The Never Ending Java Saga

November 2, 2009 at 7:08 pm (Life, Rants)

I thought I was done.

Two semesters of clawing and scraping my way through Betty Fryer’s Java classes, wishing feverishly that it would end and having my GPA toppled by getting a B in each class (even though I think Betty was being kind); I’m pretty sure she was glad to get rid of such a wretched student.  For some reason I was living with the delusion that I would never have to write another piece of java code again; I could not have been more mistaken.

You can imagine how I felt a half hour into the Data Structures class when it dawned on me that I was staring down the barrel of another fifteen weeks of writing utterly incomprehensible code that looks like Urdu to me… complete and total panic.  The concepts are easy;  I can sit through a three hour whiteboard lecture, take copious notes and understand everything the professor is saying.   But when it comes to writing the code something gets completely lost in the translation.  I have often wondered if this is some sort of weird learning disability that has yet to be identified or a broken neuron somewhere that’s keeping me from connecting the dots.

As soon as the class was over I double checked the Sage Advisor to make sure this was a requirement; it was.  I checked to see if any community colleges were having the course; surely a two year school had to have an easier Data Structures class than a four year school!  There was nothing to be had. I fretted and stewed for three days before finally coming to the realization that there was no way to get out of the class and that I had better suck it up and deal with it.

It has been a bumpy road, but I am almost halfway through the class.  I advertised for a tutor on Craig’s list and found a patient  PhD student who helped me through a big midterm project. I never miss a class, pay strict attention to the professor and am hoping to claw my way through the remaining classes without denting my pretty decent GPA too badly.

Wish me luck.

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The New Kid on the Block

May 1, 2009 at 6:28 am (Rants, Work)

I’m settling into my new routine and it’s going fairly well in spite of some pretty sizable adjustments that I hadn’t anticipated.  The new hours are ok and I’m getting used to the busier, noisier office setting.  What has been harder to get used to is having to rely on other people for everyday things.

At the district, if I needed access to something I had it simply by virtue of being the Network Administrator.  At the RIC it’s a totally different scenario because of the fact that it’s a data center with numerous tiers of authority.  I was happily adding users the other day and discovered that I had permission to one container but not another, necessitating a request for a change in permissions.   If a file needs to be restored I have to open a support ticket and wait until the backup guy can restore it.  My requests for extra permissions or an errant file are quickly granted, but I always feel like the resident pest.

This scenario is typical of how large organizations work and understandable from the standpoint of security, but it has seriously hampered my ‘get it done’ approach.  Having spent nearly ten years running my networks alone, it has been an interesting exercise for me to suddenly have to work in a team environment; fortunately for me I don’t bring my ego to work with me!

There are other things about the new job that are not as easy to understand, such as why I still do not have voicemail.  When I queried my manager about it, he said something to effect that I needed justification for it.  This is French for “we are too cheap to pay for licenses for everyone”, but I was too stunned by that response to even formulate an answer.  How about the justification that I’m an IT professional who routinely gets calls from customers who probably wonder what sort of lame organization I’m working for that can’t even provide me with voice mail? Geez….

For now I’m choosing my battles, but if the stupidity layer gets too thick, I may have to pick up my toys and play elsewhere.

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The Two Minute Warning

January 16, 2009 at 12:17 pm (Rants, Work)

Life is a funny thing.  Faced with the regular irritants of everyday life, one develops little mechanisms to deal with them much like an oyster emits nacre to protect itself against a grain of sand it cannot expel.  In the case of an oyster a pearl is produced, but with humans it is often something else entirely.

When the irritant balance becomes too unwieldy I have a mechanism I call the Two Minute Warning; it’s the device that makes me realize that a lifestyle decision must be made, and it must be made now.  I have had several Two Minute Warnings in my life; the moment I realized that I could no longer be married to the man who is now my ex, the instant I realized that a college education was essential, and most recently when it became clear to me that a job change was in order.

At my district we have Tech Specialists who handle the day to day desktop stuff, leaving me to handle the network issues.  In their defense these are not well paid people, but the problem is that they tend to be computer enthusiasts and not people who understand networking. Because of that, they often do things unwittingly that cause me huge amounts of grief.

