Diary of a Wolfeman

I was reading this when it made me think of how glad I am that I chose my current profession.

It seems almost axiomatic that a person wouldn’t want to deal with anything resembling work once they got home. Mechanics don’t want to work on their own cars, plumbers don’t want to look at the leaky faucet, and the groundskeeper’s own yard looks like crap. I really like dealing with computers, but even then, sometimes I let things slide probably longer than I should.

They say that to find happiness, you should find a way to make a living doing something you love to do, but you have to be careful with that so you don’t get burned out on it. Seeing the same thing day in and day out can wear on a person no matter how much they love what they do.

So like the mechanic, the plumber and the groundskeeper, I use my skills to do the routine maintenance in hopes of preventing a failure, even though I may skimp on the major service tasks. I keep things generally running smooth.

But boy-oh-boy am I glad I didn’t become a gynecologist.

I took some time off from work today to see if my old swag-gathering skills were still up to par – OSCON’s Exhibit Hall being free and all. Turns out that swag is getting better – I scored 4 T-shirts this time :)

I also ran into an old friend of mine from high school. Ben was the stereotypical computer nerd back then – skinny, with coke-bottle glasses up until our senior year and about 98#s sopping wet. After graduating, though, he went off to college in Berkely and went native – when I came back to Portland, he was sporting the baggy shorts/poncho/chin scruff style of a SoCal hippie.

As of not too long ago though, the scruff, shorts and poncho are gone and he’s looking much more the standard sysadmin. When I ran into him today, he was also holding a definitive open-source icon – free beer. Allow me to explain:

In the open-source world, there is more than one definition of “free”: free as in speech and free as in beer. Speech here in America is pretty free, but you do have to watch your P’s and Q’s so as to not get yourself sued for slander or other such crap. Nice in theory, but can be tricky in practice. Free beer, however, is usually just that – the person that gave it to you doesn’t really want it back.

Well, one of the exhibitors decided to embrace this idea, and trotted out a keg of MacTarnahan’s. This got them quite a bit of attention, of course. It’s a shame I don’t like beer.

The rest of the show was much as you would expect from a geek convention: every power outlet I saw had laptops plugged into it, every table I saw had at least one latop on it, and there was about a 20:1 male/female ratio. There weren’t any cell phones there though – everyone I saw had a Treo instead.

Or nearly so, anyway. No, this is not a remark about the weather – today I did a cabling walk-through for a Baptist Church that’s expanding.

Not your everyday experience. Full-on rebuilding of the whole church with over a hundred new voice and data drops. If I’m lucky, they won’t take our cabling bid but will hire us for the new computers they need.

Once again, I hate HP printers. Different client this time, but the software for these things is just so stupid. Not only do they load half-a-dozen things in the background at boot, they make it impossible to add features later – you have to uninstall all, then go back and do a full install with ALL of the additional crap to get the one added feature you wanted beyond the print drivers. I remember the grand old days when printers did their own work instead of foisting it off on the PC.

And then there’s Symantec – when it works, it’s great. When it screws up, it takes everything with it. Another client had an install of System Works go south on him, and the only way to get it out is to run the SymNRT removal tool – which must remove EVERY Symantec product in the computer, not just the one you want to get rid of. And even then, it likely won’t work, and I’ll have to rebuild this guy’s server from scratch.

Oh, I found out what happened to the new property manager Saturday – he went to the wrong house. In his defense, the house he went to is occupied by a man with a similar first name as mine, but he didn’t think to carry my cell number with him, so he still loses points. So far, he’s just breaking even – willing to come to us to talk about the new agreement, but can’t find the house he’s managing.

Woof.

While Pookie wa in the shower, I got an email reminding me about OSCON this year, so I signed up and figured I should probably request a half-day off so I could cruise the exhibit hall.

Hmmm…webmail no-workee. Server down? Nope, none of our IP addys are responding. Crappity. The T1 is down.

Which means that the server that monitors all of our client’s servers is disconnected. Oh Fuck.

ISP tech support must know about it, because the hotline dumped me to voicemail after a 3-minutes hold time. I’ll try again now…hey, I got through. Turns out they are just doing maintenance, but my line will be down for about another hour.

WTF!?! You can’t send me an email or call me to let me know that my most important server will be down for over an hour? Ok, those of you not in my line of work are probably thinking “Dude, it’s after 10, chill.” No. In over three years of running an ISP myself, the only times I dropped the network for more than ten minutes it was because something blew up, never for maintenance. And by “blew up” I mean “smoked so bad I had to drive across town to pick up the spare head end out of the warehouse”.

And it still only took me an hour-and-a-half. (Traffic was light and the Beastie jumps when you kick her.)

Nitwits.

Anyone who knows me understands that I file “Reality TV Shows” under the heading “Trash of the Most Heinous Sort” – usually it is so terribly massaged toward false drama that it makes me sick.

I have to admit though, that I have been casually following ‘Rockstar: Supernova’ lately for two very important reasons: Storm Large and Jill Gioia.

Storm Large is a hometown girl from right here in the Rose City. She’s had a pair of standing gigs at Dante’s and on the Riverboat for some time now, and it’s great to see her up there belting ’em out. She got to open the first show with a rendition of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” and I was impressed by how well she sang it – it takes guts to tackle such a classic. I’ll even cut her some slack on the jumbled line in the first verse of the chorus.

Her second performance, however, was a bad choice: Cheap Trick’s “Surrender”. One, her voice is too deep for it, and two, she was in full-on lounge singer mode. I hated it.

