complich8′s journal

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!

I picked up a 6 ounce piece of port salut to be like half my dinner, and it was just ridiculously good.

I don’t know how cheese connoisseurs eat cheese, or how they describe it to each other. But I know that Port Salut is delicious.

I saw a dobsonfly on the shaded side of a column at work the other day. It was huge. If you’ve never seen one, you should totally hit up wikipedia for them.

great grey slugs are also fascinating.

Just thought I’d share…