First wrote about this stuff this morning before breakfast but lost it due to mobile web browsers. Up early today, went to bed early last night as ken and I were up all night thursday working some kinks out of the shmoocon network.

Overall shmoocon labs went well. More done this year overall than last. I don’t think there’s a great solution to the fact that a number of groups can’t get going until the network group gets them online, which tends to delay the pretty things like network monitoring. Next year we should have a small router like a linksys or whatnot and some cables ready to go for internet access for the groups and replace it in stages while the real network comes online.

I wonder if I can get my tethering on my tilt working in linux so I could hook it to a soekris and make a stompbox on short notice.

I caught a funny article in a paper while wandering around this morning about how many people copy others online dating profiles or portions thereof for themselves. The article provided a number of examples in which people had taken quips or even entire paragraphs or poems from others. I have the benefit of having written about myself in some form online for many years, so writing a profile comes pretty easy to me now, more so since i’ve put time into writing and revamping an okcupid profile. It’s interesting that in online dating coming off funny or interesting is important, as I still assume that most to the world operates as the people around me did in high school.

I’ve thought and written a bunch about stereotyping lately. People are waking up though,

Lost a great 40 minute rant from the phone due to not being able to find a decent browser on my phone. IE breaks up wordpress to a skinny column that won’t let me access the textbox and opera mini posts an empty text box while java won’t let me copy out of the text box; having lost a short rant at the airport the other day, I tried. I’m resorting to sending myself an email via sms and postingit later until I can work something out with wordpress. An sms gateway would rock but I don’t know if I could integrate it since I host my own blog.

Foods here.

For once being up past the witching hour isn’t so much a burden as shuttle express is going to be here around 3:30am to give me a ride to the airport where I’m off to DCA for Shmoocon (by way of DIA). If you’re not coming to Shmoocon, it’s alright, they sell cool tickets every year, better luck next time.

I’ll be back Sunday, probably late, as there’s the whole work thing next week and welding dude will be here Monday morning. I’m going to read and shower and whatnot and try to consume some of this awkward waiting time.

From a slashdot thread on IT ethics, which somehow I find more interesting these days, which is interesting.

They talk with complete conviction on a subject and it sounds like they know what they are saying (to anyone who doesn’t know the subject), but with programmers I’ve found we often add disclaimers, because we see there are gaps in our knowledge and gaps in areas where we want to carry out more tests etc.

I’ve complained about people in similar ways and identify with this. I think of spoken of my surprise caused by the lack of people I know on the west coast that know anything about working on cars. I think the only person I hang with out here that does is Wendell, and he doesn’t count because he’s from Maine too. There’s definitely something about growing up in the country that makes one appreciate having a vehicle more. While I’ve been getting around fine with the bus, I recently realized how much I miss leaving town and put some renewed effort into fixing the suburban. Besides, it’s getting warm enough outside and finally stopped snowing. I got quite a ways this weekend but got cut short when it came to needing some welding done. I don’t have access to the welding gear I did in the warehouse back east, so it was either hire someone or buy some. Since I’m leaving for Shmoocon in a couple of days and won’t be back until Sunday night, I hired someone to come out next week and do the welding and put some time into the reassembly of the truck. Apparently the dude’s been fixing cars for a long time, but he’s from Montana, which I assume is a place where kid’s grow up appreciating cars like in Maine.

Of the annoying things in this escapade is looking for advice. I did get a hold of Matthew, who’s certainly my default person to bounce anything trade like off of. But of the locals that I did ping I have a hard time telling if they’re blowing smoke up my ass because I see so few people here actually engage in any trade work besides drinking beer.

Gabe posted a bit of a rant on PA recently about anxiety. I hate trying to get to sleep at night if I’m not exhausted. I have too much crap on my mind. Interesting though.

