Month: March 2016

Work
March 31, 2016

RIP Tickets

The goal today was to knock down my tickets by half. I thought I remembered having 13 to tackle, so seven done today was the goal. It turns out I only started with 11, but three more were added today. End result is the same, seven was the number to hit. I did not get seven.

I got ten. Of the remaining four, two are wrapping up testing before going to change management, one is waiting on customer confirmation, and one was on hold as the customer was out until tomorrow.

I will say, it makes the day fly by. This is the second day in a row I seriously considered staying late to finish up just one more thing, but it’s harder to justify when there’s no overtime pay. But I needed this, needed the pressure and the expectations. It feels good to remember there’s that extra gear of productivity available, that I can do solid work on short notice. It feels good to be fully engaged, to bring my mind to bear on a problem and tear the problem down. It makes me feel in rare form. Is it sustainable? I have no idea. It’s usually not needed for long periods of time. If I had to guess, it might just be sustainable. I don’t feel burned out, I feel invigorated. But that’s not really the point of a lot of sysadmin jobs. There doesn’t need to be 110% effort and focus around the clock, there are times when that mental recharge period is necessary.

In any case, I feel like I’m earning my pay. Part of the reason I was selected for this job was the generalist background; since the position needs to know Linux, Windows, and networking, and also be able to communicate and collaborate with … (More) “RIP Tickets”

Gaming Life
March 31, 2016

mrognin

It took about 20 minutes before I realized I was on the train. Having a hard time waking up, not to mention a delightful sore throat and post-nasal drip. I’m inclined to blame the cold snap that’s going on right now, though. At least nobody’s at the office to infect.

My goal today is to close half my tickets, so 7. I think I’ll be able to manage that, I like the odds. More meetings today that are tangentially related to work; I would much prefer to get the notes later on how it went. Hopefully they’ll be understanding of that.

I’ve been playing a fair amount of FIFA 13, I mentioned a few days ago. Despite their best intentions, and some talented programmers, the “be the goalkeeper” mode in Career mode is terribly boring. Reducing the chess battle to a circle you should stand in, using one analog stick to abstract away all your movement? Both boring and frustrating. I was defending in a crowded 6-yard box, an attacker gets the ball around the penalty mark and gets turned toward me. Due to the way people are positioned I can tell if he shoots it’s gonna be to my bottom-right corner, but I need to hold my spot until he winds up because there’s another attacker to my left. He winds up. In real life, the motion would be a quick wide step to my right and fall forward onto the shot. What happens in the game is I run to the right, I’m in the path of the shot, and then I dive to the right, to get out of the way of the shot. Rage.

And if the one analog stick is too much control, you can hold down LB instead and the guy automatically positions … (More) “mrognin”

Work
March 30, 2016

Tempo can catch these hands.

As it turns out, I was well within my rights to be apprehensive about today. It wasn’t just because it was crazy busy, it was more the urgency of the matters at hand to fix, with regularly interspersed meetings that could honestly be done some other time when my hair isn’t on fire.

Oh, Meraki can catch these hands too. I’ve got a new access point deployed at the opposite end of the state, configured identically to other working networks. People can associate with it, and get to the internet. I can see it from the cloud dashboard and even run packet captures on it. But the AP won’t sync with Meraki’s fucking cloud to get config changes. There’s nothing in the way here! A client on the Meraki can get to the same IP that the AP says it cannot. There’s a part of me that would really like to bring the Cisco rep in, bring the Meraki AP in, and set the AP on fire in front of the guy. Then go Ubiquiti for wireless.

Pain in the ass.

I think what really bothers me about it is that this wasn’t on my horizon of “things that could absolutely wrong,” as Meraki APs have pretty much always been plug-and-play devices, or very nearly. What I was worried about today going in, was a stream of tickets related to a LOB application called Tempo. Out of 13 tickets in my queue right now, 11 are related to LOB applications. Why are they in my fucking queue, you might ask? Because they aren’t working, and they’re accessed via Terminal Server. QED. End-user can’t print? Server problem. Application installed locally to the workstation and acting up? Server…problem..? No. Coming to a consensus on who gets what problem this decades-old pile of … (More) “Tempo can catch these hands.”

Life Work
March 30, 2016

Mother Nature is on some bullshit today.

There’s no good reason for it to be snowing this late into March. Not in New Mexico. It is rather tranquil, watching a bunch of snow-covered roofs zip by to the strings of See You On The Other Side.

This morning I’m trying WriteMonkey, which they affectionately call ‘Zenware.’ There’s plenty to play with from a customization standpoint. But somehow these distraction-free workspaces seem to always use way more RAM than they have any reason to. It’s using 100MB of RAM just for gray text on a black background, a word count, and the clock. It has a little button that randomly picks the color scheme. It’s kind of fun, until you get yellow on hot pink and your eyeballs fall out.

