Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 822 – Scott Alan Miller

August 11, 2008: We have an answer… probably

Despite all of the stress, I actually managed to sleep in a little this morning which was good. I needed some extra sleep to be ready to handle today. We have no idea what is going to happen.

One nice thing about the HP DL145 G3 that I purchased yesterday is that it is going to replace the IBM NetFinity that I have running at dad’s house. That old IBM is one of the many machines that I purchased from IBM employee sales back when Andy and I worked at IBM in Endicott, New York. That means that it is one of the machines that I have owned since before I met Dominica.

The IBM NetFinity is a dual Pentium III 667MHz / PC133 server with 1.5GB of memory and a 10,000 RPM SCSI hard drive. It is definitely nothing special anymore but it was an amazing machine when I picked it up for $150 or so in early 2001. At the time no one wanted it because it had the much eschewed PIII “Flip Chip” which I thought was great and short thereafter became the industry standard chip form. So the machine ended up being a most amazing purchase for me. It was easily a $1,000+ machine at the time that I purchased it. And it was new as an “open box” item. I added two high school SCSI drives to it and boosted its memory from 512MB to 1.5GB and had quite a little workhorse for many years.

That IBM has been with me through several locations and changes in purpose. It spent some time as my email server, did some virtualization and eventually ended up as a Windows 2003 Active Directory machine which is its current role and has been for many years. The machine is built in the form factor of a desktop workstation and not so much like a server. I am interested to see how this unit manages to perform as a desktop at Castile Christian Academy. A Pentium III 667 is generally around our low end cut-off for performance but with dual processors, tons of extra memory and a faster than usual hard drive this might be a very good machine. Under certain loads it might just outperform the Pentium III 1GHz machines of which we have a fair number these days.

The DL145 also frees up the older DL380 G2 that I have had as the intended replacement for the IBM NetFinity. The DL380 G2 takes up more space, uses more power and makes more noise than the DL145 while having less computational power and storage (but higher drive I/O.) So the plan is to send the DL380 G2 down to Castile Christian Academy to be their new file server as its drive performance is amazing. It is a fully populated unit with dual Pentium IIIs 1.4GHz processors, several gigabytes of memory and six screaming fast SCSI drives. It will be perfect for them. Then dad can scale back to just the DL145 G3 and the SunFire V100 that he already has at his house. Quite a bit smaller than the machines that he has right now.

My day can be summed up in a single word: stress. I waited all day for news about my job but got absolutely nothing. It is twenty past four as I write this and we don’t have any direction at all right now.

We officially ended the day with no good news. We don’t have disastrous news but we certainly don’t have good news. We have made no ground today whatsoever. There was a lot of talk but no progress. The only “positive” thing is that the pass-through vendor admitted to not giving any warning about the pay cut but they are acting like that is not their problem. They are apparently claiming that they have a contract with my consulting firm that allows them to claim anything that they want and bill retroactively for it and change rates retroactively at their whim.

Dominica got home and we talked for a while. Neither of us is really able to get very much done because we are so worried about our finances and whether or not we will be able to get the house still. I did speak to the bank today and they are aware of the situation and are holding tight to see what happens.

Around six thirty we got some news that there is a good chance that things are going to be okay. We don’t really know the details yet and the final word has not come through but it looks like the parties have come to a solution. We won’t actually know anything tonight but hopefully in the morning.

I ended up working late into the evening. Dominica sat at her desk knitting and watching Voltron from Netflix. I ran down to the deli in the building to grab dinner just before they closed at nine o’clock. I came up and we managed to watch one episode of Frasier together, while we ate dinner, before the phone started ringing. It was Mary and we talked for half an hour or so until ten.

I went back to “work” around ten. I have been behind at the office and I wanted to make sure that I was caught up before the morning. Or at least kind-of caught up so I spent some time doing some paperwork. I answered some emails and got some paperwork together for dad.

Oreo came out to the living room and lay on the recliner on a pillow and a pile of blankets. He always wants to be with me.

We have been able to have the windows open all day yesterday and all day today. The fresh air is great. I do get fresh air walking to work but it isn’t the same. I am really appreciating having the apartment aired out a bit. It actually gets far stuffier and mildewy here in summer than in winter because even during a pretty cold winter spell we still tend to open the windows rather a bit – at very least in our bedroom.

