Friday, July 29, 2005

Had a grand old time seeing "Phantom of the Opera" last night with The Wife at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. It's a smaller theater than Jones Hall, which is where "Phantom" usually plays when it comes to town, but the production was fabulous (along with our seats, at center orchestra, sixth, dead center--w00t!!). The actress playing Christine looked older than the actress playing Madame Giry, which really creeped me out, but the Phantom was wonderful--completely over the top and wildly emotional, just the way a hideously deformed genius psychopath should be. We all stood for him when he came out for the curtain call, and he deserved it.

Excited about Battlestar Galactica tonight. It has truly shaped up to be a winner of a show, and is one of the highlights of my week. I'd totally hang out with Starbuck.

I'm trying a radical new diet--it's the "Stop Eating So Damn Much" diet. It's been a week since I started, and, as mentioned in Wednesday's entry, the food isn't so bad. Plus, it's kind of nice not feeling so bloated and full all the time. Not eating so damn much for teh win!

Posted by Keeper @ 01:38 PM CST [Link] [3 comments]

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Brakes on the Honda have been squeaking for the past couple of days, so I took it by the car place in front of my neighborhood and had them peek at it. Rotors are scarred and below the minimum thickness for turning, and my CV joints need re-packing. Not unusual, considering the car has 140,000 miles on it. Going to run about $470, which I suppose isn't terribly awful, in the grand scheme of things.

Ordinarily, I love having a single car. Since The Wife's job is between home and my job, we get to ride to work together and spend that extra time together, and also eat lunch together and spend that extra time together. This, though, is one of those occasions when having one car sux0rs. They've said the car ought to be ready this evening, but if not, I'll need to make arrangements to pick it up in the morning and get to work a little late. Blarg.

In other news, I have been eating very well the past couple of days and I'm proud of myself. So far today, I've had one yogurt for breakfast, two chicken soft tacos from Taco Bell for lunch, and another yogurt for a snack. Dinner is lovely-amazing-tender pot rost that The Wife is cooking in the crock pot. Hooray for not eating food that makes me rot from the inside out!

Posted by Keeper @ 03:58 PM CST [Link] [3 comments]

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

My morning has been anything but calm.

I had hoped that we'd be able to have a nice, quiet, issue-free launch, but sadly, that was not to be.

At approximately 08:30, I begin hearing muttering from across the way, where our workload coordinator sits--he's the poor sap who interfaces with the help desk and hands out tickets to us. People are having difficulty accessing our file shares.

The problem gets worse. More people call. By 09:00, we have a bona-fide service outage in progress. Internal web sites hosted on the SAN are not responding. Most file shares are inaccessible. Everyone from the site VP to the janitor is crapping their drawers. Since we're the prime contractor and provide, among other things, MER support for NASA, words like "possible countdown hold" start getting bandied about. Me & my lead are elbows-deep into our SAN, trying to find out WTF is happening, but there are no errors, no alerts, no hardware problems, no nothing--just slowness.

By 09:15 we bring the networking group into the mix, and they immediately start howling about how there are no network issues, it's all our fault and all of our hardware sucks. I call $GIGANTIC_STORAGE_VENDOR and open a severity-1 call and get bandied about between multiple engineers. It is revealed, through frantic troubleshooting, that the network segment on which the file shares and web server storage volumes live is saturated.

Networking comes on and says that our upstream WAN link (which also carries public Internet traffic for our site) is pegged at 100% and is dropping packets like crazy, and at the same time someone catches sight of a hardware failure light on our local DC. At some point in here the shuttle actually launches, but everybody is too busy on the phones with support to notice.

The cause turned out to be a comedy of errors that breaks down like this:

1) At some point last night, our local DC poops itself
2) This morning, four thousand people simultaneously try to watch the live streaming video of the shuttle launch
3) All those connections saturate the WAN link that carries Internet traffic
4) Users then try to access file shares while watching video
5) Since the local DC has pooped itself, an upstream DC takes over authentication duties
6) Authentication request is sent over the WAN link, which is busy carrying four thousand users' worth of streaming video
7) Panic and chaos ensues as nobody can access any file shares because the authentication requests usually don't get through

The problem vanished like a fart in the wind after the shuttle reached orbit. Performance right now is perfect.

Hooray for NASA and the astronauts on orbit--I wish I was with them.

Posted by Keeper @ 10:25 AM CST [Link] [No Comments]

Friday, July 22, 2005

Here is an abridged, summarized version of the support issue I've been working since early this morning:

User: I don't have access to this share on a server in another domain.

Me: I don't control that server, but show me what happens when you try to access it.

Computer: ACCESS DENIED.