I’m a little pensive this morning. I’m concerned about how shorthanded things will be today. I wonder if I gave someone good advice yesterday, I was certainly trying to. My mind is generally sort of scattered, and that’s usually a good indication that I need to do a weekly review outside of my normal schedule of Fridays at 2:30. Come to think of it, it was a half-day on Friday so I missed it last week. I won’t want to feel this scattered all the way to Friday, so it’s something to be done rather early today.

I need to do better with GTD in general, I’ve fallen out of that capturing habit. It’s not for a lack of ability or resources, just lack of effort. It needs a little refocusing every now and then. Once you stop habitually capturing everything, it stops being effective as a tool to enable a clear mind, a mind like water.

The theme lately in writing has been accountability, and there’s not a significant difference between holding myself accountable at work versus … (More) “Mother Nature is on some bullshit today.”

Life
March 29, 2016

No good clippers.

I realized today that the amount of writing I’ve done this month probably exceeded what I’d done for a very long time before. I looked it up and it’s roughly exceeded the count of the last three and a half years prior. And I’m happy I’m getting back into it, I feel like it’s beneficial to me. I get to see who refers clicks to the blog, I average roughly one click per article from Facebook most days which is just fine. Truth be told, I’m writing for myself, and I don’t feel any particular way on the audience or lack thereof.

The results of the CT scan and the doctor visit were pretty unhelpful. Nothing to confirm what I do have, but it did at least eliminate the scarier possibilities of what it could have been, so I’ll take it. I also found out I’ve lost about five pounds since the last visit, which means the amount of weight to lose is far closer to 30 pounds than to 40. For some reason that’s a much, much more reasonable number to me, far more than the actual difference. And I feel good today, in a way that’s hard to elaborate on. Happier. I think it’s because I’m doing a better job of pulling my weight at work. Tomorrow, two of my three employees and my supervisor are all out. Those two employees are out all week actually, and one is out all next week too. So I have to be much more alert and responsive, and I’m doing it. The training wheels and excuse-making period is long passed. Being able to hold my own in this period will look really good, and anything beyond that will look fantastic. Time to get it in, you know? Just hoping there aren’t … (More) “No good clippers.”

Life
March 28, 2016

Like Slug said, but without the volleyball line.

I’m trying to find a balance (I’m trying to build a balance) when it comes to my writing software. OmmWriter has been the one for quite a while, but it has some warts. No spell-check, which is bearable as WordPress catches that anyway. But the bigger thing is that it will slow down the system, and if you decide to go edit something at the top of a big paragraph, it runs like molasses, just trying to figure out the word wrap. I mean, I don’t think I can write a better program or anything. But it’s distracting, and that runs counter to what a “distraction-free workspace” is after.

It’s kind of funny that we take things for granted with programs, like word wrap not slowing the system down. I’m in a different piece of software now called FocusWriter, and I’ve also had WriteMonkey recommended to me. FocusWriter seems to hit the basics. Full screen, check. Spell check…check. Adjustable fonts/sizes/backgrounds, check. Adjustable margins, check. That’s it. I bring my own music anyway, I’m working on a writing playlist that I’ll put on Spotify when it’s finished. I add to it a train ride at a time. Right now I’m listening to what I still consider my favorite album, full stop. That would be This Binary Universe by BT.

Small aside for one of the bigger little regrets of my life. When the aforementioned album came out, I was a freshman at Louisville. Louisville football had managed to play their way to the Orange Bowl at Joe Robbie Stadium (I don’t remember or care what it was called that year, it’s Joe Robbie) in Miami. So Dad and I have a little road trip to go see old friends and catch the game. While I’m down there, I find out BT … (More) “Like Slug said, but without the volleyball line.”

Gaming Life Work
March 28, 2016

He must’ve been awfully bad at golf.

Last week, from a professional standpoint, is hard to describe without using the word “cluster.” I would probably take a mulligan on it. It’s part of why there weren’t any posts from me last week. I think I know where it all went wrong, too. Around this time last week, I forgot my thermos, you see. My thermos serves double duty as morning life-giver and lunchtime Ramen Water Measuring Apparatus. So I’m already fucked up from a lack of coffee, and I decide to go hit up the local food truck for eight bucks rather than the ramen I already have and paid a quarter for. Anyway, get home, end up with nasty food poisoning, stomach’s cramping like mad, whole nine yards.

