happiest of holidays

Well may you and yours enjoy your holiday of choice this season. Mine has been wonderful and I am newly engaged :) Here's to second chances and new first times. *clink clink*

God is in Utah

I never wrote about my trip to Utah. God lives there, right on the border with Colorado. Or at least he was there recently.

I don't know what to say about my trip. I lived in a canyon at 5500 feet looking up at cliffs that were at 7000 feet. I hiked a butte that had petroglyphs on the lower cliff. I saw the leftovers from a mountain lion's lunch. I saw anthills made from crystals of every color, little grape-nuts sized crystals. I was stared down by a bighorn sheep, with his yellow, sideways-slitted eyes. I was out of breath up around 10000 feet looking down on Wolf's Creek Fault, the first time I've ever seen a fault line.

I really don't have words. Check out my pictures.

harmony

So Wednesday morning was our first day after electing Obama. It was a crisp fall morning in Ohio, but the sun was warm. I went outside the office to take a phone call and have a cig. When I was finishing up my call, two young black men were walking to class nearby. They were singing in harmony, and they just kind of floated across the field in the morning sun, singing. It was beautiful, and I see the world as a much more beautiful place than I did before Tuesday night.

fall is here, feels like old times

Sunday morning I rolled out of bed, put on some clothes, and went outside into the chilly air. I pulled out my girlfriend's Nissan, jacked it up, and changed the oil. First time I've rolled out of bed and went out to work on a car like that since I lived out in the country, and drove an 18 year old Honda Accord. The car had over 200,000 miles on it, and I had to work on it almost every weekend just to keep it running, keep driving to work all week.

The air was frosty and damp, and where the sun hit you it felt very warm. Good, good, good feeling. Made the coffee taste good. An hour later I was all done and felt like I had accomplished something. Good way to start a day :)

remember fun?

Well, in spite of the Economy, my boss took our crew out for an evening of fun. We drove go karts and spun each other out and rammed each other into walls. We played laser tag in a place called "LASERTRON", it was very '80s. We giggled like fools. When shooting folks with a laser failed, I hugged their ankles and took them down. We played lame video games. We shot hoops and got tickets. We ate bad pizza. I hit my apexes. I found that one of the apexes was in the middle of the track. One of my cohorts that I don't get along with shot me with his phaser and I drove my sprint car inside him in a corner for a fantastic collision. Remember to have fun :)

may you live in interesting times

Well the past month or so, I've fallen victim to the old curse, "May you live in interesting times". Lots of family visits and funerals. My grandpa died when I was one year old, and last week my grandma's second husband passed away. Watching him suffer from Alzheimer's was very painful. I think that I have some fear to deal with there, fear that it will happen to me. Not because of genes because we didn't share any, but just because it is a horrible fate.
But therapy taught me that we are given our life journey, and it is for us to walk. Whether we get Alzheimer's or not is obviously something that we cannot control, so I need to surrender that to a higher power, and let it go.
There is a great peace in that, if we can find it.
I didn't cry until the AmVets were marching by one by one, saluting his body. My uncle gave me a Springfield M-1 cartridge casing from the 21-gun salute, it meant a lot to me. He has always loved guns, and I have just rediscovered them in the last two years. He knows that we have a similarity there, because being a responsible gun owner and target shooter takes certain psychological traits. I am so glad that we can share that.

trying to do too many things with one computer

I ran into some issues this weekend that made me ask myself, "Am I trying to do too many things with one computer?". The disk on my MacBook got full, and somehow using fetchmail and postfix to flush my inbox made bounce messages go out to everybody in my organization from whom I was not able to store mail. Hooray. Then the NetBeans IDE that I use to do mobile java development for my hobby project, talkLock, decided that since the disk was full, it should explode. Unfortunately deleting some files did not fix it. Then I remembered that since I use home folder encryption, I have to log out for my encrypted are to get shrunk. That didn't fix it either, it didn't complain, but any disk write operations zombied out. A reboot didn't fix it either.

So the next logical step would be to uninstall and reinstall the IDE. But I quit using Windows to avoid stupid crap like this, frankly. If I was using vi and gcc it wouldn't care that at one point the disk was full.

Maybe trying to use one computer to do work like logging in via xterms, running heavy java mail clients, watch movies, listen to music, develop hobby projects, browse the web, edit spreadsheets and documents, play games, etcetera is all too much to expect from an end user desktop system.

Or maybe I should expect postfix to react like that (in UNIX land you would want a mail server with a full disk to fail noisily), and the only real problem is that no one at NetBeans bothered to test what happens when your hard drive gets full.

