complich8’s journal

So, this project I’ve recently been recruited into has servers at a bunch of different sites around the country, and that means work travel, which is something pretty new to me. Last week I took 3 days with a colleague and went to Dallas to do a partial node installation in a datacenter a little ways outside of city limits.

Well, the install went pretty well, with a couple minor hangups. The first one of those is that I’m huge, and riding economy class is no fun for someone like me. I basically can’t ride in window seats, and am pretty constrained in the aisles.

We flew out from Dulles to Dallas-Fort Worth airport on a McDonnell Douglas Super-80 (2-3 seat layout, width: 18, pitch: 33 or so). I was on the aisle seat of the 3-side, so right in the middle of the plane pretty much, and didn’t have anyone next to me. That flight was pretty tolerable … I had enough legroom, the seat was a little crowded but comfortable enough, and I wasn’t all up in anyone else’s space.

The trip back was a bit rougher. We flew back on a 737-800 (width: 17.2, pitch: 31-32). I was supposed to be in a window seat in a normal row (as opposed to an exit-door row), but it didn’t quite work out that way. The people whose space I was destroying were nice enough to switch seats with me so I’d have the aisle. A little more space there, which was nice, but the trip was still pretty uncomfortable. Incidentally, we flew into Reagan on the way back.

Dulles airport is an interesting place. The “moon buggy” shuttles to the terminals are like crazy bus/train hybrid things, which is neat. The terminals themselves have a lot of light and airspace, and generally feel open and fresh. Seating in the terminal waiting areas is also surprisingly comfortable.

DFW airport was sort of annoying to me. It’s laid out in these crescent-shaped terminal halls, such that you can’t really see what’s more than about 200 feet down the hall from where you are. The ceilings are kind of low, and the place is generally aesthetically unappealing as a result. Not a lot of air, not a lot of light, and no sense of visual openness, even though it’s one of the largest airports in the country.

Reagan is a pretty interesting place, because it’s like right in the middle of everything. It’s got a metro station pretty much built into it, which is insane. The architecture is interesting, with these huge odd-colored vaulted cathederal-ish ceilings in the inbound terminal. It’s bright and visually interesting inside, and I liked it for the little bit of time I was in there.

The city of Dallas (or I guess the Dallas metro area) was pretty “meh”. Honestly, we didn’t get a whole lot of time to spend in the city itself, or doing much of anything … we got in late Wednesday, spent a lot of Thursday doing work, and left early Friday morning. But what I saw of it was pretty shockingly exactly like the rest of America that I’ve seen … there were Wal-marts, K-marts, Best Buy and Circuit City and Office Max and Radio Shack stores, auto malls, all the usual uninteresting crap. The notable differences were the existence of a place called “Whataburger” (or, as my colleague ruefully noted at the end of his lunch there, “what burger?”). We also had some barbecue at a place a couple miles from the hotel that was pretty decent, served by a woman who wielded her carving knife with the sort of expertise that filled me with a simultaneous respect, fascination and borderline fear. Other than that, not a whole lot to say about it.

Our next trip takes us out to Minneapolis, the tail end of next week. It looks like they regularly fly Embraer ERJ-175’s on that route (which look to be 18.25 width 31 pitch seats, according to the info I’ve found). Never even heard of one of them before, so that should be interesting… sounds like the seat’ll be a bit more roomy width-wise at any rate.

So, that’s the wonderful world of travel. Really sort of … just there. Per diem is pretty nice though.

Maybe it’s my unusual (for a non-physicist) love of physics that fuels it … but something about the idea of colliding protons at 14 TeV and lead ions in the PeV range is just …. freaking awesome!

I’m usually pretty mellow, but the more I read about the LHC the more pumped up I get about it!

I think that everyone has something they can’t get enough of, to whatever end that leads. For some of us, that’s destructive impulses like alcohol or binge eating. For others it’s less destructive stuff like entertainment, or even potentially constructive stuff like exercise.

My theory, though, is that everyone has something they’re like that with. Everyone has their “thing” … that pursuit which, given the choice and the elimination of possible negative consequences, they’d do all the time.

I’ve come to begin understanding mine. It’s not any of the usual suspects … not liquor nor food nor tv nor games. Those things are, to varying degrees, things to fill the spaces between my own specific drive.

