complich8′s journal

So, like a lemming capitulating to the pressure of peers and an ancestral drive to leap off of a cliff, I’m going to once more join the crowd of people who’re doing year in review/decade in review posts, partly because having at least one post in every month gives me some sort of psychic justification for considering my blog something other than completely abandoned.

So …. 2009. It’s been a year. I started 2009 out with a review of 2008, and it was… well, 2008 was a pretty decent year, all told.

2009 has been sort of a lost year for me, in that I’m amazed that it’s over, and I leave it with little sense of immediate accomplishment. No major life transitions have hit me this year.

On the health front, I mostly feel pretty good. I still have yet to get new glasses, to see a doctor at all, to see a dentist at all, so I’m not _really_ taking much more care of myself than I was. But I am conscious of what I eat and consciously addressing my worst habits, eating a little less on the whole, exercising a little more on the whole.

I got a bike, a surly cross check 62cm – the largest size frame they make. But I’ve put maybe 20 hard-fought miles on the bike, so the cost average is somewhere in the $50/mile range right now. Shortly after I got it, the city tore up my street to repave, and then didn’t actually resurface for like 3 months, and given the fear of pinch flats and general unpleasantness of riding on grated-up streets, I didn’t get much riding in in the summer. More than that, my weird sleep cycles that have me not seeing weekend mornings took their toll on my ability to ride, as did my weird dietetic cycles. Most of the biking that I did was in my absurdly hilly neighborhood, and I discovered that I’m pretty rapidly hitting the lactate threshold whenever I try to climb a hill around here, which sort of puts a damper on a lot of riding. But it’s still fun, getting the bike up into the low 30′s on a flat or a light downhill is exhilarating, and I look forward to doing more of that next year.

I joined the gym at work, and started a workout regimen back about a month ago, that mostly consists of 3mph on a treadmill at 3% incline for between 40 and 60 minutes, and some strength work. I don’t have a specific goal in mind, other than to make it there at least once a week for now. It’s had me feeling better.

I also did spent some time playing tennis with my roommates this summer, and completely failing at basketball with them and some other friends back in late spring. Tennis was fun. Didn’t get serious enough to keep score, at all, ever, at any of it though — we’re all pretty much failures at sports, but it was a good time. Took several walks in the 3+ mile range, a couple in the 5+ range, and started using bikely.com to chart out both walking and cycling routes in the neighborhood. I also spent some time exploring the nearby forest preserves … thinking in 2010 I’ve got to look for a pair of hiking boots and do some more serious trail-hiking out in the local state parks. Seneca Creek sounds neat, and I’m thinking of doing an expedition out in the direction of Shenandoah National Park for some hiking too. To say nothing of my interest in cycling part of the C&O canal, but I’m not sure if I’ll have my bike mileage limit up to the point where I can successfully approach a full-day c&o run in the next year. Probably not at the current rate of improvement.

I also got a heart rate monitor, partly because of biking, partly because of tennis My rest heart rate is certainly a little concerning, but I’m taking it as a sign that I need to drop some caloric intake and do some more light-to-moderate exercise to get healthier. I think I hit my peak weight this year, which was in the mid 360′s, which is also alarming. But right now I’m in the mid-350′s, and slowly drifting down ever since I joined the gym and started paying attention. It’s still a big concern though, and I could definitely see myself 50 or 60 fat-pounds lighter, if not that 50 or 60 net-weight pounds lighter.

On the entertainment front, I think I’ve put about 6, maybe 7 or 8 hours total this year into playing bass. Another hobby that per-hour has turned out to be quite a bit more expensive than expected. It’s cool though, when I make time to pick it up, I enjoy it quite a bit.

I’ve pretty much given up on anime at this point. I think the only series I’ve been following is Dragon Ball Kai, and I already know how that whole story turns out. Still, it’s good nostalgia. Still following a couple Manga series, so I’ve got at least a little shounen-action-cred left. And gotwoot’s still alive, albeit in a slightly paralyzed state with the fansubbers being scared off from posting on the front page, and the forums at their perpetual rumble. I’m going to have to make a vbulletin migration to 4.x a 2010 priority and do it myself, or it’s never going to happen.

