1920 x 1200

Kinda neat one…  Not often you end up rendering a fractal that ends up being all straight lines.  At least, not with the software/methods I use.

So, it’s Saturday night, and here I sit locked down in front of the keyboard…  Again.  Like so many Saturday nightsw before me, and so many after.  I’m really just taking a brief sanity break, and then will be back at it until the wee hours.

I was hard at it until about 9am this morning…  Slept a bit, spent some time with the family, then it was time to work again.  This is an unusually busy weekend for me – a whole raft of problems conspired to make me very busy with problems that, because of the SLA (Service Level Agreement)
we have with our customers, need to get solved so I can hand off 150 imaged, live on the web, servers by noon on Sunday.

I could complain…  Actually, I do complain about it.  But really it’s an industry wide problem.  Once you pass a certain level, there’s a long stretch in your career where your hours are pretty much 24/7.  That doesn’t mean I work all day everyday.  It just means I’m on the hook should something go wrong.  The issue is that there’s a whole lot of systems that I can troubleshoot quicker and easier than most other people in my company.

That doesn’t mean I’m smarter, or even more knowledgeable than they are.  It just means there’s a big piece of our infrastructure that I’m more familiar with.  Other parts, there are other guys who are more familiar with it, and they’re on the hook for the same kind of hours as I am.

Ideally there should be “knowledge redundancy” across the board.  And to a certain extent there is.  If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, our company will survive just fine.  Someone else will shift priorities, start working on the same chunk of our infrastructure, and working from a good general base of familiarity with IT in general and how our company manages systems in specific, over time will gain the same level of intimate knowledge of the bit of infrastructure that’s currently “my problem”.

The problem is really twofold.

1.  Budgetary/traditional staffing standards.  Companies have gotten use to having a key “Unix guy” or “Windows server guy” or “Storage appliance guy” or whatever…  A key individual who gets to know a specific set of systems.  Having a lead tech for a given area makes sense, because we don’t come cheap.  Usually, this person will have 1 or more people working under them (right now I’m blessed to have two PFY‘s), but there is usually a steep knowledge gap between the two.  With the day to day pressures of business, the PFY’s usually end up doing the grunt/chore work that’s not time sensitive, and the BOFH will end up perpetually on call to deal with the bigger, more time sensitive problems.

Here’s the funny thing, there’s actually a deeper hierarchy to this.  While I may be the BOFH to two PFY’s, I’m also the PFY to a completely different BOFH.  Which is fairly standard in really large IT infrastructures.  At some point, you might pull out of that loop and move into management or architecture design, but a lot of people spend their entire IT careers in the PFY/BOFH hierarchy loop.  Probably most people.  And if that’s the case, then you’re almost never not on call, and the hours suck.

2. Personality.  It takes a certain type of obsessive compulsive person to become any good in virtually any part of IT, and when I’m being honest with myself, I take a bit of perverse pride in the ridiculous hours I’ll put in to solve niggling little problems that most people could care less about.  And that just adds to the hours.

Which brings us to the title of the post.  Sure, I make reasonably good money.  Heck, I’d cleared my mortgage when I was 35.  But there’s a price to be paid for that.  And that price is time.  I let myself dig too deeply into things, put in foolishly long hours, and it takes a toll.  Emotionally, physically, and on my family life.

And I find myself thinking about this more and more as my daughter grows.  Do we really want to raise her to be a nerdling techie?  I dunno.  I suspect she might be happier doing something else.

Sometimes, I come across a page with interesting ‘comments.’  For those who might not know, most languages have a function where you can enter snippets of information that won’t be executed – they’re basically cheat sheet notes for the coder, or also used to help other people who might need to work on the code later on.  You’ll find all kinds of gems in code comments.  I’ve seen code with Haikus inserted, bits of poetry, rants against ex wives…  I even know a website where the author maintains his personal Blog within the comments of the website.  It’s un-viewable to anyone who doesn’t read the code of the site.  However, that site is a well known, widely used forum for web developers, so there’s probably a lot of people who read it.

Anyway, I was reading the code of a web page today, and came across some comments that reflect a certain, personality, of the developer.  It’s a big commercial site, so I think the coder was probably exercising a bit of “freedom” by inserting one or two extraneous comments.  I’ll share a couple of them here.

// Look!  A clock.  Niiiice.

(someone is proud of their spiffy clock generator code)

// Yay for Suckerfish!

