Are We Having Fun Yet?

2021? Already?!

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 01:06:56 GMT

Well, 2020 couldn't end soon enough for my liking, but despite that, I'm a bit surprised that it's 2021 now. More truthfully, I can accept that it is 2021, but I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around the fact that it is now January. It feels like it should be some other month. Odd.

So far, all of us have avoided covid-19. The county went into lockdown again in December, so there's no dining-in at our restaurants and schools have gone back to remote exclusively. I'm a bit surprised that gyms are still open, but they are now capped at 25% occupancy. Vaccines are being distributed but it's still just groups 1a and 1b: front-line medical workers and the residents of long-term care facilities. I'm not expecting a shot at a shot until late spring at best.

I was awarded my black belt in karate in mid-December. Like other belts I've earned since the dojo closed in March, I consider it to be provisional since we haven't been able to meet in person to do sparring, teaching of juniors, etc.. I plan to re-test when we finally get to practice together in one space once again.

Our ten-day Amsterdam to Bern river cruise last August was scrapped because of covid-19. However, Viking River Cruises offered us a 20% bonus credit if we rolled over to a 14-day Amsterdam-to-Budapest cruise in 2021, so we took them up on it. If we can't go because Europe is still closed to American tourists, or if we haven't been vaccinated by then, we can still get our money back, but I'm choosing to be optimistic.

Travel to Canada is still blocked. At this moment, I could enter Canada as a citizen, but I'd need a negative covid test within 72 hours to be able to board the plane, and submit an extensive quarantine plan electronically before arriving. Once there, I'd be quarantined for two weeks. I have plans ready in case I need to make urgent trips to southern Ontario or northern Ontario, but I'm hoping we get clear of this damn plague before I need to test either one.

Work continues. Our company is cleaning up all of the various bonus programs and performance metrics into a single cohesive plan, and it's not a bad plan at all. My next pay (Jan 8) will pay the last of the three year signing bonuses from our purchase by Enterprise Holdings Inc.; under the new plan, I'll be eligible for up to 20% of my base salary in annual bonuses. In the next month, all staff should receive a comprehensive benefits statement, including any pay adjustments due to title changes, adjustments to responsibilities, or to keep pace with industry averages. I have no idea what if any raise I might get, but the bonus is nothing to sneeze at, even if it's only half of what my last installment from the old plan will be.

Speaking of work, I've been on vacation these past two weeks. With Christmas and New Year's on Fridays, and with the regular company holidays, it only cost me seven vacation days. There is currently one more full day off before work resumes on Monday, and I'm savouring every hour.

I wish I had more to report about the plague year of 2020, but covid made it pretty boring. No square dancing, no travels, no skating, no visits, no bar nights, no day trips, no weekends away (except to the trailer where we'd self-isolate anyway), etc.. I have no idea if square dancing will bounce back, or in what form. I just want to be able to return to Canada again to see family.

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COVID-19 Lockdown Day #47

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 02:05:58 GMT

Actually, things are pretty good!

Things still suck on so many levels: unemployment is hard to even measure, the economy is tanking in ways I've never seen before, and US deaths have topped 50,000 with no obvious end in sight. But as ugly as it all is, my attitude is vastly better than it was couple of weeks ago.

My job is still secure, as is Kent's. Michael's travel business is non-existent but that's not for lack of effort on his part. We've fallen into some stable & workable routines, and while I'd like better lighting in my basement bunker, it's all working pretty well.

We're all healthy, as is our extended family: we've heard of friends of friends down with covid-19, but no first or second degree connections.

Some supply shortages have been corrected, others haven't but don't affect us too much. At least the bare shelves aren't getting more bare: the shortages haven't spread into other products or stores. And the seniors' shopping hours are kinda fun if you can bear getting out of bed at such an early hour.

We miss going out to eat, but we've figured out which of our regular restaurants are open, and can handle the new curb-side pick-up procedures, among other variances. Tipping huge, needless to say, trying to help out the tipped wait staff as much as possible.

Zoom-based karate sessions haven't been too bad. It's nothing like being in an actual dojo with a proper non-cement floor and real people, but I'm able to keep a bottle of water nearby and make recordings so I can review new sequences in slow motion later. Michael's zoom-based yoga seems to be satisfactory as well. It's better than nothing.

The closed library system is a pain, but I've had a steady stream of books on my Kindle. I'd be happier if many of the books I wanted weren't already lent out, but I have several on hold and should be able to get them soon-ish.

I'm missing some of the square dance stuff, but not too badly. I like having many of my evenings back, and the lack of extra event coordination & overhead is nice.

I miss the gym. A Lot.

Mostly though, I miss travel beyond our immediate neighbourhood, especially the trailer at Roseland. Knowing that I can't fly to San Francisco for work, or to Canada for family is a fairly severe limitation.

But despite it all, we've largely acclimatized to this lower standard of living. Nationally, I think we've largely hit the floor after a long & seemingly endless plummet, so the bulk of the uncertainty has passed. Now we need to continue the distancing, keep large gathering places closed, and get a vaccine. None of these will happen quickly, but we can tough this out.

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Surviving the Lockdown

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 20:22:25 GMT

I got home from Canada on March 9, just as closures & lockdowns in the US were starting to take full effect. Michael arrived home from Ireland a week later, on March 16; he was three days early on his return, but international flight restrictions were being instituted and we wanted him home before every airline was grounded.

And since then? Well, nothing much to report.

I've been working from home as part of my general practice of the past 11 years. The San Francisco main office has been evacuated so everyone is now working from home, whether they want to or not. Business travel, our core business, is 20% of what it was this time last year so while our parent company Enterprise has told us to continue with our original product line & releases, hiring has been frozen. I did get a $10k raise just this past week, and my position is secure. Even if they did lay me off, they'd still be contractually obligated to give me a pile of severance, unpaid vacation time, and a large bonus already scheduled for next February.

Kent's office has gone to work-from-home as a matter of policy, replacing their grudgingly-permitting-it-only-once-per-week. They have done some staff reductions, but Kent's position was spared.

Michael's travel business has all but evaporated at this point: his Milan trip for the international LGBT travel agent convention is cancelled. We are still planning to go to Amsterdam in August, pandemic permitting.

Nearly all of our square dance gigs --dancing, calling & running events-- are cancelled indefinitely. The only thing left in the next several months is the IAGSDC convention in Denver in early July. Hopefully, the worst of this will be over by then.

Karate has also closed, but we started doing online sessions last night. It's been a huge comfort to see the gang together again, even if just virtually.

