Any Port in a Storm

Finally met my boss, and found out (in a general sense) what I'll be doing. It seems that the Advanced Architecture folks do the interfaces, APIs, web services, and other such glue between the existing Cerner Millennium backend and the new web-based frontend. My sub-group now has a grand total of three people, including me, so I have a feeling that they need all the help they can get. That, and they said as much.

Turns out that said boss is the very same man who first interviewed me for the job a few months back. I'm on his team because he specifically requested me. Which is, for starters, extremely flattering. But the reason why is even more intriguing: I'd mentioned to him (in all honesty) that I really enjoyed teaching and prided myself on my ability to explain things in an understandable matter. Unsurprisingly, people who write middleware have to do a lot of that for the engineers writing the layers immediately above; and equally unsurprisingly, a lot of the current geeks don't much care for it. So yay me, I guess.

He also made the well-no-kidding suggestion that I ought to max out my annual 401(k) contributions, particularly in light of Cerner's stock matching. But, when I looked into how much that would be, the answer is a full 25% of my gross income. Gulp. I'll probably do it anyway, but I really need to do some more budgeting and figure out how much I really need to, y'know, live.

At least renter's insurance turns out to be cheap - I can live with $18 a month.

Looks like I'll be mostly using WebSphere Studio Application Developer, which is a superset of the Eclipse IDE that I (and maybe some of you) are already familiar with. So that's a help.

In marginally more interesting news, the weekend of UNL's fall break could be interesting: Rusty and Jesse might come down, but I also got a request from the Three Wierd Sisters to stay at my place while they go to the Kansas City Renaissance Fair (to which I can get cheap tickets if anyone else wants). Wonder how many people I can fit in my apartment. Guess I'll find out.

Donations of posters or other accessories for my uber-bare apartment still welcome.