Advantages to working smarter…
Now I know that this may not even apply universally to everyone in the Information Technology field but I felt that I needed to share anyway.
One of the greatest things about my current job is the ability to work from just about anywhere using just about any computer as long as I have an Internet connection and a SSH client. I frequently find myself working from home on my personal laptop, or from friend’s houses using their own computers and I am as effective as I would be at the office. Today really cemented that fact with me when I made the Monday morning blunder of arriving to work without my laptop. Instead of driving all the way back home (and wasting even more of the morning) I just grabbed a spare laptop that is laying around the office and using that today.
I remember a number of nights earlier in the year when I was on-call and out somewhere either without my laptop or without an Internet connection. Though it was slightly slower than I would have been on a laptop I managed to resolve a number of production critical emergencies using nothing more than my BlackBerry and MidpSSH.
I leverage a few tools to make this happen but the most important one I think of them all is GNU screen. The usefulness of this to anyone who wants to be able to use any computer in the world to be productive cannot be over-stressed. I recall one evening while I was on vacation in Australia last month where I noticed (via our internal IRC channel) that people were trying to troubleshoot a problem with our network storage infrastructure and was able to connect in to my work computer 12,000 miles away and fix the issues with nothing more than a terminal application on my laptop.
For IM and IRC I have as much connected to Irssi as I can reasonably manage. Irssi is a really great compliment to screen and there are a number of sites advocating that particular use case. I never miss anything with this configuration as I am always online and Irssi is kind enough to log everything and provide a pretty lengthy scroll-back buffer. What I end up with is essentially one screen session that contains my e-mail (using mutt) for both home and work, IRC, IM, and many of our internal web-based tools (thanks to w3m). Thanks to work being almost exclusively a Linux shop all of this can sit running all the time on a system sitting in one of our data centres with what essentially amounts to a Gigabit Ethernet connection to the Internet. From there all I ever really need is ssh(1) to connect to any of several hundred servers scattered across the United States and I can manage to be just as productive as if I was sitting in the office.
I honestly can’t imagine considering a job where I’m tied down to an office, or at the very least one where I was tied down to an office and then expected to work non-normal business hours. With pretty simple tools it is extremely easy to allow IT people to work from anywhere happily and securely. The ability for employees to continue to do their job from anywhere on the planet should the need arise is not only great for morale and general quality of life (you mean I can work from the beach?!) but makes sense when business critical applications and services require specific expertise that may not be replicated anywhere else in the company (what do you mean Bob is on vacation in Fiji?!).
Baseball
The boss suprised the team today at our weekly meeting with an invitation to a Red Wings baseball game. There happened to be a game this afternoon and I work a few hundred feet from “Frontier Field,” the stadium that my employer is a title sponsor for and home of the Rochester Red Wings. I think I’m starting to get this baseball thing a little bit. It is an interesting game, and the more I watch it the more I start to enjoy seeing it. It was also nice to get out with the team and enjoy an afternoon just hanging out and relieving some of the stress that has built up after the craziness of the last few weeks (months).
I did however forget that I was Irish again. I am sunburned something fierce.
More silly software…
I am not really a programmer, or at least I have never really thought of myself as such. I am more of a ‘systems & network engineer’ in the typical benevolent BOFH jack of all trades, master of the electric stapler kind of guy, but lately I’ve been flexing the software muscles a little bit more than usual.
I have been meaning to start learning python AND to start playing with the Gnome libnotify stuff a little bit here for a while now. Using Ubuntu 7.10 has sort of re-ignited those desires due the the large amount of python on the backend (as well as plenty of notifications from the various little applets). There seems to have been a push at work to start using python more, and the big application that I have been working on is purely python except for the web UI layer (which I will rewrite at some point) which I prototyped in PHP because it was fast and I needed access to visualize the datasets so I could continue work on the backend.
Anyway, all of the current event crap aside, I tossed together a little python guy that works on both OSX and Linux because I wanted some excuses to work with OSX a little bit. It trolls your last.fm profile and pops a bubble when one of your friends listens to a track. It’s kind of neat in that it lets you see what deranged music your friends listen to. It currently will even fetch the artist picture from the last.fm site for the popup bubble.
It’s not done, but it’s usable, and you can get it from my cvs web. Enjoy, and drop me a line if you like it!
A wonderful thing called life…
It has been a busy week this week and there is no sign of it calming down for a little while longer. The company I work for, Frontier has recently purchased a small local telephone company (ILEC) that is headquartered in Dallas, PA. My boss, his boss and I all went down Wednesday and Thursday to meet and greet the team and what is essentially our analogs there. It went pretty well and it was nice to get a chance to scope out the operation. The 8 or so hours in the car in two days was pretty grueling on my back, so I was quite happy to get home Thursday night and get to sink into bed.