Then we’re in bed, and we hear the dog barf, not hard since he sleeps beside the bed about a foot from my ear. I’m trying very hard not to throw up in the first place, dog isn’t helping, Diana goes and cleans it up. In the middle of cleaning it up, she knocks over a glass in the kitchen. I hear it roll to the edge of the table, then fall off. This thing detonates. It absolutely pulverized, a jet of glass about six feet in every direction. It’s after midnight at this point. I have to hold barf-dog while Diana makes an attempt at getting the glass out of the bedroom carpet. A lint roller is quite good at it, it turns out. It’s after 1 at this point, I’m still feeling very ill and need to be up in four hours, Diana is pretty much done. We decide to both take a sick day. And I don’t regret it, it was the right choice. I’m just bummed that I’m totally out of sick leave … (More) “He must’ve been awfully bad at golf.”

Gaming Life
March 21, 2016

Wouldn’t you not want to never not pass up this deal?

I saw one of the dumber attempts at deceptive advertising today by Comcast. Really, the sort of thing that makes you wonder where that “most hated company in America” title came from. In looking at internet options for the area of the house we’re looking at buying, their site gives the breakouts; you get 5Mbps for this much, 25 for this much, 75 for this much, 150 for this much…and 2000Mbps.

Wait, what? 2Gbps service? I mean, as a professional nerd, I don’t even have to look at the terms and conditions to know something stupid is being presented. For non-nerds, nothing in your house has the capability to go past 1Gbps for download. So what Comcast is doing here is listing the 1Gbps down, the 1Gbps up, and adding them up to get 2Gbps to make them look twice as good as Google Fiber, even though it’s the exact same service. This is the only one in their lineup that they present in such a manner. The others are only your download speed, and this one is download + upload.

The thing is, it’s $300 a month. It’s gigabit internet. Who are you trying to deceive, Comcast? The one demographic that immediately sees through your shady bait-and-switch, nerds that want gigabit speeds and are only going with Comcast because Google Fiber isn’t in their market yet. I’m one of those! And I’m not impressed or amused.

I played a fair bit of Cities: Skylines yesterday for the first time in a few months. The last few cities I built made use of the Unlimited Money/All Buildings Unlocked mods that come stock with the game (and a big thanks to Colossal Order for that and the Steam Workshop integration). Going back to a standard playthrough, it was rather liberating because … (More) “Wouldn’t you not want to never not pass up this deal?”

Life
March 21, 2016

I See a Red Door and I Want to Leave it Red

I really want to believe there will come a time again where I don’t need to wear my ski jacket to catch the 6:34 train. It’s unreasonably cold every morning.

I just sent one of the more potentially life-altering texts of my life. Diana and I have an offer in on a house. The price is hard to beat for the city, but it had as many things that concerned us as things we liked about the place. Since it was a short sale, we’ve gone from early January to now without anyone bothering to look at or accept our offer, and nothing had come up on the market in the last few months to justify jumping ship on it. Nothing until Saturday, that is. We were supposed to be looking at two properties. One of them cancelled on us at the last minute, but another came on the market the day prior, and it was just a couple of blocks from our non-cancelled appointment.

By sheer serendipity we managed to get a time for a viewing within an hour, and let me tell you, it’s got a lot more right than it does wrong. The things I dislike are no different than the house we’ve been on the hook for (air conditioning and ductwork are alien concepts to a city at 7000 feet), but it gets a lot of our concerns about the other property right. It also represents about a 20% increase in price, but it looks like that premium might be needed to not have to sink an equivalent amount into repairs and maintenance right away. I told Diana that anything at this price range would have to be damn near perfect. This one is. So we’re retracting our offer and putting in one for this new … (More) “I See a Red Door and I Want to Leave it Red”

Life
March 18, 2016

Stream of Consciousness, 3/18/16

It’s no small concern of mine that nobody is asking me for a house-buying license during the process of trying to find a home in Santa Fe. At what point was I mentally capable of processing the reality of a 30-year mortgage? When was the class on repairing the myriad items and components that make up a domicile? I missed it. I missed a lot of classes, though. That’s not a big surprise.

That we collectively decided that agreeing to terms of payment on the next 30 years of life is odd. If you’re in a position where you need a mortgage, you’re also not in a position to guarantee that things will be just as good 30 years down the road, really. Hell, getting into state government is one of the safest possible choices in that regard, once you’re in and off your probationary period getting fired is a battle. Things could happen, though.

We’re looking at two more houses tomorrow, we’ve had an offer in on a different one for over two months now, but they weren’t lying when they said it was a “short sale opportunity for the patient buyer.” One is more “homey” and with a great location, a ten-minute bike ride to work if that. The other looks ridiculously nice, like in the realm of “What the hell? I get to live here?” kind of nice. So it appears in the pictures, anyway. Maybe it’s actually a small house photographed by a smaller human, or an iguana.

I was a little bit bothered a few days ago when someone mentioned that they were diagnosed bipolar and one of the markers was having days where they just stay inside and hide from the world, for lack of a better description. That was me not terribly long … (More) “Stream of Consciousness, 3/18/16”