(actually, this is a nice little tip of the hat – Suckerfish is a well known and widely used chunk of code used to generate those spiffy drop-down menus you see all over the web)

// Let’s define the innumerable global arrays that Javascript will use to keep track of things.

(someone’s a little bored with grinding out variables)

// …that’s a bit of an overstatement, don’t you think? there might be a lot, but innumerable?!

(someone’s boss is reading their code comments)

// Various data arrays.

(yup, they’re still bored with grinding out data chunks and variables)

Ok, maybe that’s only interesting to me.  I dunno.  Seemed kinda cute at the time.

One thing I should mention.  If you’re a sensitive type who’s easily offended by foul language, never, ever, read the code for the Linux kernel.   Linux kernel writers have issues with cuss words.

Right now, I have both an iPhone (personal) and a BlackBerry (business – paid for by my company).  I have them set up to manage email and my appointment calendar.  I even have RDP and VNC installed on my iPhone, so I can remote manage several computers from anywhere I can get a cel signal.

I have big data packages for both, and they get used.

And I  hate both of them with a rare passion.

They’re like electronic leashes.  Everywhere I go, I emit a steady dribble of beeps, bloops, and musical ringtones – (my iPhone in particular, I have a number of custom, “unique to me because I made them” ringtones, so I can determine what kind of call is coming in, or who is calling without having to even look at the caller ID).  Again, the level of customization and personalization I’ve commited to the devices might fool you into thinking I’m enamoured with the devices.

But let me stress again how far that is from the truth.

I customize them because I have no choice but to deal with them.  I go to lengths to make them less annoying.  Mostly, it fails.  I mean, it works to the extent that a snippet of late 70′s, early 80′s garage punk is a way better way of being notified of an incoming call than some chirping blip-bleep.  But it doesn’t make dread the call itself much less.

Half of my calendar year (excluding holidays) is spent “on call” – I can be no more than 15 minutes away from an internet connection (and thank god for mobile 3g sticks…  Does that count as a phone too?).  when the phone rings, there’s a good chance that something has gone wrong.  It’s going to be complicated.  It’s going to eat my time.  And it’s come at an inconvenient hour. Say, dinner time, or when a sane person should be comfortably in bed.

I also have to monitor pages and emails that are automatically generated by a mass of servers when they auto-detect something out of norm.  Given that we’re talking about hundreds of servers, it’s pretty much a given that the automated stream of error spam is pretty constant.  And even these are segregated by priority.  Some are more informational “Hey, Mr. On-Call man, I got a little busy at 8pm.  Try and figure out why when you get a chance.”  These come as emails.  A low tone bloop on my phone that I can (and usually do) sleep through.  Some are more urgent, of the “Hey, Server X isn’t responding to pings, and it’s IMPORTANT!!!” These come in as pages, and the noise is…  Well, let’s just say I’m not likely to sleep through it.

And it goes beyond that.  Because email is so important to the modern workflow, the fact that I can respond to it from anywhere, to a certain degree means the expectation is to actually do that.  I’m one of those guys you see who parks his car, steps out, and whips out his smart phone to read and respond to emails while he finishes walking the last couple of blocks into the office.  Distractedly missing his floor on the elevator (or absentmindedly walking off on the wrong floor), face buried in a BlackBerry.

From my side of that picture, it kinda sucks.  “Always on” is, well, draining.

When I have time off, I tend to turn my phones off.  Completely.  For days at a time if I can.  And then my mom ends up getting annoyed that I don’t return her calls (sorry mom, it’s not you – it’s the phone).

I dunno, I guess I just needed to get that off my chest.

And, well, the dang phone’s incessant reminders and nagging me with problems is the reason I missed the last two days’ worth of posts.

For those of you contemplating upgrading to Win7, or making any major OS upgrade (be it Mac, Linux, Unix, Solaris, whatev…), here’s some advice i posted on a forum, I thought I’d repost it here, on the off chance somebody reads it.

When a new OS comes out, if your current one is working, keep using it until the following:

3 months bare minimum have elapsed since release, preferably 6 months. This gives others a chance to uncover any hidden bugs and come up with solutions.

You have researched a clear migration plan for all critical software. Some will work, some will need to be updated, some will need to be replaced. This is a good time to figure out which ones you can live without. Use the 3 to 6 months after the OS’s release to figure out which is which. (Sounds tough, but thanks to google, you can figure this out usually in a couple of hours).

