Jon

If you didn't see my twitter this evening, I wrote "Stuck my hand in a hat hoping to pull out a rabbit. Afraid now it might be an angry kangaroo."

I realize that was cryptic and might require some exegesis, as we used to say in philosophy class.

This afternoon, work decided that I'd be a great guy to send to fix some problems we're having in Sydney, Australia.

I'll admit to having done a pinch of lobbying, with the acquiescence of my lovely and tolerant wife, but truth be told I didn't expect it to be successful lobbying, since other more relevant people were perhaps better choices.

Only it turns out they didn't want to do it. So it's me.

And I leave on Sunday -- something else I didn't plan for.

And, "as long as you're in the area," my boss told me, he wanted to send me to some customers in Malaysia on a fact-finding mission and to work on one customer's longstanding performance problem. ("In the area" means, apparently, an eight hour flight away...)

So I'm a little bit freaked out now -- it's a lot of planning and thinking and learning to do on short notice. The Malaysia piece of the trip is still a bit up in the air, as are return dates -- I'm trying to figure out if I should bring my dive gear (and if so, how much of it), and even what else I need to figure out before Sunday.

After three job titles in nearly as many years in the Global Services group at Isilon, I'm moving into Engineering. I'll be the Sustaining Engineering Lead, which will put me knee-deep in issues being escalated from Support into Engineering, and will also probably involve me more deeply in the maintenance releases.

I'm a bit nervous, in that I've done a great job of being the voice of the customer, translating that for Engineering. I hope I can retain the ability to see problems from the customer's point of view while also making myself useful to the Engineering group. There's necessarily a lot of tension between those perspectives, and it'll be something of a balancing act to resist adopting all of engineering's imperatives.

My mantra regarding this has been that my job is to solve the same problems as I've been working on, but wholesale rather than retail.

Well, as of about two hours ago, I'm shipping out tomorrow to Arizona. I'll return on Thursday, theoretically early enough for a V-day dinner with the spousal unit, and then we'll be flying out at oh-dark-thirty on Friday morning to go visit her mother in Kentucky. We'll fly back late on Sunday, though hopefully not too late, and I'll be back at work a week from tomorrow.

Gah.

On the other hand, it's nice that the people from the customer site like me and want me back.

So let me get this straight:

I'm working on a system...
... connected by a serial console to another computer...
... which I'm accessing via Remote Desktop...
... from another Windows system...
... which I'm connected to via WebEx...
... from another Windows system...
... which is a virtual computer hosted on a different system...
... that I'm accessing via VMWare Console...
... from a Windows computer...
... that's itself a VMWare system...
... running on my Mac...
... accessing the keyboard and mouse via Synergy...
... from my Linux box...
... which is, actually, a real computer, with a keyboard and mouse attached to it.

So work is sending me onsite, to Fort Huachuca. Tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning. This decision was made at about 10:30 this morning.

I'll be there overnight, and if all goes well I'll be home by 9pm on Thursday.

But sheesh! Last minute, and probably with some holiday-related airport business, too.

Today I go to Flagstaff, AZ. Well, today I get to Phoenix, tomorrow we go to Flagstaff, and Wednesday we leave Phoenix for home.

Justin, the volunteer coordinator for 826 Seattle, asked why they keep sending me to miserably hot places for work.

This will be interesting, though: all of my other work trips have been solo. This time I'll be with another member of the Support team, and two guys from the Sales team.

Still and all, I'm looking at work in the morning, work in the evening, and work inbetween. I'm already looking forward to coming home.

In the realm of trivial accomplishments that nonetheless display some persistence, I broke 10,000 points in my online sudoku game for the BlackBerry. With each day being a maximum of 50 points, that's a lot of sudoku. Only 200 days, if I played every day. It would be another 300 until I made the top ten score list if everybody on it stopped playing today.

At work, solved the customer problem that I was sent onsite to resolve back at the end of June. We had almost all of the pieces lined up, but ran into a bug in Apple's netinfo or automounter today. Basically, "-o rsize=32k,wsize=32k" works on the command line but breaks when automounting via NetInfo; "-o rsize=32k, wsize=32k" works when automounting via NetInfo but breaks on the command line.

Yes, the only difference between those two lines is a space.

It took two accidents in order for me to figure that out, but the difference results in five times the write performance over NFS for Mac clients.

Ouch.

I look forward to verifying that and filing the bug with Apple.

