Chris Dwan

Tag: work

  • Observations

    Snippets and observations from a day:

    * Woke and fought the alarm, as usual with alarms.
    * Coffee. Sometimes you need coffee before you go downstairs to get coffee.
    * Solved technical problems by social means. Primarily public shame and an unwillingness to just let it go. Labelled the goddamn wires so it’ll be hard to claim ignorance when they get screwed up again.
    * Solved technical problem by technical means. Damn the tape robot. Damn it to tape robot hell.
    * Found a local judo club. Called ahead. Got nervous about grappling with these people
    * Lanced a social issue at work. Sat very, very still while said social issue worked itself out. Washed hands.
    * Rode mass transit for 1.5 hours to get to workout. Read first half of The Watchmen
    * Felt calm on the ground and standing. Saw the opportunity to apply a choke, and applied it. Opponent tapped. Noticed flaws in technique, worked on them.
    * Rode mass transit for 1.5 hours to get back to a hotel. Nearly finished with The Watchmen
    * Decided to go to Hampton, VA tomorrow evening rather than stay here. Save myself a whole trip by sacrificing a day.
    * Hotel restaurant closed. Restaurant kitchens close at 10pm. Bars are open later. Asked the front desk for local kitchens open late. TGI Fridays. Ick.
    * Ate dinner surrounded by waitstaff having a beer after their shift. Nice folks. Foul deep fried dinner. Foul.
    * Heard lyrics in head – “Bartender” by Dave Matthews Band. Next song on the radio was “Satellite” by the same. I was thinking Bartender please, fill my glass for me, with the wine you gave Jesus that set him free after three days in the ground., but instead I got satellite, strung from the moon, and the world your balloon.
    * Set up travel for tomorrow. Dependencies: Train, Flight, Car, Hotel. Car depends on flight, since I need to know where to return the car. Hotel totally doesn’t matter, since “recession” means “lots of hotel rooms.”
    * Posted to LJ.

  • Good day

    Today was pretty good. We had an Apple engineer onsite, and everyone learned something.

    We rebuilt a 30TB SAN to make it faster, and we rebuilt a 40TB SAN to make it more reliable. We made a plan for the 50 and 60TB installs, when we can get a maintenance window on them. I specced out 4TB of insanely high availability storage with a disk to disk to tape backup scheme.

    After lunch, I stripped the canvas top off the Jeep Wrangler that Hertz rented to me for the week, and we semi-kinda bluffed our way onto the air force base to ogle the F-22s. One of them blasted off basically right over our (exposed) heads. Kids in a candy store, I tell you.

    Tomorrow, I go home.

  • My day at work

    All my travel plans worked out great. Saw sacredangle‘s junior guitar recital, which was stunningly awesome, and got to hang out with the whole extended fam as well. Conversations were happening in at least three languages at the after party. I felt privileged to be there.

    Late in the evening, justkidding_nr shared some of her compositions, including “Don’t Fuck Around When you Choose a Major,” and “Stop Playing With Your Wii”. Pure genius.

    Afterwards, I drove to Richmond with my dad and secured a rental car for the run to Norfolk. I had been unaware until that point that Hertz rents the Jeep Wrangler. It’s a vaguely MASH looking cloth-top. Somewhat fun to drive, I guess technically it’s a convertible, and not at all what I was expecting. Wheee!

    Since I had a little extra time, I drove out and went across the 17 mile long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I dig bridges. This one was super awesome, since it also includes TWO underwater tunnels.

    On the way in to work this morning, I drove UNDER a pair of jets doing touch and go landings. It’s days like this that make me really love what I do and where I do it.

  • Sysadmin gig in Basel

    Email me if:

    (a) you’re an amazing network / sysadmin, able to set up a Force10 network and a Linux environment for a major research shop in about 2 months.

    (b) you’re available to go to Basel Switzerland for about 2 months, oh, now-ish.

  • Go team!

    Our newfound ability to gather web statistics on the corporate page has outed this as my blog to my employers. I got an “Is this you?” note from one of the owners. Well, that and the picture of myself that I posted there. That can’t have helped.

    After the shock wore off, I found myself somewhat dismayed that we beat spam by only two links. Come on people!

    - http://fdmts.livejournal.com 8 8
    - http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ 8 8
    - http://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/exhibit_floorplan.asp 6 6
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Grid_Engine 6 6
    - http://www.linkedin.com/jobs 6 6
    - http://tvsetmp3.com 6 6
    - http://guide.apple.com/action.lasso 5 5
    - http://biojava.org/wiki/Main_Page 5 5
    - http://www.worldwidemoviesonline.info 4 4
    - http://www.apple.com/server/resources/ 4 4

  • Job post

    Does the rock star life appeal to you? Ready to step up?

  • Protected: AAAAAAAAA!

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  • Brewing day!

    I’m totally psyched about brewing day. capital_l and technolope are coming down this afternoon at a time to be determined by how late they stayed up “playing video games and drinking” last night. I’ve got my guess … but we’ll see what reality provides. Two batches, a stout and a west coast ale.

    Installed a new rack in the cage yesterday. Moved servers and power around to compensate. The goal was to collapse our two-cage presence down to a single one, thus freeing up several hundred dollars a month. I tried out the camera in my phone, and got these. The quality is pretty good, provided that I hold the damn thing very, very still and there’s plenty of light.

  • Endgame

    Intel loved my report. This makes me feel good. They also apologized several times for the hardware troubles. During the conference call (which included, give or take, everyone at Intel) my sales guy / boss was IM-ing me frantically saying things like “accept their apology!” and “nod and smile!” So now I’m fixing the tiny, tiny things they wanted changed (calling the processor by its Intel Trademark Name rather than the codename that everyone on Slashdork will recognize, stuff like that). Supposed to have it online by this afternoon. No problem.

    There you go. A positive, happy post in LiveJournal. It’s about work, even. Ha. Take that.

    –UPDATE– The report has been temporarily redacted until the “trademark police” approve it. The link will be live again “soon.”

  • Whine

    Whine complain moan bitch gripe.

    details