Gaming Life Work
April 12, 2016

74/240

We got Nutanix racked and stacked, powered up, networked, and updating. It’s also the most I’ve walked since I started here by 40% over the next highest day according to my Fitbit. It didn’t seem like that much in the moment, but by 3:30 I was feeling it. It’s about 5 miles of walking, all between two adjacent buildings.

So, a number of things to be thankful for. All the gear is working well. The Dell tech, so far, has been quite good and works well with us. I bought lunch for the team and that went over quite well. No dead drives out of 38 to get started.

Good chance that tomorrow we’ll be out of the setup phase and ready to vMotion some test machines, and seeing if we’ll be able to use Nutanix’s in-built backup utility. The details we got initially aren’t promising on that front, and we may need to spring for Veeam B&R. If we have a VM living on the cluster tomorrow I’ll consider us well ahead of schedule.

I can already tell this week is going to fly by.

I had to put in a change request for a new Software Restriction Policy. The last SRPs I had to deploy were to block CryptoWall. This one is to block Windows 10. Despite a Group Policy named “Do not upgrade to latest versions of Windows”, a registry key named “DisableGWX” (Get Windows X), and a registry key named “DisableOSUpgrades,” I’m still somehow not being clear enough to Microsoft, because new updates are pushing the GWX app anyway.

Our users can’t perform the upgrade themselves anyway, they lack local admin rights to do so. But it still nags the user and basically asks them why their sysadmins are horrible security-haters.

It’s hard to believe that … (More) “74/240”

Work
April 12, 2016

63/240

I strongly considered another 45 minutes of sleep this morning, which would’ve left me driving up to work instead of relaxing on the train. I don’t know where this responsible side of me came from but it’s a rather welcome addition.

I only just now found out that the Surface Pro 3 has a default scaling of 150%, when I set that to 100% the blog is tiny as fuck. I think I’ll work on that for the rest of the trip up. I’m going to let this new theme ride for a while and see what I think of it.

I would be more internet-productive if there was any mobile signal out here. I feel like it’s more correct to blame the USB modem here than Verizon, because my phone has signal for 90% of the ride whereas the modem has signal for…maybe 20%. It’s disappointing to say the least. It’s also free, so I can’t complain too loudly.

Nutanix begins about four hours from now. I’ve gotta figure out how Dell is going to get all the gear from my office to the datacenter. Hopefully we can jack a rolling cart or two or three from somewhere.

I have a couple of “soft skills” pieces I’ve been meaning to write for bluesoul.me and /r/sysadmin, including one about GTD. I think I’m going to hold off until I finish reading Time Management for System Administrators and see what can be adapted there. I’m a couple chapters in and it seems to be rather heavily inspired by GTD. But, maybe there’ll be something good in here just the same.

The other bluesoul.me piece is on the new file server infrastructure, which I might see if CSO Magazine is interested in since this is being built with security in mind first.… (More) “63/240”

Life Work
April 11, 2016

50/240

I really dislike this business of moving offices in the middle of the biggest server implementation in the last five years. Neither us nor the people in the room we’re headed to want to do this right now.

I did manage to snag a pretty sweet 30″ monitor along the way, but I can’t get the full resolution out of it without an adapter. This irritates the piss out of me. The monitor is DVI-D Dual Link. The docking station is also pinned out for DVI-D Dual Link. However, it actually runs as single link, halving the throughput and leaving me with 1/4 of the maximum resolution, so Lenovo could save a quarter on a dock they sell for 300 fucking dollars. This leaves me to have to buy an active DVI-to-DisplayPort adapter for like $125. That’s some shit.

I was pleasantly surprised that I went all day without even the 0mg juice. I might go through a fair amount of chewing gum at this rate, though. Might have to figure out how to buy Doublemint in bulk. Did you notice they stopped the fat packs of gum? Everything’s these slim packs of 15 now, and I swear to god there’s less gum to a stick now, it’s either thinner or smaller, maybe both. I double up on the gum, I’m not a part of your system.

I tuned in to DI today for the first time in ages. They’ve grown up so much, it’s incredible. They also have a lot, and I mean a lot, of advertisements. Pandora seems to have hit on the appropriate price to go ad-free and the number and duration of ads to endure if you’re not a paid subscriber. DI is 40% more, and the ads per hour time is probably six times … (More) “50/240”

Life
April 11, 2016

39/240

If it could warm up just a bit more in the mornings I would be so happy. Like, another 5 degrees so I can skip the jacket? It’s ridiculous to have to bring a jacket home when it’s 81 degrees getting off the train.

I’ve had an odd sort of illness going on. A nice rattling cough, and what felt like asthma after playing some PIU yesterday. The interesting coincidence of it is that it’s coinciding with the last little push to drop vaping. I don’t know if it’s 1% or 100% responsible but I feel like there’s got to be an element of correlation.

Right now it’s been roughly 39 hours with no nicotine in the system. I know roughly what to expect here, it takes about 10 days to get completely out of the system and that for addicts, the worst of it comes over the next two days. I also know that since e-juice uses nicotine isolate rather than the compound that includes whole tobacco alkaloids, the MAOIs that trigger an addictive response are not present. And if there was a “worst of it” to get past, it’s laughably easier than smokers have it.