I’m pretty sure my next job needs to linux operations only.  I did mention a recent chat with an executive about IT. I don’t care a whole lot about the money side of work, but I do consistently make below what salary sites say I should be be making. Salary is such a weird taboo in the industry around these parts. That’s fine with me, when I took this job my boss mentioned wanting to avoid a bidding war between this company and another. I said that’s fine, because I don’t want to fuck around with that either. Matthew used to talk of his business practices and we’ve had a conversation that stuck in my mind. Basically, pay people what you can. Let’s say you’re selling a bunch of crap to person A for $100. Someone else (B) offers you $150, so you tell A you’re going to sell to B. A then offers you $200. Now it’s more complicated than this, relationships and all, but the question you have to consider to A, is if they can pay you $200 now, how long have they been ripping you off for. I take this attitude into salary negotiations, which I realize is totally wrong and everyone in the world would call me a fool, but I just don’t find negotiating worth it. Maybe that’s why I prefer work in a dark closet near a server room somewhere.

In any case, after much desk building and windows server/database fucking around, I’m thinking next job needs to be specifically skilled enough that people won’t want me doing that shit based on what their paying me. The company isn’t paying my expenses for shmoocon, but is considering it paid time off for educational reasons or whatnot. As I was sitting in bed reading a Ruby book last night, I looked at the stack of books physically on my bed (most recent) and they included an RT, Vista, Exchange and Puppet book as well. It’d be nice if the fact that I get no training on this crap was made better by having on the job training, but I have a tough time recalling a situation where “on the job” training amounted to anything other than “happen to be in the office when I’m reading about it and teaching myself”.

I have to figure this is common for tech people, but I’ve been thinking about programming, design, etc and I’m not so sure it gets too far out of IT (systems/network administration/engineering).

So I did something on the truck today. Nice, as long as I don’t see some other huge part that needs removing, I’m about to “put it back together” mode. Probably would have made more progress with less breakfast and Linda’s and procrastinating, but it was good times.

If you ever need to replace the the radiator support on a Chevy K2500 (4×4 3/ton) suburban, it’s easy: don’t and pay someone else to do it.

There’s so many damn bolts and it really is the entire front of the trunk. A name like “radiator support” is deceiving. Worst is that I had to remove the air conditioing condensor, the radiator (including what looks like an oil cooler and a transmission cooler lines) and a power steering pump cooler, which I had to cut one of the lines, finding no other way to get it out through the small hole.

I also trashed the grill, but it was broken anyways and I didn’t want to find the time to find all the small screws. Unfortunately I started this project 2 months ago before it got cold and I didn’t think it was going to take this long, so I didn’t bother putting bolts in ziplock bags with labels as to where they came from like I normally do. Reassembly is going to be fun, and I’ll be impressed if I manage to not forget to bolt something important back in.

Just gotta get some photos from random times uploaded and I’m off to Adam’s for a Haydrian reunion, which seems like an excuse for Adam, Jim and I to drink at this point since those suburban folks don’t like making the drive all the way into the city.

I wonder if somehow it’s the cats moving around that keep waking me up. They don’t cause much trouble, short of taking about fifteen minutes to take a dump and seemingly scratching the side of the litter box the entire time. Early morning though, unless something cataclysmic happens I’m going to finally go put some time into working on the truck today. It’s a little dreary out but I’ll find some tunes and put my head into it.

My grandparents emailed me recently asking what the address to my blog was. I warned them it’s probably not their style, and when I talked to my dad he told me they had discussed it with him and he warned them to stay away as well. Best the fam not know about the dead hookers anyways.

So for know, we will stay away from the journal as we are getting too old for that heavy stuff!

They are a pretty amazing pair. They should both be about ~76 these days and still seem intent on doing more in a day than most people half their age do all week, as they say. They’ll be out here for a couple nights in March as they visit family in the Northwest and according to their itinerary, take a train all over the place, apparently for the entertainment value.

On that note, I did get most the decent photos from 2005 off CD and on to flickr. It’s mostly a road trip Maria and I took around the US back then and a bunch of animals we saw along the way. I’ve got a physical server I’ve got to host at some point here, as soon as my boss gets back to me about if they feel legally okay with me keeping it at work. When I do I’ll dig out the old gallery from my old webserver before I went virtual and disk space became a concern. The vhost I’m using right now is about 24GB. The server is about 2.4TB in a RAID5 configuration. Note the T instead of the G. So that’ll be nice, there’ll be some funny memories there. A lot of that trip had slipped my mind. While it’ll be three years ago in March or April, it’s also about two lifetimes ago and so much has changed since then.