Jill Gioia has been touring with Trans-Siberian Orchestra for some time now, so I’m already pretty familiar with her work. She’s a tremendously talented singer, and I’d love to see her hit the big show – provided she still does the TSO tours too, of course :)

The first night, she went out and belted Janis Joplin’s “Piece of my Heart” and just nailed it to the wall. I need to find the video of that performance so I can load it into my MP3 player. She dropped to the bottom three, unfortunately, and had to make up some lost ground on the second show. To prove to the guys she can sing without the rasp she chose Evanescence’s “Fallen”, a song that had already been done (poorly) by another contestant. Damn – another trophy on the wall.

The third reason I’ve been watching is an unknown: Patrice Pike. The first night, she was absolutely channeling Grace Slick for her performance of the Jefferson Airplane classic “Somebody to Love”. Impressed the hell out of me.

Enough TV for now.

When about half of your readership bitches at ya for not scribblin’, it’s time ta get scribblin’. (So what if it’s only two guys…)

There is a freaky-huge moth currently bashing it’s brains out on the flourescent fixture here in the garage. Just thought you’d like to know.

Work has been it’s usual interesting self today. Tasked with making calls to past clients to drum up new business, I got nearly nothing done because the phone kept ringing – sold a new printer + installation and scheduled a call for tomorrow.

I also got bonus points for the way I handled one of our clients. I’ve been trying to get a VPN working for him since May, with no luck. It’s based on a Linksys RV042 router with the QuickConnect VPN client software, which refuses to connect. Linksys tech support has been singularly un-helpful to the point of idiocy. (They have asked me twice now what the setup is, after I gave it to them in my original email, and they quoted it back to me in the second. Fucktards.)

Yesterday, I threw in the towel and told the Bossman about the problem and that we needed to find a different solution. We recently partnered up with a contractor to handle my overflow, so we brought him into the client today to look things over. The client reported that he has been quite happy with my handling of the situation to date and was even happier to see us bring in an outside party to find a new route to their needs. I am about 400 times more pissed off about this than the client is, which is extremely unusual. Insurance guys must be more patient or something.

Anyway, this contractor, though…wow. A dyed-in-the-wool Micro$haft FA-NA-TIC. This guy didn’t just drink the kool-aid, he stayed late and licked everyone else’s cups clean. He simply CANNOT wrap his head around any solution that does not involve a MS product. I will admit that his server skills are better than mine (one of the main reasons we brought him in), but Jehosephat! I thought his head was going to explode when I explained to him the layout of this job and that I wasn’t using the VPN functionality built into the server due to it’s un-ease-of-use. *Foomp!*

So, yes he will be useful, but the only time I will ever ask his opinion is when I know the solution will have to be a MS product, as in “what version of server2003 should we sell them?”

Birthdays are a bitch, and more so the older you get. You always end up sitting there late one night near the actual day thinking about what you have accomplished in the preceding 365 days. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Better yet, let’s not, because it will piss me off and depress me even worse than I already am.

I love America and being an American – DOC knows there are worse alternatives.

For now, any way. Check back in a couple years, that may be different.

Can’t lose my whopping readership now, can I?

Hmm…let’s see….
It’s frelling hot out lately. You knew that.

Tolerant went out and got herself a new cell phone the other day – one of those new Moto SLVR phones (SiLVeR? SLiVeR? SLaVeR? Whatever). It’s really pretty cool – good camera, waaaay better voice quality over her last phone, and it just looks neat. The killer application as far as Tolerant is concerned, however, is the MP3 capability. The girl is quite hooked on the idea of having an hour or two’s worth of music in her pocket, rather than the little fanny-pack thing she used to carry her CD player in. Can’t say as I blame her, I love my Zen player too.

Work has been interesting lately – I’ve gotten to the point that I want more than just monitoring capability for the clients I deal with, I want remote control so I can spend less time on the road. Turns out that our monitoring software provider has some cool additional tools – that don’t work with the version of software we have. Of course. I’ve spent sevral hours over the last few days researching some alternatives, and I think I have a couple of contenders for a replacement. Both systems offer some really cool features, and one of them is a lot cheaper than it has any right to be.

And here’s where I run out of things to talk about again. Blame it on a sun-baked brain that can’t focus.

I just love those talks you have with a teenager that start off all right, then trail off into a depressing slump for the teen in question. My work here is done! I’m beginning to think this is a lousy week.

Nothing huge is going wrong, it’s just little things here and there. I was watching “My Name Is Earl” earlier tonight, and started wondering if my own karma needs some attention. Well, I did give about 20 minutes of free advice to a non-profit today. I know, it’s not much to go on, but the guy is a priest…

The last time there was a major HR-shakeup at a company I worked for, said company put a freeze on all wage increases (including cost-of-living) and hired a new Director of HR at some ridiculous 6-figure salary, paid to move him out to ‘Vegas, and then fired him a year later. Pissed off everyone in the company and caused a huge drop in morale. Had they taken all that money and just spread it around from the bottom up, it would have done the workers a world of good.

This time, my boss realized wew were getting dicked over by our HR outsource, and fired them. During the negotiations with our new provider, he managed to get enough of a discount that the company can pay for all of the employee’s health care, instead of just 75% like he was before, for the same price. Yeah, I could use a raise, but considering how much time I spend blinking my eyes into focus lately, I could use cheap healthcare too. I don’t have all the details yet, but I’m hoping vision is in there or at least real cheap.

In other news…there isn’t much. I finally got that bonus check I was promised, but it sucked. Whee. I’ll get excited when he ups the percentages so that bonuses hit triple-digits.