Category: Life

Life Work
April 8, 2016

Transmission Level: Pitino

Yes, a few things got done here and there today, but overall today went beyond mailing it in, towards something like faxing it in. Never really felt 100%, and there just wasn’t much terribly important going on today anyway. Read-only Friday is especially sacred when you’re shorthanded.

We’re moving offices, by all accounts. Going down two floors, getting the entire ops team in one place is a plus, and it puts us right by a little side-door to get in and out quickly. What I don’t get is that this went from concept to “get your shit and get out” in two days. State government is agonizingly slow in so many other ways, why the rush here? I will be more than mildly inconvenienced here; I have a half-dozen servers and some 10GbE switches in my office to be deployed next week. I’m going to try and stall so they only have to get moved once.

Nutanix is about 12 business hours away from reality. I know the team has been fighting for a hyperconverged solution well before I got here, but it’s going to be crazy to finally have it all come together. I hope my systems guy doesn’t think I’m micromanaging by wanting to be in the datacenter when this goes live. Won’t get another chance at a game-changing deployment for five years, I want to be right in the middle of it.

I don’t know if it’s just from lack of sleep but I’ve had this tic in my eye for days. I’m gonna see if I can catch a half hour nap.… (More) “Transmission Level: Pitino”

Life Nerd Stuff Work
April 5, 2016

BTYBTL6?

Well, I feel quite a bit better today. I don’t know if I was fighting some kind of illness yesterday or just didn’t get enough sleep, or perhaps the anticholinergic wore me out, but I spent most of yesterday in an exhausted fog. Felt rather useless at work to say the least. I’d have started to really worry about myself if I had to miss today, not because I might be sick, but because that would mean I’d missed every other Tuesday for the last 8 weeks, and that’s suspicious.

After some discussion on my fears, however unlikely it may be, that we would buy a house and then I would not be retained at work, I think we’re going to hold off on the whole process until the probationary period is over around Thanksgiving. It also lets us keep saving up money which is wise, if we can do it for a year it’s probably going to put us in a position to pay off the credit card debt, maybe pay off Diana’s car, and put us in better shape overall.

There was also some discussion on future plans involving spending money, and how I was a little put out that while I’m bringing in a lot of money, I’ve been really good in not spending it because the house was coming quickly. However, there were still projects coming up that didn’t involve me getting to buy those things that I want. I’m oversimplifying but to Diana’s credit, she heard me out and understood. So she wants me to get the list together of the stuff I’ve had in mind to upgrade.

I’ve been wanting to get back to other forms of media creation, in particular either a podcast, a radio show, or a screencast. My concern is the … (More) “BTYBTL6?”

DanielTharp.com Life Work
April 1, 2016

High-Speed Rustbucket

It’s a thoroughly nasty rain/mist/drizzle combo outside, a weather pattern more suited to Kentucky teenage depression in October than April in the desert. The music shuffle today has given an equally somber song to set the mood.

We’ve made it about 10 miles north and it’s turned to snow. I’m altogether not looking forward to what this has turned into when we get to Santa Fe County. In like a lion, out like a lamb? Not quite. The fog pattern is an unusual one, I’ve got what I estimate to be 15 miles of visibility except for Albuquerque which looks to be positively covered in fog, a cloud ending abruptly at the foothills of Sandia Peak and about a thousand feet tall. It looks for all the world like someone poured a giant bucket of dry ice on the city.

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I’m mostly at peace going into today, I busted my ass yesterday and today is Read-Only Friday. I’m not looking to be a hero today, being a hero is not making anyone work this weekend. I can work in the lab, I can do documentation, I can follow up on quotes, I can do my weekly review, I can plan new security initiatives, there’s a lot of stuff to be done that doesn’t involve poking production systems.

I’m surprisingly awake today. I think it’s a combination of “yay friday”, realizing I had slept in and had to rush, and more upbeat music. I think I’ll start doing this a little more often, the embedding of songs as I’m listening to them. Last.fm only updates when I get home and run iTunes, which isn’t terribly often, and I like the look of them.

I’m considering a redesign of the blog, nothing major, but widening the main column a bit, … (More) “High-Speed Rustbucket”

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”

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”