Older blog entries for avriettea (starting at number 51)

I fucking hate software.

Let me start with memory usage. To round out the top ten, on my powerbook, with a gig of ram (which has allocated 8.9gb (!!!) of swap to defend itself):

1. Finder 1.2gb
2. firefox 678mb
3. Photoshop CS 380mb
4. "WindowServer" 332mb
5. Word 2004 314mb
6. Keynote 308mb
7. iPhoto 295mb
8. Pages 264mb
9. "ATSServer" 234mb
10. iTunes 230mb

Now, Photoshop, I expect that from. And even iPhoto -- it's got a lot of stuff to keep track of. And iTunes is playing some music (Jah Wobble incidentally), and keeping track of 11,000 tracks. But what the fuck is the finder's problem? Or firefox's? What bugs me is I could buy another gig of ram for my powerbook and I'd still be equally fucked.

Now, I'm gonna rant a little different. I got iWork 05 recently, and was thrilled to death to have Pages so I no longer have to use Word, which is slow, and hideous. I decided, being prudent and jobless, it might be a good time to update my resume. My resume has gotten kind of cluttered over the years. It's gotten me a few jobs, but it is really time to make a resume that I like. So I made one. In pages. And yay, it turned out okay in PDF too. But every fucking recruiter and HR droid on the planet wants MS Word. So, I export from Pages to Word, and get this garbage. It's totally goddamn fubar. And if I sent that to a catbert, I'd get laughed at. I certainly wouldn't get the job. And that same catbert wouldn't take a pdf. So I wasted my damn time making a resume I liked, and I suppose I'll just have to go with the resume that "seems to work" and hate it.

Some bitches better start calling me about some jobs. Real damn soon.

Ah. After Jah Wobble came Underworld. Cups is good. Will have some more of my Aberlour and perhaps drown my misery in progressive house and scotch. I'd say "fuck all y'all", but it isn't really your fault. We're all here because we like software, and want to see it suck less. I just wish we were there NOW.

Very depressed.

Getting a lotta shit done on the wikipedia, and I've even started working on the wiktionary (not really my bag, but there are a lot of articles in the wikipedia which should really be moved over; I've been doing that).

Would like to transition blog from advogato to Blogger so that I can integrate my flickr feed with it, but the guy who wrote the Net::Blogger interface didn't deign to add "date" fields to newPost(), even though Blogger supports it. And, naturally, like all of the goddamn cpan (besides me!) he doesn't answer his fucking email.

So maybe I write a scrape-and-post script myself. It'd be useless because of course it would be me-tailored, and I'd only use it once, and it would only be because that guy didn't write very good software. That would suck. And I'd rather read about fucking catamarans anyways.

I guess it's evident I'm in a foul mood. Fujitsu hasn't called, so we're still on hold on the whole moving to hawaii thing. I interviewed at NASA the other day, but managed, like a complete asshole, to be almost an hour late for the interview. I did pretty well on the technical part of it, but everyone was late and running around irritated that I had put my interview into the middle of their day. So I'm not crossing my fingers.

Somebody also recently asked me for my opinion on company blogging policy. I'd just like to point out this link, which I think zhaoway found first:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Policy

And then my friend Colin had to come along and point me at this. Ugh. I'm not the blogging posterboy. And again, I hate that word. But I do want to repeat here, what I said to him, because I do believe it is important.

it's entirely moot. think about it. regardless of whether it's free speech, or whether it's libel against the company, or divulging secrets, companies need to have policies on the subject because people are going to continue to do it. and they need to have policies that make their employees feel like they're part of a company that cares about them or they will FORCE their employees to blog negatively about them. oroboros, my friend.

And so here ends another useless rant about joblessness and weblogging and all that other drivel. I wish I had some better news to report, but I don't. Rest assured, if I hear good news from anyone, advogato will be somewhere in line to hear it.

I've never really liked Justin Frankel, but I did spend some of today reading through his weblog. While most of it is (like this weblog) just personal effluvia shat out onto a helpless internet increasingly devoid of actual content, I did find one thing that disturbed me.