My roommates and I went to a memorable concert: Dethklok and Mastodon on Halloween at the Patriot Center. I ended up getting not a single decent picture, and I don’t think I wrote about it at all before, so I’ll write a bit here: we showed up before the first opener. There were two openers: High on Fire and Converge. Both were surprisingly good for opening bands. I liked High on Fire better for the musical style (which is a little more grungy, a little less punkish). Converge had better (insane, frenetic) energy and was a real crowd pleaser, but they were also a lot more punkish, fast and loose, and a little out of the line of my more melodic tastes. Mastodon played through their entire Cracke The Skye album, which was ok, but honestly kind of unengaging — it’s their newest album, but maybe not their best for a concert performance. But then they broke some stuff out from remission, leviathan, and blood mountain that was pretty rockin’, and we had a good time there — but the dethklok show completely brought the house down, had the whole place literally rocking to the music. It was a blast, but also a valuable lesson: next time at a metal show: ear protection, not optional.

Speaking of memorable activities, how could I forget attending the Obama inauguration, in the bitter cold. My roommates and I made it in at around the Washington Monument, immersed in an absolute sea of people, watching the proceedings on the giant screens they had set up because even though we were “there” we were like a mile and change away from the proceedings. And even though I subsequently spent a week recovering from the knocked-down immune system and the moderate flu that set in after the trip, it was totally worth it.

Back on the work front, I did a bunch of traveling, all around the country, which was interesting and got me quite a few interesting experiences and enough hours in planes and airports to be considered a veteran business traveler. Also spent a lot of time in various airport Marriotts and became pretty decent friends with the coworkers who went along. It was a good experience, and I got to sample a dozen or so cities on a dime that wasn’t my own. When I’ve got someone to go with and a bit more financial stability, I can definitely see myself going back to a lot of these places (and others) for my own tourism reasons, which is interesting because I never really had the opportunity to do any really touristy stuff growing up.

Work was also pretty engaged for other reasons. The project that had all the travel also had a big web portal that I helped architect, and built the systems and most of the security setup for it, and managed to guide through the whole deployment process from start to finish, which was big points on the work-kudos scale. Then I also did a big incident response and recovery after a moderately-important system got compromised. I’ve led up on a couple projects and contributed to a bunch of others. Really, I’ve pretty well integrated myself into the team at work, and I’m as close to having hit my stride as anyone really gets in a world of moving targets, to the point that the other admins depend on me pretty heavily for a lot of stuff. I’ve also been put on the “recommended for promotion” list, so it’s possible that I pick up a job title upgrade in the next few months. Or maybe not, there’s no promises there.

A lot of my life has been revolving around work. It’s pretty much work, eat, sleep, repeat. I’ve also dumped a lot of time into gaming. I picked up a ps3 specifically and solely for disgaea 3, into which I put in something like 250 hours I think. I picked up legit copies of a couple games I had non-legit copies of before that I found myself playing all the time. Spent the first half of the year in and out of rock band, which I haven’t played at all this month for lack of compelling new DLC. I put a couple dozen hours into simcity 4, probably logged a bit over 100 hours in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne this year (some on a twinked-demons hard-mode replay, the rest on a clean-room hard run that I’m almost done with). Spent the last week or so immersed in Dragon Age: Origins (and by immersed I mean 65 hours in 6 days, which is absurd). Not a lot of other games on the docket this year, I’ve been mainly focused on deep plays of a few games, rather than broad-spectrum gaming, but it’s been pretty satisfying.

I didn’t read as much as I had hoped in 2009. I only really made it through 6 or 7 books total, which is sort of a sad showing for a nerd like me. I’m thinking of a furniture upgrade just to give myself a comfortable place to settle in with a book.

I started down the road of the wine snob, with six semi-random bottles I bought on my birthday. Took me till thanksgiving to get through them all. I learned a few things about my tastes and likes and dislikes from the experience. I learned that I don’t much care for Sherry, it’s ok but not something I’d go out of my way to drink. I discovered that a Ruby Port gives me more of a hangover on less than half a bottle than a full bottle of whiskey. And that half a bottle of ruby port is not enough to get me more than a slight buzz. I learned that wine-buzzed is sort of a more mellow, slow-onset, long-lasting buzz (versus the fast-onset, fast-retreating liquor buzz). That Pinot Noir is a bit too delicate for my palate, and that the flavors of a pinot grigio aren’t up my alley. I liked a Davinci Chianti Classico, and a young, cheap Ravenswood Merlot made my favorites list. I am lukewarm to the Cabernet Sauvignon I’ve got in front of me right now, which is fairly strong and bold, but without a whole lot of complexity or well-defined flavor. I could see myself finishing off the bottle tomorrow, but it’s not my favorite wine in the world.

