A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

“We No Speak Americano ft. Cleary & Harding”

So in another attempt to keep myself off of Borderlands, Mass Effect and Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour I’ve switched the SATA cable from my Vista drive to my Ubuntu drive.

Seriously, those two have been life sucking. It’s just so easy to “play a couple rounds” of C&CG:0 and such.

So now I’m staring at a native linux desktop again and, unlike working with RHEL and SunOs in work, there’s nothing I have to “work around.”

My .emacs file (and it’s attending schlock) just… works. typing “make all” in ~/. rips over a source tree that has elements that are in some cases 20+ years old and “just works” (the make tree, not the building. The code can be… temperamental. But it sure tries like hell.)

So AGAIN I ask:

What are the must haves?

Customizations
Installs
Environment changes

I want to be comfortable enough with this platform that I can reasonably resist the constant pull to shut down and switch the sata cable back. There’s not really anything (other than my mp3 player and crackberry) which doesn’t work under linux.

You know I just don’t forward or post things about alerts I get from other people. It’s a bad practice for someone with my position in the social order.

But this is too important to keep to myself:

Women often receive warnings about protecting themselves at the mall and in dark parking lots, etc. This is the first warning I have seen for men. I wanted to pass it on in case you haven’t heard about it.

A ‘heads up’ for those men who may be regular customers at Lowe’s, Home Depot, Costco, or even Wal-Mart. This one caught me totally by surprise. Over the last month I became a victim of a clever scam while out shopping. Simply going out to get supplies has turned out to be quite traumatic. Don’t be naive enough to think it couldn’t happen to you or your friends.

Here’s how the scam works:

Two nice-looking, college-aged girls will come over to your car or truck as you are packing your purchases into your vehicle. They both start wiping your windshield with a rag and Windex, with their breasts almost falling out of their skimpy T-shirts. (It’s impossible not to look). When you thank them and offer them a tip, they say ‘No’ but instead ask for a ride to McDonald’s.

You agree and they climb into the vehicle. On the way, they start undressing. Then one of them starts crawling all over you, while the other one steals your wallet.

I had my wallet stolen July 4th, 9th, 10th, twice on the 15th, 17th, 20th, 24th, & 29th. Also August 1st & 4th, twice on the 8th, 16th, 23rd, 26th & 27th, and very likely again this upcoming weekend.

So tell your friends to be careful. What a horrible way to take advantage of us older men. Warn your friends to be vigilant.

Wal-Mart has wallets on sale for $2.99 each. I found even cheaper ones for $.99 at the dollar store and bought them out in three of their stores.

Also, you never get to eat at McDonald’s. I’ve already lost 11 pounds just running back and forth from Lowe’s, to Home Depot, to Costco, Etc.

So please, send this on to all the older men that you know and warn them to be on the lookout for this scam. (The best times are just before lunch and around 4:30 in the afternoon.)

Yeah. SUCH a mistake.

Hereza deal:

Post a link to it? Again? I’m enough of a narcissist that the response it brings is always really helpful. And for reasons I really don’t understand at all, it’s worse the last couple years than it’s been. Does that make ANY sense? Shouldn’t it be getting easier? Better?

Wednesday night I got in to a full bore screaming match over the “9/11 Mosque” which yes, I understand, is 3 blocks north of ground zero and is a Rabat, not a mosque (which is orders of magnitude more offensive, but the liberals don’t care. They just like to say “isn’t isn’t isn’t.” Such intellectuals.) Now, it GOT to a screaming match because logic was getting me nowhere. Fortunately, even though I lost my temper I didn’t resort to ad hominems; I was still trying to make a cogent point.

My friend behind the bar (rightfully) pulled the friend + customer in a place of business card. Fortunately after the moment I was shouting in the land of fuck youitude and literally slamming my fist against the bar, the antagonist walked away, so calming down (outwardly) was trivial.

But I am without a doubt NOT to be fucked with about this. I will drop your ass like a bad habit and not look back. If it comes up in work, on the street, at a bar, I will go off. Maybe in a month I’ll be able to have a sensible conversation about the topic again. But right now I’m just going to look for something sharp.

That said, I won’t start it. I’m not an antagonist at my worst.

I’m trying to hold it together here and I’m really not doing a very good job.

In mid July, our primary linux development host was unreachable.

Eventually it came out that it was in a data center that was being shut down, and while the infrastructure people had communicated this to our team’s management, that information never quite made it down to the line developers.

After some confusion, scrambling and a couple nastygrams they brought the machine back up for 36 hours while they set up a replacement.

Machines housed in this particular data center are easily identifiable by a prefix on their host name.

Eventually the replacement came up (it wasn’t 36 hours) and they pulled down the original again.

