Change, she is a-brewing

I accepted a job offer at the startup Acceleware today. Although the target market is small, the products have potential. Who knows how long it will last, but now is the time to be in a startup, when I don't have any children and while the market is looking pretty good and it shouldn't be too difficult to get another job should things take a turn for the worse. The job is there at the end of September, so I don't have to worry about looking for work when we move back to Calgary, which is a relief.

I must prepare to say goodbye to the days when I could come into the lab at 11:00 am, leave at 3:00 pm, and call it a hard days work (never mind that I did most of my work in my bathrobe at home from 7:00 am to 10:00 am and from 9:00 pm to 2:00 am). In a way, this is a good thing, since hopefully it will be easier to separate work from the rest of life. Except for when it is necessary to pull 14 hour days to meet a deadline. Hopefully that won't happen too often, but maybe I'm being too optimistic. At least the weekends won't blur into the work week to the point where I have no idea what day it is anymore.

On the other hand, I'll miss the flexibility that grad school affords: when there aren't deadlines, it's possible to do stuff whenever you choose. The freedom to research whatever happens to be interesting at the time, even though the supervisor would prefer one to focus on the thesis. Taking walks in the dog park in the afternoon. This flexibility can be hazardous to one's work ethic though. It's possible to fall off the wagon for months at a time and do nothing except play video games, surf the web, and ride the bike. The one thing I remember about my former life in professional software development, it's that having a customer asking you for things can make you do stuff you never though you could do, and in less time too. And so far, it has rarely been necessary to skimp on quality, although write-it-quick-and-fix-it-later became a necessity to finish my thesis work for an August defense.

Tamara and I have our 2nd anniversary on August 30th. Tamara's parents are having a biggish get-together tonight, part of which is to celebrate our anniversary. Rod even bought a bottle of scotch (Balvenie 12 year old 'DoubleWood') for the occasion. We are going to eat BBQ'ed roast beef. Mmm beef. People are arriving, so I must conclude.