Of course if you have a few computers then you have the issues with synching things up, and of course you cannot bring clipboard items over from one to another while working.

Or maybe I just need more rest :) One of my tools that I learned in counseling is HALT. Whatever you're thinking about when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired, stop thinking, halt. Take care of your hunger, anger, loneliness, or sleepiness, then you will be clear to deal with things.

Regardless I packed up the Mac and wrote this post on my Linux laptop. Maybe tomorrow I'll try and fix Netbeans on the Mac.

But I just did a new fix in talkLock so I want to test it! Hopefully it'll work fine on the Linux machine.

Network Engineer, 7 Years, and so on

Okay, so to wrap up the whole "How to be a Network Engineer" thing, I'll make a short post.

I ended up moving from being a vendor to being a client. I was The IT Guy for a county-wide library. I had routers and switches and servers. Some of the servers were big Suns. Very fun! I learned a lot there and was very free to explore and build things.

After I was divorced and had settled down some, I decided that it was time to get out of the small town that I had lived in and go to the big city. I was already living there, so it made sense to get a job there.

I did a ~1 year stint at a law firm as The IT Guy. Gone was the freedom of the library, instead I was always being bossed around by shallow, mean, bitchy lawyers all day. It was a Catch 22 situation, and I was not psychologically healthy enough to stand up for myself and define boundaries in that environment. I quit. But I had acquired some training on SQL and gotten comfortable writing database queries and getting around on a database server.

While at the law firm, I had started exploring a Big Ten college campus next to my neighborhood, and took a night class in calculus. It was very hard but a very cool environment.

I took a job at a dry cleaner's, and set about going to school full time to study engineering. I had an Associate degree in electronics at the time. A few weeks later I got a student IT job at the university and was all set to pursue my undergrad degree.

After a year, the guys in the networking department that I hung out with had an opening for me, and I moved over there as a student employee. My new job was to set up Linux servers, work on web and automation scripts, and configure Cisco equipment. Big time real world networking experience! It was a joy.

I learned PHP, Perl, Java, and got more experience with C, C++, bash, SQL.

After a year of that, you can see where this is going. I got a new boss who used to work for an ISP, a state-wide ISP funded by education. I was made an offer and became, yes, a Network Engineer. In only 7 years :)

I am still a senior in Electrical Engineering at the university, but I have not taken any classes since I got my position. We'll see what happens.

Now I work on Cisco, Juniper, SMC, Force 10, and lots of networking equipment. We use BSD servers to do our work. It's not quite the fun and free environment the university was, but it's pretty cool. And now I actually control the internet bandwidth for that Big Ten university, and most of the others in the state :)

We've already got that memo. And others.

Well, I was reading The Unix Hater's Handbook again, and I came across a couple of beautiful gems that I felt like sharing.

"This book is about people who are in abusive relationships with Unix,
woven around the threads in the UNIX-HATERS mailing list. These notes
are not always pretty to read. Some are inspired, some are vulgar, some
depressing. Few are hopeful. If you want the other side of the story, go read
a Unix how-to book or some sales brochures.
This book won’t improve your Unix skills. If you are lucky, maybe you
will just stop using Unix entirely."

"Unix haters are everywhere. We are in the universities and the
corporations. Our spies have been at work collecting embarrassing
electronic memoranda. We don’t need the discovery phase of
litigation to find the memo calculating that keeping the gas tank
where it is will save $35 million annually at the cost of just eight
lives. We’ve already got that memo. And others."

Hahaha, I love it :) That's what I love about Unix folks. We all have a certain gallows humor, a dark understanding that even though we love Unix, we also hate it. We know that it's terrible. But it makes so much more sense to us than other computer operating systems. We are trapped, for good or ill.

I challenge you to find Windows experts with these qualities. People who write about Windows write stuff that reads like sales brochures. I don't like reading sales brochures, because we all know they are bullshit.

Yeah, we've already got that memo.

goto after the fall of manila

Well, I started this blog because of a character in the Neil Stephenson novel The Cryptonomicon. Goto Dengo was a Japanese sailor who survived a shipwreck, the headhunters and jungle bugs of New Guinea, and building a mine to bury Japanese war gold that he was supposed to be buried in as well. After New Guinea, he was recuperating in a mission hospital in the mountains of Luzon. While in the hospital, he had a moment of clarity, or hit rock bottom, or surrendered to a higher power. He realized that the tools that he had for living his life were no longer useful, he was on a different planet now. That is the place I was in when I started this blog.