Three weeks ago we had one of our (close to a dozen) development databases disappear. People flipped out. “We were doing critical testing…” etc. On a hunch I went and dug up the host name of this database… yep. Decommissioned box.

Last Friday morning there was a production problem and we needed to simulate a situation in production to duplicate the error.

It took 45 minutes to load the database from the production dump, and testing was off and away. About 3:00 in the afternoon I heard the developer doing the testing, a 20 year man, emit what I could only assume was an expletive in Croatian.

“I can’t connect to the database! Can anyone else get to the database?” It was the Friday before a long weekend so I didn’t stick around to hear the resolution.

Yesterday, the first day back from the long weekend the same guy needed a database, presumably for the same test. As I was working on deployment scripts I said just to take mine. They were worried that I was volunteering something I shouldn’t, but a production problem generally takes presidence over development work any day. They hemmed and hawed about it. “Just take it. It’s not my critical path right now. You need it more than I do.” They nervously looked at each other.

The analyst called our boss, who was on her last day of vacation, and asked if it was ok. I was gobsmacked. She said it was fine, and they were off and running.

This morning I got in and was going through email. There was a back and forth between one of our other developers and database/infrastructure teams asking about why he couldn’t connect to the database HE was using.

And of course the host had been decommissioned. I just started laughing.

Now, with the database vendor we use, database names are all mapped to their host and port names in a single file. I went to this file and scanned it for all hosts that were in the data center being decommissioned. I built that list and sent an email to the team explaining that it was a LITTLE bit silly for us to act surprised when these databases disappear, and by the way, here are the rest of the databases that are going to vaporize.

About a half hour after I sent this email, I heard “Hey Mike, can you get to that database you were using?” (Referring to the one I’d lent him yesterday.) “I can’t seem to connect.”

I went into a five minute gigglefit. “I’ll bet you lunch I know why.”

“Why?”

“Dude, it’s a cmc box. It’s being decommed. It’s gone. Did you see the exchange with Xiao from last night about his database disappearing? Same issue.”

I went and checked (pinged and tracerouted) all the hosts that were under contention, confirming that they were indeed all gone.

Our boss asked him what was going on and he stuttered a bit as I walked over, then pointed to me. I gave her a quick overview; that database boxes are in a decommissioned data center, that we’d known about it for months and that our surprise that these things had all disappeared was a little weak.

“Do you want me to follow up…”
“No, I’ll…”
“Got it.”
“Let me know if you need anything from me on it.” She gave me a half nod and I knew I was dismissed.

I came over here and opened this buffer in emacs to let off some steam. A couple minutes later I saw Vlad’s reflection in the cubicle glass, coming up behind me, so I paused my Johnny Cash (Folsom Prison Blues), pulled my ear buds and wheeled around.

“It would be nice if these infrastructure people would tell us that they were taking down these machines before just doing it.”
“Well, we knew the data center was going away in July. Remember? When they pulled our development box?”
“Yeah, but they should really let us know. Maybe there was a conference call I wasn’t invited to.” I let it go.

We talked for a couple more minutes about the replacement databases we’re supposed to be allocated and how they weren’t going to be very useful (a whole different set of issues. I’ll vent about that when it blows up in a couple days. It’ll be fun, really.) Then he wandered away muttering about the injustice of it all.

Now, believe it or not I actually do appreciate, as the teller of these tales, that I may have a certain kind of narcissistic myopia for which I am more or less famous, depending on how long you’ve known me.

But Nobody on the team has less information than I do. There aren’t emails I received that they didn’t. There were no conference calls they weren’t included on. But there’s no follow-through. I just don’t understand how people can be surprised (to take this particular instance) that the databases disappear.

My head just spins with “What did they think was going to happen?”

I’m left here looking for a sensible epilogue with nothing but the quote from The Bird Cage when Gene Hackman finally begins to grasp what’s going on and just says “I feel like I’m insane.”

It’s clear to me only that I can’t see the forest for the trees somehow. I’ve got a bad primary directive in there someplace. Either I should be able to cope with this (a notion that strikes me as a concession to utter madness) or find a development shop full of people that don’t behave like a bunch of petrified lobotomized cogs.

Believe it or not, what makes me most mad is actually NOT that this behavior is going on. It’s that I know these guys are all smarter than this. We have 3 team members with PhDs in applied math or physics. The ‘long timer’ has been in this division for 20+ years and is a kindred spirit with regards to skunkworks code generation and refactoring projects.

These people aren’t stupid. Nor are they cantankerous curmudgeons. It’s actually a good bunch of guys. But they’re just entirely unwilling to act outside of what they’ve been told.

If it were a bunch of morons I’d bitch about my circumstance, but be more easily able to deal with it. As always, it’s the incongruity that I find so utterly incomprehensible.

As always, any input is thoroughly welcome, even (perhaps especially) if it’s input you think wouldn’t be particularly welcome.