Weightlifting at the gym is my preferred method of de-stressing, but that hasn't been an option for two weeks now. Last week, I was checking websites to see if there was a gym ban in neighbouring states, but yup, there was.

I had hoped we could go to the trailer this coming weekend at Roseland, West Virginia. We haven't de-winterized yet: everything is still stored in our basement. Alas, yesterday, the shelter-at-home order was given for West Virginia, essentially closing the campground and restricting movement, so our trailer plans are dead.

Virginia and DC school systems have both announced their academic years are toast: the schools will not re-open before June. I expect our county at least in Maryland to do the same shortly. Most of our square dance clubs follow the school boards' open/closed policies, so we've lost our venues for a while longer. Ditto my karate dojo.

Back in Canada, things aren't much better: nearly every province has a shelter-at-home order, or nearly so. None of my family are sick: even Mom and Grandma are doing fine, just frustrated by being housebound. My brother and his wife were about to move from Nova Scotia to Ontario; while the sale & purchase of homes has closed, I don't know if they've found a moving company still available to actually do the move yet.

So far though, this has just been a major annoyance, not a crisis for us. The local grocery stores are still open and while there are shortages on some shelves, we're doing OK with things we can buy and the supplies we already have in stock. We had no pending medical appointments to cancel, and our prescriptions were already stocked. While our dentist's office is closed for elective stuff, they were open to finish outstanding dental projects, such as the final filling cap on my root canal of Feb 5, and the replacement crown installation for Kent this morning.

So I'm still working from the basement computer bunker, stess-eating a lot, going for four mile walks when weather permits, and reading more than I have in years. We'll get through this mess somehow.

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Work Status, January 2020

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 03:17:31 GMT

I'm writing this on the plane from San Francisco back to DC after a week onsite at the SF office and the Santa Clara data center. And in all, it went well.

My old boss, Bret McGinnis, left the company at the end of December 2019. It had been a long time coming, as he and our current CTO didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of high priority issues. Our CTO is classic Silicon Valley start-up: break things, fail forward, be disruptive, avoid committee, beg forgiveness rather than ask permission, etc.. Bret worshiped at the alter of 100% Uptime, discussed joint issues with other teams as needed, and kept a very close eye not just on security issues, but audit compliance topics. Our CTO gives lip service to the issue of our PCI and SOC audits, but flatly disregards the actual rules if they are inconvenient and expects somehow that Bret & the rest of us will find some way of bridging the impossible gaps.

Anyway, Bret is gone and we have a new interim boss, Josh Woodward, working remotely from Armonk, NY. He seems nice and listens well, but he's a contractor brought on a few months ago by our CTO to consult on software development project planning. The hope is that he'll agree to go fulltime with us, but I'm unsure if that will actually happen.

So while there is a sudden gap in our team, there is some effort to fill it, and I had some good one-on-one meetings with both the CTO and Josh this past week. I can work with them in various degrees of enthusiasm, depending on the topic.

On the good side, on Friday, I received the first retention bonus following our acquisition by Enterprise this time last year. In 2019, I was offered a pile of cash for my stock options and a retention bonus of 40% of my base salary in January 2020 and again in January 2021. After taxes and 401k, it's still north of $40k, so I'm happy to have it, especially if we decide to go ahead with the house renovations this year.

I hired a new guy for my systems engineering group recently. I originally wanted him to start Jan 6 so I would be in San Francisco to onboard him myself, but he really wanted to start asap --I think there were some financial pressures-- so he started Dec 23 instead. I finally met him last week and he has been working out pretty well. Interestingly, I hired him based on the content of his resume and our telephone interviews, as well as the onsite interviews by other people on the Operations team; his references checked out well too. When I finally met him, I learned he's 10 years older than me, about 63 or so. Silicon Valley looks askance at anyone older than 30, so I suddenly have an appreciation for how hard it was for him to land a new position, and the value of working from the data rather than from appearances. If I were slightly more shallow than I already am, I might have overlooked him too in the interview process.

Our search for a new network engineer was stalled, but the CTO has named me the hiring manager for that spot so I'm now working to pick up where Bret had left off. The sooner we get an extra person in that position, the better.

Our San Francisco office at 642 Harrison Street is going month-to-month on the lease as we seek cheaper digs elsewhere. There is a small office being built out in Campbell, CA (San Jose area), primarily for the executives who dwell in the south bay area. I visited that site Friday to see how the office space is being renovated and it's looking pretty good. Naturally, all of the networking equipment and videoconferencing systems are top-of-the-line and brand new: the execs insisted on that for themselves; the new Oakland office for the plebes will not be so lucky. Interestingly, while the executive space has side meeting rooms, they've still gone with mostly an open office environment, including a standing desk in the main room for the CEO.

The renovations are only just starting on the new Oakland space, two floors at 1300 Broadway, just above the 12th Street BART station. I looked around the area Saturday, just to see the location and the amenities in the neighbourhood, but had no access to the building itself. I don't know how comfortable the offices will be in the end, but no one will starve and the public transit accessibility is good.

Having testing the BART accessibility and timing to the airport, I've largely decided that future trips will still likely be via SFO rather than Oakland's airport. Yes, the Oakland airport will be vastly closer, but it's hard to find a non-stop flight from the east coast to Oakland at decent times on an non-sucking airline. The Alaska Air non-stops between Dulles and SFO have been largely good to me, and I can handle an hour on BART to Oakland: it's only four more stations than the Powell one I've been using to my San Francisco hotel. Of course, I'll need to find a decent hotel near the office that's within policy...

We're about to start a round of SOC2 audits & evidence collection once again. In fact, I'm supposed to be onsite in San Francisco for the week of February 24 to face the auditors directly. I should book that air fare & hotel soon.

There's a boatload of small projects still in flight, but I'm feeling pretty confident about my working environment, relations with colleagues, and my future in general. The departure of Bret and a couple more people has made some space for me to grow into other managerial functions as a director, and as long as I ask for more responsibility from Josh and Neil, I'm relatively confident I'll get it. As long as I don't screw up, I'll be making their lives easier.

The biggest challenge for me at the moment is a kind of time management. Working three hours ahead of California has permitted me to do some personal stuff in the mornings: gym, medical appointments, commuting to the data center, etc.. My day picks up at noon eastern time though as meetings start in San Francisco, and they tend to run into the early evening because, obviously, that's still the business day for SF. I have to be firm about not letting much slide past my 6pm so I can still have dinner with my family, attend karate, go square dancing, etc.. I need to be more efficient in the 12-6pm hours, and to make sure my colleagues on the other side are as efficient about that too.

