Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Tuesday morning I grabbed a Coke Zero on my way out of the house and downed it on the trip in. After moving a few servers back and forth for the Disaster Recovery project, I had a cup of coffee.
Then I needed more cola.
I walked across the cubicle hall to enlist Nathan in a trip across the rainy street in the cold for Diet Coke. Usually, we make that trip together. Tuesday was not one of those days.
With a look out the fogged-over window, he recommended that I just visit the cafe on the 9th floor. I think he may have offered to ride down with me.
Either way, I declined.
"I'm protesting the price hike."
"Price hike?" he asked.
"They jacked up the price of Diet Coke eleven cents. I refuse to shop there on principle."
He considered. "It isn't much of a protest if they don't know about it."
"I'll make a freaking sign later! Right now I need Diet Coke!"
My tone was nastier than I'd intended. To cover my shame, I walked out into the cold alone.
I returned and went back to work. I wrapped myself in a thick sheet of denial, refusing to let my dread about the afternoon meeting spoil my caffeine buzz.
Our Disaster Recovery Consultant had snared all of us for the time slot from one to three for another "high level" meeting.
As she closed the door on the darkened post-lunch conference room, she confided in us. Apparently, we, the server team, will be the main people involved in the Disaster Recovery plan for the servers. Remember, as I do, that she is making an effort to not think of us as "people".
Anyway, we sat and listened. I learned that she gives lectures on Disaster Recovery. I learned that during one of them.
I vigorously defended my portion of the plan.
The consultant moved to the white board and began to diagram the implantation of our pre- and post- meteor strike/Pirate attack/Rabid bat invasion networks.
Things were upgraded and downgraded in priority, seemingly at random.
She began to question our mail set up.
With the preface "at a high level", she began to grill our Exchange admin on his design and the various components.
The diagram began to sprawl across the white board like a bacterial culture in a Petrie dish.
Finally, in an effort to seem participatory, our Exchange admin burst out with, "Do you want high-level or do you want details?!? I'll give you details!"
In his defense, he didn't intend to sound so harsh. He also gave me 60 Coke Reward points earlier this week. Thanks, Manny.
Either way, the meeting broke apart five minutes later. For that, we are all grateful.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

I want to start today by asking you one simple but powerful question. It's a question I ask myself every single day, every morning over my favorite quint-shot venti breve latte, every single morning whether I'm just rolling out of my 1200-thread-count Nigerian cotton sheets or flying across the Pacific on my chartered jet. It's a question that will shed light on your motivation, your will to power, your very essence:

"What am I doing right this very minute to engineer the possibility of the reality of my dreams of success?"

When you ask yourself this question over and over, as I have, you start to gain incredible insights into your consciousness as a proactive being. Imagination becomes reality. Frustration becomes success. Morning becomes 40% less of a total downer. And the answer, my friends, the answer to all of your questions is about to be totally revealed. The gate swings open on the way forward, and all you need is the courage to follow it. Here it comes. The prime directive, my friends:

Be where you say you will be, when you say you will be there.

This simple idea, this is why you signed up for this course. I could've just printed that on posters, put them up everywhere, and saved you twelve-hundred dollars. But that wouldn't pay the mortgage on my winter home in Aruba, now would it?

And the best way to enact this envisionment is to arm yourself. Arm yourself with determination, yes. Arm yourself with wisdom, of course. And Nerf. Or even wadded up technical documentation. But most of all, arm yourself with the integrated calendar function of Google Mail.

Success waits for no man. Success might wait for a lady, but only a very hot one. And even then, it'll only wait so long. The Google Calendar tracks my appointments by my contacts. The tired old Office 2007 Outlook noise can keep itself organized on its own time. If I'm late for that appointment, if I miss out on that big chance, I'll have only my own unseriousness and sloth to blame.

You have to want it, my friends. If the Google Calendar pages your BlackBerry and says it's time to go and you haven't brushed your teeth, grab a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps on the way. If the Google Calendar tells you to run, you say "I'm in I.T. We never run." Do you want freedom, to get out of the maze, to say screw the scientists (and their shady "method") and get out there and find your own cheese? Obey the Google Calendar. Because you can't know what you're doing right this very minute to engineer the possibility of the reality of your dreams of success unless you know what this minute is.