It’s been 2.5 years since I moved out here. That’s one restart of life right there. 1.5 years ago was the other. Moving out here seems like an easier one to mark, that was 8/2005 but extended most of 2005 really. It took that trip, a lot of conversations with Maria and starting to feel like people in Maine were baggage to initiate a re-roll. Whereas 2006 there’s less of a defining moment. Probably the most turmoil was in quitting Strategy, but more in making the decision to do it and stick with it, even if I had to convince people I was nuts to get them to leave me alone. Breaking up with Maria that year and moving into the Awful Shark were both huge changes in my life as well though. So while lots happened in 2007, I’m glad I can look back at it and feel like it was relatively calm. Except for the accident I suppose, that was life changing, but not in the ways people always want to have been from stereotype or whatnot. I didn’t meet God. If I did, I probably jabbed him in the kidney and he took my memory of it away so I couldn’t finish off life with that level of satisfaction. All those stories about being a pain in the ass and the medically induced coma and shit are all god’s lies.

When I left the office last night just me and the CEO were left. As I said goodnight he thanked me. I looked a little quizzical, wondering what for. I particularly felt unsuccessful, having just spent a good number of hours fucking around with MSSQL to no success. He told me for taking care of a new employee earlier that day. We joked for a minute about how I mostly get thanks at work for the little things that people see. We have pretty pictures around the walls of the websites that the web teams and creative teams make, news articles about our software, etc, but of course there’s never anything posted up talking about how awesome the new debian repository is or anything like that. I had this conversation with someone else in the last six months and I remember expressing that if you work in IT long enough you get used to it and don’t have any expectation of getting your work on the fridge anymore. Maybe that’s not true, maybe it just hasn’t ever been a big deal to me. But I do find it pretty funny all the same. Five minutes of helping someone figure out how to use Office gets me much more praise than five days of mashing a pile of open sources packages together to provide slick back-end solutions. Mostly the funny part I think is that getting the latter done is always what makes me feel good about my job, whereas while I happily help users, it’s not why I go to work.

Kennifer, David, Anthony, Ken, Anna and I played poker last night. Playing poker may have been a first for me, definitely close. Good times seemed to be have had by all, although it looks like we got David and Anthony trashed, even without moonbags or anything.

Gotta get going and get outside though. No use procrastinating.

And I don’t give a damn about a life after death,
But I’ve gotta get some proof that there’s a life after birth.

Amazing waking up to a beautiful day for a change, even if it came with a sore back. Driving to IKEA six thousand times yesterday due to broken communication made me really miss driving to nowhere and listening to music. Really gotta get off my ass one of these weekends and finish fixing the truck. I swear it’s gotta not snow one of these weekends.

My paper copy of NE came today. Maybe I’ll read it on the bus and pretend that I’m deep.

Great week overall. A couple things happened that put in a good mood. A few times I’ve walked down the street listening to Bonnie Tyler and felt awesome. Now normally I walk down the street AND listen to Bonnie Tyler, and don’t necessarily feel awesome, so it’s progress not attributable to Bonnie Tyler lyrics which ARE awesome on their own accord. I’ve kicked my own ass and made some small steps at taking care of old business, starting as early as Sunday, which as been good.

There was that whole consulting business back in Maine which a good handful of EVERYONE I knew there bailed on me on. Getting that sorted out, and paying for it. But someone’s got to. Turns out I get to pay more medical bills because of insurance lapses between startups. I guess that’s the cost of not working thirty years for a pension at some blue chip place. Taking care of that too though.

I went on a date this week too, it’s been a while since I did that, and that was a lot more fun that I could have hoped for. I had almost given up on that shit, having given it a shot and somehow came out of it feeling almost more lonely. Looks like I can still like people though.

Not a whole lot going on the last couple days otherwise I guess. Staying sane mostly, but glad for a couple happy days all the same, even if it’s possibly in my head. That’s the part that doesn’t like the winters anyways.

I like reading Aristotle but do find the translations a bit tough to read usually. I don’t consider myself any sort of real philosopher, just your average over thinker I suppose. I do find a bit of irony in readings works thousands of years old on topics that have formed an entire self-help industry. For starters, this is interesting:

The first condition for the highest form Aristotelian love is that a man loves himself. Without an egoistic basis, he cannot extend sympathy and affection to others (NE, IX.8).

