my glass.

At home I drink from a huge glass, and I used to do that at Chess too. Now I don't have a large glass at work, so I have to keep walking back and forth to the water cooler.

The water cooler at work has recently been replaced. We used to have one that worked with large bottles, that were delivered every two weeks. The problem with that, was that all the bottles were empty long before the new delivery arrived. Since a week we have a water cooler. This one is connected to a tap which gives the best of both worlds: a non-stop supply and freshly cooled water.

I like to pride myself that within three months in my new job the water systems had to be replaced because it couldn't catch up with demand.

Today I spent all day making sure that our applications were deployed correctly on the test servers.

The systems that they were being installed on worked fine with the old version of the software (we did a very nice baseline check a few days ago). However, the new version has a lot changes that were also reflected in the configuration, so it took quite some time. But we made it. At the end of the day all the applications that I wanted deployed for today were deployed, and the last two will be ready by tomorrow. In the mean time the testing team started testing already, and they found the first bugs.

It's a nice thought that we're going to the testing phase of the project. When I started on the project there was uncertainty (at least for me) on what we should, and should not implement. Figuring out the scope of the work has taken a fair share of my work so far. Being able to go to testing means that an important first phase has been completed. Now up the next step: we're ready for bug fixing.

The piece of software that we've been working on is ready for testing.

The testing team is almost ready for it, and the software is good-to-go, so now I'm making sure that our software gets installed correctly on the right places. I'm also verifying that we have all the down-to-earth things in place, such as a bugtracker repository, and a testing and deployment schedule.

I really enjoy the work I'm doing: it's interesting, fun and I am learning a lot. The walk home from work is a nice way to leave the hectic work behind and arrive home with a 'fresh mind'. Cooking is also perfect way to relax and slow down; tonight I made couscous which turned out to be quite nice.

I went to the bank the other day to ask about my PIN code. The lady told me to wait for a letter with a new, different PIN code, instead of trying to use my old one. I am pretty sure that's not what they told me initially, and I haven't seen a letter yet. I'll wait another day or so and then check with them again. In the mean time I'm still paying with cash everywhere (my current card only works in the bank's ATM, not at merchant's registers).

Things are getting up to speed at my job. I am working now on a major project we are doing, I started helping out on that project Monday. It's really nice to be part of a project: feeling the rush, getting things done and working under some pressure makes working fun.

I am making long days, much longer than at my previous job. I knew this in advance when I decided to go the US, and actually it much less tiring than I thought it would be. I guess it makes a big difference that the work I'm doing is so much fun. Also I'm glad that we live so close to my work so I don't have to commute a long distance to and from the office. Tomorrow a lot of colleagues will have a day off, as Christmas is coming and many people are traveling tomorrow.

Around 18:30 o'clock I went to Starbucks, a coffee shop near my work, to get drinks for me and a colleague. I remembered that it's pretty cold outside, so at the last moment I grapped my coat.

When I returned to our building the doors were locked. I forgot to bring my electronic building pass, that can be used to open the door in the evening, but luckily somebody else was just leaving and held the door open for me. I entered the elevator and pressed the button for our floor. However, just when I was one floor below mine, the elevator stopped, without opening, and went down again. Turns out: to operate the elevators in the evening you also need this personalized building pass that will let the elevator stop only on your own floor. Very secure.

The end result was that I went home, and that I drank my hot chocolade but my colleague spent the evening without his coffee. Oh well, at least I had my coat, with the keys of the apartment and my money in it.