Wednesday, April 24

Up by 7:15. Two cookies, and a sip of coffee, and I headed to the subway by 7:50am. I thought I’d grab a bagel from the food truck dude. I skipped L-Carnitine – that stuff is just too strong. The train arrived empty, but there were many people waiting at the station. The bagel was so-so.

My email still didn’t work. My ActiveDirectory name was fixed yesterday, but the email was still not working. I was told to wait till this morning. Still not working. Jeffrey from the ticket asks where I access it from. But I work from this grey-area laptop. That was easy for him to say I should access it from the corp laptop. I couldn’t log in to the corp laptop either. Igor says I need the email access first to access the laptop. Catch-22.

9:30 standup. Firstly, about my IT adventures, then they talked about the trains. What they talked about the trains I barely understood, but I noticed David seemed to know the system very well; he recalls station layouts, and gives counter-examples when someone wants to generalize about this system. It’s a complex system.

Then I read Kotlin docs. They have coroutines: that is really awesome. Wow. It’s been a long time since I wanted coroutines – now it’s just part of the language.

At 11:55 I was able to open my email for the first time. It took less than a week. And then it got busy: everyone writing me something, asking me something. Life was good without the email. 

The last big thing remaining is to change my directory name. They added me as “Grigory” in the system. No, I’m not Grigory. Grigory got in trouble; cops call me Grigory. Grigory is summoned by the judge; and sought by the authorities. I’m Grisha. Alternatively: Grishka, even Grikha, but not “Grigory”. I tried to tell Igor, he sounded Russian, but he didn’t understand my pain at all: Igor is always Igor; I don’t know why – Russian names are the weirdest thing. The hardest part of starting to read Russian literature by non-Russian speakers: understanding that Dmitri Fyodorovich is the son of Fyodor Pavlovich.

I told Glen – he was like: “Nope, supposed to be the legal name.” Then I said: “But William is listed as Will.” And then he said: “Oh, yeah, and Robert uses Bob as his first name.” He got it. He promised to help. We will see. I hope I can win this battle. 

3pm we met with Will. Just looked at the code a bit, and talked about my first project. It seems clear. Turns out the estimated arrival time now is just the scheduled time adjusted by the arrival time at the most recent station. Seems too simple, but good enough to start with it. Feels like it’s a good place to use some ML later.

Left the office by 5:30pm. After 40 minutes on the train, I realized a delicate problem: my butt gets numb. I get on the train at the last stop, at South Ferry, and the uptown train is not as crowded as midtown/downtown, so I can just sit and read; my favorite commute – reading on the train. But the problem is that sitting on the plastic chair for 40 minutes makes my butt numb. What a problem! I’ll have to do something about it.

I met with ZL at 6:30. She wants me to mentor high school kids who will be coding projects over the summer. She asked me my rate. I couldn't tell easily – obviously, I would be doing it not for money. She told me to think twice and get back to her. I guess she meant to ask more. 

Then dinner, and finished the chapter about the rise of neoliberalism in Latin America at the end of the 20th century. Bed by 11 something.