I also suspect that as I take on more management, I'm going to be spending more time working with Bangalore, which means more late night hours. But I'm typically up until midnight anyway, so that's not a huge burden.

So many pieces in progress, but it's working out well.

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In Today's News...

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 18:13:41 GMT

My flight home from Canada a week ago was uneventful. Per my usual luck, I had to join a work-related defcon situation the moment I walked in the door at home: no one else in the company has experience working with Solaris, Veritas volume manager, or Veritas Cluster Service. Indeed, I'd rather not myself but until we phase out that stuff in a few months, I'm still the go-to guy.

It's been 9 days since Dad died. Oddly, I don't really feel it yet. I do have moments of sadness that I'll never see or talk to him again, but nothing I would call grief or intense emotion. I suspect a huge part is that once he passed away, my primary task was to keep Mom grounded and to help her get through the essential paperwork. In essence, Dad became a project rather than a death in the family.

The Christmas holidays and the sudden trip to northern Ontario have upset my usual routine considerably. It's not a bad or resentful upset though: I was glad to spend time with the kids, and always love going back home to see the farm although the circumstances of this trip were horrible. But it was nice to get back to karate last Friday: I've missed that. Heavy snows this weekend and a dental appointment this morning have kept me from the gym, but I'll probably be back tomorrow, the first time in nearly three weeks.

I missed little work over the past while. The load was light during the holidays, even though I was on-call. Almost nothing came up while I was away, although I did log in from time to time, just to read emails and to make a few tweaks here & there to help keep the production systems stable. My task list is only just now gearing back up to a normal load, and there are good things in progress.

So, it's all a return to normality & routine now. It just feels so anti-climactic.

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2018 In Summary: Work

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 22:26:39 GMT

I'm still at the same firm I've been at for ten years, Deem Inc.. Indeed, this past week was my 10th anniversary, if you count from when I first started doing work for them, Jan 5 is my 10th anniversary if you count from my official start date.

On January 25, I became the manager of our systems engineering team. I was already the senior member and was doing the equivalent of team manager since the prior fall, but this was when it was made official. Unfortunately, it did not come with extra money or stock options: management pleaded poverty. I accepted it however as it definitively shifted my job title from mere systems guy into a management roll; this is something which would look good on a resume should I move elsewhere, especially if the company was pleading poverty.

It has been a good year. Besides the day-to-day activities of keeping our systems running, we cleaned out & closed down the one cage in DC3 which I had originally been hired to support & manage ten years ago. We had switched over 90% of all activity to the new cage in May 2017, so we just had to be aggressive about moving that last 10%, then securely disposing of the old equipment.

The other big project was getting our PCI compliance certificate in the fall. Because our systems store credit card information of our customers, we are required to be certified by the paycard industry as compliant with their security guidelines. Some rules had changed since our last certification, and some of our systems had aged out of compliance on their own: it took a significant amount of effort just to collect the proof of compliance for our good systems, not to mention upgrading & modifying our non-compliant ones. In all, we were successful by the deadline but it was a huge effort.

There are still quarterly activities which must be taken as part of the compliance. I just received word yesterday that we have cleared the hurdle for this quarter. Good times will be here again around March 20.

On August 8, I was promoted from Manager, Systems Engineering, to Director, Operations. This promotion did come with extra money, and a pile of additional stock options. Now several teams report to me (and me to my senior VP, Bret). I'm spending more time in coordinating activities and in managerial meetings, but I still have my finger in the systems administration side of the house. I'm still the only person who lives even approximately near our production data center near Dulles Airport.

I had two trips to San Francisco this year, two more than last year. At the moment, there is a strong possibility of another trip for the first week of February, but I'm awaiting word to confirm that.

And while I can't write more about it here (or anywhere, really) because of confidentiality issues, there is something big and wonderful happening right now with work, and I'm very excited about it. I hope to write something a lot more informative by the end of January.

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Demolition & Data Centers

Fri, 04 May 2018 20:33:33 GMT

I started working for Deem, Inc. (formerly Rearden Commerce) in December, 2008. At that time, I had passed all the interviews, left my job at Fannie Mae and was taking a break of a few weeks before my official start date of Jan 5, 2009, but there were four guys moving equipment from a Savvis data center near Boston to one near Sterling, VA. My job would be too look after this hardware once they finished and returned to the San Francisco Bay area where they normally lived & worked. It would be advantageous to work with the new systems as they were being installed, and to meet the guys I'd be working with for the next while.

It is now nine years later, and I'm still at Deem, even when all of those guys have left for other jobs. And Tuesday, April 10, 2018, I completed the decommission & demolish the cage of equipment which we had collectively installed back in late 2008.

The new cage we had assembled in May, 2017, as our new production system occupied nine racks; the old systems occupied 21. The new cage uses about 1/5 the electricity the old one did. I'm certain our air conditioning requirements are also substantially smaller.

Decommissioning is both harder and easier than one might suspect. On the good side, one no longer need be gentle with equipment, especially hard drives. I'm so accustomed to holding equipment gingerly and ensuring it receives no shocks, physical, static or otherwise. When decommissioning though, it's rather nice to toss a hard drive or drop an entire stack into a bin instead of placing them carefully into padded trays. Taking the old equipment to the electronics recycling dumpster was a lot of fun, kinda like throwing a discus but with servers.

We brought in an outside vendor to shred the hard drives so we would have a certificate of destruction for our auditors, and naturally to protect the customer data which was on them (encrypted, naturally). In all, we shredded 608 drives.

Trashing an entire cage meant as well erasing a number of embarrassments. Yes, I did my best to keep cabling tidy & colour-coded, but sometimes we needed to cut corners because of urgency or a lack of parts. And over nine years, some systems are decommissioned, some new ones added: even when starting clean, it's harder to keep things neat as systems change organically. Trashing the cage removed all of the eyesores and little compromises.

Getting rid of old equipment also means fewer future trips to the data center. Fewer hard drives and newer hard drives means the failure rate overall has plummetted. Towards the end, I was making trips to the cage every 2-3 days, but now it's once every 2-3 weeks. I have to admit though some of the drives have been working 24/7 for at least nine years --some were still the originals from the Boston data center.

There was an obvious evolution of racking kits over the past nine years. The oldest equipment had rack nuts & bolts to hold trays in place on which the equipment would sit. Then they became rails held in place with rack nuts & bolts. Then we got simple rails which locked themselves in place without requiring pre-installed nuts & bolts. Most of the equipment required the nuts & bolts, so the electric screwdriver I had became my best friend ever: without, I'd still be removing equipment today.

