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June 10th, 2008
09:42 am - Heading West
With some luck and hard work, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) swan_tower and I will be heading west today. I'm packing as much as will fit into the Prius, and then we're en route west as rapidly as is reasonable, shooting to be in San Mateo some time late Friday or early Saturday so that I'll be around in time for our rental tour on Sunday and my work start-date on Monday. If you need to reach either of us, cell phones are probably the most reliable method, at least until this weekend.
To those Indiana folks I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to, I'll be coming back to help my lovely wife pack our worldly possessions in advance of her move, which probably will be occurring some time around August or so. Otherwise, if you're ever in the Bay Area, drop me a line.
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April 25th, 2008
12:32 pm - Employed Again! ...Or Rather, Soon...
Today, I officially accepted an offer to start working for Akamai Technologies again, this time in San Mateo, California, starting June 16th. I'll be a Senior Network Operations Engineer, which is a step up from my previous Akamai position. This means that, while I'm still looking for work in the (very) short-term, I've got a new job on the horizon. ...on the west coast.
Phew. That's more or less over with. Now just the worrying about moving to California. :)
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April 3rd, 2008
07:47 am - Unemployed Again
As of this morning, my erstwhile employer filed Chapter 11. I am thus out of work. No, I don't really have more information than that quite yet. Likely, I'll be diving into a rather frenetic job search process now.
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November 18th, 2007
12:28 pm - Mid-November in Texas
So ... the last month has been a rather jam-packed one. A brief update on what I'm doing and where I'm doing it seems in order.
This last week, I've been at the Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA) in Dallas. I loaded up on tutorials, focusing on Solaris 10 administration and performance tuning, Cfengine, shell scripting practices, and OpenLDAP. By the end of the week, my brain was pouring out my ears, as these classes are very much akin to drinking from an informational firehose. While at the conference, I reintroduced myself to a few people, got to know a large number of very interesting folk, joined the League of Professional Systems Administrators (LOPSA), and got far too little sleep. The vendors also gave me nifty toys, including bar towels from Google, a half dozen T-shirts, a rubik's cube, two bags, and a handful of nick-knacks. All in all, a definite win.
In order to save on lodgings, I stayed with my in-laws, who live only about a half hour away on the DART, and my boss said that it would be acceptable to VPN in to work remotely the first few days of this coming week. Consequently, since my lovely wife and I were intending to spend Thanksgiving with her family, I arrived in Dallas on the 10th, to return to Indiana on the 25th. Apologies to those who weren't aware and had hoped to do something with me during that time.
After a lazy Saturday and a (perhaps excessively) brisk workout this morning, I'm feeling far more human. The conference had started to wear on me, and I hadn't even been drinking that much with the LOPSA folks. ...not that this was any fault of theirs; they made every effort to make it easy for me to do so.
I've also had some stressors of late; good friends of mine have had some really rough times, and there has been some drama surrounding my grandmother being put in a nursing home. ...but I've got my heath, a pretty good job, and a lovely and talented wife. Overall, I really can't complain.
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November 29th, 2006
04:09 am - Adieu, Google Answers
So sayeth google's official blog. It's unfortunate. I always thought that it was a nifty idea.
That said, I now try to take a nap before my next downtime-related action. *sigh*
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November 27th, 2006
03:30 pm - Radio Silence
Tomorrow night, my employer is going through a large datacenter power cutover. This means that, with the exception of this evening (where I'll have a minor amount of time to myself), I'm going to be working my butt off or asleep from now until Wednesday mid-morning. If you don't hear from me during this time and would normally expect to, that's why. If you absolutely need to contact me, call my cell or contact swan_tower. Otherwise, I'll hopefully emerge Wednesday evening or Thursday some time.
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November 8th, 2006
03:37 pm - Gods Be Good!
Not only are the political prospects of the country looking mildly positive, including Hastert stepping down from the GOP leadership since my last post, but it would appear that the major power outage that we haven't really been preparing for appropriately at work has been pushed back from next week to the week after Thanksgiving.
This is clearly a day for great celebration. Well... celebration for people other than Faith Hill at the CMAs.
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November 1st, 2006
04:57 pm - Thoughts on iPods and Podcasts
So, for those who aren't aware, I drive an hour each way to and from work each workday. This means that I spend about two hours in the car, Monday through Friday. Ten hours per week. That's a fair amount of time, particularly in an area with no kickass radio stations. As a consequence, I have grown to consider my iPod to be indispensable. I've had people ask me what the hell I listen to on those trips, and ... well ... I might as well tell everyone in one fell swoop.