The big problem I have with the whole wine scene is that apparently a lot of the wine you can buy is categorized as “too young to drink” … and it’s hard for someone who’s just starting to know when a wine is “ready” — you just about need a sommelier on-call to tell you what’s good and what’s going to be good in a couple years. It’s kinda crazy.

On the music tastes front, I haven’t moved too far from the beginning of the year to now. I went through a serious Megadeth kick, and the tail end of a serious Buckethead kick, but I’m back to my some-chillhouse some-classical mostly-random default as of late.

Personal life wise, I am still pretty much just here. My social life is not particularly extensive or interesting, and there’s not really much to say about it. Hopefully that’s something to change next year.

Lastly, on the financials front, I’m better than ever. I’m close to 5-figure savings, I’ve got less than 16k in student loans and less than 16k in car loans, a little in the stock market (where I’m taking a beating, I bet half the money I put into it on a bad horse, and missed my opportunity to dismount). And I’ve built up a pretty decent chunk in retirement mutual funds thanks in no small part to corporate contribution matching. It still adds up to a negative net worth, but only just barely. At the current rate, I’ll be debt free and have a mid-range 5-figure savings balance by the time I make this post in 2012, so I think I’ll be looking for my non-rental house in either 2013 or 2014, depending on a lot of factors and assuming no pay raises or promotions. And pay raises and promotions are likely (though no pay raise for this year, ’cause of a corporate-wide “curve bending” operation). Considering my life of sensible excess (it’d be relatively easy for me to cut my monthly expenses in half) that’s not doing too bad.

Right, so that’s 2009. It’s slight progress on a lot of fronts, but no game-changers. May 2010 see improvements where appropriate.

Yep, so right after my last post, I got a couple hours of sleep and headed off to Houston, for the second time. Our first trip out there, we went to an airline that lives basically on the airport campus. This time, we went to a larger carrier that has its own facilities downtown. That meant getting away from the airport a bit more, staying in the Galleria area instead of just hiding in the airport. So that was cool.

Per usual, I’ve got some pics from around Houston up in the gallery. It was good times. I think the coolest thing about this trip was probably that there’s this pretty unique motif for the streets, which centers around stainless steel and sort of futuristic-looking decorations. So like, in part of the city, all of the light posts are mirror-polished stainless steel, all of the street signs are suspended mirror-polished rings, etc. It’s pretty neat.

For food, we hit one place in the Galleria mall itself: a Japanese Fusion restaurant called Kona Grill. I had a chicken dish, which was like ideally cooked and just ridiculously delicious. Coworkers had slightly different dishes, but generally the same reaction: that place makes a pretty respectable dinner. As a bonus, we had a waitress named Pepper, who was like ridiculously cute, but I think stretched a little thin on the tables she was covering.

We also hit a place a block or two down called Maggie Rita’s. Predictably, they’re a mexican/tex-mex place. We all got fajitas, and they were great… but I can’t think of a time I’ve had bad fajitas. Tortillas were a bit inconsistent though … I think you probably get better tortillas at places like Guapo’s around here or Pappasito’s in Texas. Still, I was satisfied.

JW Marriott hotels have kind of a weird room layout compared to a normal Marriott, I learned. I’m not sure how I felt about it, but it wasn’t bad. Probably a bit better on the bedroom area privacy (couldn’t hear hall-goers and no beds on shared walls), but overall I didn’t care too much, since I was there to sleep.

Not too much eventful to report about the flights. Flew American Airlines, MD Super-80′s all four hops (IAD->DFW->IAH, back the same route). I’m not a fan of the super-80 or the md80/md88 setup in general, but the flights were at least on-time and largely annoyance-free. Three of the four had in-flight wireless, but it was like $14, so I didn’t partake. Per usual, got back right in time to catch the peak hour or so of Friday evening rush hour, which wasn’t a great time. I finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers on the flight there. Thought it was stellar, but I don’t really feel like writing a book review, so … yeah, it’s good, and definitely recommended!