Yay, more people following me on Twitter. I am becoming a Twitter celebrity. Okay, not quite. But I do have several people that I have never met following me. I am finding it to be an interesting addition to my regular blogging. I really like the fact that I can put on updates throughout the day to let people know the current status of things without them needing to wait until the next day when the SGL dailies post.

August 10, 2008: The Blissful Life of the Unemployed

Our high stress weekend continues. Nothing has changed – and that is the source of the stress. On Friday evening, when talking to real people with real influence, you get the sense that everything is fine and that come Monday morning we will be able to work things out and have a good resolution to the issue at hand. But then spending the weekend with no communications (even though we were not expecting any communications) gives ample time to sit around considering all of the things that could go wrong and to worry that things won’t go well Monday morning. Inaction, at least for me, is a huge source of stress.

Oreo had a great time at the party last night. He had a whole yard and house in which to run around freely and two dogs to play with. The one collie was eleven and very aged so they could not play but was very friendly and looking for attention from everyone. It is very sad seeing a sweet dog get so old.

Dudley was there, Katie’s dog, and he and Oreo spent a lot of time running around together. Oreo does not often get wide open space so it was a nice change for him. They played pretty well until some kabobs were given to the dogs and some territoriality came into play. In a surprise move, Duds, who is close to three times Oreo’s size, and a little argument with Oreo and in a flash Oreo was flipped over on his back and panicking. We had to pull them apart pretty quickly. That was the end of the fun night for Oreo. After that he just wanted to be held and to relax.

We had to sleep in a bit this morning just to make up for getting in so late last night. It was around ten thirty when we finally got out of bed. I did a little work in the office but only a tiny bit. Today is my last official day with a contract so I figured that I should at least do something, even if it was only symbolic.

We found out this morning that the Mazda PR5 is not going to be purchased as we had hoped. We have been waiting for the final approval of the purchase for two weeks, or so, thinking that everything was pretty much finalized and then today, in the midst of everything else, found out that they weren’t actually interested in it. Of course, bolstering my already hearty dislike for people’s concepts of “vacations”, we would have known this quite some time ago but people went “on vacation” and stopped communicating to the outside world – ignoring obligations because somehow some parts of society have approved the idea of a “vacation” as exempting the vacationers not only from their work obligations but from their personal ones as well.

I think that this concept is probably quite old. When I was a child (and obviously any time before that) going on a vacation (one that involved travel, at least) meant going to a remote location where postal mail and telephones were impossible to get or unreasonably expensive for anything less than a full emergency. But that world has past and today with the Internet, mobile phones, BlackBerries, etc. you are no less accessible while in a remote location than when sitting in your living room. Today, having a telephone that doesn’t reach you everywhere actually costs you more, usually, than one that does not reach you everywhere.

Basically, we live in a world when the traditional concept of escapism in vacations is no longer an intrinsic feature of travel but now requires active, intentional ingnorance (in the tradition, true meaning of the word as a derivitive of the word ignore.) You have to ignore people trying to reach you. You have to avoid responding to people. It is a completely different animal these days. And this phenominon is not new. Mobile phones have been making this shift occur since the early 1990s and the Internet has been changing it since the late 1990s. It has been roughly eight years now, a decently long time, that there has been little to no excuse to ever be out of reach for more than half a day or less. And now that most people use instant messaging and text messaging via mobile devices all day long any breach in ongoing communications because of a “vacation” has to be completely intentional.

I am not suggesting that people never stop working and never take a break from work. Moreso I am saying that personal responsibilities are not curtailed in any way by a claim of “vacationing” or being out of town. People have traditional used the idea of vacationing as a way to avoid responsibilities and communications because it was a difficult claim to dispute. No one would be able to know if you were truly stuck in a situation without communications or not. Today that is not true and there are so many, free or nominal cost communications modes and so little change between home, office and hotel in relation to those modes that not responding to responsibilities while away is exactly the same as not responding to them when standing face to face with someone.