So, if you didn't get the message last time, I'm speaking at SASAG tomorrow, at the University of Washington. My topic is Technical Support, and why System Administrators should help professionalize it. If you're not reading this until Thursday, it's happening tonight, at 7 pm.

I'd love to see you there, whoever "you" may be.

In unrelated news, it's hot enough that this is one of those rare days I wish I had air conditioning. (They're few enough that I can live with that.) Also, I bought the new Spoon album today, and I just started listening to it...

One week from this Thursday, I'll be presenting a talk at SASAG, the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild. The talk is entitled "Why Sysadmins Should (Help) Professionalize Technical Support", and my abstract is below:

From the release of the first edition of Nemeth et al's _UNIX System Administration Handbook_ in 1988, and perhaps culminating in the formation of LOPSA, System Administration has transformed from an arcane oral tradition into a full-fledged professional discipline. By contrast, Technical Support has not yet developed as a discipline of its own. This talk explains why System Administrators should care, suggests reasons for the disparity, and tentatively suggests a future direction for the professionalization of Technical Support as a separate and unique discipline.

This is my first presentation in a long time — circa 2001, excluding any Old Bay SAGE presentations I may have given in the 2002 - early 2003 timeframe — and I wouldn't look down on a cheering section. I think it's an interesting topic, I'm hard at work on the presentation, and I think and hope it'll be worthwhile. I'd love to see folks there.

Flying to New York for work tomorrow. Working in New York on Thursday, and Friday morning if necessary.

Friday afternoon, flying to Portland, to attend a wedding. Sunday, taking the train back to Seattle.

Two weeks from Friday, flying back to New York, for my father's wedding. Two weeks from Sunday, flying back to Seattle.

Two weeks following that, maybe heading up to Vancouver for the weekend to see friends.

Whee.

I haven't posted about work in a while, so I haven't mentioned that I have a new job title. I'm now Customer Support Technical Lead, or as my business cards put it, Technical Support Lead. As of last week, I even have a draft job description:

( Can be summarized as Other Duties as Assigned )

In other words, it's a handful: deep technical knowledge plus management finesse (or working at it), big picture thinking plus detail orientation, write scripts and develop non-technical process flowcharts.

I can't decide if this makes me a computing generalist, or a tightrope walker. I love what I'm doing, but wish I understood what my career path might look like.

If you'd like to join me, and do high-level, deeply technical customer support on an awesome, exciting product, we're still hiring. Drop me a line if you're interested.

Dinner is in the oven: a zucchini-carrot kugel straight out of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. We seem to have a pretty good batting average out of that and The Moosewood Cookbook, though as a non-vegetarian neither of them will replace my beloved The Way to Cook Everything.

I should cook more things that require an hour or more in the oven: it'll give me time to get my head back on right and unspool my thoughts.

( Water spirals the wrong way out the sink )

( Words and Music )

Weinberg's second law: "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."

The second woodpecker who came along would really make bank as a consultant.

This post brought to you by Section 110 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, sponsored by the U.S. Congress, with a founding grant from Pope Gregory XIII.

I don't write much about work here. Or, really, anything I wouldn't want to put on a postcard and mail to my parents, my employer, and my worst enemy. Lots of days I feel that doesn't leave enough to bother.

Work is exhausting me. I completely love my job, and I mostly love the niche I've carved out for myself. At the same time, I wish there were two of me doing this job, or three of me. (Which reminds me: we're hiring. If you're good with Unix, or you're smart and you want to be good with Unix, drop me a line...) I feel as though I'm one of a couple of indispensable people. And, as the old saw has it, cemeteries are full of indispensable people.

I used to take that to mean that, no matter how important you thought you were, you were still going to die one day, and you had to be prepared to hand off anything important to someone else. These days, I feel like indispensability is the shortcut to the cemetery.

And, despite that, despite the brutal hours, despite feeling like I never go off-call, I still like my job. Even if I do have to fight off cynicism regularly.

I turn 31 on Friday, but I feel like I've aged more than that one year since I started working at my job. More than a little of that is the pathetically grown-up schedule of up at 5:30, asleep by 10, which puts me out of sync with those I still think of as my peers. On Saturday, Laura and I decided to go home early and go to bed, rather than see a movie that began at 10 pm...

But, despite waking up and suddenly discovering that I'm old, I'm still thinking more about having been at my company for a year than I am about another birthday.

Taking time out from my 11-hour workdays (all right, so I took an hour for lunch today... so only 10 hours), I realize that I haven't posted before that work is sending me to Tokyo next week. (Arrive on Sunday night, leave on Friday afternoon.)