I’d definitely consider myself less emotional and more turned off in years past. Since then I’ve definitely grown out more, been more social and as trying as it is at times, put myself in more uncomfortable situations and come through them satisfactorily. Despite all the turmoil of this winter, I still feel in a more sane and confident position than times ago.

I have this idea in my head that personal growth is like climbing a mountain such that some periods are easier than others and there are times when we reach plateaus where the next course is so daunting that we’re often apt to wallow in our prior accomplishments rather than risk the failure of the future. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten anyone to agree with me on this, but screw them, I’m pretty sure I’m right. Alright, maybe my metaphors are a little lackluster.

Anyways, this quote got me poking through the Nicomachean Ethics a bit, and I’m taking pause here to try to transliterate and perhaps not re-read paragraphs more than a half dozen times.

… for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

I often find it hard to put reason to social matters. Over time I’ve been more willing to chalk peoples anger, passive-aggressiveness and other such bullshit to matters of ego whereas in the past I wouldn’t even have taken the opportunity to label it as much. I would have said it was out of people being complex enough to make evaluation far more expensive than the return would justify. Maybe these days I look back feeling like I’ve known more people of value than I did when I was younger.

Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge. And so the man who has been educated in a subject is a good judge of that subject, and the man who has received an all-round education is a good judge in general. Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit.

Why do I feel like I’m writing a paper for highschool all of a sudden? I’ve talked more than once recently about the frustrations with dealing with inexperienced people in trades, mostly technical ones, and never had the vocabulary with which to speak of what I though was driving them.

I have many more Microsoft certifications than open source ones, probably higher level ones as well. However, I’d say I know much more about open source software than Microsoft software, having built and maintained networks utilizing both. Sometimes on IRC when venting with my pals about how much time I had to spend beating my head against the wall with some Microsoft software due to some level of “you know it or you don’t” obfuscation, I get a “You should replace those windows servers with linux servers” from some kid. I’ll avoid the rant on why this is absurd, but on it’s face, it’s not a reasonable suggestion. If you care why you’re welcome to ask me anytime. Now I’m generally reluctant to write it off as “some kid”, having been some kid once in my life and had as many people hinder me as help me in those times. Good thing when crazy old men threatened to report me to the FBI my mother was always intelligent enough to question them and call their faceless bluff. Anyhow, I’ve talked to some chaps about this as it’s interesting to me, and I do think at the moment this quote sort of hits the nail on the head. Very rarely when I’m like “damn this shit” do the less experienced ask my why I say that, where on average the more experienced will. The end of the quote I identify with as well, as all of this has more to do with peoples motives combined with their experience, than their age.

Far best is he who knows all things himself;
Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right;
But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart
Another’s wisdom, is a useless wight.

This translates to me as it’s best to know, but when you don’t, it’s best to listen to those that do. Otherwise you’re not going anywhere.

Distractions abound though, I’m trying to get some actual personal work done for a change so this will wait for later.

You can convince yourself of a lot of things. I didn’t leave work until about 9pm tonight, so on one hand it makes sense that I’m still awake. On the other hand, with everything that’s been on my mind as of late, I’d rather not be. This Jean-Claude Van Damme movie is even terribly non entertaining at the moment. Apparently when dude’s in trouble though, they send boats full of helicopters full of marines. That would be nice to have at the disposal of a phone call next time ninjas attack me on the boardwalk. Is that Led Zeppelin?

Another night with tons of wandering thoughts on my mind with no appropriate or useful outlets though. I’ve been trying to revisit old thoughts of maslow-ish conclusions about life, probably mostly in an attempt to put some sort of sane explanation on the tribulations such that they’ll gasp their last breath and fade away, the strength coming from emotion no longer able to exist.

I keep thinking about perception lately, in an attempt to reason my way of out these places. It seems the more years that go by the harder that is though. Attempts in the past to further embrace my emotions have somehow backfired and left me more and more vulnerable to them.

The winter is almost over though, and for the most part I’m optimistic about things looking up from here, but still not expecting so much.