The Generosity of Geeks

April 13, 2009 at 5:02 pm (Work)

I have been on the new job for about five weeks and am already racking up quite a few  projects.  One of these projects is a webdav implementation on a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) box.  The idea is for school districts to be able to upload web pages using port 80 instead of using ftp ( or using those incredibly lame Front Page file extensions). The project was started by a former colleague who has moved on to bigger and better things, so I was pretty much left to figure it out.

One of the cool things about Linux is that it can be compiled or built in all sorts of different ways; this is less cool when you have to pick up where someone left off.  My Linux skills are still pretty marginal and my predecessor Jason was fairly creative,  so you can imagine how much fun I was having; after beating on this thing for a few weeks I swallowed my pride and gave Jason a call.

One of the complaints I hear all the time about tech people is that they are stingy with information, territorial and prefer to keep things to themselves; clearly these are the same people who never heard of the open source movement, but I digress.  Jason was willing to come over and show me how the config files were set up, run me through the scripts he wrote for maintenance tasks and was patient while I wrote a few notes.  In exchange for a couple hours of his time I gave him two containers of fresh horseradish; a pretty good deal since you can be sure he isn’t working in Manhattan for condiments.

I have always felt that one of the great joys of life is watching someone do something they are very good at no matter what that thing may be. The bonus in this cram session was being able to look over the shoulder of  someone who was goddamned good at the command line and hopefully this was just the nudge I needed to get the project done…and work on my skills. Thanks Jay!

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My Favorite Time of the Year

April 2, 2009 at 7:23 am (Uncategorized)

Spring is here in the great northeast and while many of my gardening friends are grumbling about all the mud, I’m just happy to see the snow disappear and the days get longer.  If there is a little mud involved, so be it.

I’m one of those weirdos for whom anticipation is something of a drug, so you can just imagine how heady I find early spring.  Every day is a new discovery of swollen buds, things popping out of the ground that I had completely forgotten about, and the delicious planning of a redesign.  Finally, all those damned gardening catalogs that have been teasing me since the day after Christmas can be seriously perused.

The down side of this is that I’m suddenly impatient with anything that keeps me indoors…like homework, housework or rain.  Like an addict, I plan and scheme to maximize my time outdoors; after a long winter it just seems impossible to get enough fresh air and sunshine.  And of course I’m constantly reminding myself that it’s a finite season and that I must savor every moment.

I’m going outside now.

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Rolling with the Changes

March 11, 2009 at 7:34 am (Uncategorized)

I officially started my new job this week and it has been an interesting adaptation in a number of ways; one of the biggest changes is working 9-5 as opposed to 7-3.  When I applied for the job I knew that I was going to have to pull that shift, but it seemed like a small price to pay for working close to home with people who are pretty much as nerdy as I am.

Thinking that I was going to just hate my new hours, I decided to pack in as much useful activity as I could from the hours of 5 to 9; this has proven an excellent time to do homework and go to the gym.  Focusing on homework  with a freshly rested set of brain cells is somehow more productive, and the gym is awesome at 6:00 am being sparsely populated at that hour.  As an added bonus, there is practically no traffic so I can get there in about twelve minutes.

On the work side of things it’s a bit of an adjustment as well, but nothing insurmountable.  Almost all server access is done via VPN and RSA token, so switching back and forth between local connectivity and vpn connectivity has resulted in some “duh” moments.  There are dozens of servers, so figuring out who does what is interesting and of course my biggest problem is that I want to know everything yesterday; being patient with myself has never been my strong suit.

In spite of all this change I think this will be a good environment for me, and I’m looking forward to learning all I can.  Bring it on!

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Back to the Barn

February 28, 2009 at 5:31 pm (Life, Work)

Well, I did it. After much consideration I applied for a job in Mid-Range and actually (miracle of all miracles) got it. This means that I will no longer have to go to a district four days per week, but will drive to the network center which happens to be a mere mile from my house. It’s going to be an interesting learning curve as it deals largely with Unix, Linux and web services, but it’s manageable since I have had some exposure to all three technologies, albeit not extensively.

The district is disappointed that I am leaving, but I gave them three years to start treating the place like a real network instead of some sort of frat house for computer enthusiasts (minus the drinking and sorority girls, of course). The job I will be doing is actually a job that I had considered applying for a year ago, but I wanted to see the district through the completion of some big projects. That has been accomplished, making the re-opening of this job a sign that it was time to move on. As George Peppard often said, “I love it when a plan comes together”.

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Out of the Loop

February 16, 2009 at 7:20 am (Uncategorized)

One of the things that drives me crazy about myself (and probably my friends) is the fact that I have no idea what is going on with regard to movies or television shows either current or past.  Colleagues of mine are constantly talking about the latest episode of “Lost” or “The Office” and one of them will invariably turn to me and say, “Remember that episode where …” and I know I’m done.  Not being a television watcher puts me at a definite disadvantage when it comes to a lot of conversations.

Ken is amazed by this.  He grew up in a troubled household where gluing oneself to the television was the only means of escape, so he assumes that all childhoods were spent this way.  He has seen vast quantities of cartoons, movies, sit-coms, game shows…you name it.  He loves to spring tv trivia on me just to get me going, or he will say, ” Remember so and so from the whatsis show”?