You have backed up all your data files. Not just the critical ones. ALL of them. If you don’t, then that one spreadsheet you thought you’d never need is the one you suddenly can’t live without 6 months after you’ve killed it.

Pull your old system hard drive and set it on a shelf. Hard drives are cheap. New OS, New Hard Drive. I can’t stress this last point enough. Don’t do an “upgrade”, failure rates are really high for any OS. By pulling the old primary drive and setting it aside, you have an instant fall back point should things go horribly wrong.

Disconnect any secondary hard drives/storage, but leave in place.

Install that spanking new hard drive you bought for your new OS. Install new OS on said new hard drive. If everything goes according to plan, start reconnecting the secondary hard drives/storage.

One by one, install your software according to your migration plan.

If things go wrong, try a second time just in case you fat fingered. After the second failure, re-insert the old hard drive you had with your previous OS and software. Go back to Google and try and figure out why it all went so wrong.

It sounds time consuming and labour intensive, and… well, it kinda is. But if you do it right, “transition day” is far more likely to succeed, and has a much lower stress level.

And the above advice applies to any significant OS upgrade. Mac, Linux, MS, Solaris, whatever.

Joe Consumer won’t do it. That’s why Joe Consumer isn’t making a good living in IT. Don’t be Joe Consumer.

I woke up with a head cold to beat all.  Tried to get some work done from home this morning but then just crawled back into bed.  I probably shouldn’t have tried to get some work done because I suspect I fat fingered some imaging in a vain attempt to be productive, and probably just ended up costing time for some other people in the long run.

Eh, the world will keep on turning.

That’s about all I have the brainpower to comment on today.

Well, just started my new job yesterday, and man, talk about jumping on a learning curve.  Surprisingly, this doesn’t bother me too much.  I’m playing with some pretty hardcore gear, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

Let’s put it this way:

If you’re a pilot, you probably want to fly fighter jets or the big airliners.  Something fast, or something big and serious.

If you’re a crane operator, you probably want to work the big Sky Cranes.

If you’re like me, and a geek, you want to work with the high end hardware, doing interesting things with cutting edge software and code tools.

It’s not about the pay, really, it’s about the challenge.

I got lucky.  I get to play with some really cool, high end hardware, and do some really interesting stuff with it.  Sure, I may be in a bit over my head right now, but from talking to the people around here, they all felt that way when they started.  The general impression I get is that it takes months to really get the swing of the toolset here.

And I’m ok with that.

At least I won’t get bored with it anytime soon.

So, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, but I changed jobs yet again a couple of months ago. I’m working at a “Technology Re-Marketing Company” now. Basically, we collect old, surplus tech from large companies, refurbish and sell what we can, the rest we sell to recyclers for various rates depending on the scrap value of the components.

Friday was a “slack” day, and we got a little bored. So a co-worker and I pulled out my digi-cam and got creative. Here’s the video:

So, I’m almost 2 months into the new job, and like any FNG, I worry about whether I pull my weight. Especially at a job where I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time surfing the net, working on my blog, finding excuses to take long lunches with buddies on flimsy “work related” reasons. Especially when I bill those lunches back to my employer.

So, this week I thought I’d test something out. You see, we have this wonderful database at work that we use to keep track of pretty much everything we do. Every time I talk to a client, generate an ad, place a candidate in a position, etc., a note gets created in the database. These notes are track-able across the company, so that different employees don’t accidentally trip over each other and call the same people too often, or waste time replicating work that’s already been done.

If you’re an old keyboard and database ninja like me, you can use this constant tracking to give yourself a summary of everything you do in a day. You can also use it to track what everyone else accomplishes in a day. I bet you can guess where this is going.

Sure, it’s only Wednesday, but I’ve been tracking my own activities and the activities of my “peers” – people with the same job description – all week. And guess what? I’m nowhere near as lazy as I thought.

Not only are my activities generating a lot more tracks in the system, but by analyzing the tracks (and yes, I have enough time to do this), my activity is actually generating as good or better results as people who’ve been here for years.

Go figure.

If you stood back and watched the office, some of the others might seem busier, but realistically, it’s a lot of wasted motion. Running around like a chicken with its head cut off type activity. The “star” employee spends a good chunk of the day throwing hissy fits over insignificant bumps in the road. And complaining about how many hours he puts in.

Granted, he’s putting in a lot of hours. And he’s perpetually “on call” evenings and weekends, but what does it really accomplish for the company? He outperforms me in measurable results, but only by a tiny fraction. It’s kinda scary.

