I am still getting used to the new job and whatnot. I have more stuff to post on the state of the church in America but I want to give those pieces more attention that I have to offer at present. I am sure more is forthcoming but I have to find my balance first. Heck it’d be nice if I could make it to church on a regular basis. Anyway that’s another post all to itself. Hopefully more later folks. Enjoy the recipes.

If this works I have something that impressed me that I want to share. If it doesn’t then I’ll test the next application. I wish I could add this to tweetdeck so I had a single point for everything!

All the rational reasoning in the world isn’t letting me sleep at the moment. There is simply no sleep in sight. My stomach is in knots and I am quite frankly a little sketchy. It’s all nerves and it sucks right now. The worst part is that I know this will make me miserable tomorrow. I just can’t face being alone in the quiet with all the doubt at the moment. So here I sit worrying about my lack of a job, where I get the money to pay my mortgage, how I will put food on the table, and all the worry in the world doesn’t provide a single answer.

I guess the upshot is I can get caught up on some TV the wife doesn’t enjoy all that much…

As many of you know I am a bit of a food aficiando. I love the sublte tastes in various type of cuisine. My lovey wife, however, is not. I love her to death but hearing her explain why eating somewhere we haven’t eaten in a month is having something we have all the time is mind boggling. To get to this position she divides food into three top categories: My cooking, eating out, and take home. So if we got Scholotsky’s a month ago and haven’t eaten out since then Scholostsky’s is what we eat all the time, but only in the take home category. It is like that for all of the categories as well. Furthermore her palate doesn’t seem to distinguish between cuisines at all. If we had a nice beef fried rice at a hibachi joint then there’s no way we could have any of the following later that week: beef fajitas with Spanish rice, thai food at all, any vietnamese, or any chinese. So not only are all of the oriental cuisines lumped together in one bunch so are the ingredients. So nothing with beef and rice and no oriental food if we’ve had fried rice while eating out and are going out again. That’s only mildly crazy in my opinion but the top breakdowns come into play and I could cook my own stir fry over rice the same week we aren’t allowed to go out for any oriental or meat and rice dish.

It is maddening to try and find a place to grab some take out. Only slightly less so for going out for a sit down meal. And honestly when I cook I try to make things my wife likes but in the end I make what I want to make and it usually works out.

You may think I am joking but none of the above is hyperbole at all. Most of it is straight from a conversation earlier this evening (or yesterday evening as the case were). I only hope she hasn’t passed on whatever gene causes this to our children.

Love ya baby…

Tomorrow night The Revival Tour hits Walter’s on Washington. It’s going to be bad ass and I am going to go. I am not a fan of all the bands that the boys on tour are from but I love every bit of their solo stuff. It’s going to an amazing night to be sure.

I have been thinking about the political landscape since the elections and have decided I don’t really care all that much anymore. I know it sounds strange coming from me but after so many years of watching both sides be equally stupid and neither one more right than the other I am burned out. The left has it right on many issues and so does the right however niether of them even get it mostly right. Add to that the fact that your vote is, for intents and purposes, completely worthless and it all ceases to matter. I thought this was apathy but it is really not. I have never felt more free when thinking about politics than I do after coming to this realization. If you really want to get into why your vote doesn’t matter one iota I will write a post on it but I am n ot going to go into right now. If you are thinking, even just a little bit, I am apathetic because my side lost then I assure you I didn’t have a side in this election. Neither candidate came close to representing my views, my class, my beliefs, or anything else you might add to such a list. I didn’t vote and I am proud that I didn’t. In the end I know I did the right thing this time around.

On a completely different note I have decided, after a while of actually using it, that I like the iPod Nano I picked up. I don’t like the capacity but I love the Genius feature and I have about a dozen playlists saved from using it already. I have decided to skip album covers as 8GB isn’t really enough to do whole albums and just name tracks from the same artist as being all from an album title I made up and give each artist on pic so that the cover flow looks good. That eliminates the biggest annoyance I was having with the interface. However good it is for travel or driving in the truck it does not have enough capacity to satisfy my musical needs while I am chained to a cube for eight hours a day. And that is where a cool new tool I just found comes into play.

I just installed, configured, and tested Subsonic in under ten minutes. It wasn’t easy because I am a geek though. It really is just that easy to configure. It also is directory based so it doesn’t take hours to have your collection on the web. It is password protected, allows multiple accounts, and does a decent job of streaming even over a cable uplink. I highly reccomend getting it if you want to have access to your music anywhere you have a net connection. It even sounds decent on my phone which is cool. I am about to install the LAME codec so I can downsample as there is some skipping when the kids are playing WoW or other internet based games but that’s to be expected.

Anyway that’s all I got for right now. Thanks for reading, I’ll catch you on the other side.

I now know how to set up a software RAID on Linux, remotely, with no data loss. That was an interesting lesson and now we have a checklist so it won’t be a major issue on the next two clusters we have to do. Not that anyone reading cares much about that level of geekdom but I wanted to point out that I got it working and wrote the technical doc for it. Not that anything else went all that easy but what the heck if it were always fun and easy they wouldn’t have to pay me for it.

I am so wiped out right now I don’t have much to say. Everyone, save me, around here is sick. I was up until almost 0500 with two of them and the damn wife woke up sick (check the moniker under which she posts here if you think I’m being snide) so I have had four whole hours of sleep and been dealing with puke for the better part of a dozen hours. It’s not been a fun weekend yet and likely won’t be. The best I can hope for is early bed for the kids and a movie at this point.

