joeware - never stop exploring... :)

Today is a very green day. Not like the band you numpty, but like the color. Though come to think of it, some Green Day music turned way down would be nice…

Err, back to point… I am sitting upstairs in my palatial mansion (LOL – if 1800 sq ft is palatial) sitting at my laptop which is sitting on a table I keep here in my master bedroom in front of two really big windows looking out over my back yard. It is a nice back yard, I only have about 3/4 acre of property (32670 sq ft) but it is my 3/4 acre[1], well a big nod to the bank there too… but the bank rarely comes over and mows so I will call it my property for the time being…

Err again back to point… I have some nice big green trees in the back yard and I tend to keep the grass on the longer rather than the shorter side. You walk in it, you know you are walking on grass versus say, Astroturf or that cheap looking green patio carpeting. So that means the grass is very green too.

We also have sort of a gray and rainy out as well so that just enhances the general greenness and means I will likely be mowing again in two days because this is the kind of weather that the grass really likes to grow in.

I am basking in this greenness, I really like the color green. No clue why, don’t care why, I just like it. I also like blue a lot, the darker the better. I am also a fan of the various purples and combinations of all three of those colors.

I am also basking in the sounds of the rain falling and birds chirping and my keyboard keys clicking and the occasional vocalization from Trouble the black cat from the suburbs of Hell (about 13.4 miles from downtown Hell she assures me).

I am relaxing today because the last few days of this week at work were trying. Trying, I think, to make me go insane or burst a blood vessel. I was having fun in that I was learning stuff I didn’t know technically, but there were some things that MSFT did in some implementations that were just pissing me off to no end which I may write about later when I am more sedate and have less emotional attachment to the stupidity.

Also, there was a ton of pain being experienced due to management morons. Briefly one or more managers made stupid decisions last December which I and others told them was stupid then and every month we had the opportunity since. The problems that I and others forecast were all coming true and things were getting worse and worse. Management chose to ignore the problems until this week where things escalated into VP levels, etc and then all of a sudden it was all hands on deck oh my god we have to fix this with managers on con calls everywhere discussing how critical it all was but no one mentioning how the techies said months ago we were on a stupid path.

Of course, had we done things properly in the first place (as defined by what I and others said we should have done in the first place), this wouldn’t have become an issue ever let alone a 5 alarm fire issue. To be honest, it really wasn’t my issue and I very likely could have said and gotten away with… “Go away, you made your bed, now try to sleep on the spikes”. But that isn’t me, unfortunately. So this last week had me writing lots of scripts and figuring out various command line tools to make sure we fixed things properly instead of writing up documentation to hand over to a bunch of button pushers who could then inconsistently do the work so we had other issues to deal with. This resulted in little sleep and lots of time working. The fire is still going on but I gave thrown enough water in the air that it should be able to be controllable by the others involved now.

On the one side it was pretty fun, I am an adrenaline junky at heart and enjoy trying to pull off miracles to see how far I can push myself and still deliver.  Also my mind comes up with interesting solutions to problems in cases like that, stuff I may not have come up with previously under normal circumstances. It felt very much like I was back in the fire doing operations (prior to the last operations job that was done properly because I got to help define what we did) because honestly, it was an operational fire drill based on management stupidity. Not my closest direct report to management, but other higher up management.

Unfortunately, I don’t get nothing near to what I got paid when I really did operations support which means I really shouldn’t be doing anything involved with OPs that I don’t like. You don’t want to hire me for an ops guy unless you are very serious about ops and you have the money to spend on it. Ops is hard to do right and I won’t do it wrong which means you need to pay me. 🙂 There are much easier ways to make the money (at least for me) that most people make doing ops so it makes no sense for me to do ops – unless I am paid properly.