Now I have gone through that and learned some new tools and started making some new dreams. But it is not always easy being on a new planet. Sometimes you want to go back to the familiar. And unfortunately, people that you love and trust will not always be happy with your new psychologically healthier lifestyle. They are more comfortable working with the old you, instead of a new unknown quantity. But you can't go back to the person you were before; experiences have changed you into something new, you are reborn. It is wonderful but sometimes very difficult and painful. Painful because when you see people acting toward you like you are the person you used to be, you realize how sadly flawed your relationship with them was before. You see patterns of behavior that show that you used to have compatible illnesses. Now that you are getting better, that compatibility is not there.

I am struggling with this at work, and also with a very dear old friend that I made early in adulthood. But I am struggling with both things for the same reason. I used to not listen to my feelings, and not use my words to express my thoughts and feelings. I used to always put other people's accomplishments ahead of my own. A common ailment, and one that leads to unhappiness. Now that I am expressing myself, and probably not very well yet, people seem caught off guard, and threatened. I will get better at it. But they will have to get over it; I will continue to use my words, listen to my feelings, and do something good for myself every day. The three new tools that I have that changed my life. The three tools that allow me to survive on this new planet.

life is full of Personal Growth Opportunities

Well, it's been an interesting couple of months. There is plenty I could write about, but for now I'll talk about a work situation.

Last week I went back to work while in recovery from The Crud, or what the Brits call The Lurgy, that wonderful winter-to-spring sore throat, fever, sinus agony, congestion, and fever ailment. I had started a project about a year before, and I kept struggling to get traction on it. I had actually gathered my enthusiasm and torn into it many times, but every time I thought that it was done and ready to put into production, I would get feedback with another revision. Tuesday I decided "today is the day" (once again), so I did some final testing, put it in the queue to be pushed out, and pinned down a couple of folks and asked if it was time to ship it. They gave me another revision, and then after looking at my work (for the first time in a year), they gave me a whole page of revisions.

So Tuesday I tossed and turned all night, and in a display of a total lack of maturity, thought about beating the shit out of the guy that gave me a page of revisions. The gall! I had come to the end of my rope. The next morning I felt like hell, I was still somewhat sick and had gotten almost no sleep, and was emotionally totally frazzled. My girlfriend talked me down from the ledge, and helped me spin out of my anger and take a step back. I came to understand that we have a PROCESS problem, and that this is not a personal problem. It's not that people hate me or think I'm stupid or want to torment me, it's just that they have not had their attention drawn to the fact that the current process is a Catch-22, slam your hand in the door on purpose type situation.

This is a big step for me, in the past I have always gotten to this point in my work, and said fuck them, and gone to find another job, feeling totally defeated and destroyed. This time I disconnected from the defeated feelings enough to suggest a new process, and explain (without tainting with frustration) what the problems are with the current process. That was Thursday, and Friday I did not get any feedback. I would have liked to have heard some "you are my hero", "this is brilliant", "you rock" kind of feedback of course. But now I understand; "If you do not ask for what you want, you will surely never get it." So I have explained the problem, and suggested a solution. And if it turns out that it is decided that the status quo is fine, and we don't need a solution, I will not strap grenades to my body and blow everyone into quivering giblets; I will note that the current work environment is not the right environment for me, and look for a more suitable one, with my head held high, and my chest swollen with pride that I Did The Right Thing, instead of suffering in silence.

this cracked me up...

I saw this at the end of the month-long OpenBSD vs. RMS thread that ran on the misc list at OpenBSD. It was a befuddling and bizarre sort of flamefest. Basically, my take is that the OpenBSD folks suffer from some kind of stunted emotional development: Of course, RMS was incredibly zen and Ghandi-like. He was in fact in India when it took place. Now on to the wacky quote that kind of said it all for me:


Emacs/XEmacs is an excellent Microsoft Operating system shell to run.
Manage your files and browse the web.

It is released under the GPL (general public license).
Running a program on Windows is not encouraging the use of Windows.
Rather it is actually encouraging people to use Windows, you see. That's
not the same thing.

People publish screenshots of Emacs running on MS Windows and post them
on the internet, and this is the enemy of your freedom. It shows how
excellent XEmacs/Emacs run on Windows so that they don't even have to
run gNewSense.

When the dog wags his tail, the tail actually is wagging his dog. And
when the tail wags the dog, the dog is actually wagging the tail. Not
the other way around.

Oranges are free, grapefruits are not.
Oranges are free, grapefruits are not.
Oranges are free, grapefruits are not.

L505

a thought about guitar tone

Keef Riffards already knows this. Everybody else, read on:

If you have a lot of distortion on your guitar signal, and you hit the strings lightly, it goes "GLEEEEEEERRRRR". If you hit the strings hard, it goes "GLEEEEEEEEERRRRRRR".