Anyway I need to go to the store and get the rest of the fixins for the chicken soup. I’ll try to post more later.

Son the third just wandered up to me while I was sitting here tapping out some notes for my training materials. I was getting ready to tell him to go on and play because I am busy when he smiled and said “I love you daddy”, reached up his arms and gave me a hug and kiss. What you have to understand about son the third is that he doesn’t just give a little peck. He places his kisses very carefully and if you are, for instance, walking out the door to go to work and lean over and give him a quick peck he doesn’t have time to get his placement. You have to let him pick where on your cheek he’s going to kiss and then wait for the kiss. Sometimes all it takes is a hug and kiss to make all the stress melt away. That and his constant smiles make going out of town a real bitter experience.

I am starting to not like the out of town stuff at all as I miss my family too much. But that’s another discussion.

I also need to mention “Daddy whatever you cook is my favorite food ever” courtesy of son the third as well.

So things are not sorted at work and I am apparently falling deeper. Here’s the rub: We have these guidelines, ten of them, and we are supposed to follow them. Now let be clear that I thought I was following them. This is not a case of me thinking I know better than someone else. This is a basic disconnect in logic. I am not going to bother to post the whole list but simply the one I am in trouble for. If you are stuck on a problem for 15 minutes you call a peer (co-worker), if you are still stuck after an hour you call the vendor. To me it seemed obvious that this mean you weren’t making any progress. I was wrong. You don’t have to  be stuck you just to need to have not resolved the issue. That makes no sense to me to be honest. Stuck means you are not getting anywhere. Words mean things and stuck means that there is no movement. Even if you read all the definitions at that link it means the same thing over and over. So I wasn’t stuck. Me and my co-worker were going through the steps to troubleshoot the issue. We didn’t have a solution but we were eliminating possible causes. We were not stuck. So we didn’t call the vendor. It turns out that we should have called the vendor at an hour regardless of any progress we were making. We didn’t have to be stuck. The guideline is worded incorrectly. They are changing the damn wording thanks to my pedantic ass but I am still getting the heat on this one. I was told that I should have followed what it meant not what it said. So I am supposed to be a mind reader as well as a bad ass tech and damn good consultant.

I have been told that I need to question my project managers on every detail, give them what they what not what they say, follow what they meant by the guidelines and not what they said, make the best decision in field for the company and not the client, and to top it all off I am supposed to work faster than I am on the documentation.

Over 350 pages of training material that is three major revisions behind. Command sat completely changed, a scheduler I don’t and that doesn’t already have a module or a lab, and it was bid at 40 hours. That boils down to 6.6 minutes per page of documentation not including the parts that haven’t been written. Admittedly there is a lot of culling to be done as the course is more focused that it previously was but that means every page has to read, have a decision made to keep or discard, updated complete with new screen shots, and proofed in 6.6 minutes. This was assigned to the guy who has never written training materials, only been presented with the original course halfway through one time and has no knowledge of at least one lecture and lab that has to be given. I don’t think it could have been done by someone who the material back and forth. Taking screenshots, updating a page’s information, and proofreading takes more then seven minutes and that’s just a simple fact. But when I try to explain this I get shot down and blamed for the project taking too much time. In fact, apparently, 4 people agree that it should take 40 hours. I don’t believe that for a second.

Now all of that and I still don’t really want to leave this job. I like everyone I work with. I can even handle having to assume my project managers are idiots (I was told that in those words). What I can’t handle is being given a line of crap about how long something should take by someone who has never done it before. That’s just a load that is hard to bear. I can deal with everything else so my goal is to get out of his radar and back into good graces, follow every checklist to the letter and by doing so I have been told that cost overruns won’t be blamed on me, and get the job done. Eventually I will learn to think like they want me to think but in the meantime I am going to have to work at it.

It’s their world right now and I am just living in it. I will take care of business and I will be successful regardless of their fuck ups, miscommunications, and all the other crap. I will get to where when I am handed a line of bullshit by a director who doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about I can call him on it without fear of losing my job and then I will be a happy camper at work once more.

So that’s how my day went. I got ambushed by problems no-one communicated to me existed while they were happening. I have one passive/agrressive PM and one who reschedules everything and never returns calls. I can deal with passive/agressive, hell, I can even work that to my favor. The other guy is my favorite guy at the office but it still gets under my skin and it’s not going to stop so I have to suck it up and be happy.

Did I mention all these engagements were solo and that I hadn’t been sent out with a senior tech to participate in an engagement? After only being given half a training course? Yeah I didn’t think I’d mentioned that. Of course that is, and I mean it, no excuse for the mistakes I made in Boston. I still don’t think I made a real mistake in NJ but that doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

It’s one of those slow sort of bluesy days with a bit of twang for flavor. I am worn down and no sign of a respite from the grind. My soul is tired. I need more time in the day right now.

The kids have been mostly alright today and didn’t burn the house down even though me and the missus slept in. Oldest boy has been stepping it up the last few days so he can go hang out with his mom come December. Oldest girl is their right now and I miss her something fierce.

This is where it usually falls apart. Not this time. I am holding up even with the pressure and stress. I need to figure out the moodiness for everyone else’s sake but i don’t think that’s too big a deal to get under wraps. Sorry for the rambling. I feel like I drank myself into a stupor yesterday but nary a drop was had. I guess I need a night of real sleep and some relaxation.

I got stuff I want to put down on the screen here but nothings coming to me. So this is what you get for now.

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…