Starts with lots of e-mail. Much of it SPAM, even with the filters. Makes you want to have the option to “Nuke Originator” which we all know may have nothing to do with the sender.
Next is the Problem Meeting. I attend this meeting mostly in self-defense. Occasionally, someone will try to blame the mainframe for something delayed. Even more rarely, the mainframe has a problem that we tech people have not heard about. So we can at least get a start on fixing it. If business folks would just appreciate that very often they get what the pay for (and pay for what they don’t), life for everyone would be smoother.
My former employer sold an acquisition. I will need to separate the common performance and service level reporting. This needs to be completed by July first. I think I know what needs to be done. I started on it yesterday for the things that were end-of-period. The spin-off company will return to monthly reporting so that should muck up the simplicity of every week has 7 days and every period (mostly) has 4 weeks. Keep those mental gears turning.
One of the guys is teaching a course in REXX. This probably means nothing to the kids in school today. It is actually an ok language with a lot of the features that you find in Ruby and such but a bit cruder. It is not nearly as terse as C or Perl and hence easier to work with. Lots of built-in functions. The problem with built-in functions is that you need to know about them. Otherwise, you end up reinventing the UPPER option when you just needed to know the correct option of the DATE() function. A learning experience.