Home again, home again. And tomorrow, on the train to Boston. Ungh. At least real rock stars get cocaine and groupies. Class went well. Tomorrow, I plan to verify that … oh who the hell cares? I’m going to be a geek again tomorrow. Any questions? No? Good. I’m going to bed.
Tag: work
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Bethesda
Color me surprised, Bethesda doesn’t suck nearly as much as I remember it sucking! There’s a Rock Bottom brewery around the corner from my hotel, plus six or seven really yummy smelling Thai and Vietnamese restaurants. Plus, the streets are populated with semi-drunken 30-year-old fratboys. This means that it’s totally safe out there, as long as I present a less appealing target for molestation than a drunken fratboy. I had the Barley Wine, which was remarkably similar to the one I made. Stopped at one, lest I become one of the herd. Also, crabcakes. Can’t come to MD and fail to get the crabcakes.
Class today was fun. My colleague taught, and he’s entertaining. He kept saying things like “fundamentally, computers are boring unless they’re doing something cool for someone smart” and “grid computing is mostly hysterical lies backed up by misleading press releases.” I hope to be so inspiring for my bit tomorrow.
Excitement is in the air: I ordered two beer kits (plus a new bottling wand and a new capper to replace the ones that finally crapped out). We’re making cherry stout and the “tongue splitter” west coast ale. After the kits arrive (supposedly the 9th, according to UPS) all are welcome to a day of wort boiling debauchery!
As part of my “not really a resolution, but it seems like a good idea to try to stay in good shape” for the new years, I busted out the Navy Seals Workout DVD. I have fallen far. I had that damn thing well in hand. Now I struggled to even get through each section doing some of the exercises from each set, much less keep up. I am, to put it lightly, quite sore.
I will return to peak form. I’m not going to get in shape only to let it slip away. Dogs of maniacal working out, to me!
Oh yeah, looks like I get to be an author again, provided that I can slap about 40 pages of well intentioned but poorly worded text into a presentable form in the next week. Hooray for collaborators who see that I can write and that I know the topic and are all like “this is way behind schedule, wanna fix it and be my co-author?”
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On the road again.
At the airport, headed to Bethesda, MD for a two day training gig. This should be fun, since I actually get to work with one of my colleagues. He will teach a one day course on the cluster queuing system, and then I get to teach my “intro to The Software” session. Audience of eight, with one guy from Apple auditing. We plan to sit in and support each other, which will be relaxing. I love teaching, especially in small and highly interactive formats. Interestingly, this is one of the first times that I’ll be working directly with anyone else from my company. We tend to work alone … and I don’t think that this guy has ever actually seen me teach.
Of course, this makes three business trips in as many weeks … which is tiring but sustainable. Business is psycho-good, and it looks like we’ll be back to “travel as much as you want to” for the next couple of months.
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Me, but in Chinese!
Check this out: I was digging for some old references, and I found this: An article in chinese with my name on it.
I plugged it into a handy dandy web translator, and this popped out:
“Should the computation environment which promotes turn the reality”
It’s a mangled rewrite of an article that I wrote last year on grid computing. I’ve been chortling and laughing as I read this aloud. As soon as I’m able to breath again, I need to call my copyright lawyer…but for now…mirth.
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Baked
That whole “early train” thing is starting to suck just about now.
Staring at a little moving progress bar, creating a clean install … so I can copy that install to another disk … so I can re-install a clean OS by remote … so I don’t have to be here tomorrow in order to reinstall an OS over and over.
Blarg.
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Early train
On the early train this morning. 6:20 out of South Attleboro. Damn. The sun isn’t even up yet.
In most of my days, there’s only one 5:30, and it has nothing to do with morning.
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So this is where it stops…
Today is debugging day.
One customer is testing airflow issues by letting a large set of jobs run for three hours with the rack doors open, then shutting them and running for another three hours. God, I hope that one works…I’ve got no idea where to go next.
Another is still wrestling with the malevolent “Mordak”, preventer of Information Services.
Still another is totally nice, but so un-clued about the unix command line that I’m just doing everything for him, rather than risk him typing
sudo suand whatever comes after.Totally stalling on even logging into the folks who (and I know this to be true) sit with a stopwatch, hitting up-arrow, return over and over again to find out why their system is “so slow!” Keep in mind that “so slow”, is like a two second lag between a job finishing on the cluster and the results appearing in their browser. We’ve been having this conversation for more than a year now.
Oh yeah, then there’s the fact that we’re supposedly shipping a new version of The Software this afternoon, but the two lead developers (me and Bill) are both nearly incapacitated by allergies and the medicines that they force us to use.
Yeesh.
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Users
Had a good one this week:
User was having a bear of a time getting our software to install correctly. Stuff just wasn’t acting right. Plus, he’s behind a firewall, so there’s only so much I can do in terms of remote diagnosis. Finally, he calls me on my cell phone absolutely triumphant. He had been observing the desktop of the system by remote (as people do), working on some other stuff. He noticed the mouse moving around on the remote system, without his help. As he watched, someone else busily turned off and undid all the changes that he and I had just walked through. He sprinted to the machine room and confronted the sysadmin who had decided to “help” by turning off most of the vital services on the cluster. “You don’t need to run DNS.” That sort of thing.
I love my job.
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Corporate…
Spent the afternoon with two guys from Intel, who were explaining why their technology is cool and getting cooler. While the information was nice, it was even nicer to feel important. Like, I’m some sort of valuable guy to know, and getting on my good side is important to them. Yeah, that’s it.
In other news, my customers have gone into some sort of wild and energetic spasm of productivity. What they’re producing are support requests. Back to it!
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So cold
The train this morning is very, very cold. It was 60 degrees out as I drove to the station, and somehow I was dumb enough to still be wearing my Tivas and just a t-shirt. Tomorrow, sweatshirt. No doubt about it.
The plan is to spend the day in the frigid, dark confines of our co-location facility, producing a new version of The Software. If I succeed in getting the hardware slapped into shape in the morning, my reward will be to move to the other office, where I can see hawks soaring through the window as I work.