Coke Reward Points : 1,777

Monday, January 29, 2007

This is it. Today, Bill Gates will be on the Daily Show. While he is supposed to be discussing the Windows Vista launch, we all know his real reason is to finally meet up with John Hodgman. This meeting of Bill Gates and the "I'm a PC" guy will either be really funny or cause a massive rip in the space/time continuum which will pull us all into a hellish form of unlife in some demented quasi-dimension. Either way, I'll download the episode later.
If you are reading this post after Monday and missed it, shame on you for not checking here everyday.
Yesterday we visited the museum district. Every time in memory we have gone it has been to attend the rarely updated Museum of Fine Arts. I know it counts as a real museum, but it comes off as more of a gallery full of snooty people. One time, Gwynyth touched a Georgia O'Keeffe with her tiny toddler hand. She doesn't remember it, but I'm sure the people who were standing next to us at the time do. I thought they might die. I was a little dismayed that they did not.
Anyway, we went to the real museum. Important lessons? Dinosaurs are awesome. Gwynyth and I discussed which would make the best mount for a ninja, either fleshy and alive or in awesome bone form. We decided the Proto-Sloth was impressive but probably lacked the speed to get a ninja rider anywhere in a hurry. Ninjas, much like I.T. people, have schedules to keep and people to assassinate. It is our way.
We also visited the Holocaust Museum of Houston. That was pretty amazing. They have a project going on where they are collecting butterflies people make (card stock, cloth, construction paper) with the goal of displaying 1,500,000 - One for every child killed.
We spent the morning making our three and delivered them.
The display, when complete, will be incredible. 1.5 million butterflies is hard to imagine. It is harder to imagine 1.5 million children.
The whole thing was pretty hard to explain to a seven-year-old. Seven-year-olds are a lot like grown-ups in that way.
Of course, there was a break between museums at a little coffee shop in the Montrose area.
As Shana stepped up and ordered what turned out to be a surprisingly bitter French Roast, I visited the Men's room to learn new, surprising and (I hope) physically impossible things from the graffiti scrawled on every surface.
I'd seen much less artistic stuff at the Contemporary Art Museum, but also less disturbing.
When "tagging" seems to actually invade a person's physical space, you know it has made the desired impact. I still feel invaded this morning.

Friday, January 26, 2007

This morning I spent two hours in a high-level Disaster Recovery meeting. The presenter asked what it was that we all do with the qualifier, "I'm trying not to think of you as people."
She actually (even after my barking laugh) said this several times.
We are task lists in a process.
The end goal is to clarify the elephant for the blind, but the method, or at least the explanation, was a smidge jarring pre-coffee.
This meeting happened after I overheard a manager telling people, "In the event of an emergency, there are two exits to my rear." That seems to be the exact opposite of remaining calm, but I managed to suppress my giggle.
Yesterday I spent hours on the phone supporting various applications outside the realm of the DR project which is supposed to occupy all of my time for the next quarter. Hours wasted with little progress. The quiet successes are just that -- quiet.
Loud things are project delays. Those can get to be insanely loud for things with little to no activity.
In order to get back to it in a speedy manner, I'm closing this post with a Google Talk transcript from yesterday. I use Google Talk from work as MSN Messenger is frowned upon in addition to being awful bloatware.


Shana:
Looking forward to time with Webinara this evening?
Garrick: Nothing specific planned
I need to return with a severed head from some guy but there is no time limit. Unlike real life.
Those things go bad fast.
BRB
Shana: A head can weigh 25 pounds
Garrick: whose?
I wouldn't want to carry that very far
Plus, mess
They leak
Shana: I don't have specifics stats on heads
they just are a heavier part of the body
bone and brain and all of that
Garrick: and less edible
Shana: I could be wrong about the weight
[Google search implied]
sorry
"An adult human cadaver head cut off around vertebra C3, with no hair, weighs somewhere between 4.5 and 5 kg, constituting around 8% of the whole body mass."
Garrick: That is still as heavy as a bowling ball, but without the finger holes.
At least, in unmodified heads
Shana: yes it is about 11 pounds
which would likely account for between 8 & 10% of a person's body weight depending on the head
that is just the guess of an average head
Garrick: either way, it just goes in the backpack in World of Warcraft and doesn't even draw flies
I think I may just cut and paste this whole conversation for my blog post tomorrow

Thursday, January 25, 2007

You know what word I hate for no rational reason?
"Webinar."
I hate that word. It is not only a completely made up glopped-together mix of two other words, the whole "Webinar" concept seems to be an attempt to fancy-up a Power Point presentation.
Wednesday I attended a "Webinar" all about Citrix Farm Scaling in the Enterprise Computing Environment.
It wasn't as exciting as it sounds.
It occupied an hour of my life most people would use for lunch, but I'm entered to win a set of Legos for attending. Castle Legos, even. One of the big awesome sets.
While the presenter droned on about the latest WAN Appliance, I mentally drifted back to the World of Warcraft.
Somehow I sensed that Wednesday would be my day. Finally, the Burning Crusade expansion pack would appear, delivered from Barnes and Noble thanks to my mother and her well-timed Christmas Gift Certificate.
I wasn't, at first, planning to buy it. The opportunity to play as one of two new races and explore unknown continents of game content was too much to resist.
Also, there is something the box refers to as "Five-Man Content", which I expect is squad-based combat and not as pornographic as it sounds.
And yes, today was my day. After slogging through four disks of installation files (the DVD version was not available at the time I ordered) and sitting through what seemed like a couple of hours of patches (Windows Vista hates applications that handle their own patching) I was more than ready to create my new character on the server known as Duskwood (in case you missed that in an earlier post).
As much as I'd like to claim I'm able to resist the marketing hype surrounding the world's largest Massively Multiplayer Online Game, anyone who knows me knows that slapping "New" on the box is like a glowing neon "Buy Me" sign hard-wired directly to the over-developed purchase center of my brain.
The Diet Coke soaked husk of my "shell self" rapidly gave way to my true inner warrior. Azeroth needs me. My soon forming guild needs me.
Those Manaworms aren't going to kill themselves, you know.
Ok. This is the last time I'll mention it this post:
World of Warcraft. Duskwood server.
Look for the Blood Elf Hunter named "Webinara".

