Change

Change, even change for change's sake alone, is often very good. Sometimes you just have to give your status quo bias a kick in the shins, to teach it who's boss. Or, to put it in other words:

Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you know not what disaster may happen on earth. If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves on the earth, and if a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie. He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap.

As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.

Ecclesiastes 11:1-6

I've barely a week left until I move to Houston. It's nice not having any clue what my life will look like in a year.

the wild self

Alex Tabarrok, on gift giving:

Someone gives you $100 cash. You go out to the store and buy a set of car tires. Purchasing the tires clearly maximizes your utility. Now imagine that instead of $100 the gift giver gave you a set of car tires. Would you be happy that they know you so well that they purchased for you just what you would have purchased for yourself? I don't think so.

The example illustrates that we want the gift giver to buy something for us that we would not have bought for ourselves. Or more precisely one of our selves wants this - the self that is usually restrained, squashed, and limited, the wild self, the passionate self, the romantic self.

Gift giving, therefore, is about reaching out and giving to the wild self in someone else. Why would we want to do this? Because we want the wild self in someone else to be wild about us.

I concur.

them long words are hard

Last night at the KC Chiefs fantasy camp event I sat through a 15 minute Q-and-A session with one of the PR reps for the KC Chiefs. I about fell out of my chair when he described all of the back-office administration activities: "You really don't see it, but there's always something matriculating behind the scenes". Oh the irony...

Yeah, yeah, I use words out of context all the time. It's still funny, though.

my speed-reader is broke

I read pretty fast compared to most people. Probably about a page a minute for normal fiction. My definition of "normal fiction" is made up of a completely abstract combination of variables such as page size, font size, writing style, complexity of plot and general likability of the book, none of which is very well defined in my mind. I just know that when I'm reading "normal fiction", I tend to read about a page a minute. Which is a whole lot slower than some people:

I read fast. Really fast. I read about six paperback pages a minute, give or take.

Her secret is to skip things. I think I do a fair amount of skipping as well, but probably not nearly as much as she does. Anyway, that's not my point. I was reading the comments below her post about speed reading when I came across this statement:

In my limited anecdotal research, I have found the reason why some people read so fast and others cannot is that the latter learned how to read by actually "speaking" the words to what they are reading in their minds, as if they were reading out loud. Those who can read very fast uncoupled that need to "speak" the words in their minds to comprehend what they are reading.

I was stunned to discover that simply reading his hypothesis caused me to start sounding out words in my mind, which momentarily crippled my ability to read quickly. It was frightening. I can't imagine living in a world where general reading requires effort. Yes, some study reading will always require concerted effort to comprehend, but in general I expect words to leap naturally off the page and into my head without any conscious effort on my part.

Now, if my speed-reader has recovered, I'm going to go finish reading The Last Templar. It's in no danger of becoming one of my favorite books of all time. But then, it's a book about modern conspiracies related to the Templar Knights, and I'm not sure that there's ever been a book on the topic that was *really* good, as opposed to just being readable.

a rose by any other name would smell as sweat

I now own a football jersey that has been autographed by Casey Wiegmann and Derrick Johnson, smells of sweat and has my manager's name on the back.

My manager told me yesterday that one of our vendors had reserved a spot for him at a Kansas City Chiefs fantasy camp. He was busy tonight, so I got to go in his stead. We toured the stadium, received personalized jerseys (not Chiefs jerseys, unfortunately), played a 30 minute scrimmage at their practice facility (Wiegmann and Johnson were the coaches), ate some pizza and generally had a blast. I caught a touchdown and also scored on a 2-point conversion. Pretty cool.

The coolest thing has to be the jersey. I mean, anybody can get a cheap jersey autographed by a couple of athletes, but how many have a cheap jersey autographed by a couple of athletes, but the jersey has their manager's name on the back? I'm going to have to start wearing it to work every Friday. I'll make him call me "Schmieder".

something to remember

If you must drive into a ditch when you're on a secluded country road, do it when there's a helpful cowboy with his helpful cowgirl in a big pickup truck complete with towing chains driving down the same road about 30 seconds behind you. You'll be glad you picked that time to drive into the ditch, I assure you.

fighting fires

I think I've figured out what it is that I most enjoy about sysadmin work: fighting fires. No, not literal fires. If I ever have to fight a literal fire while working as a Unix system administrator, things will have gone very, very wrong. The fires I'm talking about are the system outages that have to be resolved as soon as possible, and even then it will be too late. The kind of outages that have customers asking for tens of thousands of dollars in refunds, the kinds of outages that have CEOs screaming for status reports every 30 minutes, the kind of outages that involve dozens of people unable to do their job until I fix the computers that they are depending on.