The hardest part, besides lifting so much equipment, was disconnecting all of the ethernet and fibre cabling. It's a simple pinch to unlock the cable from the network port, then a slight pull to remove it. But do this several thousand times and your fingers get very worn and bruised. Booted/snagless cables are the worst: I have learned a new hatred for them. Add to this the occasional scrape, scratch or cut. Merely washing my hands was agony each time. It took a week before I could hold a pen comfortably, and nearly a month for my fingers to return to normal.

It was a long & glorious ride. The original equipment worked longer & harder than we had any right to ask of it. We had some scares & nightmares, but on the whole, it all worked well. Rest in peace.

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Mega-Spam

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 16:40:28 GMT

For reasons unknown, someone somewhere decided that the web certificate admin account and my account at work should both be the subject of a major spam attack. These two email addresses were injected into a vast number of online forms, including email list subscription forms. Every one of these targets then generated at least one response, sometimes many, back to my accounts.

After waking up to 400 unexpected emails, I began setting up my own filters to trim out the excess while our Corporate IT folks worked with Exchange to see if they could do a better job of blocking these. Since that time, I've received another 8,500 messages, nearly all blocked or shunted into a spam folder.

This experience has revealed how much crappy web design is out there. Why would you run a sales ordering web site that accepts orders for hardware with no physical address entered? Why are there still mailing lists that allow anyone to subscribe someone else? And why do so many lists not yet send a click-to-confirm-you-actually-requested-this message? Why does any list still exist which doesn't tell you how to unsubscribe? And why does Outlook.com (our email platform) have systems to block senders, but not the senders' domain?

The biggest question for me though is: who profits from this? What gain could there possibly be for adding my name to thousands of mailing lists, nearly all in country I've never visited in languages I can't read? The list owners don't gain, I don't gain... who would benefit that they would undertake this kind of thing?

I think the worst is over... instead of 20+ messages per minute, the rate has received to a few per hour. My bigger worry now is checking that my filters weren't overly aggressive and accidentally swept up legitimate work emails.

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Promotion!

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 04:09:37 GMT

Today, I was formally named Manager, Systems Engineering for Deem, Inc., my employer of nine years.

I've had five managers in syseng since I started, and now after all those years of working for The Man, I am now The Man --and working for a Different Man since I still have a VP to report to, naturally.

In a longer view, this is my return to management. I was the manager of Physics Computing Services when I worked for the University of Toronto. Of course, that was 22 years ago in another country, so that aged off my resume some time ago. If nothing else, I'm grateful for the management title as it legitimizes my less formal management experience when/if I go job hunting again in future.

It's not really much of a change overall since I was already informally the team manager since mid-November or so. My team is pretty small too: me, Chris in California, Leeno in Bangalore, and Allan (a prior holder of my current title) who is a contractor with us in California. And my projects & priorities haven't changed a great deal: I still will be looking after the DC3 data center, and have a hand in the SC4 data center. The only adjustment will be doing performance reviews and approving vacations & expenses, and representing our team at management meetings. 90% of my day-to-day work will be exactly the same.

A half-dozen people besides me were promoted today, but not one of us got a raise or extra stock options. Finance simply refuses to release the funds for that. We are informed that we're shortlisted collectively for any raises or bonuses if/when Finance ever relaxes the purse strings, but that may not happen for a while. I did receive a lovely $5 Starbucks gift card. I don't drink coffee, but cuyhogarvr can use it.

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Good Security Gone Bad

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 15:12:42 GMT

My plan was to upgrade the RAM in three servers at the data center. They're at 64GB each right now, but we want to migrate some Windows Server virtual machines onto these boxes so bringing them up to 128GB would be a huge help. It seemed so easy a plan.

Alas, after driving to the data center, I learned the magnetic lock system on our cage isn't working. The
badge reader is reading, but it is unable to reach the database to confirm my authorization. The staff here learned it was offline earlier today but didn't have a fix yet.

So they issued me the override key which I could use to offline the magnetic lock. But for that to work, the override mechanism has to face the outside of the cage so it can be reached by a person standing outside. Our lock was installed facing inwards so it is unusable.

Their only option left is to physically power off the mag lock entirely so I can get into the cage. Or lift some floor tiles so I can crawl underneath (not recommended).

I'm giving up on it today as the RAM upgrades can wait. They promise a fix for the mag lock shortly, and will submit a work order to get the override lock facing the correct direction.

Yes, it's a Monday... why do you ask?

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It is Done.

Wed, 31 May 2017 02:17:57 GMT

The past few months, I've been working on a major project for work: building out a new cage in our data center near Sterling, VA. Our current two cages are working reasonably well, but the equipment has aged, enough that much of it is no longer viable under Paycard Industry 3.2 standards (PCI). Even on the hardware we could keep using, we desperately need operating system upgrades and extra capacity.

The new cage has 9 racks, compared to the 27 racks in the old cage. Nearly everything is virtualized and clustered, all of it has the latest patches of whatever OS they're running, and we have RAM, storage & CPU cycles to spare.

And this past weekend, we went live.

It was a bit rocky in parts. One of the first tasks I had in the migration plan was to fix some issues in our Sun Microsystems/Oracle database servers, and our Veritas Cluster System. It took more hours than I was hoping/expecting, but I did get through it all. I think I spent more time delving into the depths of VCS that one night than I did the previous ten years.

By midday Saturday, everything had been migrated and we were starting running test traffic through it. We found some issues in routing, permissions, ownerships and such, but not many. Most effort was focused on getting the F5 traffic managers fully tuned for our requirements.

Today was our first regular business day since the cutover, and although we've had some problems getting our new IP ranges white-listed with a couple of our larger customers and had some performance problems with our hotel search databases, the day has been a success. We're getting great comments about the vastly improved speed & performance of our systems as well.

The road ahead is still a long one. While the travel portion of our systems have migrated, our Purchase and Car Service divisions have not yet. The Sun servers moved to the new cage, but their data still resides on a storage array in the old cage. At this moment, I'm still waiting for the license codes to built out a new monitoring system.

Once all of that has finished, there's a tonne of dismantling & disposal to do with the old cages & equipment. Some will be redeployed in our non-production environments, but 80% will be trashed completely. The most intensive part of the project is over, but I have work for the rest of the summer.

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Office Madness

Thu, 25 May 2017 17:52:09 GMT

This morning, a fruit basket & candy package arrived, sent by my COO, CTO & head of HR, addressed to the "Jarvis Family." The note attached thanked my clan for supporting me as I worked extra hours on the latest set of office projects. Nice touch --although I'd rather have a small bonus rather than $50 gift package. Thoughtful, though.