It occurs to me that Mr. Frankel, with $86 Million and probably in the neighborhood of tens of thousands of shares of TWX, doesn't really have to think twice about whether he wants to work for himself or someone else. He can pick up and leave. Or, he can seed his own company, and do whatever he likes.

For the rest of us, the only solution really is self employment. Justin is right. He's more right, I think, than he thinks. What he says applies to any trade in which we take pride in our work.

Let me elaborate. (hey, I have a captive audience, right?)

As a systems administrator (which is the hat I wear today), I take pride in what I do. When I am the sole (or one of a group of) administrator of a machine, I want to do the right thing. I don't want to cut corners, implement quick fixes, or do any of the other things that generally get handed down from the pointy-hairs. At AOL there were thankfully few (well, only really one, but I'm just saying that because I'm bitter) pointy-hair types. However, in general, we are forced to subject our craft to things we feel harm it. We are forced to commit what we feel to be crimes against the craft. Be we programmers or systems administrators or database administrators.

The only answer, if I may repeat myself, is self employment.

If I may digress for a second, I recently found the 43 Things website. On that site, one of my objectives is get rich. Note what one person had to say about this objective:

...there are three easy ways to become rich. you can win the lottery you can become a smart successful criminal you can have an excellent, simple, outstanding idea and sell it.

i do not play lottery. I do not have the attitude for crime. I need an idea.

I find this frustrating. I do not have the thousands-of-options/shares. I do not have even one million dollars to seed a business. I have become a business in Virginia, and I manage to come up with a few thousand dollars a year in income for that business. But it's never enough; I am always beholden to some larger fish than myself for income. That larger fish is responsible for 80% of my creative direction in my career and thus life.

It disgusts me that it is so hard, in this free nation we live to be actually free.

In other news, I'm famous in Japan. Cool.

I suppose there's no harm in mentioning that I have again transitioned employers. Thankfully, I am not prohibited from discussing the terms of such termination this time.

I was fired by voicemail. In actuality, it was pretty funny. Never really been fired before, and certainly not by voicemail. I guess it doesn't really bother me, because I didn't really like the job anyways. Struck me as one of those half-hatched 1998 companies. In fact, I continually joked with coworkers that I was working for The Underpants Gnomes. Wage good, quality of job pretty good, but business model and company morale both scored pretty high (or is it low?) on the "wtf" meter.

So since some people are actually reading this, I'll give the details of the so called valve. I mentioned some time ago that a move to Hawaii was possibly imminent. And a move which would result in my working on what is really one of the coolest telescopes on the planet (love it) with Solaris (love it) and of course, living in Hawaii (love it). I realized, as I contemplated the position, that I would probably be paid a little bit less. And we wouldn't be able to eat at places such as the excellent Ruth's Chris Steak House (there isn't one on the big island). We would be leading a seriously subdued life. And it would probably be for several years. But what we would be trading for all that decadence and consumerism would be passion. To be passionate again about one's career. Fuck yeah, man! Work on the Subaru! Watch stars! That's what the really cool shit in life is. Not writing "Metrics and Monitoring Systems." Not writing database migration procedures. Fuck all that.

So I did it. We went to Mauna Kea. We stayed in Hilo. It was cool. It was way cool. The work didn't seem like it was anything I couldn't do, just your standard Solaris shop, running on Solaris and Fujitsu hardware. The tricky part for $job[-1] is that this seemed to occur at roughly the same time as I was in the hospital with food poisoning. As it turns out, they really were happening at the same time. I was in the hospital in Virginia one day, and at Urgent Care in Hilo the next day (or a day or two later, whatever). The point was, I was deathly ill, and the only thing that kept me alive during that period was lots of MS Contin, Prednisone, and Phenergan. Sick lot of drugs, that. At any rate, there's this whole 5-hour time difference between Hawaii and Virginia, and the hotel had no internet access, so my keeping in touch with anyone back home was pretty impaired. They didn't like this, and while I did try to keep in touch, after about a week of my being "just gone and presumably sick", I think they decided to fire me (or perhaps they saw flickr and/or advogato where certain mentions of Hawaii were made).

At any rate, it's all past now. I get to find a new job. This time, one that I like, instead of just the first one to come along and put and offer under my nose. It may be the job in Hilo, in which case, I get to move, too. That's always an experience.

