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 :)