If you want some sympathy from me in reference to you being helplessly out of reach you had better be backpacking through Kyrgystan and even there you will likely have intermittent phone and Internet access. There are very, very few places left on earth where you are truly out of touch and fewer and fewer people who are comfortable being in those situations. Most people today desperately want to keep in contact via email, phone, web, etc. Recently I even had a conversation with my friend David while he was hanging out in a cafe in Tunisia. He was just checking up on his email, FaceBook, etc. It’s far more interesting, I think, vacationing in places when you can still communicate to the outside world instead of just “disappearing” for a few days and then returning with some pictures.

All of that aside, we are rather happy that we are not selling the car as we think that we will most likely want to have it once the baby arrives in November. We need a car that can haul some things and will easily fit the baby’s car seat, Oreo, both of us and the baby’s things. The PR5 also gets good gas mileage and has amazing snow tires. It just had a bit of work done to it and has been sitting all summer not getting any older so its value to us is probably much higher than its street value and we had been planning on selling it at rather a bargain. So, other than a certain desperation for cash right at the moment because of the house, we would prefer to hold on to the car.

My afternoon was spent writing a very large BASH script that will take our newly built Castile Christian Academy workstations and turn them into fully ready desktops. It has to remove all of the unnecessary and inappropriate packages, change repositories, add in needed educational packages, change system files, detect the system’s identity and do all of our standard customizations. It is rather involved.

I got some word, finally, from the consulting firm this afternoon but it wasn’t encouraging. Basically, they claim that their hands are tied and they have no contracts to protect them. It would appear that doing the “right thing” is way too much effort and so instead they see me as a scape goat and are just passing the cuts on to me… including massive monetary gains for themselves. The original cut was just 7.5% but it escalated to 15.73% by the time that it reached me. That means that while there was a cut (which was at their discretion and they opted to take) at the beginning I am taking more of a cut than anyone and the only person losing here is me.

In fact, everyone else is making a fortune on the deal – coming completely out of my pockets. In addition, I took the furlough earlier in the year which was an additional 3.5% or so. So my total cut, between March and August comes to 19.5%!! This is insane. And they wonder why I won’t even discuss the possibility of accepting the cut. To make things even more stressful I have a very large amount of comp time and 401K money on the line that could very easily be taken away. At least things look promising to have my contract moved to another pass-through vendor, but who knows what all impacts there could be along the way. I think I need ulcer medication 😉

For dinner we ordered in Brazilian Pizza again. It was awesome. We ate pizza and watched two episodes of Frasier. We are on the third season still, I think.

The weather is cooler today than it has been in a while so we decided to open the windows and let some fresh air into the apartment. The apartment has gotten musty and stale. The air conditioning units did not get cleaned like they are supposed to be because our bed takes up the entire room and there was no way to clear space to do the cleaning. Or at least we imagine that that is the reason. Nothing was said to us so we are giving the building the benefit of the doubt that the cleaning process even occurred. It might easily have not taken place at all.

I was doing some shopping on eBay and discovered an amazing price on a high effeciency Hewlett-Packard DL145 G3 rack mount AMD Opteron based server. It even comes with the rack mounting kit which is nice.

Andy called and we talked for an hour or so this evening. Then it was time to walk Oreo, wrap up SGL, do a little work for the office (in the minutes running up to the end of my contract), answer emails, update Twitter and head off for bed.

No wonder it is hard for me to ever actually make it to bed!

This coming Saturday, Dominica and I have Nadine and Clarence’s wedding to attend. So we will be gone for most of the day. Every moment that we are not gone I am scheduled to be working – although that is obviously in some question at this point.

August 9, 2008: Visiting Grandview-on-Hudson

We got to sleep in a little this morning. That was nice. Oreo definitely enjoyed that.

My friend Clare pointed me to Microsoft’s Research on Six Degrees of Separation. The topic came up when we realized that even though we live about 2,500 miles from each other on different continents that we had both stayed at the same hotel in another city several thousand miles away from either of us. I would like to see Google, AOL and Yahoo! perform some silimar research using their own resources on an even larger scale. Could be very interesting. FaceBook and MySpace should get involved as well. Using the conglomeration of these social networking tools might prove that the number of degrees is actually lower when they are used in conjunction with one another.

I got to working as soon as I got out of bed this morning. My original day included an incredible about of work for the office but a lot of that work was canceled either Thursday or late yesterday evening so my day isn’t nearly as hectic as it might have been.