I'm exaggerating a bit--clearly, any job that features this kind of activity on a daily basis is a job that won't last long, if only because any company that has so little stability in its computing infrastructure is doomed to fail. Alternatively, any sysadmin who sees so many outages happening on his watch is a sysadmin that really needs to go back to answering phones for the help desk. The whole point of employing sysadmins is to prevent these sort of outages from ever occurring, after all.

But any IT shop that is frequently changing its hardware or software infrastructure is going to experience unplanned system outages or will face projects with urgent deadlines that absolutely must be met. These situations can be stressful, but it's a kind of stress that keeps me interested in what I'm doing. Much better to be working under pressure than sitting around waiting for something to happen, doing hardware inventory, reading or writing documentation, looking for ways to tweak software to gain incremental efficiency improvements. I *like* knowing that people are depending on me to get a job done.

We had another outage on our LDAP infrastructure for about 30 minutes yesterday morning. It could have been much worse, but I and a coworker of mine were on the problem immediately, had it diagnosed, developed a procedure for fixing each LDAP client, and had over 300 servers repaired in 30 minutes. It was *fun*. I want that kind of fun more often.

This job has been a bit too boring for my tastes. Fortunately, that should be changing. We just kicked off the planning for a massive overhaul of our core database infrastructure. We'll be migrating our storage platform to a new Hitachi SAN, our database servers to new Sun v890s, and our network gear to new Cisco switches.

This isn't that big of a deal, except for the fact that our customers want no downtime whatsoever (sad for them, because downtime will be unavoidable), and our management wants us to simultaneously be upgrading all of our customers to new versions of our proprietary software platform. And they want all of this done by the end of the 1st quarter. So the entire project constitutes one big fire. I have a feeling I'll be working a *lot* of Saturdays for the next three months. I'm glad. I'm tired of boredom.

good bye, self respect, you'll be missed

A couple of months ago a friend of mine showed me a book he had recently obtained--a 19th century 1st edition by a notable author, if I recall correctly. My thoughts went back to that book as I was unpacking some of my own books last night. I picked up an old book, took note of the decrepit binding and yellowed pages and thought to myself "I wonder if this is an early edition?"

I'm ashamed to admit that it took me at least five seconds to remember that I was holding a copy of a work by Aristotle. Yeah, I'm brilliant. But at least I give me something to laugh at.

chillin'

The furnace repairs are underway, finally. A second HVAC guy came out this morning to replace a control unit and quickly discovered that the problem wasn't in the control unit, but in a gas valve. So the original guy who mis-diagnosed the system on Saturday brought over a new valve and he's working on installing it. Here's hoping he doesn't blow up my house.

In the mean time, here are a couple of links that kept me warm while I was chillin' on the couch last night:

• Books are "for to be to get you dead".
• If I buy a new blender I can have myself a delicious cochicken smoothie.

it's a cold night

I usually enjoy cold weather, when I don't have to be out in it. It tends to lose its attractions when I can't get my furnace to come on, though. It's less than 50 degrees in my house right now. I own four blankets. I'm sleeping under four blankets tonight.

The furnace stopped working sometime Friday night. Excellent timing, what with my family staying with me that night. A heating & air guy came out to take a look at it the next day and he determined that the furnace was fine and the thermostat was fine. The problem was a control unit between the two that was receiving the "we need heat" signal from the thermostat but wasn't passing it on to the furnace. Jiggling some wires seemed to resolve the problem and the furnace fired up. Problem solved.

Until I came back from a holiday party tonight, and discovered that the furnace was out again. I jiggled the wires, tightened the connectors, jiggled the wires, and gave up. It looks like the circuit board in that control unit is hosed. Aren't I lucky.

I need to buy a space heater.

not much ado about something

We had a big meeting at work to discuss some ownership changes that are coming. But I can't tell you what they are, or what they mean--I know the basic change that is coming, but I don't know how much impact it will have on my employment situation, how much impact it will have on the company as a whole, or anything of any real significance at all. Even if I knew any of these things, I'm sure the FTC would require that I keep my mouth shut about it. So. Not much ado about something.

In the context of the announcement, a managing director from our new ownership team stated that "you never want to make an omelet, because once you mix everything up you can never take it apart again, and you end up with a schmoozle". I'm not positive that he actually said "schmoozle". It sure sounded like it, though. I know the point he was trying to make in context: we shouldn't expect massive changes or instability in the near future, because trying to integrate disparate organizations can create chaos and turn successful businesses into failures. I can understand why he'd want to follow that philosophy in managing his businesses, but I don't think I like that philosophy as a way of living my life. I've lived that way for a long time, and it's really rather dull. Besides, I *like* omelets.