First off, I'm a big fan of Audible.com, where I have a Premium account. This means that I can get the New York Times (hour-long) daily digest for free, and for some time, I did precisely that. Unfortunately, the narrator they have for the digest has a somewhat soporific voice, and I generally started to drift off around the business pages. Plus, given the Podcasts I've been listening to, this has become somewhat redundant. More important is their audiobooks. I've long since gone through most of the audiobooks I found interesting in my local library, so Audible's selection is awfully nice. At present, I'm working through George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. The first three books are all narrated by Roy Dotrice (who played Wesley Windham-Price's disapproving father in Angel and Mozart's disapproving father in Amadeus), whom I can recommend wholeheartedly. (The same goes for Lenny Henry's narration of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.) Believe me: with audiobooks, the narrator is about 70% of the selling point.
This accounts for about 30-40% of my listening time. The rest is generally eaten by Podcasts, of which I can recommend several (most pulled down through the iTunes music store, rather than through an explicit RSS feed):- CNN and NPR offer five minute news summaries, which are updated hourly and which I listen to nearly without fail.
- Ebert and Roeper's movie reviews are also available as Podcasts (generally released on Thursdays), though I'm a much larger fan of Roger Ebert than of Richard Roeper; consequently, Ebert's recent absence due to cancer-related surgery almost prompted me to remove this one from my list o' podcasts.
- Jim Lehrer's NewsHour also offers most of their stories, interviews, and panels as podcast downloads, which accounts for the majority of my news consumption.
- NPR's All Songs Considered has a weekly podcast (released Thursdays) which accounts for much of my exposure to new and offbeat artists. If I were to point to a single one of these as a recommendation, this would be the one, as the sheer breadth of music they present means that you will find at least one track on a given show to be interesting.
- NPR also offers their "Story of the Day" and their "International Story of the Day," which they cull from their various news programs (All Things Considered, Day to Day, Talk of the Nation, etc.).
- Have Games, Will Travel is a more-or-less-weekly podcast by Paul Tevis (ptevis), focusing on board games, card games, and role-playing games. There's a surprising subculture of gaming podcasts out there, and Tevis is perhaps my favorite.
- The Viking Youth Power Hour is a group of four Chicago guys in their late-20s to early-30s range who put out a surprisingly interesting show which explores largely left-leaning modern popular culture, magic(k), and the quality of the alcohol they're imbibing during the show. moonandserpent introduced me to this show a while back, and I am slowly working my way through their archives.
- Woot.com, which amounts to a Home Shopping Network for the techie set, also puts out a daily podcast which is short, amusing, and occasionally informative, which is more or less all I ask of a podcast.
- Likewise, The Onion produces a daily faux-news short that I listen to, generally before I even leave the house.
- Edit: I nearly forgot that NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is also podcast. For a humorous run-down of the week's news, you could do much worse.
There are also a few shows I've been made aware of relatively recently that I'm meaning to look into, but that I might mention:- Occulterati, which I found on jeregenest's del.icio.us feed.
- Though this wouldn't work well in a car, Battlestar Galactica producer Ron Moore apparently puts out an episode-by-episode podcast, which is meant to act as a secondary audio track to each episode. My friend Chase, who pointed this out to me, claims that half the fun is listening to Moore pour himself scotch and get pleasantly drunk during each podcast, describing behind-the-scenes stuff that you wouldn't necessarily get for a television show. Definitely something to play around with once we've caught up with our DVD watching.
This is probably more than any of you ever really wanted to know, but I figured that some of you might find this useful. There you go.
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October 11th, 2006
06:32 pm - Speedy Delivery!
So last night bit the big one. Today, however, saw the delivery of my new baby. Yes, it's Intel-powered, but between receiving it and getting dispensation to work from home today, this afternoon has kind of rocked the Casbah.
Woot! New toy for Kyle!
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04:23 am - Oncall Hell
When you're oncall and they are planning for a "transparent" cutover of non-datacenter power, expect to get no sleep. Further expect that you'll be paged at least 120 times between midnight and 4am. Thank god for remote console devices.
Ugh.
At least the mission-critical servers are back up and running again. ...and now? I sleep.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/sad.gif) exhausted
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June 10th, 2006
04:17 pm - The Results Are In!
The last week of stress and sporific lectures paid off! I just got the results from my Red Hat Certified Engineer test, which I took yesterday, and lo and behold, I passed! Consequently, I am now an RHCE! Woot!
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June 5th, 2006
01:46 pm - Recipe for Disaster
1 Kyle
< 6 hours sleep
1.5 hour drive
7 hours RHCE training
1 filling lunch
1 monotonous, semi-humorless instructor
Season to taste. Whee!
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/tired.gif) sleepy
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November 30th, 2005
01:19 pm - Life Update
This has been a crazy couple weeks.
( Changeling game ramblings.... )
( ...Thanksgiving thoughts.... )
( ...the weekend.... )
( ...and the week thus far. )
For all that it's been objectively a bad week thus far, I'm reasonably upbeat today, and things could be significantly worse.
I don't have any clever or interesting information or anecdotes for general consumption, save that the Navarro Vinyards grape juice I had over Thanksgiving is worth every cent, and I may very well be purchasing a case.
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