So the good side was the adrenaline and fun. The bad side was the same issue that tended to occur to me when I did ops… I become single focused, everything else in life stops… I wake up at 6:45AM on a Friday (after going to bed at 3-3:30AM) and I sit down at my laptop and besides grabbing occasional peanut M&Ms and sips of Coca Cola sprinkled with restroom visits I don’t really stop until after 10PM and then I pass out. The house could collapse around me at any point in that cycle and I likely wouldn’t notice it. I don’t spend time looking out the window, I don’t spend time appreciating the singing of the birds, I don’t even get to appreciate my cat whapping at my leg because if she is, I don’t notice it. If someone asked me to summarize everything I did yesterday including phone/con calls, emails, and other stuff I couldn’t even begin. I just know this morning that just one of the scripts I put together quickly in the afternoon yesterday is just under 500 lines of code because it was sitting on my desktop when I sat down at my laptop. That is one of several scripts I put together and doesn’t include any of the testing and working out of other things which were simply me indicating how to get a command line tool to do something for us versus having to write a script. Hmm I just looked at email, I sent something like 53 emails as well. And many aren’t short, they are detailed technical brain dumps with opinion about where we are and how we got there and where we need to go sprinkled generously throughout and I wasn’t being gentle… LOL.

Yep, I am now missing 2-3 days but at least today is nice and green. 🙂

   joe

[1] I have a leads on 13 acres (566280 sq ft) and 21 acres (914760 sq ft) nearby that I need to dig into though…

I watched Man of the Year this evening, good movie, I laughed, I thought it made a lot of good political and state of the country points. Had to chuckle when Jeff Goldblum found out Eleanor didn’t lose her access to the systems when she was fired and commented something like, “Wasn’t that a bad idea?”. I have to say, that is more of a real situation than many people who don’t deal with that kind of stuff would like to think it is. 

I also found the fact that the company was willing to bury the problem and set Eleanor up to be the fall guy and then try to kill her to be believable. Some of the stuff I have seen in big business has leaned in that direction of badness, just not quite to that extreme but then, I have never been around the stuff that could embarrass a company out of existence. I have had more than one occurrence that occurred to me though of someone making up things about me or stuff I had done to try and get me and my judgement and character called into question. Both by big companies and small wannabe’s. Hasn’t worked in any case, its tough to bust someone and “turn them out” when they are already willing and in the process of telling the truth. If I screw up, I am one of the first to call attention to it. How can you trust me otherwise?

In general, I think Douglas Adams got it right… the President is the person who distracts you while the real people running the “universe” do so undisturbed. Certainly if Bush were truly running things, I think we would be much worse off (don’t get me wrong, I think there is a lot of screwed up stuff but it could be worse). I wouldn’t trust him to find his way from my house to my mom’s house (about 200 miles away) if he had a map and a GPS.

Lots of great one liners in the movie that will make you laugh out loud, here are just a few:

I did inhale because I thought ‘What the hell, it’s lit, it’s in my hand, I’ll inhale it.’

If you’re representing special interest groups, maybe we should be like NASCAR with the little patches on the back: ‘Enron: We take your money and run!’

I did not have sex with that woman. I wanted to…

HMOs will pay for your Viagra, but they won’t pay for your glasses. So you can have a hard-on, but you can’t see where to put it.

There was also a great bit about how in customs we interrogate 80 year old women who are citizens of the US but let entire “illegal” families fly across our border to the south with dinette sets. Basically saying it is tougher to get into the US as a legal citizen than otherwise.

So we are down to the final two… While Melinda was certainly a better singer than Blake, she really had no real personality and the one she had the “Oh who me? I am that good?” was really worn out, I was tired of that after the first 2-3 weeks of her being told she was really good and her responding… “No…. Really??”. It was sort of like when Pickler tried to really push the air-head angle. It seems some of the folks find some personality groove and try to stay in it even if it doesn’t make sense. She is a good singer though, but I expect her doing more studio stuff versus going out in front of people; she just doesn’t seem very comfortable up there.

Anyway, Blake… way better entertainer than Melinda, great personality. He is going to get spanked by Jordin though, she is a much better singer. Don’t get me wrong, I like Blake, I like when he keeps his special “sounds” to a minimum and actually sings. But him and Jordin are in different classes and that whole complaint from Simon of “Old lady in a 17 year old body…” just relax Simon. She isn’t old enough to have her own “feel” yet, IMO. She’ll get it, right now she is just showing off the fact that she has great talent and her singing skills are not necessarily shown off by the latest songs.