Older blog entries for squiggy (starting at number 7)

Woke up to some killer thunder & lightning this morning. Had a nice refreshing shower, and a bite of breakfast. Did some morning stretching. Stopped to get gas on the way into the office, and got it for less than $1.25 for the first time in ages. What a nice morning. I like having more complete control over the way I live my life.

Spent a few minutes getting Mon configured to check up on our new internal mail server. I suppose the next logical step would be to actually build the internal mail server. This is going to end in a bloodbath between Haiyan and myself.... she comes from a research computing background. We're gonna butt heads over this 'bleeding edge' vs. 'solid and stable' thing. Oh well, should be fun.

I think I found my new watch. Anybody know anything about these things? Like wether or not they're crap, or where I could go to try one on, or especially where I could find one cheaper?

Had a going away luncheon for Scooter. He's fallen prey to the great techy gold rush of the late '90s. He's been workin' out in the bay area for a while, but now they are well and truly leaving town for good. *sigh* I 'll miss 'em.

But that and the impending departure of Chris has lead me once again to think about the conversations I've been having with him lately... The same conversation I've been having with myself for a few years now. Basially, is it time for me to leave? Have I grown as much as I can here, and staying longer only stiffles me as a person? Perhaps staying in the midwest is one of the reasons I'm so brutally unhappy all the time.

But then again... why would I be leaving? Running to the remote possiblilty of something or someone or somewhere better? Running away from myself? Running away from what I see myself becoming or maybe failing to become? Would I be running away from my family problems?

You know... I think probably that the real benefit of therapy is not in helping yourself get through the really bad times. Rather I suspect it's in helping you cope with the questions that arise when you start to get better. *shrug*



[Thoughts?]

I've been here like 2 hours, and I've already accomplished more today than I did all day yesterday. This in spite of the fact that we had a fire alarm go off the second my butt hit the chair. I almost went straight home after that. Kinda glad I didn't though. If I had phone service in my new apartment, I probably would have worked from home today, but then I would have missed out on all the politics I've dabbled in today : service ownership, what it means to rewrite things, and the difference between "My boss said..." and "This is what's actually going to happen". *sigh*

The boss man usually does such a good job of filtering out the politics. I hate it when he's out sick.

I've already dealt with three "DHCP problems" today. One of which looks like it's actually a minor WINS issue, one is our ongoing battle over the lease DB file *yawn*, and the other appears to be a network problem... my guess is it's a cable.

In addition to carrying the group pager, I did some '-admin' work for news (why the hell did they feel the need to create the 'codewarrior.*' heirarchy? this should be under comp.*), dhcp, and majordomo this morning. Looks like I'm gonna do listserv for Peg next week. This work stuff is starting to be a lot like work. And all this before I've had my morning's caffeine.

Had a nice lunch with my Bro. We gossiped about dad for a while. I like havin' Wes 'round... I'm gonna miss him when he heads back to school. It's quite amazing that he manages to be at least as cynical as I.

Man alive!! People that don't even know me are actually reading this!!! How odd. jschauma, man, yer web page is out of control!

Hrm... still listed as Journeyer. *shrug*

Had a nice lunch at the Encore Cafe with Jeremy, Adrian, Chris, and Chris' lovely sisters. It was fun. I got there late (because I had to drive across town from my office, while they all walked about two blocks), had to leave early (see below), and had difficulty talking while I was there, because the place is so damnably noisy. Some heavy duty baffeling and noise cancellation gear would do that place a world of good. I'm told I'm not allowed to have a crush on Chris' little sis.... some technical detail about her being half my age.

While at lunch, I got paged about 30 times for alledged DHCP problems. Turned out to be nothing... just Haiyen experimenting with a few code changes. I've GOT to get that girl thinkin' more like a production service admin. When you have a backup server for testing and experimenting, then you USE THAT SERVER for that purpose, and leave your primary alone. *sigh* Sometimes she's so smart... sometimes she just doesn't think.

Oh well... I expect she will grow out of it... or she will suffer my wrath.

Had a good weekend. I did nothing, on purpose. I sat out on my new front porch, and reread some more of the Cryptonomicon. I napped intermittantly. I did enough push-ups to make my chest hurt. Discovered that I have a TV antenna (I get like 6-7 channels!!). I arranged some of my crap. And eventually I forced myself to take a couple more jeep-loads of stuff from the old place to the new one.

I'm approaching the point where I'm starting to ask serious questions about what I need to keep, and what I need to toss. I'm also getting into the areas where it's difficult to extract my stuff from my soon to be ex roomate's stuff. *sigh* This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Got my 'pute moved, and set up, just in time for a big electrical storm. Everything still works. Need to move my desk now, and get the home LAN goin' again. Once everything is running again, maybe I can get to work on all my personal programming projects.

The bro came over to see the new place, hang out, and watch a few movies. That was fun. Then we went to a party, which held lots of promise, but in the end was just lame. Because I'd been conducting Tequilla Stress Analysis experiments (turns out that Tequilla doesn't react as well as you'd think to having lime jello stirred into it... it never really 'set'.... it just sort of congealed), I actually let Wes drive Bettie. Good thing too... we saw about 40 cops on the way home.



[Man I'm a long winded S.O.B.]

Having a long talk with Chris via email about yesterdays 'Man! Everybody hates their job except me' diary posting. A lot of talk about investment of self, and taking things too close to heart. I think it bears further discussion, but I missed last nights 'beer and bitch' session 'cause I was waiting on Alix to help me move.