So the valve, folks, really amounts to just a sort of cathartic flush of the old job down some employment toilet, and the hunt again for a job with passion. That smiling geek from a few weeks back was smiling because he knew he was going to Hilo. He knew he was going to see the Subaru and the Kecks, and that there was a spark there, somewhere, in what seemed like a pretty droll career.

Lesson learned? When in doubt, flush.

note: It is kind of a shame that I don't get to work with some of the coworkers from the last job, I had gotten to like some of them. Mo and Shawn in particular. Sorry, guys.

So I just finished reading Singularity Sky (I confess I am most certainly an extropian), and decided to take a gander at the Wikipedia's coverage of Charles Stross. It turned out to be mostly useful, and as complete as can be until I finish some of his other works.

Somewhat disturbingly, I wandered across this in Mr. Stross' blog. It tells a familiar story of a person being fired for blog existance/content. Again, I'm contractually prohibited from discussing my relationship with AOL post-termination, so I won't mention any specifics that I might find familiar, and you will find said entries on advogato either edited or deleted.

It is sad that we continue to see this. If I were my current employer, and I were reading this weblog, I would wonder to myself, "gosh gee, why has alex posted these two drink recipes titled safety valve to his weblog?" Alas, I think it will become apparent in the next few days what needs to be done; the means necessary to overcome. What it takes to restore passion in a career. What is worth fighting for.

It's not position. It's not CTO. It's not HNIC. It's not owning root and all the install servers and the inventory and the keys to the datacenter. I wish that were it.

I'd say more, but instead I'll quote Mr. Stross:

As with most journals where the author thinks they have a sympathetic audience, an unsympathetic audience can find copious quantities of ammunition.

Root gets old.

Safety valve, approach two:

• 6 oz lime juice
• 6 oz grape juice
• 6 oz honey
• 6 oz myers legend (or myers dark) rum
• 8 oz bacardi 151
• 16 dashes bitters
• 16 dashes grenadine

As before, store overnight in a 1L container in the freezer. Meter doses of appx 8 ounces into 12 ounce tumblers (or pint glasses) with plenty of crushed ice.

Repeat until desired effect is achieved.

Safety valve, approach one:

• 3 oz lime juice
• 2 oz grapefruit juice
• 2 oz falernum
• 2 oz simple syrup
• 5 oz captain morgan's private stock
• 4 oz bacardi 151
• 4 oz myers legend (or myers dark) rum
• 4 oz appleton estate rum
• 4 oz flor de cana grand reserve rum
• 3 oz maraschino liquer (cherry Pucker works fine)
• 8 dashes pernod
• 4 dashes angostura bitters
• 12 dashes grenadine

Store in 36-ounce (1L) container in freezer overnight. Pour over crushed (1 cm^3) ice into a pint glass nightly after work, followed by another if necessary. Do not exceed two doses in a single evening. Storing in the freezer is essential to maintain consistency. A thicker consistency is much more pleasant. Depending upon amount of ice used (more is better), recipe provides 4-7 doses (eg, enough for a week).

It is important that consumption occur in the company of loved one(s), and that discussion of work, nor performance of work occur.

comments welcome

mirwin, this saddens me. I cannot see the value in a forked wikipedia.

In other news, my safety valve is almost ready for release.

Back during my defense work days, we got to the point where I was having three hammerheads (two shots of espresso in a cup of coffee) a day, drinking too much at night, taking a mild steroid to overcome the hangovers, and various opioids for the migraines and back pain that comes from doing work in datacenters (great environment for machines, not so good for people).

I made the decision that it wasn't healthy. I was getting sick a lot.

I'm getting back to that point again. Not quite there, but I'm not sleeping well, and the infighting and backbiting at work seems to be coming to a head. Even before leaving AOL, the stress was building up due to the team being short-staffed, and some "complex relationship problems" with my boss.

When I spoke to my doctor about getting into that rut again, he told me that I had to get out of the industry. That he has a lot of patients who come see him for 3 months supply of Ambien, Xanax, antidepressants every 3 months. It destroys them. Programmers, sysadmins, IT managers, everyone.

Why does our field do this to us?

I'm working on my solution. I'll keep you posted.