Anyone traveled to Tokyo for business before? I've skimmed the Lonely Planet guide to Tokyo, and read a bunch of stuff from the Web on "business in Japan" but still feel mighty underprepared.

I'm going to be doing mostly technical training, theoretically, and some assistance with process with our partner company. No negotiations or any such thing.

Alternatively, can anyone tell me things I absolutely shouldn't miss, that I can do on a weeknight in Tokyo?

Thanks!

I realized it's been too long since I posted here when I realized that everything—photographs, bookmarks, and LJ posts—had scrolled off of my homepage. Oops.

I'm not dead, just working too many hours. Time not working is spent doing laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, and sleeping. But life is good, really; I like everything I'm doing, I just wish I had more time to do other stuff.

Of course, what did I do on today's day off? Laundry. And cooking: ironheadjane and I baked not one but two cakes: a lighter orange-almond cake made with olive oil, and a rich devil's food cake in two layers with orange buttercream frosting between the layers and and orange-chocolate glaze on top. I can't wait to get to tonight's event and taste both of those...

For dinner, herb-marinated grilled pork chops and corn on the cob. Soon, fireworks at veovix's place.

( A funny dream from the other night )

I've done a lousy job of keeping up with movies I've seen in this space, but recently I've seen Prairie Home Companion (it was about what I expected) and Beowulf and Grendel, which I liked a bunch. (You might not give a damn if you don't think "Squee! Vikings!") Like I said, I've mostly been working. Speaking of work, we're hiring tech support people in both Seattle and the Bay Area. If you're smart, you like Unix, and you like Internet protocols, let me know and I'll send you some additional details...

I'd say something like "more to come later," but I can't imagine when.

Every weekday morning, I get off of the bus at about five minutes of seven. I walk two and a half blocks to work.

Every weekday morning, I walk by the same little storefront martial arts business, with the same video running in the window.

This morning, it occurred to me that the video was always in the same place.

Now, in reality it's probably just that every minute of the video looks pretty much like any other minute, to the casual observer. I know that.

But I preferred to imagine that the sensei was as regular as I was with his schedule, hitting play at the same time every day. That would have made us both part of the same giant world-clock.

Now, there's a word for a part of a clock -- one common part, anyway: that's "cog." And I was pleased to be a cog.

I feel ashamed to enjoy being a cog, but perhaps there's nothing wrong with being the right cog in the right machine. (And all machines are clocks, of a sort; machines have driven our need for standardized, accurate timekeeping.) If you're the right cog in the right place, well, that's nothing to be ashamed of.

And yet that thought, too, feels shameful, though it also feels right.

So I woke up to deal with some on-call stuff, and I'm not asleep again, somehow. So I should review The Matador.

In short, it's gayer than Brokeback Mountain. (Which, okay, I said wasn't very gay.)

First, it's a mismatched-buddy film; those always have some kind of sexual undertones. (What exactly was Mel Gibson's lethal weapon, anyway?)

( The rest of the review, with mild spoilers )

And, since I'm apparently never going to finish my Disneyworld entry, I should put in my review of The Producers ( here ).

So ironheadjane and I are officially engaged... we told the family at Disney; more about that later. (I've actually already started that blog post, but it's been on hold since I've been too busy.) We'll be married on April 8th, with most details to be determined. Small and informal is quite likely.

Last night was my first night on-call for work. I woke up half a dozen or more times to read e-mail that in other circumstances might have required action on my part. I think tonight Laura's going to make me sleep on the couch so that she can get some sleep. (I don't blame her one bit!) The good news is that it's going to be only about five on-call days a month, maybe less in the near-future when we've done some more hiring.

Emily says, "5 days a month of sleeping on the couch is prolly par for the course once you get married anyway ;-)"

...was a smashing success. Just what I was going for. I'm thinking that this will be a pretty regular meal.

Finally, this week at work I felt pretty productive straight through. We got a pretty significant customer due in part to technical problems that I helped solve; I've got a feel for the older generation of hardware; and I'm beginning to feel not totally incompetent as regards the software, though there are still huge areas that I don't yet understand.

Unfortunately, I'm showing up at work at seven in the morning, which means waking up at half past five and going to sleep by ten at night. Worse, it's not terribly painful to do so anymore, and I'm worried that I might soon start enjoying it. (I think I'll like it better when it's not the dead of winter any more.)