Friday was Sanford and Amy’s wedding, the ceremony was held at the Churchville Methodist Church, and was rather tear jerking. I think I caught myself holding Carla’s hand a few times during it more to calm myself down than her, though I doubt she’d believe that ;) The reception was held at the Burgundy Basin out in Fairport and barring the disappointingly burnt coffee it was a good time. Sadly the DJ seemed to have an 80′s club music theme going on so I never did get a dance in with Carla, but it was amusing to see her and most of the other girls there dance like dorks. It seemed like she had fun so I was glad.
I finally made the connection of where I knew the “Rich” that one of Carla’s friends is married to from. It’s such a freaking small world I swear — years ago when there were still BBSs around I had met him on a local board called Chat City. He even signed my keyboard, which is a story for another time.
I was proud of myself last night, despite the fact that many people at the reception were smoking and that I myself was drinking fairly heavily I resisted temptation and will shortly reach 8 months since I last smoked. It is something I can be proud of and I must admit the temptation was fairly high.
It is amazing how time flies, and how life twists and turns around in such crazy ways. This time next year I will probably be living alone and if you had asked me this time last year what I’d be doing in May of 2008 my answer probably would have somehow involved being married which is about as opposite as living alone as I think you can get. I imagine that in a few short months I will be somewhere looking back on this with the same sort of retrospect.
Sometimes I catch myself wishing for the future, but my Grandfather always used to say, “Don’t wish time away, someday you’ll be wishing for it back.” I keep trying to remember that, and the fact that once I get past this trial and hardship in my life I’m only going to encounter another one. Whomever is the next lucky recipient of my heart is likely to cause me as much frustration and heartache and pain as all the ones before her and while I endeavor to learn from my mistakes I know I have many more to make. So there really is no point in wishing this test away, a new one will only rise to take it’s place. What I should be doing is making the most of the day to day joys, no matter how tiny they are.
Of course what I should be doing and what I actually am doing are two entirely different things. Such is the dichotomy of life.
These early mornings are going to be the death of me
I think this is the earliest ‘morning’ yet at work thus far — which is to say that I made it in the office by about 4:20 AM to start work on a rolling set of software updates on our various RADIUS clusters. Of course the wonderful remote management modules in the particular brand of servers we happen to use here are total crap and randomly decide to pack it in and stop working. Of course since they are purported to be ‘LOM’ or whatever they don’t power off when you power cycle the server so nothing short of yanking the two PSU modules out of the arse of the server for a minute will bring them back from la-la land.
Wonderful.
So I’m sitting around on my thumb waiting for someone to drive out to a remote office to yank the PSUs out of a server that the vendor swears up and down can be managed remotely. Oh to live in that perfect world of vendor-created illusion and wonderment. Other than that hiccup the work itself went smoothly and I finished up with about half an hour to spare in my allotted time.
The consolation prize is that I get to go home at noon, which is never a bad thing.
Keep busy, be happy.
I’ve been hard at work evaluating our storage solutions for this upcoming year. It is really quite exciting to get to evaluate some big iron storage solutions such as the EMC CLARiiON CX3-80, Cellera NSX and the Network Appliance FAS3070. It is great stuff and I’m having a ball putting them through the dog and pony show.
Reviews came out today and I got a pretty good one. It is nice to see on paper that someone thinks I am doing a good job and that I am appreciated and that I’m doing something right. I am looking forward to the changes and improvements I can make over the coming year. The extra money isn’t a bad thing either.
Another early morning and crazyness.
Another 05:00 morning for me, which again has the lovely side effect of getting me out of work at like 1:30. I’m pleased to say that everything went well and the huge stress-ridden nightmare that is touching the SAN at work is over with for now. I can almost get around to some projects that I have had on the back burner for the last 3 or 4 months now that this nonsense is over with, one more hurdle to go.
In other work news, I got x2x working between the two laptops and as a result am setting up my own little empire in my cube. If only I can get myself a roof and a door I could feel like a real boy(tm).
If the calm actually lasts long enough to get any real work done(tm) I’d be suprised and happy, I have a bunch of boxes that are screaming loudly for attention that I unfortunatly have been short in supply of.
Also, reviews raises and bonuses are coming up. This is a good thing(tm). All praise the company.
Early mornings mean Insomnia
Got in at 4:40am today to do the first of two maintenances to rearrange the network connectivity for the EMC gear here at work. It went really well and the upside is that coming in early means going home early. After the 3 hours of sleep I got last night I imagine I will probably crash and burn when I get there.
Edit: I got home at 1:30 and wouldn’t you know it, I’m WIDE the hell awake now. /cheer.
Tie Tuesday!
So some of the gang at work have dubbed Tuesdays as “Tie Tuesday” so I felt like shaking up the place today so I participated. Proof is in the gallery.
In other news work is really busy, but that’s good because I don’t like being idle and it’s keeping me focused on what I have to do. It is really nice to be able to be working on applications that is going to make the service we provide better and will hopefully make more money for the company. I’m not really a business man, so the bottom line isn’t ever my concern. I strive to do things right as opposed to cheaply.
Anyway, off to try and get more of my life in order… since there is no food in the house and I have become the cook, cleaner and whatever else.
Mornings suck
So more fun here as I fight fires at work left over from yesterday’s fun.