Anyway, that’s it for that…

So I went to Atlanta last week for yet another node install.

On the work part of the trip, the install was a mess. We ended up in a datacenter that made our sloppy cable-buildup over the last decade or so in the server room at work look absolutely solid pro. Had space issues and problems finding adequate power to run the whole node, and ran into mysterious network config issues including but not limited to a bad cable and a weird switch configuration, and the normally expected router hiccups. Think we were there a bit over 5 hours, which is close to our record longest.

The weather was pretty scuzzy, and one of the coworkers was meeting up with some family, so we ended up just kind of driving around the downtown Atlanta area in the rain and not really stopping or walking around at all. We did see quite a few people getting pulled over and/or arrested though… so there’s that. I’ve got some pictures of the scuzzy rainy drive over at the gallery.

The one interesting dining place we landed at was a seafood joint/bar called Spondivits. I had the “deluxe platter” (some regular crab legs, a couple king crab legs, half a lobster tail, a bunch of pretty big shrimp, and a handful of specialty-cooked oysters), which was impressive looking, respectably well-prepared, and filled me up pretty well for about what you’d expect to pay for a meal like that. Atmosphere wasn’t great (you know …. it was basically a so-so bar with a seafood menu), but had reasonably good service and pretty good food. Not sure I’d go back unless I was really hankering for some crab or something though.

Flight both ways was an Embraer ERJ-175, which has decent seat comfort and a decently high cabin for being a 2-2 layout plane. As a bonus, the flight attendant ad-hoc upgraded me to economy plus on the trip down, so I actually had enough legroom for a change… which was nice. IAD->ATL is a pretty short hop though.

Overall, I was sort of luke-cool on this trip, I guess. I wasn’t really feeling it. I think after better than a year or this and something like 8 trips down, I’m sort of burning out on this whole work travel gig. It’s kind of annoying, it eats up more than half of the week, and we don’t really get any opportunity to really get to know the cities we visit at all.

I’ve got one more trip to Houston slated to lift off in 6 hours, and probably another visit to Minneapolis sometime around December, or possibly the beginning of next calendar year, but I think that’s all we’ve got planned for now, so I’m kinda burning out on it at right about the right time I guess.

Yep, I’m now a prime age again. It’s been a long couple years since my last prime …. like 6 of them. Next one’s only two years away…

But the primality of my age aside, it seems like this would be a good time to post a life-and-times update, dontcha think? Well, plus or minus a couple days….

So I’ve been working my current job for a bit more than 18 months now, I guess. It’s definitely flown by. I’m pretty comfortable with where I am. I’m financially stable, I’m pretty well-respected at work and the work itself is surprisingly satisfying. In any given day I can go from “long-term strategic planner” to “brute squad”. In fact, in any given 10 minute span, that shift can happen. I do everything from building rackmount kits and hanging servers to cabling to os installs to capacity planning, up to infrastructure R&D work. I’ve got a group of coworkers I’ve got a good rapport with. Probably the most satisfying thing is the refreshing independence: my management basically gives me as much leash as I want, as long as I stay in the neighborhood. Very empowered feeling.

Work’s sort of been the focal point of my life here. I don’t have much going on outside of it… I come home, play games, watch stuff, hang out with a relatively small social circle at pretty regular intervals. Sometimes I play tennis. Sometimes I cycle. Sometimes I walk. Occasionally I’ll pick up the bass and plunk at it for an hour or so. Probably of those four pastimes, I don’t do any of them enough to get any better at them… but given the fact that I consider a 4ish mile walk circuit to be the routine walk now and it doesn’t really phase me, I’m not sure how much better at that one I’d expect to get. Still can’t play bass for crap, and the cycling’s pretty limited even on the flat right now, until I get around to getting a gel seat cover or a pair of padded shorts or something.

Still running gotwoot, still out of the fansubbing game. I’ve definitely lost interest in anime pretty much wholesale, and in that world I’m only tracking DragonBall Kai (out of a sense of nostalgia, I guess) right now. Thinking of picking back up the phpdev hat and the trackerdev hat and migrating the tracker to a new piece of software and the admin interface and wp-torrents to something newly-brewed, and maybe doing a theme update on the front page and a version bump and theme update on the forums. But at the same time, it sounds kinda tedious, and I sort of don’t want to do all of that.