Most of the day was spent supporting the Surfing IT Wizard, John Stephens, as he did some work in Ithaca. I also did some work for the office. It was a mixed work day.

Dominica spent most of the day shopping for diaper stuff. She is completely enthralled with diapers which I don’t understand at all.

My day was pretty long. I worked a full ten hour day from nine until seven without even enough of a break to go to get food. Around noon Dominica ran down to the deli downstairs and grabbed some French toast and scrambled eggs for me. Other than that my only break all day was to walk Oreo once.

When I wrapped up around seven, I jumped into the shower as quickly as possible and we hit the road up to Katie’s summer place in Grandview-on-Hudson for her river party. Our trip didn’t go too smoothly. First the GPS took us on an insane route using i280 and the NJ Turnpike which didn’t make any sense at all. Then, as we entered the turnpike, the person in front of us went through the EZPass lane pulling a trailer. The trailer, of course, tripped the EZPass system for us so that when we went through it had already registered “Go, No Tag Read” – meaning that the Turnpike intended to charge us the full length of the turnpike because of someone else breaking the rules!

When we got off of the turnpike we stopped at the toll booth, not the EZPass booth, and explained what had happened and they had no resolution whatsoever and they, as well, charged us, in cash, the entire length of the Turnpike! So, in the end, the punishment for coming to New Jersey and using the EZPass system correctly is to get double fined the max fine! And, of course, since EZPass is based in Newark, their 800 number was down for the night so we couldn’t even speak to anyone. There is apparently no recourse for people using EZPass – you are simply taking your chances. Now we will probably have to deal with opening fraud charges against them through the credit card company.

It ended up taking us an hour and a half to go the forty-five minutes to Katie’s house. Dealing with the Turnpike issue cost us over twenty minutes sitting in completely stopped traffic – an additional punishment over the double fine. It was around nine when we finally arrived in Grandview-on-Hudson.

The party had been going on for quite some time by the time that we had arrived. There were some portabello mushrooms on the grill for us still although everyone else had eaten long ago. It was very dark but the view of the Hudson was awesome. The glittering lights of the Tappen Zee Bridge and Irvington and Hastings-on-Hudson on the other side of the river were really spectacular.

We stayed at the party until around one thirty. It was pretty late for those of us used to going to bed long before midnight and we had to drive back to Newark yet. It was a little after two when we got home and got to bed.

Tonight might be the first time that I have actually hung out in Rockland County since Phil Ayers and I stayed in Rockland for the New York State Math Competition circa 1993.

August 8, 2008: 080808

I’m thankful for days like today because one of my biggest challenges in life is coming up with a cool title for the daily post and today it is so obvious that I didn’t even need to think about it. One less thing to come up with on a busy Friday.

Once again I am backed up on email. One busy day and everything falls apart. It took me days last time to get caught up on all of the mail. It comes in so quickly and so much of it is something that I need to keep for one reason or another. I find the constant flow of it to be pretty frustrating. Even with all of the diligence that I put in attempting to read everything that pertains to me the levels of SPAM that we have – internal SPAM that is, not external – completely overwhelms us and forces us to automate huge swaths of email reception so it is extremely easy to miss something. I must spend two hours per day just managing the email.

I had a very busy morning with tons of requests coming in even before my morning started and while I was on the train in to Manhattan. My entire morning was spent just completing incoming requests as quickly as I could. Very draining. I am going to be doing a lot of catch-up work tomorrow – if just to get my mailbox back to a state in which I can manage to take care of people without missing critical things!

For lunch, Katie and I went out to Financier Patisserie on Stone. It’s Friday so that sandwich of the day is the hot smoked salmon and Gruyeres which is amazing along with their crap quiche which I have not had an opportunity to try before. Lunch was excellent although it is always so crowded down on that part of Stone – it can be rather uncomfortable to attempt to eat there.

My real shock of the day came in the early afternoon when my consulting firm called me to tell me that not only was I going to receive an “out of the blue” paycut but that it was going to be 15.27% and that it was effective immediately – starting Monday morning (today is Friday.) I was originally told, by my consulting firm, some month or two ago that there was a cut but that I exempt from it and not to worry. This news, apparently, is actually the news that caused this disaster to happen.