Last night was pretty okay. She and I went and grabbed some Mc Nuggets and I got to ride in her new car. She still puts me a tiny bit at ease even though I was filtering a lot of what I was saying because I didn’t want to turn the evening into a bitch at her fest again.
Then I found out this morning that Mom was going to ambush her today. Of course it turned out far worse than I expected. I feel so torn between a billion and one different places. I still love her very much and I know that I will for a long time because that is who I am. As such I am still fiercely protective of her and I’m getting frustrated and hurt when I see her getting beaten up like this. At the same time I know my family is just trying to be loyal to me and protect me and that they don’t realize that by doing this they are hurting me just as much as they are hurting her.
I think it says something about me that even after all of this I am more upset that I’m not doing a better job protecting her than I am that our relationship is over. I really really hope grandfather would be proud of me.
What a day
Today started with such promise. It was going to be a quiet day in the office followed by a vendor-provided lunch followed by a nap. How fast things went wrong. The lunch was fantastic as we were treated to some marvelous steak from a local place called Black and Blue by our EMC rep, but upon arriving back at the office half of the core network was down. Needless to say instead of getting home at 4:30ish to sneak a nap in before I have to go resign my lease and do all that other crap I just now walked in the door, 15 minutes or so to relax.
Oh life, how I love your marvelous way of keeping every day so full of excitement. Thank you so much for etching my new motto so perfectly into my head.
Down… not across[1].
At least I get to spend a little time at home before I go to sign the lease and then head off back to mom’s. Of course what do I do the moment I walk in the house, other than grab a beer of course. Yep, I cleaned up. Who ever would have thought that I’d become the kind of person who obsesses over tidying up. Also, I hacked 6 inches off my hair because it was bothering me leaving me with this 6 inch rat-tail thing sitting on my desk. Now for some reason the cat is freaking out running around the house. Probably because I just cleaned out his box and water dish.
It almost feels like home. At least I haven’t woken her up by being too loud.
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=down+NOT+across
End of year screenshots
New screen shots from my gaggle of computers.
Khadgar and Istari can be found here and Medivh (work laptop) can be found here.
A great weight…
It feels as if I am finally recovering from a great weight being lifted off of me. I’ve been stressing out at work pretty harsh for the last few months because I’ve had this big EMC code upgrade project sitting on the burner. The EMC stores all of our customer’s data, some 4 Terabytes of it and all if it is irreplacable. This of course puts tremendous pressure on me. Network outages can be fixed, system crashes can be recovered from, but losing all the data that our customers have stored… that is get-fired-for-fucking-up territory. So all went well and now I am finally unwinding from all the pent up stress. In this troubled time in my life it is nice to have at least one thing go right.
Yawn
So it is 12:04am and I’m at work. EMC is starting their work upgrading the code levels on the gear we have here and I’ve got some downtime before I need to hop into gear and start bringing servers down. It’s quiet, I like quiet.
Strife always does this…
It is funny how I will disappear off the internet for years at a time when things are going well. I guess I don’t feel a need to toot my own horn when stuff is rocking. Anyway stuff has kind of turned on its ear now and so I’m back at it! While I’m not really ready to go into details about what is going on with respect to the turmoil, I can talk a bit about the rest of life. Back on 4/20/2006 I was promoted within Frontier to Systems Administrator II, which is a senior level position which I’m thrilled with. A whole lot of corporate drama ensued, but I’m fairly content and happy about it. I work with a great bunch of people and while I am in charge of a number of very serious production systems it’s nothing like Xerox where I had systems that did payroll and accounting and SEC compliance under me. An outage for me may be stressful and customer affecting, but it probably won’t result in any federal actions or paychecks getting screwed up! I do get to take care of some very neat toys, like our EMC gear, which is big, loud and fancy. Over all, it is a very good thing — being on call here is nicer too, much less of a chance of having to drive in.
In other news, I quit smoking on 9/24/2006 and have been smoke-free ever since! I am feeling a lot better physically, I don’t wake up every night coughing up crap, I’m not totally out of breath after a few minutes of ‘elevated’ activity and unfortunately my sense of smell has pretty much returned full force! :) That might explain the new-found use of air fresheners in the house. Along with quitting smoking I am also walking on a pretty regular basis. I am up to about 3 miles a day at a pretty brisk pace. I am generally feeling good about that as well.
Finally I can say that the tumultuous events of recent past have jarred me into realizing that if I want to obtain my goals of finding someone and building a life with them I need to work out a few issues I have been carrying around for the last 15 years or so. A lot of the fears about becoming like my father have haunted me for a long time, nipping at my heels and causing me to deny myself the thought of starting a family. For so long I have been convinced that I shouldn’t ever have children, that it would just drive me to the edge and turn me into my father. The thought of perpetrating the same thing upon my own offspring upsets me to no end so until now I have always staunchly been against children. I won’t say that I’m completely over it now, but I’ve thought a lot about it over the last month and now I realize that it is just fear and that I can overcome it with the right person by my side.
Now to find the right person!
Surfing Safety.