I've been working extra hours (extra extra hours?) this week as we run down the clock to our big data center migration. Today, two people who now report to me (one is my former boss, on contract!) are flying from San Francisco to Sterling, VA. Tomorrow morning, I also head to Virginia to meet with them, ensure their badges & keys work at the data center, and generally show them the cages, servers & tools we have on-site for this migration. I also hope we can discuss in person the sequence of steps we're taking once the site goes offline Friday night, filling in any details I may have overlooked.

I'm staying at a hotel in Virginia Friday through Sunday so I can be as close as possible to the data center. I'm also expecting that after many extended hours of battle, I'd be in no shape for a 40 minute drive home and return the following day.

Friday night, about 10pm Easter time, our site will go down and the fun begins. In our preliminary testing, we were getting speed improvements of 5x or so, but I think that's just a happy dream of what we'll be able to do in another two months: even after the apps move from the old cage to the new, the databases will largely be reaching back to the storage arrays in the old cage over a 4Gbps fibre link until we can migrate the data. I do intend to start migrating the data after we go live this weekend, but it will take weeks of effort to finish that (I'm hoping to have the bulk of it done by July 1).

I cannot say how relieved I am to get the new cage online. It's not just that we've been working on it constantly the past several months, but we've been letting maintenance of the old cage slide a bit, and it had inherent issues we couldn't easily fix anyway. Killing the old cage removes a lot of legacy equipment & unfortunate architecture decisions: the slate gets swept clean.

And even when we shut down the old cage, there is still much to do. We could only make this deadline by physically moving the Sun T4-1 servers with their Oracle databases to the new cage. We were originally planning to let that equipment be retired, but that aspect is a huge project in itself. In the next three month work sprint, we're going to: identify the data we need to retain, convert the data from SPARC data word format into Intel data word format, and restructure the database & LUN layout. All on live systems. The database team has 80% of this workload, but I'm still in the mix, doing the storage allocations and helping where I can with optimizing the process.

At this moment, here and now, I'm feeling rather serene. I've just ticked off the last of my pre-migration tasks, and finished scripting a lot of Veritas cluster stuff I need to do the moment the site is offline Friday night. In all, I'm now in wait mode. There is nothing left to do but wait for the dawn.

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There is No Cloud

Fri, 05 May 2017 15:57:04 GMT

Folks are storing their data in the cloud, things are happening in the cloud, our businesses are becoming more cloud-based, etc..

Great buzzwords. Still a lot of hype.

There is no cloud, just other peoples' computers. There are still servers and hard drives out there, stuffed into data centers: you just get to rent a little part of it to store your files. The "cloud" nomenclature was created to demonstrate directly that you, the customer, have absolutely no idea where those servers, drives, and your data actually are. The sales pitch is that you don't need to know, the reality is that you can't know.

As one who has worked in major data centers for decades, trust me: I know where the cloud actually is. I've had a direct hand in building small portions of it. Indeed, since each machine has a number of sharp corners & edges, I've had more than a few injuries getting the equipment assembled & racked, and I'm of course not the only one.

It's an interesting thought: the 'cloud' contains not just your data, but an awful lot of very real blood, my own included.

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Better Moods

Tue, 02 May 2017 13:46:14 GMT

We survived the weekend in Rehoboth Beach, DE. Travel to Rehoboth is always a dodgy thing and it's not a place I enjoy, so I'm relieved we're done for another year.

My boss flew into town late last night to work in the data center. We'll be doing some long hours Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday; he flies back to California Friday morning. I'm going to help on some of the network stuff, but my major tasks are:
- moving four Sun servers from the old cage to the new one;
- configure said servers;
- install 20 new servers (due to arrive any day now);
- install 4.8TB of RAM in the form of 16GB DIMMs. Half are replacements for 8GB DIMMs in 35 machines, the rest are upgrades to existing servers, taking them to 128GB of RAM each. It's overkill for what we need today but will give us serious room to grow for the next couple of years.

Come Thursday, Bill Eyler will be coming to stay chez nous as we shuttle him around to various square dance gigs in the greater DC area. The recent minivan engine trouble was worrisome but we're back on schedule now that the PrincessMobile is fully repaired.

Speaking of square dancing, I've submitted my availability for the Zig Zagger's calling schedule for 2017-18. I've also sent my preferences for slots at the upcoming IAGSDC event in Palm Springs, CA, although I don't expect to hear back on that for another month or so.

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Plans for 2014

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 01:37:32 GMT

I'm not a big believer in new year's resolutions: if something is a good idea, it should be implemented immediately, not at the arbitrary turn of the calendar. That said, the xmas & new year's break is a great opportunity for personal introspection so new goals & targets are to be expected.

I'm going to continue my gym weight training with determination. My novice phase has ended so now I will focus on development & capacity. My gym membership expires in mid-July so I have a convenient built-in deadline --and a near-certain renewal.
I'm going to cut down to 15% body fat (20% currently) by May 1. Depending in how it goes, I may push onwards to 12%. More veggies & meat, more exercise, less starch, less (*sob*) sugar.
I'm going to pursue additional work skills training. At the moment, I'm unsure what form that will take but I believe all education had some value so I won't turn down opportunities which may fall into my lap.
I plan to see a career advisor. I like my work but I need some objective outside advice on evaluating my strengths and making possible course adjustments.
More massages, fewer all-nighters & working weekends.
I'm going to learn the C3A square dance program.
I want to cut back on square dance teaching. It's fun but it's exhausting and a vast time commitment. I missed a number of professional goals & opportunities in 2013 because of teaching commitments: I can't afford to keep doing that.
I was planning to see a chiropractor in January but the immediate physical need seems to have passed. Was it just stress or some issue now dormant? I should probably make that appointment anyway to establish a baseline.
I need new glasses, probably bifocals. An appointment will be made this week for as soon as convenient.
I want to cut back on old committee work. I've made my contributions and it's time to move on in several instances. I've already terminated one, reduced another and will let a third expire on its own. That said, I'm looking forward to new experiences in other board roles.
We will make some household improvements. The front door is a mess, the laundry room sink leaks and we need new towels. There's more, but this is a start.
Starting immediately, I'm putting $200 per paycheck into my savings account, up from $150.
The demon credit cards have been slain: they will stay that way.
We will update our wills & medical directives with our tax returns this spring. (Memo to self: don't die until then, much later if feasible.)
I will send xmas cards in 2014 even if it kills me.
Find my bliss. I haven't felt any worthy dream or goal in many years so it's time to spend some time & effort getting reacquainted with myself.

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I'm Not Dead Yet

Sat, 28 Dec 2013 03:17:05 GMT

...although my long absence from social media may have lead you to think otherwise.