So my day went from busy to insanely stressful in a moment. No warning at all that something like this was going to happen. Blissfully going through my day thinking that everything was great and then “blam”, humongous paycut and a hearty muhahahaha!

Most of my afternoon, somewhat obviously, was spent panicking about what was happening with my pay and my job and my consulting firm. What a mess. I finally reached my boss out on Long Island and was able to talk to him and then administration and the staffing department. The company for which I work was not happy to find out that I was getting a massive paycut, without warning and for no reason. Their recommendation to me, that I had also come up with on my own, was simply to not accept the new offer. On Monday morning, in theory, there will be some serious renegotiations and very likely a change of consulting firms. We are going to see.

So, somewhat nerve-wracking, I am officially unemployed this weekend. Monday morning is going to be interesting. The company at which I work is thinking that things will be okay – but it is still stressful as there are so many variables and changes and potentially bad things that can happen. For example, this could really impact the 401K that I have been investing into as I am not completely vested yet. I hate that companies can take away your vestment simply by lowering your rate or firing you to protect themselves.

I was at work until seven this evening. This is going to be a long weekend as we wait to see what will happen come Monday. I hate that so much of my career involves major disasters in the eleventh hour and then having to wait while no one is available to see what is happening. Completely inappropriately, my manager at the consulting firm is both on vacation all next week and decided to just leave in the middle of the afternoon so that I had no one to reach. I reached out to her backup manager to whom important things are supposed to go when she is not available and that person’s out of office email message said that they were on vacation and that people who needed them needed to speak to the person that I tried the first time! Circular out of office hand-offs. How professional. Argh.

This has been an ongoing situation for me over the years. I cannot count anymore how many times I have been given incomplete information or have received major changes in plans or have gotten disasterous news on a Friday afternoon (I seriously believe now that this is planned so that people don’t have to “deal with it”) and then absolutely anyone who could be involved leaves the office early and hides. This has often occurred when work scheduled for a Monday morning gets cancelled and no one wants to admit that they never had a contract for the work. It is very common. A consulting firm should never have a circumstance where people are not available over the weekend. I even left a voicemail for the entire consulting office, before five o’clock which is well before the end of the working day, for just anyone to call me back as it was an emergency and not one person bothered to contact me knowing that I had an emergency and that both of my managers decided to stop working today.

Something that “non-contractors” seem to forget is that in “business time”, a Friday night and a Monday morning touch each other. There is no work over the weekend. Not real work anyway. There is no HR, staffing, managers, etc. If something is left unresolved on a Friday night that means that it is unresolved over the weekend and on Monday morning. Did my consulting firm really forget that when they said that Monday morning I had a new rate that that meant that it had to be completely dealt with before I left the office today or else we had no resolution and no contract on Monday morning? It isn’t like they can get into the office (or will bother to go into the office) early on Monday, contact me before I am supposed to start work and make a deal with the company at which I work and coordinate with the “pass-through” consulting firm all before I start needing to work around seven in the morning! They aren’t prepared to deal with this situation in any way. They just run home, stick their collective fingers into their proverbial ears and go “la la la la – I can’t hear you” and hope that the situation resolves itself, magically, without their intervention.

Why does every company find it so important to make going to work everyday and doing a good job incredibly stressful? It takes real effort to make things have this much stress. This doesn’t happen naturally. It took a minimum of four or five people at my lowest level consulting firm alone completely failing to do their jobs to get us into this situation and they aren’t even the company that initiated the whole problem! It took a lot of screwing up to get here. How come all of those people aren’t getting major paycuts? I put in a lot of effort this afternoon trying to find a way to keep my job. Apparently neither of the consulting firms cares whatsoever if they lose me as a consultant (and, as we approach the end of day – perhaps lose the company at which I work as a customer.)

It’s no wonder people go out drinking so often!

It was after eight when I finally got home to Newark. When there is this much stress, though, it isn’t fun going home. You want to stay in the office and get things fixed. You want resolution. That’s what makes me the most upset. That so many people can just knock off for the weekend because it doesn’t directly affect them is outrageous.

