- Cool! I can twitter inside of Wordpress. Not that I am logged in that often but it’s a neat feature. #
- Let’s see if this OpenSUSE install works! Still sick. Bleh! #
Well it’s going to be an official counseling. I know I am not on the road to being fired. Too much invested. They want me to be successful. I just have to start thinking like a consultant and not like a customer service representative. It’s going to be a major shift in my thinking to be honest.I can handle it. I am changing so much right now I think I can work this one in.
I am changing the way I think about money, changing the way we school the kids, changing the way I handle going to church, one more change shouldn’t be an issue. I think I am in a state of flux right now. Some sort of weird fugue state without the memory loss. I feel the changes. It’s uncomfortable to be honest to but the changes are for the best.
I know I haven’t been lighthearted lately and likely won’t. I have a lot of things to work out. I need a space in which to work them out and this is it. All those uncomfortable feelings associated with change, the panic, and so on. The dysfunctional personality who knows what needs to change and tries hard not to change anything.
I need to stop going out. I need to stay clear during these changes. I need to slip back into Warcraft as an alternative or get the bitter geek to throw a game or play poker (once we get money worked out). Going out leaves my head cloudy for a couple of days and every time as of late I have come home thinking not about what a great time I had but about how much I should stop. This is a huge change for me. This is huge for me to admit stone cold sober and not hungover in the least. I think this will be the hardest change overall. It may be easy in the short term but making it happen long term may be problematic. I can pull back when I need to short term but long term I always end up going out again. I don’t mean every once in a while but on a regular basis. I can always go out every once in a while. I don’t need to go out on a regular basis. I need to find more happiness at home and not outside of the house. I like my friends and when I say going out I don’t mean going to people’s homes.
Wow that was long and probably mostly pointless. Maybe there is some insight into what I am thinking for those who might say a prayer for me.
Watching this election cycle is starting to make me feel like Spider Jerusalem (The bespectacled character on http://rsv.myevilminion.org) in that I don’t think there is much truth out there. Palin is the most honest figure in modern politics but she’s just up for VP. Obama is either insane or deluded and McCain is only credible because of Palin. I can’t stand the media sucking the Obama cock day and night. It’s just outright sickening. Their coverage of him is dishonest in his favor and their coverage of McCain is dishonest against McCain. I don’t like either candidate so all I can really say is that the media is a bunch of whores felating the Obamessiah. And for the rest I’ll just quote Spider:
That’s what I hate most about this fucking city — lies are news and the truth is obsolete!
And for good mesaure:
That’s what a monoculture is. It’s everywhere, and it’s all the same. And it takes up alien cultures and digests them and shits them out in a homogenous building-block shape that fits seamlessly into the vast blank wall of the monoculture. This is the future. This is what we built. This is what we wanted. It must have been. Because we all had the fucking choice, didn’t we? It is only our money that allows commercial culture to flower. If we didn’t want to live like this, we could have changed it any time, by not fucking paying for it. So lets celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger.
FETE
29
Sep
So the new external drive won’t act as a boot device. Oh well. Three hours of being icky sick wasted. At least I can use it to get a bunch of stuff off of the main drive on the box. Maybe I can free up enough space to install Linux onto the internal drive. I am not hopeful but then again I am not hopeful about much right now. I guess it’s a side effect of being sick.
I am not looking forward to the conference with the bossman about the bad decisions I made in the field. I guess good will come out of it because when I understand the logic he used to decide what I should have done I will be able to apply that logic in future situations and not make the same assumptions and mistakes. It will still feel gross to have to go through the process of having that logic imparted unto me. I have some solutions to the time sinks I ran into and I won’t run into those again but the fact of the matter is the whole Charlie Foxtrot could have been avoided on the front end of this deal and I wouldn’t have been in a position to make the decisions. That rests firmly with the people responsible for planning the engagement. I intend to make sure this is noted as well. My lack of communication was a problem. The lack of attention to detail prior to the engagement was a problem. I am starting to feel like I was put into an avoidable situation and shouldn’t have been. Now that doesn’t absolve my bad decisions at all and I will take full responsibility for them. I expect others to do the same. I suppose it’s possible but I don’t consider it likely.
I have come to realize after three engagements for two different vendors that exceptions are the rule in the supercomputing industry. From cables being shipped to short, I mean visibly short, to non-tested hardware being brought in for what was supposed to be a fully tested engagement, to clients meddling and messing things up, this is our world and these are the things we deal with. I will be called on again to make decisions in the field and I will make the right ones next time. So far I’ve had one bad engagement, one good one where the client and the vendor sang my praises, and one that remains to be seen. I don’t see a pattern of bad decisions. I see a fucked up situation where I made the wrong call. No pattern and no worries because the same situation won’t likely happen again and I am not too concerned. I just dread these types of meetings.
Things are going well overall. I know am a bitchy little girl the last couple of days and my posts have likely been boring as all hell but that’s why I write here. I don’t have to try and captivate an audience. People can leave if I bore them. Or they can whine back at me in the comments. This is cathartic. I need to grab more sense of story to my engagements because there are colorful characted involved and I should write about them. I most likely won’t find the energy to bother but I can wish…
I have been felled. While not a mighty oak some microscopic bastard has taken up residence in my sinuses and chest and felled me much like an axe fells a tree.
Ok enough with the waxing poetic about being sick. Yeah the hills are gonna roll and all that mess. I am sick in a most gross way. I can handle being really good and sick. Being down, in bed, feverish dreams and all that. This is not a sickness like that. It is mild fever, leading to strange hot and cold spells, a horribly runny nose, a productive chest cough, and nausea from so much phlegm running down the back of my throat. It must be some Boston sickness. Texas illnesses are least ones you know you are well and truly sick! I am guessing this is a result of putting in almost forty hours in three days and being in the moist and almost rainy Boston weather.
While not officially I am getting some work done from home today so I don’t feel completely useless. I have to focus on one thing at a time and be careful about distractions.
So one of the things with which I have been tasked is developing a standard Linux load for the office. I have an almost successful load at this time but the USB drive won’t boot. I mean I have ~5 external USB drives, not counting sticks, sitting around and this is the only one that won’t act as a boot device. I have no idea why. I am going to have clonezilla the bastard over to another drive to finish my work. The only thing left is to get VMWare to actually read the virtual machine we have for running Windows applications. This may be moot as Office 2003 runs under WINE and I may be able to get official backing for doing it that way but in the meantime I want a Linux load pretty badly.
The reason I want a Linux load is that I work on Linux clusters. It’s what I, and my team, do. Last week I had to download various utilities, which only partially worked, to deal with a CPIO archive. Having a Linux load would also allow me to have a build environment for building things like a custom Anaconda installer without having to find a server at a client’s site to do the build. While I have used and loved Linux in the past this time I have a real reason for wanting to use it other than the fact I like it better.
So back into the fray to burn off a Clonezilla live CD an see if I can make it do USB drive to USB drive. It has some features that make Ghost look like a second string offering but I don’t know if the author included good USB support in the Live CD distro. Hear’s hoping…
