Kayaking the York River

The York River, Wiggley Bridge, and Barrell Mill Pond

For the past four years, my wife and I have been enjoying a new hobby - kayaking. But when we bought our vacation home in Maine, we temporarily put aside the kayaking and concentrated on long walks and the beach. We promised ourselves that we would find a place in Maine to use the kayaks, but never got around to it.

A few weeks ago, I finally mounted the roof racks on my car, strapped up the kayaks, and brought them north.

On a quiet Sunday morning, near high tide, we brought the kayaks to the York Town Dock #1, put in, and spent a wonderful couple of hours on the York River.

The York River is a tidal river running inland from the York Harbor. You can put in on the York Town Dock off of Harris Island Road, right next to the commercial fishermen and lobster boats.

We quickly crossed the York River and paddled under the Wiggley Bridge. The bridge is a famous, 80-year-old miniature suspension bridge (the "smallest suspension bridge in the world?") which is part of a scenic, fun walk into Steedman's Woods. As we paddled under, we said "Hello" to the folks fishing from it, and into Barrel Mill Pond. Barrell Mill is a tidal pond with some beautiful houses lining the shore. A few fish, a few turtles, and a few birds were in the water with us, and a lot of sun.

After making the trip around the pond, we headed back into the river and paddled inland for a while. We got to see more fishing and lobster boats, more beautiful houses and docks, and a lot of seabirds sunning themselves.

We paddled back toward the harbor and past some boats returning from the ocean. They were all courteous and careful with their wake. I nudged out into the open water to see what that was like, but quickly turned around as the current was rather strong.

We spent a few minutes more paddling around the beautiful boats and docks, watching boats being launched from the nearby marina, and then, since the current started to get stronger, we headed back to shore.

It was a wonderful way to spend a Sunday morning. I can't wait to get out again!

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This article originally appeared in my blog: All Things Quality

	My name is Joe Strazzere and I'm currently a Director of Quality Assurance. I like to lead, to test, and occasionally to write about leading and testing. Find me at http://AllThingsQuality.com/.

Free Podcasts I like - Jill On Money

Free Podcast - Jill On Money

Often when I'm relaxing on the beach, or taking a walk alone, or doing yard work, I use my iPod.  I have found that, while I enjoy some music, I tend to enjoy talk and good discussion even more.  So I have loaded my iPod with podcasts, and refresh them regularly. copyrightjoestrazzere

As I have mentioned before, I've been doing a lot of reading and listening about financial planning and investing recently.

I found another interesting podcast in this field: Jill on Money by Jill Schlesinger. I really like it.

Jill on Money is unlike most other financial planning and investing podcasts in that it focuses almost entirely on call-in or emailed questions. This allows it to take on a wide variety of topics in a single episode.

From the show's description:

Hosted by CBS Senior Business Analyst Jill Schlesinger, "Jill on Money" is an entertaining call-in radio show that helps listeners take control of their financial lives. Jill communicates complicated and murky financial information in a relatable way to listeners of all ages with varying amounts of money and experience.

You can find the Jill on Money web site at http://www.jillonmoney.com/.

You can find the Jill on Money Podcast on itunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/jill-on-money/id431167790

Check it out if you want to hear some good questions and some really great answers.

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This article originally appeared in my blog: All Things Quality

	My name is Joe Strazzere and I'm currently a Director of Quality Assurance. I like to lead, to test, and occasionally to write about leading and testing. Find me at http://AllThingsQuality.com/.

Eight Years!

What does the future here look like? Reply hazy, try again later.

Today marks my eight-year anniversary at my current company.

It's hard for me to believe that I've been here eight years already. Yet when I look back at all we've accomplished, it sometimes seems like far more:

• When I started, there was no real Quality Assurance Team.  Whatever small bit of testing occurred was being performed by Product Management folks in their spare time.  Since then, we've created a terrific team in the US, augmented by some good contractors, and a small team in India as well.
• Bugs were not being tracked in any central system.  There were a few emails floating around, and an occasional spreadsheet, but no place where people could go to find the status of bugs.  Now, we use Bugzilla, and people have grown tired of me asking "Do we have a bug report for that?"
• Lots of people have come and gone over the past eight years.  Initially, the biggest change was the prior CTO being replaced by my boss.  Since then, many other folks have left.copyrightjoestrazzere
• We've changed a significant portion of the infrastructure behind most of our applications.  It's far more scalable and sustainable now, although we continue to make changes
• We've formalized many of our development and testing processes, and created the necessary processes where none existed before.
• We've gone from fighting fires every day, to a much more stable, dependable set of systems.  Where before many of our systems needed manual, hands-on attention every day, they now run in a much more automated fashion.
• Our product lines have changed over time.  We have weeded out some products that were single-customer, poorly funded products.  We've created some new products, and retired others.
• A few years ago, we were purchased by a much larger corporation. It hasn't been all bad, and it hasn't been all good.  The volume of big-company administrivia started out small, but has increased, and it continues increasing now.
• We are still in the middle of a massive project to move our production infrastructure into the corporate facility. We have purchased new hardware, new software, database upgrades, etc, etc. We have embraced new processes for security, administration, installation, and support. And of course we are "improving the applications" as we migrate them. With almost all the variables being changed at the same time, this has been a big task for everyone involved, and a very big testing task. It has been "interesting", and a huge drag on our time for building and testing revenue-producing applications.
• My QA Team was re-orged last year. And my current boss is now reporting to someone in the corporate office, rather than the local General Manager. She also has responsibility for more than just our local division. That means I have even less contact with my boss these days.
• As part of reporting up into corporate, we are now being required to use some of the formal corporate time-reporting, project management and metrics systems. For me, it's a lot of time spent on administrivia, rather than more productive work. I'm trying hard to minimize the impact on my team, but I can't eliminate all the overhead.

Lots of work, lots of changes, lots more to come.  All in all, a good eight years.

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This article originally appeared in my blog: All Things Quality

	My name is Joe Strazzere and I'm currently a Director of Quality Assurance. I like to lead, to test, and occasionally to write about leading and testing. Find me at http://AllThingsQuality.com/.