I've been incredibly busy through November & December. I've been spending most of this week simply recharging my batteries. Is it even possible to have a negative energy level? If so, I had it. I'm back into positive territory but still have a way to go.

There hasn't been any great burden in the past 60 days, just a stack of little things. It's the proverbial nibbling to death by ducks, death by a thousand papercuts, and other similar imagery.

I don't suffer from SAD per se: it's not the length of the day which gets me down, the fewer daylight hours, the longer nights. Rather, winter implies the holiday season which further implies obligatory social events, all of which chip away huge chunks of my introverted self. It's the end of the calendar year so I have a tonne of end-of-year work commitments. The fall/winter season also has extra square dance classes and events on top of the usual cycle of club nights, all of which have their own time commitments (well, at least if one is to do them right).

New Year's can't come soon enough so I can get back to a normal cycle of routine and rest.

While I'm going to miss one of my major goals for 2013 and haven't yet found the time this week to even file the papers in my overflowing "in" tray, there have been some successes. The gym work was new as of July and has been going very, very well. My financial situation, generally healthy, has improved significantly, achieving my goals of starting a savings account and paying off all credit card debt. On the whole, life is stable. Now if I can just get a good night's sleep this next week...

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Catching Up, September 1-15, 2013

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 23:28:40 GMT

The past half-month has been a bit of a blur, but it's been good for the most part.

We spent Labour Day as planned at the trailer in West Virginia. All five of us were there, kent4str, cuyhogarvr and me, along with co-trailer trash Jerry & David. It makes for a crowded trailer and not a great deal of isolated rest, but it was fun nonetheless.

cuyahogarvr and I stayed at the trailer for the rest of Labour Day week. Outside of some moments of stress because of a dead car battery --it had a charge but was just shy of its 7th birthday so it didn't retain enough juice to start the car-- I caught up on some rest and reading. More precisely, I caught up on some self-study, working towards my eventual Cisco network certification later this year. Still, I could have used a few extra days to fully recharge.

Work has been active. Our team has been distracted from large outstanding projects by a surge in daily problems-of-the-moment. Not realizing the wave of minor things would run on for days, we didn't prioritize our tasks properly and it cost us some time, but this week we'll be more aggressive about it: a couple of our team will be dedicated to simply addressing the daily minor things while the rest of us attack the outstanding big projects.

That said, I did get two major projects off my plate and a third nearly completed by this past Friday. I'm confident our team overall will be back in a very good position again with in a week.

Spare time will be at a premium this coming week: the Mainstream class with DC Lambda Squares continues for another two Wednesdays, even as a new Mainstream class for Chesapeake Squares starts this Thursday. I have a club night with Chesapeake Squares this Tuesday, then a six hour calling marathon, Mainstream through Challenge-1, with the Times Squares in New York City this coming Saturday. I also have a board meeting with the Mid-Atlantic Challenge Association Sunday afternoon.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to all of these projects but it will require some heavy lifting for the next two weeks.

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Vacation!

Tue, 03 Sep 2013 16:42:34 GMT

I'm utterly delighted to report that I'm on vacation right now. While I've been at the trailer at Roseland Resort since last Friday, the vacation part didn't seem real until I set up the out-of-office auto-reponder for work. Now I'm blissfully plugging away on my laptop on my own personal projects without worry of distraction from more urgent work-related matters.

There were more than 750 people at the campground this weekend, a new record for the place. The staff are understandibly exhausted. The crowds were a little overwhelming for me so I was happy to stay close to or inside the trailer nearly the entire time. As an introvert, it's tough enough being available to the public, not to mention on a stage routinely, during weekdays: I come to Roseland to retreat from the world and recharge.

Nearly everyone cleared out of the campground on Monday. Currently, Wayne & JD are at their trailer, as well as the Bills in their trailer just below. Ron & Derwyn are here too, and another trailer further east of ours is occupied. That's the entire population of Rose Hill, our little neighborhood of the campground. There's perhaps a dozen other people scattered around the place. Wayne mentioned many of these remaining people were planning to depart today, further reducing the population. Yay for isolation!

I'm keeping busy though... I've finished four books, including a history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a political piece on South Korea, and two books on team management. I've finally found time to catch up on some computer-based training courses I have on my computer, working towards an eventual Cisco certification. I finished one on Xen virtualization (not Cisco-related), and another CCNP-level Cisco course on network switch management. I'll start the next course when I'm finished with this posting.

Tomorrow morning, cuyahogarvr and I are heading to Cleveland overnight to tackle some minor business. We'll be back Thursday morning. Mercifully, it's only a four hour drive to Cleveland from the campground so it's not a big imposition into our vacation time.

There really isn't much else to report at this time, largely because I'm working very hard to ensure there isn't anything to report. The whole point of a vacation, after all, is to relax and let go of the mundane headaches of life in the real world. You'll let me know if something comes up, right?

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Recent Nerdity

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 21:19:23 GMT

Work has been an interesting combination of boredom & terror over the past month, kinda like flying a plane with one engine missing. I take consolation from knowing I still have at least one spare engine and a lot of experience, but it's still a bit less than ideal what with the passengers occasionally hitting the bar or screaming in fear. Very distracting, but if we keep doing the right things, we'll be soon clear of the turbulence.

My team was expanded by two extra bodies in July. The new guys are still coming up to speed, but they're progressing very well and are demonstrating the initiative & curiousity I had anticipated. There is a lot to take up, but they are pulling their weight and this makes me happy. I'll be even happier yet in a few months when they're fully up to speed and we have some major projects behind us but I need to be patient.

We've had a burst in workload this past two weeks. No single item was a killer, but the volume was more than we could handle at our regular pace. Still, with some extra hours and some judicious shuffling of priorities, we were able to tackle nearly all of the outstanding items before the weekend began.

My boss took a well-deserved vacation day on Friday so I got to play interim manager again. I like those opportunities because they give me license to speak with a higher degree of authority than I would when the boss is in and therefore might be seen to overstep my bounds. These perceptions are exclusively in my head, of course: my boss wouldn't object and our management structure for problem solving is very flat, but I am by nature hyper-attuned to levels of management, degrees of latitude and adherence to procedure, propriety, etiquette & appearances. If I ever think I'm losing any portion of my Canadian identity, here's a perfect counter-example --and perhaps one I should be more aggressive about addressing since it's probably holding me back.