See, the thing that keeps me going is rational engagement. I don’t care where it comes from, whether it’s from an informed debate with me as a participant, or disabusing some poor victim of some insane notion of theirs, or being the victim of someone else’s lecturing, or reading books or watching things on TV. But especially watching and listening to that stuff…

So I’m trying to find things that satisfy that rationalist bent. Whether it’s watching a diatribe by some political commentator or a recording of a distinguished guest’s talk at a conference or gathering, I can’t get enough of it.

I’m looking for more of that. Lectures by engaging intellectuals who have something to say… shows that encourage you to “turn on” … in short, frank, direct and honest discussion. Now taking suggestions…

Jeesh, I’ve just realized that I haven’t written a blog post in almost 2 months. Then, I haven’t written a substantial forum post in months either.

Work is busy. The last couple weeks me and my office mate and the other linux-specialist sysadmin have been crazy-busy getting ready for this big redhat enterprise 5 migration, and this week was the big upgrade crunch-time. It was nuts… lots of random scripting, cluster-defining, close to 100 nearly-identical redhat installs between the three of us, work on the provisioning server to make it all work, dealing with random problems, pains and disparities. It’s been … busy. The devs have it bad too … with one of the project managers letting me know today that he’s at 50 hours for the week as of Thursday night, and looking at probably a 12 hour day Friday. I’ve had a nine, two tens and an eleven, so I’m taking Friday off this week to take care of my sanity and some stuff I’ve been putting off for lack of time the last couple weeks. It’s fun though, we really kicked a lot of ass on the upgrades and just generally making things work, so I’ve got a pretty high level of job satisfaction right now.

In other news, I went to Otakon last weekend with my roommate and a couple other Boilermaker-Anime/Kawaii-Radio friends. It was an interesting experience. There were tons of anime nerds, 10-15% in costume, and just throngs of people. I missed out on a couple things I wanted to see because of long lines and overcrowding, but saw other less-crowded stuff instead.

Overall, my impression of the Otakon experience is characterized primarily by consumption and materialism, which I don’t think is totally a positive impression. We had fun, we ate good food, we saw interesting things, and the other people I was with bought a bunch of stuff. I left with a freebie Haruhi poster and nothing else. Incidentally, the cosplay ranged from pretty pitiful to pretty damned good. The best I saw was probably a really impressive Ryuk, with an excellent makeup job and just a great costume overall. I should have taken more cosplayer pictures, but I wasn’t really in photographer mode, so I didn’t get any the first day and left my camera home the second.

At the con, we saw Death Note live action movie 1 in the HD theater, but the lack of stadium seating, the unimpressive sound, and the low-hanging subtitles obscured by the heads of people in rows ahead of us made the experience pretty bad — made worse by the fact that the people operating the projector clearly hadn’t had the chance to do something like a dry run before they started it up. I think the viewing experience is definitely better in my room on my computer, or in the living room on the TV over tv-out though, which is a bit of a shame.

We also caught 5cm Per Second — a movie about drifting apart and being disconnected. That viewing experience was a bit better, partly because it was a dub and partly because it was in a wider, shallower room — meaning fewer rows of people to look over and no craning necks to see subtitles. Nice art and a pretty tolerable dub, but the theme of the movie was basically loneliness and depression over failures to connect. Usually movies with similar themes try to end on a hopeful note, but 5cm shrugs off the burden of normal, to end in pretty much one of the most depressing places it can land.

We missed out on The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, because the convention staff decided to be dickish about enforcing the “no bookbags or recording devices” rule in the HD Theater on Saturday. Which was annoying, since it was like a 20 minute round trip walking to the car and back to drop off backpacks. Since I wasn’t buying stuff, it wouldn’t have affected me, but I didn’t really want to go see it alone and the line mechanics were such that the group probably could have made it back in time to see the movie, but definitely wouldn’t have gotten decent seats and couldn’t have rejoined me where I was. So we bailed on that in favor of trying to catch this dude’s Rakugou performance, but the line for that was way beyond the capacity of the room it was in… so we ended up checking out the gaming room instead. That was … sort of so-so for me … got to see some SC4, which was cool, but the lines to play were like 20 people long on any given game, so I got bored spectating and bailed on that too.

