complich8′s journal

So after some hemming and hawing about whether or not to go to the inauguration, But in the end, some urging by friends and the fading symptoms of the cold I’ve fought for the last week, I opted to go ahead and go.

And I gotta say, it was NUTS. Just insane numbers of people there. There were seriously MILLIONS of people there. I’m hearing just under 2 million people, official count.

My roommates decided to tag along when I told them I was going. We all ended up leaving the house a little before 8 am, took the bus to the nearest metro station. There were maybe 80 people in Rockville station waiting to buy farecards and stuff.

We walked right by that crowd, ’cause all three of us are locals with smarttrip cards. Yay locals! We felt superior.

Got on the train, and all but the last two cars were packed. By the time we got off the train a dozen or so stops later, that train was also completely packed.

Well, we carried on down, walked maybe 2 or 3 miles in a seemingly endless crowd of people all going the same place as us. It was absolutely nuts. We filled in the mall, and found someplace to stand near the bathroom building just east of the Washington monument. So like … a mile out from the action, but a couple hundred feet from the nearest jumbo-tron. And then there was an hour or so of watching random footage from Sunday’s concert before the program started.

And lemme tell ya, it was ASS cold… and not one person complained about it within earshot. Now, I grant you there were only like 20,000 people that I could hear, but …. you know, that’s still something, ’cause it was pretty bitter out there.

Entertainingly, the audio lagged about 5 seconds behind the video for pretty much all of the proceedings… so that was sort of odd.

Anyway, we waited, watched, listened…. took craptons of pictures, and had a generally good time. And of course got to see the live stream of pretty much everything. Laughed at the chief justice going off script. Laughed at the booing every time we saw Bush without Obama by his side, and the confused ambiguity when they were together: “Do we applaud Obama, or boo Bush?” Enjoyed Aretha and the absurdly all-star quartet and all the military musicians. Honestly, you’d have a better experience watching it at home (verified: tivo’d nbc’s coverage… better view, more context, warmer, but a lot less crowd energy), but it was really cool to know that what we were seeing was just under a mile east of us on the other side of a seemingly endless and remarkably friendly and well-behaved crowd. You know, other than the sort of classless booing and whatnot.

Well, after Obama’s speech and the hilarious benediction we made our way back off the mall and out with just absurd numbers of people, squeezed onto a train and left, mainly because it was really really cold. But also pretty fun.

If you want to see what we were seeing, well … I took just shy of 180 pics, which are on my gallery and also on my facebook profile. They’re pretty much unedited and chronologically numbered, so … if you’re interested, check them out!

Off to work and back to normal tomorrow… it’s a whole new day…

Everyone else is doing 2008 retrospectives, so I might as well too, right?

The most salient thing about last year is that it to me marked a sort of real liberation. In 2007, I graduated, moved to the DC area and started a “real job” with CACI in downtown arlington, but I wasn’t really making enough to buy a car, and I was spending entirely too much time commuting on the subway (about 1:10 door to door if there weren’t problems on the trains), not to mention the job was unfulfilling, with a couple of micromanagers staring over my shoulder constantly and no sense of empowerment to change things that needed to be changed. All in all, caci was paying the rent, but it wasn’t fun, or exciting, or good… everything about it sucked really… but it got me out here.

In early 2008, around the first week in February, I got a phone call from the staffing company I was hired through, saying that they’d cancelled my contract and wouldn’t be offering me a job. I was shocked and worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep doing what I do, because it was my first “real” position out on my own… so that night I sort of sat around in shock. The next day I updated my resume and re-posted it on monster, and by the end of the week I started getting preliminary calls from other HR companies that wanted to interview me, and by the middle of march I’d accumulated competing job offers from a place in Germantown, a place in the Reagan building in downtown DC, a place in Silver Spring, a contractor at the Naval Surface Warfare Center around Cabin John, and Mitre in Mclean. It was exciting, because I had 5 solid offers for at least 10 grand a year more than I was making at CACI. Can’t really complain about that, ya?

I took the job that seemed like it was in the best environment (which didn’t start me at the most money, mind you), and started there in the tail end of March as a contractor on a 3-month contract. In June, they offered me a permanent position, and I’ve been there ever since. It’s like the diametric opposite of the environment at CACI — I’m empowered, I’m valued, I’m generally respected and left to do my own thing with little or no supervision, and I actually feel useful and fulfilled.

The other thing about the Mitre job is that the pay increase meant I could afford to buy myself a car (mainly because I needed to get to the place, and it’d be like 3 hours commuting by train and bus). So I joined the world of people with mobility, got myself a 2008 Nissan Altima 2.5 SL with a couple of nice packages on top of it, and haven’t regretted that decision either. It’s nice, it’s comfortable, it’s responsive and it’s got pretty decent fuel economy. And most importantly, I can fit in it comfortably, which sets it in a very exclusive class of vehicles — when I went on my search for cars, I only found maybe 8 that I could reasonably drive, and only 4 of them were comfortable.