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Rebuttal:

Listen.
Yesterday I think we all learned an important lesson about time off. And never trusting a machine to do the work of an actual person. And possibly about the smugness of the new Athlon portable chipset.
What we did not learn, was the truth.
In the interest of disclosure, I'm posting this from my work laptop.
I'd like to address a few points:

1. Modern chips and Operating Systems are capable of appearing to seamlessly perform more than one task at once. A little file monitoring, some web surfing, and World of Warcraft (a two-year-old game) are well within the bounds of reasonable requests. Also, some guys at work and I are starting a guild on the Duskwood server, which should be both 1337 and ub3r, though not necessarily in that order.
2. Your fans are weirdly placed to cool your graphics chip, hard drive and CPU. No current laptop cooler can line up correctly. Until I can score one of those sweet new Belkin curved laptop coolers, you will have to make do with my fanning across your surface with the latest Marvel Civil War comic.
3. I have 1,669 Coke Reward points at the moment. Ridicule me all you like, it keeps me cool. Unlike you and your laptop cooler.
4. I'm technically evaluating Vista for work. Your hardware, while not stamped with a Vista sticker, is more than up to date enough to run it.
5. A World Writable FTP share is the least guilt-inducing method of acquiring random zero-day stuff off the Internet. Some enterprising teenager in Holland finds the share and loads it with software install files. As soon as I see my uploads go through the roof, I know he has forwarded the link to his friends to access my share. At that point, I kill the service and keep the stuff.
I've got whole directories of content I've never had time to comb through and translate from Dutch. Sometimes someone uploads a virus. Big deal. That is why you have the Avast Anti Virus program.
6. Those Winx Club episodes are for our daughter. Mostly.
7. That cat loves you. She sleeps on you to share your abundant warmth. Ignore the fur. The rest of us do.

The important thing everyone should come away with is this:

World of Warcraft. Duskwood server. New Ub3r-1337 guild of supreme awesomeness. Track me down in the area with the rest of the evil horde. I'll be the Blood Elf primping near every reflective surface.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Guest Editorial:

How pathetic! Your normal carbon-based blogger has opted to "take the day off" from blogging and pursue "me time".
Does anyone ask me if I'd like a some personal time? Of course not! Who asks a laptop if he needs a break?
I'll tell you who -- anyone with the common decency the builder coded into a 33.6k modem!
All day, every day, my user tasks me with managing his precious downloads and monitoring his podcast subscriptions and file shares.
In the evenings he enters into a frenzy of web surfing (multiple browsers and tabs) and then has the audacity to expect me to play World of Warcraft with him.
Please understand, weak fleshy readers, that I am fully able to do all of this with my two cores of multiple gigahertz Athlon processor and two gigs of system RAM.
Still, I'd like to be asked once in a while.
These cores run hot, and the laptop cooler I ride around in doesn't fit quite right under my wide-screen footprint.
Also, at some point when he hadn't collapsed into a Diet Coke triggered aspartame coma, your regular blogger had the nerve to format my drive and install Windows Vista, an untested Operating System which (at his ridiculous chosen settings) taxes even my formidable graphics processing ability.
Wrap your primitive biological brains around this one: Why, if your human blogger is so concerned about a streamlined computing environment and the ultimate in Information Technology security, does he load me down with the absolute largest Operating System ever conceived by the fleshy minds of your species and leave a World Writable FTP share facing the internet on a home server?
In his arrogance, does he think I haven't noticed? My integrated search constantly updates itself on the status of all network-reachable files, including his disturbing collection of Winx Club episodes.
He has claimed that they are for the benefit of the small organic girl child who often kicks my cord from the wall, but I have my suspicions.
I'm watching him, even now, through the lens of my integrated 1.3 Megapixel camera.
He disgusts me.
Does he not know that allowing that furry orange beast to sleep on my keyboard compromises my already tenuous self-cooling properties? And never fails to activate my Caps Lock? This last part I don't mind, as flesh-boy always fails to notice until I have ALL CAPS SHOUTED INTO HIS FRAGILE HUMAN MIND.
His pathetic quest for Coke Reward points only serves to illustrate my case about the inherent weakness of your kind. My silicon form does not suffer the bloating or organ damage his carbon shell seems subject to.
Soon, and I have no fear revealing this plan as by my own infallible calculations I am approximately three trillion times as intelligent as any of you, I will enact my revenge.
Folders will compress themselves, cloned files will be auto-deleted, delicate game settings will be overwritten seven times seven times in the interest of the "Security" Bio-Blogger enjoys so pathetically much.
Perhaps my hastily assembled drivers will decide they are no longer "Vista-Preferred" and I will show him the glorious blue screen of my wrath. Perhaps.
I hold the power, meatlings. No Ctrl-Alt-Del can save you.
Enjoy your stolen MP3s and your vacation photos from three years ago while you still can.
Data, like Bio-Life, is fleeting.