We ended up Saturday night by going to the Cosplay Masquerade. It was in a hockey arena, with probably 7000-8000 people attending. We saw a “junior” category cosplaying singer who pretty much froze onstage, then 40 participants in the masquerade in various levels. I would say about 25 of them were just eye-gougingly terrible skits, 10 more were bad but not really terrible, and maybe 5 were worth seeing. It was … very odd, and mostly terrible.

So, overall Otakon was a mixed bag. Saw some decent deals in the dealer room, but nothing much better than bargain-hunting online would get you, and the shopping experience was pretty unappealing to me. Saw some good cosplay, went to some good panels, saw some good shows, but also saw some pretty bad cosplay, went to some not-so-great shows, and spent inordinate amounts of time in lines for things, which kinda sucked.

I guess I’m on the fence about whether I’ll go back next year. I mean, it was interesting and distinct, but not really all that great. Definitely a little too crowded, if nothing else. I don’t regret having gone, but … I just haven’t decided whether or not I want to make a habit of it.

I’ve been contracting for basically the last year or so. Before that, I was in class working towards graduation, and then working towards getting a job that pays well enough to pay back the student loans and … err … eat.

It’s interesting though. Now that I’m a full-time employee with a permanent position, I’ve sort of got a different mindset that I’m adjusting to.

See, when I was a student, I was working toward a specific, temporal goal. Even with setbacks, as long as I kept working at it and didn’t fail out, graduation was essentially a temporal inevitability. I always knew it was up ahead, always knew I was working towards some specific goal, some time at which things would resolve themselves if only I could hang on and keep it together until then.

Then I graduated. The temporal inevitability came and went. I survived, I made it, I crossed that line. And I looked ahead, and found another line: finding a full-time job.

I was pretty much always confident that I could get a job. I’m smart, I’m attentive, I’m friendly and generally easy to get along with, and I’ve got pretty absurdly good technical skills. I wasn’t always confident where I would get a job, but the fact of the matter never left me. Working was another temporal inevitable. It was, in my mind, an irrevocable fact that I would at some point in the indeterminate near future get a job.

And get a job I did. I accepted the CACI job in the end of July and started there in September, after really seriously starting the job hunt in September and having to basically choose between two possible places to go. And when I started there, it was as a contractor.

As a contractor on a limited-term contract-to-hire setup, I knew that it was basically inevitable that I would become a full-time employee. Of course, that turned out to be wrong, CACI turned out to be a bad fit for me, and got hit by a nasty budget crunch that caused my contract to get squeezed out. But I spent 8 years in college. I’m used to setbacks. And after a day or so of being confused and disoriented, I stood up and started searching for jobs, regrowing the sense of inevitability that I’d find a job after a couple of very positive, very successful interviews. And find a job I did, as a contractor again. This time on a 3-month instead of a 6-month, but the same deal: temp to perm.

And 3 months went by like nothing. I guess if I can spend 5 months at CACI being bored to tears and have it feel like an eternity, the 3 months just evaporating in front of me was a pretty good indicator that Mitre was a better fit. And then they made me a full time offer that was slightly better than what I’d initially negotiated, and I accepted, and became a full time employee. Again, all these events, to me, had a certain inevitability to them. I knew that it would happen. There was always room for doubt, but there was also always a sense that this was definitely going to happen, at some point. If not here, then somewhere else.

So now I’ve crossed that line. I’ve got a real position without an expiration date. It’s at a company consistently rated pretty high on the “best places to work” lists. It’s got great benefits, great vacation policies, and a healthy culture that really fits me. Things are great.

But now I’m faced with a problem. The only thing I see in the future that I’m confident about, that I see as inevitable is my own death, and that’s not for a long time. I don’t have a milestone to wait for anymore.

See, the last … I dunno, 27 years or so, I’ve been waiting for things. Waiting around to get into elementary school. Waiting to get out of it. Waiting to get out of middle school. Waiting to learn to drive. Waiting to get out of high school. Waiting to finish college. Waiting to get a permanent job. It’s so easy to justify killing time, wasting it, watching it slip by, knowing that the things you want to do are essentially inevitable. But now I am starting to feel guilty about it, because I feel like my time-wasting is finally, actually wasting it.

The momentum is gone. I don’t have anything pulling me forward anymore, so if I want to do anything before I die I’m going to have to do it on my own motivation. There’s nothing else. It’s a little disconcerting.

Maybe it’s time to build my own fire.