It’s one thing to have science on your side, and another to actually believe the science. I’ve secretly been dreading this transition even while knowing that it shouldn’t be a problem. And then halfway through Saturday, I just decided to switch to 0mg juice and that was that. I think part of what’s making it easier is that I’m not leaving myself with no options. I actually have my 6mg juice and tank in my coat pocket along with the 0mg juice and tank. It’s there if I decide it’s not going to work. I’d be more than a little disappointed in myself … (More) “39/240”

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”

Gaming Work
April 8, 2016

Gross Performance

This is the least sleep I’ve managed on a work day, while still making it to work, in quite a long time. Things didn’t really go according to plan for the most part. I did make a purchase last night, the Asus VG248QE gaming monitor. I’d been watching this growing arena of 144Hz monitors with some interest; I knew the science was there for a noticeable improvement over your standard 60Hz or 75Hz display.

Even knowing the science was there, I was not prepared for how dramatic a difference it would be with the right games. The big ones that let the GTX 970 show out was NBA 2K16 and X3: Albion Prelude. There’s a smoothness that I’ve quite literally never seen before in a PC game. And for all the shit people give these 144Hz displays for being washed-out looking, for a TN display it looks incredible even when making full use of the high refresh rate. My plan is to also get a 27-inch (60Hz) IPS display and see how I like it. I’m starting to think I might just want to get another of these, because at some point in the future I’ll have the desk space to run 3 of them and get that sweet triple-monitor gaming experience. It’s an enticing proposition.

DangItBobby was well-received, I do like the /r/sysadmin community and how it leans towards being helpful when it’s sensible to do so. A lot of places have the chance to be helpful and the culture of the place means it’s just shitposting instead.

I’m left with not much to do today, I need to do a little technical writing, some additional instructions to the end-users for something we rolled out. I think I’m going to write a soft-skills piece for bluesoul.me and /r/sysadmin … (More) “Gross Performance”

Nerd Stuff Work
April 7, 2016

That script ain’t right

So I have a code offering today, which I’m calling DangItBobby.ps1. It lets you remotely disable the NIC of a computer given only the username that is logged in. In essence, when in the middle of a ransomware infection, and you see that the owner of all the files is changing to Bobby, you run the script and provide credentials of a local admin account. Then you tell it you’re looking for Bobby, it’ll check AD to make sure that’s a valid account, then check with WMI to see if there’s an explorer.exe process running under Bobby’s context on each computer, which you can narrow down with the first few characters of what the workstation might be. If they’re logged into multiple workstations it’ll let you choose which one to work with. Then it’ll give you a list of NICs and a little information about each one, and let you choose which one to disable.

I hope I don’t need to tell you to be careful running this.… (More) “That script ain’t right”

Nerd Stuff Work
April 5, 2016

The more you know, the less you say.

Pleased to report that Windows 10 hasn’t reduced the Surface Pro 3 to smoldering rubble. In fact, it’s quite a happy upgrade so far. The Verizon USB card seems much happier in 10 than it did in 8.1, and the applications all came over flawlessly so far, quite a feat considering it went all the way from NT6 to NT10. (That’s nerd sarcasm, by the way.)

I was mildly amused by being notified that I’d earned some money from Amazon Affiliates. That would be from my I Miss Grantland project, which runs ad-free and has a page where you can buy books on Amazon from writers featured on the site. The site has been up for about 3 months and has managed something like 104,000 hits. Out of those, about 132 hits were to said book page, representing about 7,000 clickable links. 88 clicks were made (a ~1.3% clickthrough rate) and 7 items were ordered, representing Amazon cutting me a check for almost four dollars. It’s seriously a good thing that the whole thing is automatic and able to run on my shared hosting account, so my only expense is the domain renewal.

It’s not hard to understand why so many sites are fucking littered with ads. All that said, I still run an ad-blocker. Not because I feel people shouldn’t get paid for creating content, but because the current system is a mess and more than a little insecure. E.g., malvertising. It’s one of the great unsolved puzzles of the Web. For a long time, Flash was the enabler of the worst offenders. Now it might be JavaScript. A simple, if regressive, solution would be to standardize on text-based ads, with the use of a 1px transparent image for basic tracking for per-impression based ads. Image-based ads … (More) “The more you know, the less you say.”

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?”

Gaming
April 4, 2016

FIFA 15: Get Good or Blame The Camera

So after lamenting the sometimes-broken play of FIFA 13, I decided to pick up 15 for $20 on Origin. EA Sports titles that are on annual cycles can have surprisingly high variance year-to-year, even when they obviously share some (or a lot of) code. I played it most of the weekend and it’s mostly good with a few head-scratching changes in there as well.

Places where 15 is better than 13

The ball behaves more like a ball would, and less like a magnet. The ball physics and illustration of spin are significantly improved. In 13, the odds of getting a successful tackle in were extremely slim. The ball would stick to the foot of the opposition like it was on a string, but you would usually not have the same good fortune, even if you are covering the ball. Now the occasional reckless touch will put the ball a little too far in front, leaving you or your team a chance at poking it away cleanly or, failing that, sliding in and actually having a chance at catching the ball before the player.

Speaking of slides, they’re viable again, and the physics are somewhat improved. I almost said “much improved”, but there’s some good and some bad. To the good, they behave largely as expected, and are very dependent on timing, as they are in real life. Also, players have a chance to jump over the slide, or keep their footing and get the advantage from the referee. To the bad, the slow-motion replays will show all the wonkiness this game engine generates with falling players. It’s not uncommon to see a player tumble over a sliding defender, and right before they land on their back, they gain altitude in mid-air, rotate another 180 degrees, and land on their … (More) “FIFA 15: Get Good or Blame The Camera”