It's a difficult thing indeed to call someone up and say "Why the hell aren't you here?!?!? Yer LATE!! Get off the damn phone with your boyfriend, and get over here dammit!" when they're going well out of their way to do you a favor. But it's almost more hassle than it's worth sometimes. Sure, using your truck to move my bed makes things better, but sitting on my ass with my bed in the front yard for 3 hours, wondering where you are pretty well overrides that.

And another thing, how the hell did I end up as a Journeyer all the sudden? I mean, you know, sure, I like the status, fame, glory, and the ladies that come with it, but I was kinda hopin' to bag a hottie with an apprentice fetish before I moved up the programming food chain. *sigh* Foiled again.

Doh! Got called out on that relatively minor web thing I've been studiously avoiding working on for the security office. Guess I better hammer that out today. A few lines of SQL, and liberal use of CGI.pm, and it should be done. I'm still not at all certain how this became 'my project'. I mean I don't even work for the group that wants this.

Had a lunch date with an RLG (Real Live Girl) yesterday. Angie, the girl I went to high school with. It went as well as could be expected I suppose. Ed was supposed to call for a full report, but I never heard from him. That got me thinkin' about some stuff. I think I'll turn my love life into an open source project.

But enough about that... There's currently a meeting going on about the accounts database redesign. Being out of the loop kind of sucks. Not that I especially want to be involved in every last little detail, it's just that I hate being the only person in my group thats not in a meeting. Reckon I should count my blessings. It's probably just me having trouble with the notion that something could possibly work properly without my input.

Why is it that all the people in my life are unhappy with their jobs? I mean, not just 'man I hate the fact that I have to have a job' kind of stuff, but real 'I specifically hate the specific job that I have, for these specific reasons' kind of stuff. Sure, sometimes I hate parts of my job, and right now, I'm suffering some post-traumatic-vacation stress syndrome that makes me more than a little unproductive, but I don't just have that blanket 'every aspect of my job sucks' thing. What gives?

Is my job just better than other's jobs? Am I just too stupid to realize how bad mine is? Perhaps I hate my life so much, that by comparison, my jobs seems pretty damn good. Or are others expecting too much from their jobs? Maybe I don't expect enough. *sigh*

[Your thoughts?]

Right on. Yesterday's little tweaks to expire times on the alt.binaries.*.erot* groups seems to have pulled my news servers out of trouble for now. Had a good talk with Josh about some signifigant news server upgrades in the not too distant future.

Had a chat with C.R. from the NOC about DHCP in the residence halls. He needs database access to map MAC addresses to usernames. Shouldn't be a problem. We also discussed a scheme to enforce DHCP on the Halls nets, so we have better data for security incident tracking.

Today I *must* get the Kerberos shti done for DHCP registration.

Went to dinner at the Crazy Horse last night with Chris and Ed. It's just not the same without Kira or Randalyn (sp?) as our waitress. We auditioned / interviewed a new waitress, one of their friends, Sandi... she did ok, and even handled the trivia section of the interview rather well (she came up with the character name 'Maxine' from 'Being Jon Malkovich').

We're very finicky about our food.

Back from Wisconsin. The airshow was fun, as always. Need to build an airplane. Perhaps I could turn it into some weird opensource project. Need to think on this a spell.

My news servers are acting funny again. I got called by the office on my cell phone about it. Tried to fix it, while driveing the jeep 80MPH up the interstate, dodging semis the whole time. I rule. Disk filling up, inbound feeds stop, expires run, we have no spool. I'm tweaking expire times now to try to combat it... we'll see, I suspect.

The news must flow.

Today I should be neck deep in some dhcp code, but I'm not. I'm struggling with a little programmer block I think. I should be working on the authentication mechanism to associate usernames with MAC addresses and stuff.... but I don't wanna. I've been wrestling with the little problems in this for so long that I have this weird latent dread. I start to work on it, and I find something else to do instead. It's not helped by the fact that I have so much other legit work to do.

Hammered out some more idea about keeping a history of MAC addresses and the leases they have had with Josh on thursday and friday. This may end up being a releasable product if I ever get to work on it.

Josh tells me he managed to hand build and send a DHCP request packet, so things are looking good for the new diagnostic tools.

Gotta go score the keys to the new apartment. Yea.

This morning was a beast. Got paged on my way to the shower... nameserver troubles. About ten minutes into me trying to diagnose / fix them, I got a note from our support center that went to our entire staff, telling us "Administrators have resolved the problem".

Me, I went ballistic. I called them, and raked some poor hourly over the coals for a while. Then I mailed his boss, and said in no uncertain terms "When I get paged about a problem, then I own that problem. When I own a problem, I get to say when it's fixed. It's very far from fixed."

I probably owe them an apology... but this is as close as they're going to get to one.

All morning long I spent trying to figure out why 5 AS5300s have suddenly decided that people dialed into them weren't allowed to do _some_ nameserver queries. This is a difficult problem to reproduce, and I'm running short on patience.

I'm stuck between the modem guys who think it's a DNS problem, and the DNS guys, who are 100% certain it's a modem problem. I live somewhere in the middle... I think it could be either one, I just know it's still a problem. But I'm finding it hard to care, since I don't really own either service (I'm backup DNS-admin).

Perhaps it's good that I'm going to Oshkosh Wi. this weekend.

Things are mostly good to go for tomorrow's big DHCP server move. Yahoo. I have a bit of last minute code to punch out... stuff to take a snapshot of the log file, make some sense out of "who has what, when", and save it periodically. It'll make it easier for me to get security related info to the security office goons when they ask for it.

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