I also get the impression that my boss doesn’t know what to make of me. I don’t tend to get worked up about things. I generally speaking come off as bored and unconcerned. Which is a fair assessment of how I actually feel. It’s not an act. I am bored and unconcerned. Something goes wrong? *Shrug* I’ll either fix it, or I won’t, and either way, the world will keep turning.

Huh, funny thing….

I just got interrupted in the middle of this post to solve a late call assignment. The senior partner dumped it on me because to try and get someone to show up for an assignment tomorrow morning this late in the day is a doomed prospect and I doubt he wanted his name associated with it. It took me all of 1 phone call to fill the assignment. Now I’m back to killing the last few minutes before I leave.

Either I’m a friggin’ genius (doubt it), or I’m a fraction less dumb and lazy than the other people in the office.

This could almost be considered a post from the files of someone who’s never satisfied. Or at least from the files of someone who pretty obviously doesn’t know what he wants from life.

Almost 3 months ago, I finally pulled the pin at my job with the Homeless Shelter. There were a number of reasons why I finally screwed up the courage to hand in my notice. First of all, I had achieved what I set out to do at that job. When I got hired on, I set myself two goals.One was to survive it for at least two years. A tougher challenge than you may think, given an industry with an average career life span of under 6 months. It’s a stressful environment to work in, and people just don’t last. My second goal was to work towards gaining a supervisory position. I achieved that when I was promoted to supervising one of their satellite buildings, and I held that position for most of my second year.

It may sound odd, but after I achieved the goals I had set out for myself, I got a strong sense of “now what”? Sure, I still got satisfaction from the work I was doing. Helping people in need can be very rewarding work. But, personally, I kept asking myself “Where do I go from here?” And I couldn’t come up with any clear or viable answers. There really wasn’t any other job within the agency that I wanted. Sure, I could have hung on and tried to “move up the ladder,” but that would have pulled me further away from “the problem” and more into an administrative role. Without fail, the people I had seen take this step began to lose their focus on the individual people in the system and become wrapped up in the administrative challenges of a large NGO.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, or that it’s a strike against the character of the people who it happens to. It is, in fact, a necessary transition in any large corporation or NGO. At some point, people have to stop looking at the trees, and step back to look at the health of the forest as a whole. I’m just saying that it isn’t what I wanted to do in that environment. I had simply gotten to know too many individuals too well, and I knew I would have trouble making the break.

Which brings us to the second major reason I left. I had gotten to know too many of our clients too well. And it was killing me emotionally to watch the slow, downward spiral that represented their lives. I still saw them as individuals, but there were certain patterns that would be consistent. You have no idea how hard it is to have a conversation with someone and in the back of your mind a little voice is saying “Buddy, you’ve got 1, maybe 2 years left of misery and then you’ll die.” Even worse was knowing there was precious little that could be done to prevent it.

The third major reason was the fact I was working nights, and long nights at that. It was taking a toll. My wife works a “normal people” schedule, 8-5 Monday to Friday. I was working 7pm to 7am, 4 on 4 off. This meant that our days off seldom coincided, and it seemed like we spent most of our time just passing in the wind. I’m fortunate to have a strong relationship with a wonderful woman, because the strain that my schedule was putting on our relationship was tremendous. If we had a weaker relationship, it would’ve collapsed under the weight.

And there were a hundred “little” reasons to leave. To be honest, I really didn’t realize how close I was to emotional collapse until after I left and I could feel the weight start to lift.

After I left I took almost two months before I even started to look for work. Essentially it was decompression. Getting used to a daylight schedule, and dealing with “normal” people on a regular basis again was fairly challenging. When I started to look for work, I was stunned by how easy the process was. I received a job offer at my very first interview. I turned it down. I ended up accepting my fourth job offer, doing something that, by all accounts, is a great line of work, with good pay, benefits (they even were willing to waive the waiting period for the benefits package), 8 to 5, Monday to Friday. And my office is located literally across the street from my wife’s office.

I have a nice corner office and work with a great bunch of upbeat, capable people. It’s low stress work, and in another couple of months I get a company car.

Dream job.

And I just can’t get “into” it. I’m bored out of my skull. I’ve been here less than a month and I find myself asking “Is this it?” This is supposed to be the American Dream, or at least the Canadian version of it. Which maybe is appropriate, because I feel like I’ve just been sleepwalking for the past month. I find myself daydreaming about my last job. Looking for excitement and “trouble” on the weekends. Surfing YouTube when I have work that I should be doing, but really just doesn’t seem that important.