User: See?

Me: Sure 'nuff. Let's call an admin over there.

Admin over there: He's on the ACL already.

Me: Check the share permissions.

Admin over there: I don't understand your silly words. He's already on the ACL, I say!

Me: Check the share permissions.

First admin over there: I must now remand this to corporate because I don't understand anything at all. Also, my brain is made of cabbage.

Corporate: He's on the ACL already. Also, this is not our problem. Send this back to Admin Over There.

Me: It's the share permissions.

Second admin over there: He's already on the ACL! I don't know what to do because my brain is also made of cabbage. I can count to five!

Me: Can any of you check the share permissions?

Third admin over there: When I grow up, I want to be a fireman!

Fourth admin over there: Yay fireman! Fire trucks are red! VROOOOOOOOOM!! (makes siren noise)

Third admin over there: (also makes siren noise)

Me: Are any of you understanding the words I am making? S-H-A-R-E P-E-R-M-I-S-S-I-O-N-S.

Fifth admin over there: Obviously, his computer is broken. Have him reboot. I am studying for my MS Office proficiency exam and can't be bothered.

First admin over there: Wait! I am having a rare flash of insight! We should check the share permissions to see if they're in conflict with the NTFS permissions!

Computer: ACCESS GRANTED

First admin over there: Lo, my wisdom hath shown us the way to freedom! Come, kneel before me and drink from my fount of knowledge, that all ignorance may be banished forever!

Me: ...

User: (with sarcasm) Hooray, I can work now. Thank you for taking six hours to fix a problem that Keeper figured out in five minutes.

Second admin over there: Your utterances are as the lowing of barnyard animals, unclean one. Get thee from our sight.

Me: I'll be in the car.

Posted by Keeper @ 03:26 PM CST [Link] [3 comments]

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Continuing on through Suicide Project. The F&SN Critic's prose is sometimes clumsy, but it is the intentional clumsiness of the narrator, not anything indemic to the author. Being based somewhat on real life, it is a powerful read.

Also attempting to organize a trip to Splashtown. It's been probably eight years since last I set foot in the water park, but it calls to me. LASIK has stripped from me the glasses which for as long back as I can remember made swimming a near-blind experience, and I am eager to test my new freedom--preferably in the company of friends so close that they are my family.

I don't make friends easily--it makes the ones I have all the more special. I have a beloved wife, seven guys for whom I'd gladly exchange my life, and their wives and girlfriends. That's the extent of my social circle, and I'm happy with that. If I never befriended another soul, I would be happy--not because I don't want to meet new people, but because of the depth of the bond we all share.

Reading makes me maudlin.

Posted by Keeper @ 04:20 PM CST [Link] [No Comments]

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

KK and I Visited her brother's house a couple of weekends ago and hung out with him and his wife. They have a four year old--my nephew--and in their living room was a pile of some of the same books I'd had when I was his age. Lots of things by Richard Scarry. Willy the Worm rules!

IKn the chair directly behind me, Matt is screening The Hitler Rap for a couple of coworkers. Hilarity is ensuing.

Posted by Keeper @ 04:49 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Like any self-respecting nerd, I could spend a hundred million billion dollars over at ThinkGeek. In fact, vocalization of that thought today to Massurah led to a discussion on the nature of wealth and personal fulfillment--you know, then "What would you buy if you had a ho-bajillion dollars?" meandering conversation.

We discovered that we would go for distinctly different things. Car-wise, I'd do something like this, whereas he's much more enamored with something like this. We both agreed that we'd want to stay with the same houses in which we currently reside, although some serious tricking-out would be in order. Also top on my list would be large cruises on huge boats in the most luxurious accomodations available, since I am finding that I enjoy being treated richly far more than I enjoy having rich things.

If I were crazy-rich--like, actually had more than a billion dollars--I'd probably buy my own jet. But not a Gulfstream or anything lame like that--I'd be much more partial to one of these, built out on the inside in a pleasing theme (supposedly, Boeing is still trying to sell off ex-CEO Phil Condit's BBJ, which was extensively decorated on the inside to look like an 18th century British library, with chandeliers and everything). It seems to me that owning something that ostentatious requires a total lack of sense--or perhaps just a maniacal disregard for conventional ideas about posessions.

Massurah said that he would hire someone to dress up in polka-dots and google-eyes and follow him around all day, so he'd have someone to hide from to justify his paranoia. I pondered this remark while he repeatedly glanced over his cube wall--presumably to make sure that Mr. Polka-dot-google-eyes wasn't already on the job.