One of my bigger projects this past week has been completed. It wasn't a technical challenge, but a logistical one: we had over 1,000lbs of dead or retired computer equipment in my data center which desperately needed to be removed. I needed a place to discard the equipment, I needed to have the hard drives removed & destroyed to protect our data, I needed extra hands to help heft the heavier bits (one singular chunk was itself about 90lbs and very awkward to grasp), along with coordination with use of the loading dock, a cargo vehicle and a few hours out of my business day. We got that on Friday.

cuyahogarvr and I wrestled the largest portion of this pile of junk out of the data center after lunch on Friday and delivered it to our home county's electronics recycling depot using kent4str's minivan. On Saturday, I collected the remaining eight blades & servers, rail kits and such; those were discarded this afternoon, along with miscellaneous household bits (a retired TV & VCR, some dead batteries, etc.). There is now a huge amount of extra space in my data center and in our garage. I feel much cleaner --and am delighted to strike one more item off my to-do list.

I went to Philadelphia for an overnight trip August 10-11 to attend FOSSCon 2013, a small convention of free open source software users & developers. I had a good time, although not at first. The event started a little late and registration didn't actually open until everything was in operation for an hour because of traffic delays. While I had a schedule from the web site, each hall was listed with a sponsor name, but signs weren't up anywhere in the building to identify the halls. In short, the first two hours put my inner project manager into frustration overload. I nearly stormed out in annoyance and frustration.

Then I remembered two things: (1) there was no registration fee, and (2) these were enthusiasts & amateurs putting together an event, not professional event planners. I've been spoiled by major conferences with large registration fees and professional managers held at major event hotels (think USENIX, LISA, etc.): my righteous anger at misplaced resources was wrong and utterly misplaced.

Once I reframed my thinking and focused on the content of the talks & presentations, all went very well. In fact, I was pretty impressed what they were able to do with limited resources and an all-volunteer staff.

My major take-away from this panels was a list of software packages I should examine for work and/or beefing up a resume: Salt, ZeroMQ, Jenkins, Ansible and such. Of course, I need to get through my immediate work-related projects which include Xen and Ubuntu 12 first, but I've made some notes for future. And I'll definitely attend --and perhaps volunteer-- for next year's event.

I see that the technical schedule for the upcoming LISA conference in DC in November has been posted so I have to go perusing. I've been pre-approved by my VP for registration so I'll be there: the only question is how many of the tutual days I'll sign up for. More later.

And finally, some high tech trauma: one of our home laptops died. More precisely, the hard drive has snuffed it: no computer can recognize it and it just clicks spasmodically. I've tried everything I know to try waking it up, all to no avail. Yes, we have backups of it, but they predate a number of important software installations and data files. I've obtained a duplicate drive and will take both to a local data recovery service tomorrow to see if there is any hope of grabbing at least some data from the dead disk. It's gonna cost, but it's our own fault. sigh

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San Francisco, Week 1

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 16:40:15 GMT

I landed at San Francisco's airport last Sunday with rainy weather behind me in DC and heavy fogs & rain here in the Bay area. It figures: while I had packed every possible change of clothes --business casual, recreational, square dance club formal, etc.-- I hadn't thought to pack either a waterproof jacket or an umbrella. Doh! At least the "rain" in SF was little more than a heavy drizzle and it all blew out of the area by lunchtime Tuesday.

This first week was dedicated to working at my Dear Employer's new office digs in downtown San Francisco. We occupty the 20th & 21st floors of 301 Howard Street, just a couple of blocks south of the Embarcadero BART subway station. In many ways, it's incredibly convenient. On the downside, corporate policy hasn't caught up with the new reality and I must therefore continue to stay at the officially blessed Hyatt Regency, two miles on the wrong side of the San Francisco airport. Using a rental car, I've been driving a mile to the Millbrae BART station, paying $2/day in parking and spending another $8 or so for the subway ride.

I don't mind the commute overmuch. The only downside --besides taking 45 minutes per day each way just to travel-- is that I have to get to the Millbrae station around 7am to guarantee finding a parking spot and/or a seat on the train for all the 11 stops and that means the alarm going off at 6am. I'm OK with that but I'm not a morning person. Worse, while showing up at 8am is a Good Thing work-wise because there's no one else in the office, I feel a bit guilty leaving before 5pm with the rest. When I'm on the east coast, I get out of bed at 8:59am to be at my basement computer bunker by 9am. Sometimes I'll even put on clothes. And I can take a few minutes in the middle of the day to sit somewhere comfortable, away from the computer screens, to rest if desired. In short, I'm out of practice with the commuting schedule most normal people have, and which I used to follow when working at all prior employers.

A word on BART. Many of the people I work with don't have a high opinion of the system. Trains too irregular, trains too old, etc.. Having spent many years on Toronto's TTC subway and DC's Metro system, I'll say that BART has some distinct advantages over the other two.

1. The cars are clean, practically spotless. I hardly ride Metro without getting a strong whiff of mildew from the poorly cleaned & maintained AC systems. Most Metro cars desperately need some stain remover on their floors and sometimes the seats.
2. Toronto and DC's subways stop at stations wherever they please. Sometimes the train will advance to the end of the platform, sometimes they crawl just far enough for the trailing car to align with the entrance, most times they just park at some random place along the platform. BART trains stop at distinct locations and there are colored floor tiles at the platform edge to indicate precisely where the doors will be. This pleasant feature allows passengers to queue up on either side to board rather than forming an amorphous blob competing to get in the doors the moment the last departing passenger is clear. And BART passengers do queue up politely. Imagine that: a design inducement for crowd politeness rather than dissuading it.

I was surprised to learn Monday that I have a new Director of Operations. I didn't even known we were hiring such a position, but I'm guessing my VP was finding he needed to delegate more of the day-to-day business so he can focus on the larger picture. Bret seems a pretty nice guy and he seems to know his stuff. This week, he was getting to know all of the people involved, checking out the data center facilities, familiarizing himself with our networks, our fields of specialty, our day-to-day activites and meetings. I took advantage of his first day to piggy-back my own requests for a new office badge so I can get into the office during the off-hours, among other things.

There is one huge downside to working at the San Fran office: excessive visibility. Many of the things I wanted to do have been swamped by fly-by requests and/or urgent matters. Since I'm one of three people on the team (more on that soon), I usually get a stack of these but being on-site increased my percentage significantly. I'm behind on my personal work-related goals for this week.

After several days of minimal sleep, I crashed early last night. Rather, I decided that when I dropped my tablet on my face twice before 9pm when I dozed off while reading, it was a sign I should just call it a night. I slept soundly until about 6am.

cuyahogarvr and kent4str are arriving on Virgin America at lunchtime today. I received a couple of confirming text messages from them just prior to boarding that all was well.

