© 2004-2008 Corey Henderson
May
5
Yesterday was my first day on the “Tools & Automation” team, where I proceeded to kill a big project. It was the whole “First day on the job and I’m already killing projects”. But now, on the second day, we find out that the team lead (manager) is leaving.
“Get the hell out of this team before something else happens!” said one of the other team members to me about this situation (jokingly, of course).
Gotta love coincidences.
Apr
30
Starting on Monday, I’ll have moved to a different department in the company: Tools & Automation. So my new job title; Tools & Automation System Engineer, or TASE; as in, I shock people.
I should start carrying around a Taser to be funny.
Jan
15
Jan
9
The on-call rotation at work happens on Fridays at around noon; the guy going off-call goes home, and the guy going on-call has a week of stress ahead. Part of being on-call is the on-call phone.
The guy going on-call this week has a lot of mobile devices. I mean a LOT! His personal cell phone, his personal blackberry, his work cell phone, and now, the on-call phone. A comment was made to him as it was handed to him:
“Just so you know, your chances of getting laid decrease by 33% for each cell phone you have on you.”
I jumped in on the comment and made one of my own:
“Also, your chances of getting interrupted while being laid go up by about 33% for each cell phone.”
Like I’ve said in the past; our on-call phone is worse then a newborn baby in terms of amount and frequency of noise. And if you ignore it, it only gets louder.
Dec
17
At my last job I had no one who even remotely knew what I was talking about most of the time. Well, that’s not true, there was one knowledgeable guy there who I befriended (and is now co-authoring a book I’m writing) and I probably spent more time in his office chatting then I probably should have. But for the most part, I felt like no one knew or even cared about technology, and that was the hardest thing for me asside from the mediocre pay.
The job I have right now is a lot better, and I’m about to hit the 10 month mark. I’m in a department full of system engineers, none of whom talk to any customer. In fact, the only people outside the company we talk to at all are hardware and software vendors, either their sales guys taking us to lunch, or their support engineers on the phone because something broke beyond repair.
I’m a lot happier here, but when I start talking about the kernel they all give me a blank stare, and that’s a little depressing. In fact, sometimes I have to wonder about these guys … just the other day I overheard one of them was asking about how to use the rpm command, and he comes from a background heavy in RedHat. Um…
But we all have our flaws. Like this particular post of mine; I started it, wrote in it, and now that I’m a few paragraphs in I don’t know where I’m going with it. Sometimes I get an idea in my head and I go running with it, only to find myself a mile down the road going “OK now, what was I doing?” Good thing that it doesn’t happen all that often. But it’s all stuff I want to say, who cares if it isn’t organized thought. Sometimes it just takes too much time to have something be true journalism, and I find myself just not posting something simply because it isn’t a complete straight thought.
Oct
16
I get back to work after lunch today, sit down, and find that a coworker is in the middle of talking to someone from another department:
“He called me at 2am, panicked that he couldn’t get it up.”
Oct
15
The Director of Architecture where I work said as he left the NOC room:
“If you find anything incredibly stupid in the world, blame an architect.”
Oct
13
In dealing with a SAN (Storage Area Network) you often have to do the same type of task more then once when it comes to the size of a partition. For example, they’ll resize it using their back-end storage control panel, then we have to resize the partition table, then resize the physical and logical volumes with LVM commands, then run a filesystem utility to resize the filesystem that is on it.
After some poor communication about whether a certian disk export was resized yet or not; they said:
“We’ve up’d our Quota, so up yours!”
I’m not sure if he was trying to tell us to resize our physical volume… or insulting us.
Oct
13
Here I will introduce the “quotes” category of my blog …. some things just have to be shared.
This particular comment came from the manager of one of the sites we host – he wanted to know why their site was down and said he hasn’t touched the website code in almost a month. After we check it out and tell him that apache wasn’t running (and on one of the nodes, not even installed):
“As of this moment, the site remains down. Does the Apache situation have to be fixed before it goes back up?”
Sep
23
I’ve been saying it for a long time, and I’m finally going to start keeping a list of reasons NOT to use SuSE-Linux which is everything that I come across that is just off-the-wall crazy shit caused by one of Novell’s SuSE Linux distribution.
So far, I just have one thing there, and I’ll search my memory later on to add stuff that I can remember. Anything new I come across gets added to this list.
I’ve always not liked SuSE Linux. I had to stomach listening about it from Charlie, one of my sister-in-law’s (now ex) husband, rave on how great it is. I had to live through a year of using it at a previous job. And now that I find myself 8 months into another job that is mostly a SuSE shop, after many many years of using a variety of other different linux distributions, I don’t think my opinion is very bias anymore. I’m not much of a fan of Debian Linux either, but I’m to the point where even Debian is more tolerable then SuSE, and coming from me that’s saying a lot.
