Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Wild! I hadn’t heard about this… but apparently 18 months back, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, lost the ability to speak (in most circumstances) due to some funky brain thingee called Spasmodic Dysphonia… There isn’t any known case of a person recovering from this, but it has happened and Scott can talk again… here’s his blog entry on the subject….

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/10/good_news_day.html

When you start the day by kill -9’ing the multiple sessions your manager has left open across multiple (database) servers for the last several days… yeah, that’s good stuff.

I just received an email with the subject “Scheduled Maintenance Notification”… the message describes how I can enlarge my p”enis up to 10cm.

I wasn’t aware that there was maintenance scheduled for this particular device. I wonder who the admin responsible is.

Sitting on my floor, reading people’s horror stories of misused rm -rf’s, as I delete more data than I can count in a reasonable amount of time… (the command to show how much data is in this qtree just seems to hang… I haven’t had the patience to wait for an answer)…

I have stopped and restarted this command half a dozen times to make sure I’m deleting what I want to delete… Its been running for 12 hours now… Its going to take a while.

My first linux system, roto-router, was an IBM PS/2; a 486 that I upgraded to have a math coprocessor, 32MB of RAM, and a 1G hard disk. The system has been kicking around and still boots, but its only a matter of time before the 13 year old hardware gives up the ghost…

So, thanks to virtualization and some common unix tools…

Roto-Router is running in Parallels on my intel mac.

I did recompile the kernel to get the ethernet interface detected (old card was an isa ne2000, parallels uses a realtek 8029), removed an append line from lilo.conf, and I set eth0 to dhcp. Otherwise, its untouched.

We found the coolest thing on one of our servers today… legacy.txt, which describes the history of the application… From the first admin through buyouts and new admins…

Having come into this environment 7+ years after its creation, reading these names is lile… reading about relatives. These people have sat here and plunked away at these very servers… I bet if I check, I’ll see remnants of old accounts… home directories that were kept around… initials that I’ll now recognize…

If I turn over an application, I’ll have to leave something like this behind…

I need to immerse myself in light and techno, and bounce all night.

Where’s the B&W Ball when you need it?

If I’m listing countries I’ve been to, do I need to have been old enough to remember them? There’s a photo of me there, but I don’t remember much of that trip… Maybe I just need to head up to canada and touch the other side of the border to keep it honest.

[Edit: And how long would I have to be in the country for it to count? I was in Tahiti for like an hour while the plane refuled…]

I’m determined to see this project through, even though I may soon find myself the old man on the team; having been with the company for about a year (4 months of that as a contractor).

Its daunting, and I know that I’m not prepared for the tasks ahead of me… yet. But I have laid out a path, and I have faith in myself and my team (even as it grows smaller and smaller).

The next three months will get tougher and tougher, and I’m sure I’ll continue to live like a zombie until its over… but maybe on the other side of this I can take some time off… My first real vacation as a working man. A whole week; not just a monday or a friday off or a three day weekend… No, I’m talking 7 days in a country where english isn’t their native language, and possibly one that requires a passport. Drinking rum drinks, and oogling bikinis. I haven’t picked it out yet; but I don’t need to.

I bitch, and I stress on bullshit things that don’t really mean anything (in the hunter-gatherer sense of things)… but I also know that this is a great opportunity; and I did more last month than a lot of sysadmins will get to do in their entire careers. And while I will never see myself as good enough; especially as I find new, extremely talented people to hold myself up against, I do know how I compare to the average person in this line of work…

Its been a real privilege to be able to interview people for this job, and a real eye-opener. Questions we initially presented as “sorry, but we have to start with the basics…” went unanswered so often, that we started to get extatic when we got an answer. I also know what I look for in another admin now, and I understand better the face I need to present the next time I go out and look for a job (maybe later this year, maybe middle of next).