Posted by Keeper @ 03:26 PM CST [Link]

Monday, July 18, 2005

The F&SN Critic has asked for my help editing one of his books, titled The Suicide Project. It's a fascinating tale, and one that I had some small hand in crafting. I hope I'm able to bring something useful to the project.

Found time on Friday evening to catch the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, which is one of the best shows to appear in recent memory. The original one never caught my attention during my youth; having recently watched some of its episodes, I can now see why--the original show was crap. Honest, hokey, campy crap.

In a meeting today, I referred to our massive efforts to align our processes and procedures with the ITIL guidelines as "corporate masturbation". Everyone in the meeting agreed, and then there was a collective pause, and then we continued the meeting. It was rather like a bunch of hamsters all mentioning the unspeakable fact that they really aren't going anywhere on those little wheels of theirs, and then resuming their run.

It's sad that we spend so much time and effort complying with completely irrelevant processes and sets of guidelines. ISO, ITIL, OSHA Star--they're all massive time sinks. It's possible, back in the stone ages, that such certifications meant something, but now they're just meaningless lists of shit for employees to do. One of our ISO audit requirements is that we have to be able, from memory, to recite for an auditor our "Primary Quality Policy", which is that we strive to instill quality into all of our products and services at all points of the product's or service's lifecycle, for the benefit of our customers. Which, if you look at it, is a bullshit-fancy way of saying, "we try to do good". Which is the stupidest thing in the universe to have to memorize. But there you go.

We've actually reached that bureaucratic kung-fu zenith where we are able to take processes and techniques that were originally created to help people, and instead use those processes and techniques to hinder them. Like, if someone comes at me and they want me to, say, build a server for them to support a new application their department is going to buy, all I have to do is say, "Sure, just run that through the RSDI process!" That's Request for Study, Design, and Implementation. It's supposed to be a method to coordinate the requirement gathering, design, and implementation for projects, but it actually is a way to ensure that the project gets kibbitzed over, then dissected into tiny parts, then fought over by a bunch of different groups as to who's going to be responsible for what, then designed, redesigned, and re-redesigned, then abandoned because it's too expensive and by this point the customer's requirements have massively changed and they don't need the thing any more.

Remember how I said we're never going back to the moon? Yeah.

Posted by Keeper @ 04:23 PM CST [Link]

Friday, July 15, 2005

Missed making an entry yesterday. Damn it. And I was trying to be so good, too!

We finally got our rain. I was awakened at a little after 0530 this morning by the sound of thunder and a driving torrent of water falling from the sky; even though I couldn't go back to sleep, it was certainly peaceful to just lie there, dead-tired, and listen.

A customer just came through here, hunting down someone in charge of a certain system that's apparently gone tango-uniform, shouting about how this was "Urgent, very very urgent". The user found their sysadmin and ran off with him, still muttering about how urgent the issue was.

Fifteen seconds after they departed, somebody in the *nix admin row cranks their speakers and starts blaring Foreigner's "Urgent" at max volume. It was a humorous moment.

Posted by Keeper @ 09:20 AM CST [Link]

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Going to turn on Comments from here on out, to see what happens. Because, hey, why not?

Jason laments on divorce. It is a depressing read, both because their divorce is such a blow to Jason, and also because it's sad to see anyone go through the crap he's having to go through. Putting aside all questions of who's right and who's wrong and looking at the situation in a vacuum, I feel sympathy and sadness. On one hand, there is a certain parity between us because he's lost his wife, and I've lost my brother. Neither Jason nor I believed either of those things would happen, but they have. The sense of loss is similar.

On the other hand, my brother was taken from me by an angry Iraqi with a 155 millimeter mortar shell; no choice on my part was involved. Jason lost Kim through a combination of the choices they both made--their divorce is a result of their actions. This skews things, because it introduces amounts of anger and regret into the equation that wouldn't otherwise be there.

At this point, their divorce is inevitable; they've been separated for more than a year (I'm fuzzy on the exact dates--it might be two years now), they live in different states, Kim is trying to move on with her life, and there are very real legal ties binding them together that are preventing either of them from doing any moving on at all. There are questions of property, ownership, division--all the legal rambling that must be dealt with when a marriage contract is voided. Until they're divorced, anything of financial or legal significance they're involved with is colored by the existence of a spouse. For those reasons, if for no other, the divorce needs to happen.

Or, as my marriage counselor said before The Wife and I were married, "It takes two people to keep a relationship alive, but only one to end it."

Blah. So here I sit with words and advice and observations, but I don't want to talk to Jason about it. I've not asked him because I don't want to hurt him by having him talk about it, and damned if I'm going to give advice unsolicited--plus, given my own circumstances, what can I possibly say that isn't preachy or high-and-mighty?