I dunno. I should probably just get my head out of my ass and accept the fact that I’ve lucked out. This is a really good job. I should count my blessings and just get down to work.

Instead I find myself looking up other NGOs to see if maybe I can get a low paid, high stress job doing humanitarian work overseas.

Some goal. I gotta get my head screwed on straight.

I have a love/hate relationship with my job. A very big part of me derives a great deal of satisfaction working in an altruistic field. Day in and day out, I work to improve the lives of the homeless in my city, ease their burdens, and on occasion I even play a small part in helping people get “out of the system” and return to a normal life.

There’s a lot to be said for that kind of job satisfaction. There are lot’s of other reasons why I enjoy my work, but those are the big ones.

But there are some big downsides to my work, and it can be stressful on many levels. Day in and day out, I deal with people with serious depression and mental health issues. People who’s lives have been taken over by addiction. You see the same people coming in week after week, month after month, and in all too many cases, year after year. You get to know these people, and as much as you might try and keep a professional level of emotional distance, you get to like these people.

Watching people you like meet with constant failure takes a toll.

Then there are the people you don’t like. And there are plenty of these. But you can’t hold the fact that you may not like the person against them. It’s still your job to smile, be friendly, and help them in any way you can. This can wear on your conscience in odd ways. Some of the people I deal with are career criminals (of the mostly unsuccessful variety), sociopaths, and violent psychopaths.

It can be very difficult to maintain your sympathy for someone when they’re trying to bash your head in with a garbage can. Or when they bite you and brag about having AIDS.

When things like that happen, you tend to lose all sympathy for everyone you’re dealing with. At least for a time.

And after doing this work for several years, a well documented syndrome begins to kick in. It’s a syndrome that affects care givers, social workers, shelter workers, nurses, doctor’s… It can affect anyone who’s primary job is to take care of others.

It’s a syndrome known as “sympathy fatigue.” In essence, each person has a well of sympathy they can employ. The contents of that well vary from person to person. But eventually, most people’s well will run dry.

As much as the syndrome, and it’s varying effects, has been well documented, there really isn’t any known cure or treatment for it. You can’t just pull into the sympathy station and get a refill.

It’s why, nation wide, the average career span for a shelter worker is just under 6 months.

After two years of doing this, I think I might just be reaching that point. And seeing it coming and not knowing how to stop it saddens me. I took some time off over the past couple of weeks to recharge my batteries. Tonight I go back to work, and I feel ill. My stomach is churning, my ears are ringing, and I feel listless and tired, in spite of have nearly two weeks of solid rest.

I know from experience that I’ll be able to shake this as I get closer to going in. I’ll suck it up and do my job. But sucking it up gets harder and harder as each month goes by.

In the past two years:

Threats of violence against me/death threats: Constant. This is a standard response for many in our system when dealing with anyone who’s telling them they can’t do something, or can’t give them what they want right now. ie: “You can’t smoke crack in here,” “I’m sorry, but we’re out of food (or blankets, or shoes, etc.),” “Hey, put that back. Don’t steal from other guys in the same position as you.” Responses tend to run along the lines of “Fuck you, I’ll kill you you bastard.” “I’ll get you on the streets.” Yadd-yadda.

Actual assaults: This varies widely depending on where you’re working in our system. On average, over the past couple of years I’d say I’ve been assaulted roughly twice per month.

Serious assaults: 4 - This would be times I was actually injured, or something kinda “off the charts” happened. Biggest single standout incident: After about 7 months on the job, a client attacked one of our counselors. Trying to restrain the fellow, I ended up with a broken rib, and the fellow bit me and bragged about having AIDS. I’m married, and the thought of the possible implications of this… It rattled me pretty severely.

Clients I know who have died: Too many. I make a point of not counting. The worst of these was having to go to the morgue to identify a 21 year old kid who’d gotten drunk and fell in the river.

Success stories: A half dozen I know about for sure. One of the problems here is that you don’t get to see or hear about a lot of the success stories. You just stop seeing the guy. Mostly, this means they’re dead or in jail. But a fair number of the guys who disappear have just managed to find a way out. And when they find a way out, most don’t want to look back, so we never hear from them again.

Number of different people I’ve dealt with: Thousands. System wide, our shelter will house up to 1300 people per night.

Anyway. I’m gonna go cook myself a pot pie and try and settle my stomach. Once more into the breach.