On Monday, like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, a couple of things happened that made me realize I needed a change of scenery.  One of my Tech Specialists saved an 8 GB ghost image to the staff volume of my main server running it completely out of space, despite the fact that we have a server designated especially for such things.  It’s not a big deal to find the offending file and move it, but it disrupts people and causes problems with folks who auto-archive their email to their network space.  Shortly after fixing that issue, the chair of the Science department came to me because the Science Department folder containing years of shared documents was missing.  I took a look, and sure enough it was gone.

The great thing about my Novell network is that if a user deletes something it goes to a salvage area; deleted items stay there until the volume needs to reclaim the space.  When I did not see the missing folder in salvage I knew immediately that the system had purged the file to make room for the huge file my staffer had saved.  Undaunted, I assured the department chair that I could simply get the file from backup.

I created a restore job and after hitting “okay”, I got a testy message about the tape library being unavailable.  Huh?  I pinged the tape library and got no response.  Since it is not in my building, I drove over to the site where it is located and discovered that it was powered off!  Then I remembered the week before when another Tech Specialist accidentally unlugged one of the big heavy duty power strips fed by a UPS killing all the phones at the Middle School as well as the server.  Somehow in the fracas the tape library was never powered back on.

Argh!  I knew that even though the tape library was powered back on, the server was not going to “see” it until I rebooted, which was not going to happen until evening.  I had the rather unpalatable task of telling the department chair that I would not be able to restore the folder until the following day.  He was cool about it, but I could tell he was wondering if he was ever going to see his files again.

Later that evening I rebooted from home and was able to restore the folder for the staff member, but I knew that I had to make a change.  Running a large network is stressful enough on its own; I don’t need my tech staff making my job more difficult.  This sort of thing happens on a regular basis and repeated attempts to get my boss to hire more competent staff have failed.  He’s one of those nice people who never wants to rock the boat, so it looks like I will have to jump ship to save myself.

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Resolution Humbug

January 5, 2009 at 7:40 pm (Life, Rants)

This afternoon at 4:15, after getting my membership tag scanned at the gym I made a beeline for the cardio deck only to discover that there was one single machine left and it wasn’t one of my favorites.   Doing a double take, I checked the clock to see if perhaps I’d misread the time and then I remembered: it was New Year’s Resolution Time.  This meant that from now until the next long school break in February people would be flocking to gyms in unprecedented numbers in search of eternal youth, or at least to work off their Christmas goodies.

For the more or less regular clients like myself (okay, I don’t go much in June or July) this usually means trouble finding an empty locker, standing around waiting for equipment and crowded classes.  I will say that my latest gym uses a pass system for classes instead of packing people in like sardines as they did at my old gym which is much more civilized.  But it’s still pretty crowded, and crowds just aren’t my thing.

Mind you, I don’t begrudge people their resolutions; I’m not sure I understand why people wait until the beginning of the year when any time of year is a perfectly fine time to start doing something good for yourself.  But I can’t help but wonder if those resolutions would stay in place longer if people didn’t feel such pressure to make them known and then define their starting point.  As  in so many things, Marketing seems to have reaped the most benefit from the New Year’s Resolution.

Still, if folks could spread their resolutions out over the year it sure would be appreciated.

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The Debate

October 1, 2008 at 12:04 pm (Rants)

Like a lot of people, I watched the debate last week between Barack Obama and John McCain, and I never would have written a blog post on a topic like this, but something about the debate drove me absolutely nuts.  It was something that none of the media postmortems made much mention of which bothers me even more; it was the fact that during the entire debate, John McCain rarely looked at Barack Obama.

A lot of people are going to think I’m crazy, but where I come from you look someone straight in the eye when you speak to them.  Like a good handshake, it’s one of those visceral, show-you-what-I’m-made-of clues that speak volumes about a person.  In spite of Jim Lehrer’s prompting to get the candidates to talk to one another, McCain wasn’t going to budge preferring to look anywhere but at his opponent.   McCain’s whole demeanor was at odds with what he was supposed to represent; he was condescending, often appearing to talk down to Barack, and yet the lack of eye contact made him look as if he was afraid of Barack or worried that what he was saying was not ringing true.  All I could think was, if he was having this much trouble with a Senator from Illinois what was he going to do when confronted by someone as formidable as Vladimir Putin?  Even at the end of the debate when they were shaking hands, McCain was still looking at the floor.