Better to just be his friend and be there for him. At least, I think so.

Posted by Keeper @ 01:55 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Found out that the reason why Guy #21 never called me back is because he's on vacation for two weeks. This touched off many more phone calls, and I have come to the conclusion that even though the site I'm dealing with has 14,000 users, THERE'S APPARENTLY ONLY ONE GUY WHO CAN MAKE COMPUTER ACCOUNTS. Meanwhile, this poor $GIGANTIC_STORAGE_COMAPNY guy is sitting here just twiddling his thumbs, because he can't go home until we complete this test, and we can't complete this test until we get an account. The Urn of Ludicrosity runneth over.

I have an ingrown toenail and it hurts.

Posted by Keeper @ 02:22 PM CST [Link]

Monday, July 11, 2005

I'm helping one of our gents from $GIGANTIC_STORAGE_COMPANY with replicating a set of test data from our site to a remote site, as part of our effort for complete replication and off-site backup, and we're stuck. Our domain is actually a multi-domain Active Directory forest, with seven separate domains, and we need to join a virtual CIFS server to the domain where our replication target lives. Getting this done is proving to be an exercise in bureaucratic acrobatics. I've been shunted to like twenty different people on the phone, and I'm currently waiting on the twenty-first guys to call me back.

We're never going back to the moon. We're never going back there because of shit like this. Instead of building a CEV or a rocket or whatever, we'll still be deciding which forms we need to fill out. I just thought you'd all like to know that, so when you're sitting there watching CNN broadcasting three Chinese guys jumping around up there planting the red flag all over the place, you'll know that our own aerospace industry is working really hard with Adobe Acrobat to create just the right forms to talk about getting us back up there and Beat Those Reds(TM).

Also, it is raining everywhere in town, except at my house, which is where I need it to rain so that my grass does not resemble brown dead sticks.

Posted by Keeper @ 02:53 PM CST [Link]

Sunday, July 10, 2005

The word for the evening is "eclectic", in honor of my playlist. Currently listening to Rammstein's Amerika, which will be followed by Lisa Loeb's Fools Like Me, which was the closing song on Grey's Anatomy this evening. I'm weird that way.

Wow. I heartily recommend a set of these. I'm really cranking these babies tonight and they sound awesome. And now I am deaf.

Posted by Keeper @ 10:11 PM CST [Link]

Saturday, July 9, 2005

Saturday morning laze.

Found a post on Ars Technica's forums where someone is hosting the ISOs for Freespace 2, the greatest space combat game ever made. Posers who enjoyed mouse-controlled space games like Freelancer need not apply; Freespace 2 is a real game that requires a joystick and the ability to do more than just click a button on a the mouse over and over again. FS2 also trounces the previous "Greatest Space Combat Game Ever Made" title-holder, the venerable but outmoded Tie Fighter, from Lucasarts. FS2 is simply a better game, and if you don't think so, you're wrong.

Then, because the source code has long since been released, the thread recommends going here and downloading FS2_Open, which substantially updates the game's graphics and makes it look uber-badass. I can confirm that it is indeed crisp and fabulous.

Been reading more over on Jason's blog, and I continue to feel like I should be able to help him, but at the same time I don't think I can. What do you tell a friend who's that deeply into depression? Cheer up? Things will get better? At the same time, knowing that his depression is not shared by Kim is disheartening, and does not bode well for Jason's healing. On one hand, Jason is broken and lays depressed in his room for days at a time, facing what he feels is a lifetime of solitude, dejection, and failure; on the other hand, Kim is still in Seattle, has a boyfriend, and has milestones in her future to which she looks forward. The asymmetry is startling, but perhaps not unexpected, as the best cure for a broken relationship is another relationship, and women can aquire companionship with far less effort than me.

Indecision, indecision.

Rather than worry about that, though, I believe I'll go kill people.

Posted by Keeper @ 01:50 PM CST [Link]

Friday, July 8, 2005

What is the fascination in taking apart complex things, even down past the level at which they can be reassembled? Just today, I have disassembled an ancient RLL hard drive and a keyboard, down to their tiniest of component parts. The hard drive provided nearly an hour of amusement, and even now its magnets continue to entertain, but the keyboard had some cool stuff inside it, too--most notably, a large rubber membrane sheet which Massurah promptly wrapped around his head, which made his face look like the Octopus Sucker Creature from Jupiter.

I am at a temporary pause in my daily activities. In a moment, I will return to discussing intersite data replication using this, which is turning out to be a fascinating endeavour.

Jawa might come visit us again this weekend, which means we will have to try once again to not destroy the town, flying in the face of our instincts to do so.