If you have almost no distortion, but turn the amp up really effing loud, and hit the strings lightly, it goes "schliiinnngg". If you hit the strings hard, it goes "CLANGHONNNKKK!!!" If your guitar goes "CLANGHONNNNKKK", people will Respect Your Authoritay :)

How to be a network engineer in six years - Part 2

So when you last saw our hero, he had been told to RTFM, Read The Friendly Manual, and given a copy of Slackware Linux to try. I was serious about learning the UNIX-like Linux environment, and excited about my new project. I printed out the documents, took a week, and read the Installation How-To. Not an easy read, very technical, but it all made sense from my past experience. In theory anyway. So then I moved on and read the DOS/Win To Linux How-To. This was a comparison between DOS commands and UNIX commands, and a little propaganda too about how much better Linux and X-Window System are. I would definitely recommend both of these even today, years later, although save the DOS/Win document for when you hit a slump in the very long and terse Installation document, and need some perking up.

Anyway there have been a million write-ups about folks getting Linux working on this or that hardware, and it's not the point. I ended up getting Linux installed correctly on about the third try, but could not seem to get Windows to share my modem connection across the LAN with my Slackware box. The deal is, after a month of experimenting, and even installing a Slackware spin-off called Vector Linux, I ended up with a modem in my Linux box, and got it to dial up to my ISP. I learned a LOT in that month, getting around and troubleshooting the networking issues. I still remember the day I took it to work, put the modem in it, connected to the ISP, launched Netscape 4, and read Slashdot for the first time :) Very very cool.

From there I learned how to compile the kernel from source, and set up Network Address Translation (use my Slackware box as a "cable router", only using dial-up). I set up nfs, ftp, dns, and dial on demand, dhcp. By the following winter anybody could walk into my house with a PC or laptop, plug in to the ethernet, and launch their mail or browser software, and they would be on the net in a few seconds. Automagic. Think of it! In the same time it took me to get nowhere with the latest great Microsoft server system, I learned these concepts and skills:
-UNIX disk partitioning
-UNIX shell commands for working with files and running programs
-the EMACS editor
-the art of reading man (UNIX on-line manual) pages
-how to use the Slackware system configuration scripts
-how to make a serial connection with a modem using ppp
-how to use telnet to connect and use remote systems
-how to use a terminal server to hop to remote machines
-how to use CHAP to get routed to the Internet across a serial connection
-how to configure an ethernet interface on a UNIX machine
-how to configure and compile the Linux kernel from source
-how to use ftp to transfer files
-what NAT is, and how to make it work on a Linux 2.2 machine using iptables netfilter capabilities
-what DHCP is, and how to configure and use the ISC dhcpd server and dhclient UNIX tool
-what DNS is, and how to configure and use the BIND dns server, and the nslookup tool
-what NFS is, and how to configure the nfsd server and mount command
-how to use the TCP/IP tools, like ping and traceroute
-how to use the UNIX layer 3 route commands
-how to configure and use the UNIX pppd Point-to-Point Protocol Daemon to control a serial network connection
-how to find, download, configure, compile, and run UNIX C/C++ programs
-how to break the C compiler :/
-how to install Quake 2 and play it on your Slackware box :)
-that Opera was way better than Netscape 4
-netnews! rtin! PAN!
-what X-Window System is, what a window manager is, and that fvwm is a great lightweight one
-that the Linux framebuffer driver will work for X, but card-specific X-servers are much better
-how to hand-hack XFree86 using EMACS (and use tail -n to read /var/log/XFree.0.log)
-that you can burn up monitor using overly aggressive hand-tweaked X config files
-that you can listen to a cd on your laptop, while the cd is in your desktop in the other room, using NFS mount
-that you can track the positions of your buddy's team in the 24 Hours of Daytona using your laptop in the living room while watching the race
-that at the time a Pentium 100 laptop with 24MB of RAM and a 3.2GB hard disk was enough to run Slackware 7.1, and it was way faster than my Pentium II Windows machine


Okay, maybe I didn't learn all that in six months. But most of it, really! The terse style of man pages allows you to get into a technical mode where you only find the information that you need, it is all there, and you CAN find it. It is a DIY system; if you have a can-do attitude, you can do anything. You have total control over the machine, a great abstraction in UNIX, and you have the freaking source code and toolchain. Make what you want.

Looks like in part 3 we will cover moving from being a PC shop guy who discovers the wonders of UNIX to a Network Engineer. Will he escape from the Penguin's diabolical trap? Tune in next time...