Per earlier plans, I drove to the local laundromat to catch up on laundry. I have packed my bags and am ready to check out of the Hyatt at 11am. I'll park the car at Millbrae, then take the BART to SFO to collect the guys and their bags. Once we're together, we'll head downtown to check into the Marriott Marquis for the IAGSDC convention (I've already checked in online) where we're staying until July 8 when the boys return east. I still need to book an alternate hotel in SF for July 8-12, but the last minute deals are only available a week prior to the booking date so I'll worry about that on July 1.

More news as it develops.

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Mobile Phone Bitterness

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:56:23 GMT

My current phone has always been a little sluggish. It's a Motorola Droid Bionic, one of the first dual-core phones Verizon Wireless had offered and, when purchased, it was the top of the line. Alas, I do have 2800 address book entries, a number of regularly used apps and four email accounts with significant traffic: once it decides to sync email, performance nose-dives for 2-3 solid minutes, enough to render it unusable.

I had hoped the OS upgrade to Jellybean would help, but it's really no better. If there's an advantage to having two cores, it's not obvious, especially if key components of the OS are at least acting single-threaded if indeed they are multi.

My contract allows me a new phone so perhaps something with more RAM and faster CPUs would at least minimize the problems with the user experience. Oh, look... the Samsung Galaxy S4 is available! I'll go take a look!

Of course, Verizon Wireless doesn't have any in stock. I'm not surprised at that: it's a new phone with hot demand and rides nicely on the coattails of the Galaxy S III model. I was surprised that they didn't even have a demo model so we could see how it feels in one's hand or against one's ear. I was further surprised and annoyed to learn that the only way I could get the phone for the advertised $250 pricetag is to ditch my existing data & voice plans for a greatly more limited version --at the same price as I'm paying for my currently adequate plans. If I want to keep my existing plan, I'll need to purchase the phone for $650.

At the moment, I'm so annoyed & frustrated with Verizon Wireless' uttery disdain for its existing customers that I'd rather ditch them than upgrade, especially if it means locking in for another two years. I'd be willing to switch carriers but Sprint's coverage is hideous and AT&T already burned me years ago so I'm not inclined to give them a shot at a repeat. Verizon Wireless' coverage is good --very spotty in western Maryland and West Virginia-- but generally covers the areas where I regularly travel. I'd be happy to pay the regular $250 rate for a new 2yr contract, but not if it means either dramatically increasing my monthly rates or crippling the phone's abilities.

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I'm hiring sysadmins!

Fri, 10 May 2013 18:31:42 GMT

My systems engineering team has three open positions for which we are hiring. We'd ideally like to hire in the greater SF bay area since that's where the bulk of our developers, managers and non-production systems are located, but we won't turn down telecommuting talent we can locate elsewhere on the planet. I've been caring for our production data center for 4.5 years now, most of it telecommuting from home --and now you can too!

My team needs some moderately senior Linux engineers with some Solaris experience and network knowledge. Web app stuff like Java, Javascript, Apache web server and such is a definite bonus.

Here's the official job description/posting:
https://careers-reardencommerce.icims.com/jobs/2349/job

If you're interested or know someone who is, let me know and I'd be happy to fill in more detailed background.

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Three Months

Mon, 06 May 2013 21:38:42 GMT

Three months back, my schedule went straight to hell.

I knew it was going to happen: my work team was losing two people and my boss was taking extended leave to handle his father's funeral arrangements, leaving us with only a 50% staffing level. Spring is also the season of square dance fly-ins, another round of square dance teaching evenings and a tonne of other events. The calendar was a swirling mess of color listing all of the commitments and appointments until May 5.

Today, mercifully, is May 6, and it feels like the weight of the entire freaking planet has been lifted from my shoulders.

Yes, my team is short-staffed still but I'm interviewing a potential hire tomorrow afternoon. Further, a number of major projects and our annual audit have all been completed succesfully. Even our annual performance evaluations have finished and I was informed today I'm getting a 4.8% raise. Go team!

This past weekend was the last of the square dance fly-ins on my calendar before the upcoming IAGSDC convention in July. It was great fun as always, but I'm happy to have a chunk of my life back again.

The trailer is de-winterized. While that's a luxury issue for us, we had the de-winterizing tools and equipment: our co-trailer owners in Columbus, OH, couldn't use the trailer until we did our part to prepare it for use. The pressure is now off: Jerry & David can enjoy it at their convenience.

Even the family stuff is largely done. kent4str's parents are back from wintering in Floriday, cuyahogarvr's kids birthdays & visits have come & gone, and my clan have finally locked down dates for the parents' upcoming 50th wedding anniversary in 2014. Alas, that date is opposite the 2014 IAGSDC convention but I've already sold our registrations so that's off our books as well.

And extended break from all social media helped immensely. It's amazing how much time one can get back when one ignores Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter and such. I missed keeping current with various friends' travails, but I needed to focus elsewhere until the storm had passed.

Yeah, there are still appointments on the books but it's all a tiny fraction of what I had up until last night. Life is good.

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Dear Lazywebz...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:45:28 GMT

Got a recommendation for a standalone utility for wiping hard drives? My Dear Employer has sold a division of our firm to another so I'm wiping the drives of two racks of equipment before they are turned over to the new owner. A USB-based or CD-based autoboot wiping utility would be very, very useful. Any ideas?

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Still Alive

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:10:05 GMT

I haven't had much time to read or post lately... life has been busy and will continue to be so for another couple of months. This lack of spare time has been keeping me away from LJ, FB and Twitter, among other things; on the flip side, it's amazing how much spare time one can recoup by staying away from LJ, FB and Twitter.

In the past couple of weeks, I've:

finished my employer's performance evaluation;
attended the CALLERLAB convention in Cary, NC, where I was a panelist & moderator and representative for the GCA;
worked several night shifts, racking up new servers, retiring old ones, and upgrading existing ones, as well as preparing equipment to be shipped out as we've sold one of our divisions to an outside firm;
attempted to de-winterize our trailer at Roseland Resort (the campground water hadn't been turned on yet so we couldn't flush the antifreeze from the water system & tanks, and we ran out of propane for the furnace at 3am Sunday morning);
worked more extended shifts (did I mention we're a bit short-handed and hiring two more staffers for my team?);
had my old netbook die on me;
helped a friend assemble some furniture;
collected a dresser from another friend;
and prepped to head to Wilmington, DE, for the Independence Squares' fly-in this weekend.

In short, I'm up to my ears in a lot of projects. The good news, at least, is that I've completed a lot of smaller projects in the past 48 hours so I'm at least experiencing a significant degree of satisfaction and progress.

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