McCain’s attitude about Roe v Wade, paired with his pro-life presidential choice of Sarah Palin was pretty much a deal breaker for me and the debate clinched it.  Maybe I’m wrong to base my presidential choice on body language, but actions often do speak louder than words.

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Legalized Robbery

September 22, 2008 at 6:58 am (Life, Rants)

School has started, and as a college student I am preparing to be robbed by my college bookstore again.  I never fail to be astounded by the cost of textbooks, and the devices used by professors to get students to fork over huge amounts of money.

This semester I am taking two courses requiring textbooks that are large enough to elevate a small child at the dinner table.  Because they are technical manuals, they are phenomenally expensive.  My strategy is to enroll in the class early enough so that I can get the ISBN of the book and purchase it elsewhere, preferably used, in time for the class.  Half.com is my current favorite textbook supplier; one of my textbooks this semester was $126.00 at the bookstore and $43.00 on half.com….a substantial savings.

Occasionally my textbook strategy has backfired on me; if I get the title too early there is always a chance that the professor will change the text at the last minute, which has actually happened.  It’s not too bad if they just change editions, but I have had classes that end up being taught by a different professor at the eleventh hour, and they invariably have their own textbook requirements.  This necessitates finding a way to unload the unused book and I have a couple of favorite textbook buyback places that pay pretty well; facultybooks.com and valorebooks.com.  Both websites give real time buyback quotes and free shipping for the textbook you are selling which is super convenient.

Even more irritating than paying big money for a textbook, is buying a textbook that is never used.  It’s one thing to require a big money text, but requiring one that is never used should be illegal.  You can imagine that I make a pretty big fuss about this on the end-of-semester survey!

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The Issue No One is Talking About

August 6, 2008 at 12:41 pm (Rants)

I saw John McCain’s YouTube video today where he was asked by a reporter why women had to pay for birth control while viagra was covered under most prescription drug plans. It was interesting to watch his reaction. There were numerous facial contortions and you could clearly see him weighing what was about to come out of his mouth against the media spin that would result. In the end he opted to say that he didn’t know enough about it to comment, which is politician-speak for, “I’m not going to risk pissing someone off on such an unimportant issue.” Nice going, John. Except it’s an important issue…very important.

Unless you have been living under a rock you know that unemployment is at an all time high, education is in crisis, and we are facing serious food, water and fuel shortages. Our cities are becoming hotbeds of crime, our highways are congested and prison populations are exploding. The common denominator for this (and an awful lot of other world woes) is the fact that there are just too many people inhabiting this earth. I am a firm believer that the long term answer to a lot of society’s ills can be found in birth control; free, readily available birth control.

It’s no surprise that unwanted children stress our welfare systems, fill our prisons and overtax our school systems. People who can’t afford birth control are the ones who need it most, and it continues to amaze me that welfare programs can pay out eight to ten thousand a year for a welfare recipient, but be unable to shell out the hundred bucks a year it would cost to provide birth control. As a country we should not only be providing this, but we should be marketing it instead of this Abstinence Only program which is a post-Victorian joke foisted upon us by the Republican party and religious right.

Until we can become as evolved and as pragmatic as countries like Denmark and Sweden who understand the social ramifications of unplanned pregnancies, we are going to continue to fill our social ranks with people who are part of the problem and not part of the solution. Their vastly lower crime rates, higher standard of living and better educational system is an indirect result of having fewer people on the dole.

I think we have yet to realize the long term effects of our head-in-the-sand approach to population control, and when we do it will be devastating…and much too late.

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Upgrade Hell

July 30, 2008 at 6:11 pm (Rants, Work)

There is a white board in my cubicle upon which I keep a list of major projects that need doing; one of those items on the list is “Upgrade Websense” with a little sad face drawn next to it. The reason for this designation is that it is an upgrade that just never goes well. Ever. It always results in several long phone calls to San Diego where they are almost as mystified as I am.