Zen moment of the day: when I returned from lunch, I had five voicemails waiting for me; each from a different number, each consisting of the sound of the caller hanging up. One right after the other. It made me feel both wanted and rejected at the same time.

Posted by Keeper @ 01:52 PM CST [Link]

Thursday, July 7, 2005

I am hungry. Quite hungry. It's about a half-hour until we all pile into the car and head over to Tokyo Bowl, but my stomach is already making growling noises.

Broke down today and contacted a lawn care service to start mowing my lawn--having skipped the last four weeks mowing, the grass is actually evolving to sentience and plotting my downfall. It needed to be stopped, so I called in the professionals. Actually, I'm out of weedeater twine and my mower needs oil, and that stuff is all the way over at Home Depot, which is like ten minutes away, whine whine bitch bitch. It is a sad state of affairs where I'd rather spend twenty five dollars than drive ten minutes.

Been experimenting with disk quotas at work. The Celerra NS we use has built-in file system quota abilities, and I've got them up and running on a test share. We so need to implement quotas on our users home directories. The amount of space currently in use for home directories is beyond obscene. We have a tick over 4,000 users, and 12TB of network storage currently IN USE for their home directories.

That's not just bad. Nor is it just wrong. It is bad-wrong. It is badong.

New movie quote to work into everyday conversation--when a user has a problem, I'll ask them if it's their fault. When they swear to God it isn't their fault, I'm going to yell, "SWEAR TO ME!"

Posted by Keeper @ 10:35 AM CST [Link]

Wednesday, July 6, 2005

More than a year since that last entry. Crazy. I'm not too good at this blog thing.

Let's see--things that have happened to me:

* Bought a house and moved in
* Got a promotion
* Saw some movies
* Went on some trips

That's it.

Currently enamored with House, M.D. and Grey's Anatomy, and I have developed a shocking taste for Hell's Kitchen. Scary, no? I berated television for so long, and now the thing I railed against has become my wife's and my evening companion. Such is life.

I moved into the corner spot at work, and have since turned both of those monitors to portrait, which is a hugely efficient way to work since information that's on a page is actually displayed like a page. This is important because we are thankful that we have jobs.

Jobs. The job is going well--very well, which almost makes me nervous. From November 2004 through last month, I oversaw the implementation of a new SAN-on-NAS storage solution and the migration of ~20TB of data onto it; we lost not one file and had no complaints, which is some kind of record. I got a promotion out of it, hooray for me and stuff like that.

My friend Jason's depression continues. To recap, Jason was married to Kim--technically is married to Kim, although there's a divorce in the works--and then they both did many retarded things and split up. I've known Jason since junior high and he's one of my four closest friends in the world. I wish there was something I could do to help him other than just be there for him, but if there is, I'm too dense to see it. I try to just be supportive.

My dear wife got into a fight with her best friend because her best friend doesn't understand how to communicate; best friend felt ignored by her husband so she left him and slept with at least one, and possibly two, different guys, one of whom had been making his attraction to her very clear since before she even married her husband. My wife wanted to be supportive but disapproved of her getting her freak so massively on while still married; best friend didn't want anything from her except positive reinforcement. So, they don't talk any more. Nick, if you're reading this--sorry, buddy, but Jennifer is cheating on you with Ed. And some other guys, too. We're not supposed to say anything, but, hey, what do I care?

Shifting gears.

It has now been more than ten years since I appeared on this incredible edible Internet. In 1995, as a lowly sales associate at the local Babbage's, I took advantage of the free offer Netcom was giving to Babbage's employees and grabbed a Netcruiser disk and fired it up. My first e-mail, sent shortly after to a coworker over a blazingly fast 9600 bps dialup connection:

From: pokerfac@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Hey, Morgan!
To: aragorn@xxxx.net
Date: 19 June 1995 18:08 GMT-5
Hey, Morgan! What's up?

Well, here's my E-Mail...make sure to reply to me, now, so that I'll
know what my address is...it's got "pokerfac@" in it, but I don't know
what the rest of it is...

So, I'm just gonna surf around in here, mainly on the web...which is
pretty cool...too bad it takes FOREVER to get new pages...hehe...that
little status bar just CRAWLS across the screen...NetCruiser is a
pretty good software package. I've basically got a row of icons up at
the top of the screen: Read E-Mail, Send E-Mail, Browse the Web,
Browse Gopher, Read NetNews Newsgroups, Post to NetNews Newsgroups,
FTP, Telnet, IRC, and Finger (look up user info).

Anyway, I'm gonna go now...talk to ya l8r!

How things have changed.

Posted by Keeper @ 08:20 PM CST [Link]