The reason for my apparent lack of television  knowledge is that as a young person we didn’t have a television until I was around 5, and even then we were not allowed to watch it much.  Life on the farm meant there really wasn’t much time for such foolishness with all the chores,  so our exposure to television was minimal.    I watched more television in my 20’s and 30’s but becoming a college student put the brakes on that; there’s nothing like homework to put a serious dent in your tv time.  Now most television is almost painful for me to watch and I find it vastly preferable to read or surf the net.

Movies are another knowledge area I’m weak on probably due to the fact that going to a movie is a mini-commitment to sitting still for around two hours.  I have to really want to see a movie to do that; it’s also annoying that it’s too dark to knit in your average movie theatre.  My movie buff friends are all rolling their eyes right now and thinking, “come on!”, but it’s true; if I have to sit still for a long period of time, my hands need to be doing something.

The good news about all of this is that while I may not have any idea what’s going on in Hollywood, I do read Time Magazine from cover to cover every week and am a faithful listener of NPR.  This does make me a bit of an information snob, but it’s a lot more interesting than hearing who Lindsey Lohan is hooking up with.  Whoever she is.

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The Demise of the 4.0

February 1, 2009 at 11:00 am (Uncategorized)

I got my first B.

It has taken me a couple of weeks to process the fact that I am no longer a straight A student, but there it was in all its electronic glory when I checked my final  grade on the Sage website.  My hopes for a 4.0 have been dashed by a Java programming class.

There is a bit of a battle going on inside of me about this.  My rational and pragmatic self is reminding me how tough the class was and how many hours I put into the assignments and reading; I never missed a class, took copious notes and probably drove my instructor nuts with questions.  Surely I deserved an A for effort if nothing else.

My irrational perfectionist self feels like a loser who only got a B because the instructor felt bad about giving me a C, and I should be damned grateful for a B because I stink at programming.  This is the same self who wonders if all the programmer jokes I have made over the years have come back to bite me like some sort of weird kharmic debt, and who questions the sanity of going  to college at the ancient age of 47.

I was feeling really twisted up by all of this inner turmoil and shared my B with a couple of friends using my best sad face.  To my surprise, most people’s reactions were along the lines of  “so what?”.  The overwhelming majority said they would have been thrilled to get a B, and that I should relax; clearly I was making way too much out of this.  A colleague of mine who is now a doctoral candidate even told me he was lucky to get C’s as an undergrad!

After living with the idea of no longer being an A student I have decided that I might as well come to terms with it and learn to embrace my B Student status; it’s difficult, but I realized that the emotional overhead just isn’t worth it.  At the end of the day the journey counts a whole lot more than the destination.

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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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Knitting Frenzy

December 20, 2008 at 9:11 am (Life)

knitcupWell, it’s holiday time and the mug pictured above (a gift from my daughter) gives you a pretty good idea about my current mindset.  Since everyone is always clamoring for one of my knitted items, I decided to leverage those requests into some knitted Christmas gifts.

One of the biggest problems with this is that I’m not a very speedy knitter. You would think that after all these years of knitting I would be able to churn out woollies like some sort of a machine, but that is just not the case. I also have a touch of ADD, causing me to get a few too many things on the needles at once causing a certain amount of mental overload.

In spite of all that, knitted gifts are a great time to raid my stash which grew substantially fatter last spring with the closing of a great local yarn store.  As a fiber junkie it’s impossible for me to resist a yarn sale, and they are a great opportunity to stock up on luxury yarns I can’t otherwise afford.   One of my projects is a pair of fingerless gloves knitted from some yummy Louisa Harding Kimono Angora which is super expensive, but perfect for a small project. The hand painted Debbie Bliss SoHo is another one of those yarns that I could never afford to use for an entire sweater, but makes a gorgeous hat. And of course I have to mention the hand dyed Suri Alpaca I purchased from one of my favorite online yarn stores…too pricey for an entire sweater, but as a scarf it’s just heavenly.

At the end of the day, it’s a win-win for everyone; my friends and family get luxuriously warm handmade gifts, and I get to justify my yarn habit.  I’m going to go knit something now.

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Java Hell

November 30, 2008 at 2:40 pm (Life)

Yes, I know…. I have been really lame about keeping up with my blog, but I have an excuse of sorts.  The first part of a two-part Java class (which is required for my degree program) has been totally kicking my butt and causing massive consumption of my free brain time.  It seems to use a completely different mental skill set than networking, and I now have a  better appreciation for all the weird programmer jokes I’ve heard over the years.  I also have a better understanding of how in the world there can possibly be so much crappy software out there.

Java is such a strange mix of English and math that I get confused about where one ends and the other begins; there are just too many classes and methods and brackets.  I understand the need and the logic of it, but the amount of code that goes into one little command or output is mind-boggling to me and I lose patience with it.  It seems like an agonizing process to go through for such a tiny bit of information.

The good news is that I have had a fair number of math classes, so I am not struggling with such terms as ‘variable’ and ‘order of operations’; some of the people in my class are way more lost than I am, but that’s cold comfort for someone who is shooting for a 4.0.  In desperation I went out and purchased “Java Programming for Dummies”, which did help me to understand some of the more difficult concepts.

The other thing that is at least somewhat comforting is the fact that I have pretty much figured out how the compiler works.  The professor is having us use the Eclipse IDE which, as someone in my Linux group said, is like trying to learn to drive a stick shift on a Maserati.  The professor is a nice lady whose classes I have taken before, and she’s very patient with me, especially given her huge class load.

I’ll be awfully glad when the programming classes are done.

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