You would not think this would be so difficult; I always dutifully print out the upgrade instructions and follow them to the letter, making certain that the event viewer is not open and that the Enterprise Manager is not running. The install manages to stop all the services properly, the file copy goes well and then bang! An Error:128 appears and I know I’m done; stick a fork in me, it’s time to call tech support.

Websense tech support is variable; sometimes you get someone phenomenal, and sometimes you get a dud. The tech I got was okay, but you would think the error messages I was kicking out would have been enough to go on, or documented somewhere. Instead he had me trying all kinds of things like reinstalling the old version and then upgrading to an incremental build, etc.  My gut tells me that the root of the evil is a config.xml file that has been through too many upgrades and ip address changes.

I suppose I could just do a clean install of the latest version, but the problem with that plan is that I would lose all the policies I have created along with my massive white list. When asked if it was possible to send them my config.xml file and have them convert it, they told me that they don’t do that; the only time they will convert a config file is if a customer migrates from Windows to Linux (this is very tempting since I have always felt that having “workhorse” services running on Windoze is a really dumb idea).

Anyway, after hours of being glued to the phone, the tech asked me if I had a spare server laying around so that I could set up a secondary policy server and migrate the xml file to it. The idea was that the secondary server would do the conversion, I could update the original and plunk the converted config file back in. I have been down that road before and got licensing issues and other mayhem, so I decided that for all the support money we pay those nice folks each year they could do it for me.

A couple of hours later the updated config file arrived and it worked fairly well after a bit of search-and-replace; all that pain for an .xml file that’s been around the block a few too many times!

I still wish I had gone with Linux.

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Confession

July 25, 2008 at 2:30 pm (Life, Rants)

I hate my teapot. So why the confession? Because I always wanted a leCreuset teapot, and now that I have one I absolutely detest it.

Anyone who is a cookware aficionado knows that le Creuset is considered pretty good stuff, and it’s fairly expensive. So you can imagine how happy I was to get one from my daughter for Christmas. She had seen me ogling the red whistler in Different Drummer’s Kitchen, tucked it into the back of her head, and bought it for me last year. It promptly took up residence on my stove where it looked just beautiful.

Its beauty was really only skin deep, however; the leCreuset has turned out to be the most unhandy teapot on the face of the earth. For one thing, after heating the water you must pour excruciatingly slowly into the cup or the water will sputter all over you when it hits the hot sides of the teapot. The fill lid is very snug and a nuisance to remove; you must leverage your palm on the handle and pull the lid straight up with your index and middle finger. Any attempt to simply grasp the knob on the lid and pull will result in bashed knuckles. And the handle is extremely stiff, requiring a lot of force to fold it to the side for filling.

I’m going to keep the teapot until I find something more functional.  Maybe I’ll find something I like better right before Christmas.

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Summer School

July 4, 2008 at 7:34 am (Rants, Work)

Whenever someone finds out I work for a school district they invariably ask me if I have the summer off; people just naturally think that anyone who works in a school has a nice long lazy summer. But anyone who has darkened the door of a school building in July or August will find out that it is abuzz with activity.

While most people are kicking back and enjoying the slower pace, school techs are in a frenzy of upgrading, deploying and planning for the year ahead. If you are lucky enough to work for a district that is not undergoing some sort of construction project, life is good.  If you are like me, and working through the fourth year of a 92 million dollar construction project, life can get pretty crazy. Nothing adds interest to a network administrator’s job quite like asbestos abatement in your primary data facility. Or having a backhoe slice through the main fiber feed that services every building in the district…that’s fun. And there’s nothing like checking your email in the evening to discover that an entire data rack (the one housing the phone system) has lost power because an electrician hit the wrong breaker before leaving for the night. During construction every day is an adventure.

Compared to the corporate sector I suppose we are pretty lucky to get such a big chunk of time to work our magic. The down side to this, of course, is that the staff always returns in the fall refreshed and full of demands, while the tech staff has just emerged from eight weeks of exhausting work. If we seem little cranky try to remember that not everyone gets the summer off.

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