88/240
As I’ve grown up, I’ve begun to really appreciate the benefits of proper sleep. More topically, the drawbacks to not getting enough sleep. My legs are still feeling heavy from yesterday. Should’ve gotten to bed probably an hour earlier, but it’s a hard sell when I only get a couple hours between getting home and going to bed, and I already have to fit food and a shower in there.
Today I’m stepping back on Nutanix and letting my systems guy work with Dell to get us going. Wednesday is my one day a week with no obligations, no meetings, no plans. So it’s good for those larger projects, like drafting a plan for the new file server infrastructure to present at the manager meeting. This is one of the things that got me the job in the first place, the ability to plan and use resources effectively. It’s funny how my direct reports keep trying to reassure me that I don’t have anything to worry about with regards to the probationary period, they’re really trying to help relax me. I finally had to explain it as, “As long as there’s some objective amount of uncertainty that I may or may not keep this job, I’m going to worry about it.” It’s not a terribly productive expenditure of energy…or is it? I’m working pretty dang hard because there’s that uncertainty, that obligation to prove my value through actions.
We’re in an interesting line of work. There’s a lot of room for automation, and you can really work harder now in exchange for not working so hard in the future. I’d much prefer to spend some time busting my ass building some automated systems, so down the road I’m just monitoring hardware and working with some orchestration tools for whatever piece of the user or system lifecycle I need to work on. That’s actually something I can do. You can’t do that to a car, or a person.
I think the file server planning will have me get back into Microsoft Project. I looked around for a while for a free alternative, and didn’t find much that wasn’t undercooked crap. Go figure, project managers generally have money. I don’t get to use it terribly often, but it absolutely has moments where it’s the right tool for the job.
We have some truly ominous looking weather brewing. It started as some mild fog (which is highly odd for the high desert) and it’s turned into a very low and dark, thick cloud cover to the east and west. Views from the train are occasionally posted to the gram and I couldn’t resist this one.
Now visibility is down to about a thousand feet. Really weird weather patterns today. At least we’re not moving servers today.
With today being the last day of the NBA regular season, I have some data I’m gonna be crunching tomorrow related to the Vegas win totals. The short version is that the average person gets about half the over-unders right, and nobody that submitted guesses was head-and-shoulders above the rest. Since Haralabos Voulgaris is on /r/nba now I’m gonna have to see if I can get him to work with me on next year’s survey. I’ve got the blue book now, I can try and get a bunch of media types. Maybe pose it as a charitable bet next year. Plenty of time to figure it out, I suppose.