I recently put together a spreadsheet of my current income and expenditures and worked out how much I can manage to pay on my car and student loans. Based on the spreadsheet inputs and a slightly more aggressive payment schedule than I’d been pursuing before (’cause it turns out I can afford it), I should have both paid off by this time in 2012, plus hopefully a decent ball o’ wax saved up for a down payment on a house. Of course, that depends on how much of my discretionary budget I eat up on a week-to-week basis. If I spend the whole thing every paycheck I don’t end up saving much, and if I end up being fairly frugal in any given month I do a lot better. But then, I don’t account for pay raises.

Speaking of pay raises, my workplace is doing a workforce-wide “lump sum payment” this year, to bend the payroll curve down a notch. We haven’t heard how much that LSP is going to be, but basically the theory is they’d give a payout equivalent to what our annual pay raise would be right at the start of next calendar year, but without benefits withheld, and without calling it a pay raise. So we essentially get a pay raise this year but not next year, or so the theory goes.

That may or may not matter much to me, since I may also end up moving up a level this year… which might also come with a commensurate pay raise of its own in the couple-of-percentage-points range. So that might be cool…

On the financial front again, I basically owe money on my car and the student loan. The car’s at about 20k left, and the student loan’s also about 17k. I’m still feeling the car as a good choice, since satellite radio and various luxury features are pretty damned nice when you’re stuck in traffic. Still, my minimum payment is fairly steep, so I’m pretty much paying off the car and the student loans at the same rate… which sucks, ’cause that means I can’t really do the whole payoff-snowball thing and get rid of the student loan much faster. Unless I abandon the idea of saving altogether, that is.

On the “taking care of myself” front, I should really see a doctor for a physical and some associated bloodwork and to get rid of some cysts, a dentist to get my teeth cleaned and patched up, and an eye doctor for new glasses. All of these things have been outstanding for a couple years and are things that I can get for somewhere in the neighborhood of free, and my goal right now is to deal with all of them by the end of the calendar year, and most of them before thanksgiving. I’m still not really eating a great diet, though I’ve downticked the calorie count a bit and dropped about 10-15 pounds from my peak, the pizza lunches and plan-free dinners have caused me to plateau a bit there. So I definitely need to revamp that sometime soon. Planning out dinners might even help me with meeting the discretionary budget.

It’s interesting looking at the arc of my life though. When I was 19, I thought I’d be a mechanical engineer for some company somewhere, designing robotics hardware and doing what amounted to applied physics. When I was 23, I thought I’d be a developer somewhere writing some interesting and complex piece of software (though about then that idea was sort of fraying around the edges). When I was 27, I had just moved to DC (a move which I completely didn’t expect at all), and was working at a crappy DOE site doing what amounted to litigation support, and thinking that maybe sysadminning wasn’t the direction I wanted to go. Now I’m thinking that sysadminning is exactly the direction I wanted to go, and where I am is where I wanted to be.

But at the same time, I have to recognize that if I stay in it another 5 or 10 years I might find myself stagnating, sort of like I did towards the tail-end of my stay at SEAS. It’s really easy to envision myself doing this job another decade… I mean, I’m definitely planning for another 4-5 years at least, and I’m thinking about getting a house in the area and putting down roots. Right now I feel like I’m kind of getting close to that asymptote, where it’s going to take a lot more work to make relatively small gains on my technical skills. So maybe in 5 years (yay multiples of 17!) I’ll be at that point, where my foundation’s solid and the towers are tall enough that it doesn’t make sense to build any taller ones. So will I stay where I am, at a company that it’d be really easy to retire from? Or will I find something else, move along and pursue another field entirely? Or should I keep drilling down, chasing that asymptote, digging that hole, maybe going and doing more experimental/academic stuff in the field that I’m in?

So I guess what I’m saying is, I’m starting to feel like there’s maybe the itch to go back to school growing here… maybe I should see if I can pursue that a little bit more seriously than just kicking the idea around in cy10. It’s been a couple years, it’s probably been long enough…

Right. Anyway, enough of that. Still alive in 2009. In need of better sleep patterns like always. Signing out!