So I got home but it is pretty hard to relax on weekends like this. Ryan came up from downstairs and we ordered in Brazilian Pizza from a place the Dominica and I had never heard of before. The pizza was amazing. Min and I got a corn and cheese pizza which was delicious and we all shared a chocolate and cheese pizza for dessert which, sounds awful, but was amazingly good. Mozzarella, chocolate, cherries and cinnamon! We will be ordering from this place a lot. They have like fifty different pizzas.

It was around midnight before we actually got to bed. Busy day tomorrow. Working all day and then going to Katie’s house on the Hudson for a riverfront party in the evening.

August 7, 2008: No New Job For Me

Check out the slow motion lightning on Today’s Big Thing. This is truly awesome. Thanks to Vikas for the link.

I was pretty tired when I pulled myself out of bed at six thirty this morning considering the fact that I did not fall asleep until sometime after one in the morning. I am covering the early morning shift today for someone at work so it is just this one day this week. It fit perfectly into my schedule to cover this shift today except that I had not planned on working so late last night. So today I am very tired, but that really isn’t anything new.

Tomorrow is 08-08-08. Just interesting. In just over three years we will have 11-11-11 which is the coolest. That is, if a date can every be cool based on the recurrence of numerals within it. It is on the boundary of cool at the very best, I think.

My morning was incredibly busy as I worked on the same project that had kept me up so late last night. I have been determined to get to the root cause of this major issue that we have had at the office. It has been going on for two or three months and has caused countless issues and I would be so happy to have it resolved. Not just for the sake of getting it resolved but also for the opportunity to show up the “escalation” people who are supposed to have been able to fix this for us quite easily but have been unable to even grasp the core of the issue after two months with it. This is my first serious bought with the problem but it is a tough one indeed.

By mid morning I actually had the solution to the issue and was quite gleeful indeed. What a relief if was to figure that mystery out, and quite a rush as well. This has been plaguing all of us for quite some time. It is quite the feather in our administration team’s caps as well as the engineering team who claim to be our next level of escalation have been completely lost in this issue and unable to come up with a single clue.

Not one hour after completely embarrassing the engineering team, again (first time was two months ago, then someone else on my team showed them up pretty bad yesterday, then again this morning) their manager called me to tell me that they had decided not to offer me a position on their team. Ha ha. Talk about being a soar loser.

It is sad, of course, to not be offered a position for which you interview. In this case, though, it is a bit embarrassing to be turned down by a team that so conspicuously can’t do their own jobs and need me to do it for them as it is! The issues of the last few days were nothing compared to the issue that I resolved for them a few months back and that issue did not involve a “problem” that they could not solve but a massive architectural disaster that they had caused.

Oh well. After this morning it would have been embarrassing to have gone to work there anyway. People that I work with, that I really respect, have no respect for this team and would not be at all impressed if I was to switch over there. In hindsight (with the wine of sour grapes, of course) staying exactly where I am seems like the far better decision anyway. I am thankful, in some ways, that the decision was not really mine to make as I was far more likely to make a poor one.

Most of my evening was spent supporting Jeremy remotely as he worked to install a dozen computers at dad’s house with OpenSUSE 11 Linux. It is actually a rather challenging project because the computers are so old with the slowest being a Celeron 433 and the fastest being a few Pentium III 1GHz and several different speeds in between. Anything without a PC133 memory interface is being considered “obsolete” and will not be used for installation at the school. Even a PIII 667 will do the trick – it is amazing how much performance one can eek from a Pentium 3 with enough PC133 memory. But fall back to the older memory systems and the performance is just too slow, in my opinion, for desktop use. The PIII 667/133 has been my “drop dead line” for desktops for six years at least. That machine had just enough performance to make it the longest lived useful desktop platform of which I know. These days, having the 1GHz machine is quite noticably better, however, and we are trying to get as many of those installed as possible.

I worked the early evening with Jeremy on the installs and then spent the late evening writing a script that can be run against the machines to take them from the raw install state to a finished product. I am used to using RPM and YUM on Linux but now I am automating with Zypper which is similar to YUM but a little different.

I got to bed at a reasonable hour and listened to a little more of “Shadow fo the Silk Road.” I am now halfway through the book.

If you need more cool stuff, check out the face on this girl after performing a pretty incredible landing into a pond.