complich8’s journal

So, I’ve been at the new job for about a week.

The commute definitely sucks, but it’s a good chance to read. I finally finished Catcher in the Rye (the beginning was ok, the end was ok, the middle pretty much sucked, and I think it’s overall pretty overrated). Been reading Freakonomics the last two days, which is pretty good times. I think I’ll be done with it about the middle of next week.

Work’s pretty good. Can’t say too much about it … I’m sysadminning mainly solaris and some windows boxes. I’m pretty much the “junior” sysadmin inasmuch as I don’t fully get everything that’s going on. The two other unix admins tend to handle a lot of the more annoying parts (like backups and hardware failure), leaving me to do cool things like … umm … well, the last couple days I’ve taught myself enough python to write a generalized multithreaded pipe script (ie: it executes a command, it reads from the command’s output and dumps it to a queue, and has worker threads service the queue to do some other command on every result). It’s neat.

That’s really been most of this week: learning python and writing an interesting python utility. That punctuated by doing file copies and stuff.

As a whole, the job’s ok, and I can see myself doing it for a while. And with all the reading I’ve been wanting to do the last couple years, the commute’s not so bad either. I’m also entertaining the idea of getting one of those ipod touches, or just a video ipod and watching anime backlog on the commute (figure I could make it through about 4 eps a day, which would get me through most of the backlog in about a year if I stuck to that…).

Work dress code isn’t bad either. I’ve gotta wear nice shirts, nice pants, and a tie, but I don’t have to wear a jacket or anything like that, so it’s all good. And since my arms are giant meaty slabs, “nice shirts” are concurrent with short-sleeved button-down shirts. Coincidentally, my mom sent me half a dozen or so short-sleeved, button-down collared shirts which just happen to be exactly what I ended up needing, so I’m pretty good on the clothing situation. Even better, my tie goes with all of them… so that’s pretty nice. I still want to expand the wardrobe a bit, since having to do laundry on a weekly basis sort of sucks.

I’m finding my free time largely curtailed by my nearly 11 hour door-to-door days. I pretty much leave the house around 8, come home around 7, and have 7-1 or so to do whatever else I want to do. Weekends are nice though. Easy to lose appreciation for them with the leisurely lifestyle I’ve had the last couple years.

I think I’ve visited the gotwoot forums about once a day since the job started, and purdueonline about once every other day. As I get more involved at work, I’m probably going to get even less involved in the online communities I’ve been a part of in the past. Just how it is … with my free time limited, I want to squeeze more enjoyment out of the time I’ve got. Forumgoing and/or forum-adminning just doesn’t give me as much joy as stuff like gaming… and there’s a lot of new games to play. Moreso when my paychecks start rolling in and I get caught up with my expenses a bit more (which is to say, around Christmas).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 8:49 pm and is filed under life and times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.