So, another work trip recently came and went. This one was out to Denver, Colorado. Another node install, for which we were in and out of the facility in a grand total of right around 3 hours. Neat facility, but it was a cage colo, so I shouldn’t really elaborate on it beyond saying that between 36 inch raised floors, probably 14-16 foot ceilings and ample power and cooling, I was quite satisfied with the facility and wish I had one of my own.

The flight out sucked about as much as expected. We flew United out of Dulles. Outbound, it was a 757, complete with miserable 17 inch seats with no damned legroom at all. Very uncomfortable until the person sitting next to me found a seat where she could talk with her husband, so I got to spread out a bit which made life a bit happier for all parties involved.

The flight back was on a 777, which was exciting. That’s a damned nice plane, let me tell you now. Seats are wide enough for me, belts are big enough to accommodate someone a fair bit bigger than me (versus the 757 and older jets that I just about max out). Headroom to spare, adequate legroom even in economy. It was a good experience. The 777′s takeoff is gentle, and the landing is really smooth…. you could barely tell we touched down, no big jerk or impact sound like smaller jets get. And the cruising speed…. with our ~50mph tailwind for better than half the trip, we were cruising in the 600mph ground speed range at 39000 feet. It was pretty awesome. It’s also neat that it’s just as ridiculously huge as it is. If you get the choice between other Boeing jets that currently exist or a triple-7, my recommendation is the 777, hands down.

Wednesday dinner was nothing special, went out to the Applebees near the Denver Airport Marriott. Hotel had reasonably good free wireless, friendly service, nice decor, but a sort of lower-middle-tier concierge lounge offering. Didn’t get a chance to check out the exercise facilities though. Interestingly, that hotel is sort of out in the middle of nowhere, in a little campus that’s basically 5 or 6 hotels, maybe two other commercial buildings, and a couple restaurants. I guess there’s other residential stuff nearby, but it definitely felt a bit desolate.

Thursday, after the install, we went to downtown Denver and hung out there for a while, ate at a restaurant called Racine’s. Pro tip: if you order the “Mile High Nachos” there, make sure that you’re splitting them with at least one other person (probably more), and that the only other thing you order is beverages. They are literally like a foot and a half tall, just a mountain of nachos and toppings. Rest of their food was pretty decent — we all had southwestern-type fare, but it was hard to appreciate after filling up pretty much entirely on the nachos.

Denver and Aurora (Co) are interesting. Downtown Denver is basically as built-up as cities get. Even fairly late, it seemed like there was a good amount of life on the streets, like people were out and about and there were things to do… like it was a walkable/drivable/bikeable city with lots of mixed-use sorts of areas that just totally vitalize a city. I liked it, thought it was a neat setup… and it’s apparently REALLY bike-friendly. Like, there’s cyclists freaking EVERYWHERE. It pretty much felt like the diametric opposite of Phoenix, which was a ghost town after 6 pm even in very comfortable weather.

The other interesting counterpoint to Denver’s presence of night life is Aurora, and the associated Denver suburbs. They’re basically the textbook definition of suburban sprawl, the very antithesis of urban life. It definitely didn’t feel close, or walkable, at all. Definitely very …. separated, and much more sparse.

The other interesting thing about them is that those cities are sort of right on the edge of the rockies. They’re not quite mountain cities, inasmuch as they’re relatively flat, but out east of them there’s nothing _but_ flat, and out west of them there’s well-defined mountains all over the place. Sorta neat, I guess… it makes it hard to lose your bearings. Confused where you’re facing? Find the mountains!

We didn’t really go out and do much outside of driving around, so I don’t really have much more to say about it. The airport’s main terminal is a neat design, and there’s some other pretty cool architecture and scenery around, which are worth looking at. And solar panels in surprising quantity. But yeah, the trip was pretty ordinary. I’d definitely go back and try to find stuff to do if I had a week or two out there though.

On the flight out, I read about half of Terry Pratchett’s “Carpe Jugulum”. It was pretty good… finished the rest up Saturday or Sunday night (don’t remember which). It’s fairly standard Discworld fare, but if you’re into that, it’s pretty good. Also picked up “Outliers” on the way out, but haven’t had a chance to crack it open yet.

At some point I’ll post some pics from the trip, but … for now, nothing, ’cause of the lazy. HaHA!