Having the car means having freedom to go places I couldn’t go before, and do things that weren’t in my reach before. I could go to stores and buy more than I could carry without depending on my roommates. I could go to fast food places that were longer than walking distance away. Little conveniences that having a set of wheels affords you… you know?

Of course, having the car also meant trimming about a mile and a half of walking from my daily routine (walking to/from the bus stops and whatnot), and I’ve been struggling mostly unsuccessfully to force myself to add something back into the mix to counteract that. On the other hand, the fact that I’m not eating at chipotle for lunch and pizza for dinner every day has probably moderated that a bit — even if I’m still eating fast food more often than not.

My financial situation is looking up, too. In 2007, my student loans started at about a 24k balance. In 2008, I paid them down to under 20. In 2007, I had a little remaining credit balance. In 2008, my credit cards are clear and I’ve got several grand in savings. In 2007, I had no retirement fund. In ’08, I’ve got a couple grand in my 403(b).

Health-wise, I’m not sure where I stand. I exercised more on a daily basis in 2007, sort of by mandate of my living conditions — for the whole of 2007, I had no car and was walking to work, to classes, to restaurants. On the other hand, for the latter half of it at least I ate a bit worse than I do now. I had a scale that I thought was weighing me accurately, but the battery was apparently low, so I don’t know how accurate it was. I’d been relying on that from early 2006 up until graduation, and I don’t know how long, but for a long time it had been misreporting my weight. In Jan 2008 I got a nice medical grade mechanical scale and was dismayed to find that the scale I’d been using had been under-reporting my weight by like 15%. Since then I’ve been tracking, but not recording. So here, for the record, my weight this morning is 357 lbs. That’s entirely more than I want to weigh, but I’ve been fluctuating between 350 and 360 for all of 2008. I’d look and feel better in the 300 neighborhood, so this year that’s what I’m shooting for. And that means activities and exercise.

In 2008, I had no “active” activities. In 2009, that’s gotta change. I’m going to have to start deliberately exercising. Have to find outdoor things to do. Have to make that a part of my daily life again, somehow. That’s the looking forward thing. I made a lot of important changes in 2008. That’s the most important change I’ve got to make in 2009. Everything else, I just need to keep doing what I’m doing: save money, pay off debts, buy things I want to buy. But that one thing still needs change.

We went to Phoenix this week, doing yet another node install.

Everyplace we go is different. Some places put all their stuff in datacenters and remote into it. Others put all their stuff in datacenters and have people come in to work directly on it. Still others stack 17U of server and storage equipment on shelves in an ancient round-hole rack too shallow to accommodate normal dell rails. Which is the situation we had here.

But other than an unexpectedly difficult hardware install, things went pretty well, with nice people on all fronts, and we ended up with a pretty favorable result overall. I’m fairly happy with how the work went.

Phoenix is … surprisingly non-hypoallergenic. Like, most desert cities there’s not enough flowering plants and grasses and flowering trees to load the air with pollen, but in Phoenix my allergies were on a little bit of a tear. We walked around downtown Scottsdale (sort of a northeast suburb of Phoenix), and I was surprised by just how much plant life they’d transplanted into what’s naturally a desert. Lots of sand and gravel and cacti, but also lots of people with big leafy trees and green lawns. That part wasn’t much fun.

When I left for Phoenix, the temp at Reagan was about 35F. When we landed, it was 85F at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. Thursday was in the upper 80′s too. Other than the allergens, that place is some sort of crazy paradise in winter. Came back to 37 at Dulles… had some trouble adjusting.

Got a couple of decent pictures this trip, but most expose the limitations of my camera.. They’re up at the gallery.

Flight info: going out we flew on a 757-200. Seat width 17.1, pitch 32. Very uncomfortable. Flight attendant hit my knee with her cart while I was napping. Not enough leg room, not enough anything-else room either. The flight out was a bit over 5 hours. Coming back was on an Airbus A319. Width 18.0, pitch 31. Despite the smaller legroom, the inch of seat width made a big difference in comfort. It was a pretty decent trip back, with no knee-cracking or other related issues, and since we were heading east it was only about a 4 hour flight. The flight was pretty rough though, with about an hour of fairly significant shaking back and forth because of the turbulence, and it felt like the air was a bit thin, but it could have just been breathing troubles from the over-perfumed passenger a couple rows back. Seriously, why would you douse yourself with perfume knowing you’re about to get on a crowded airplane?

Phoenix was a nice place to visit … in November. Wouldn’t want to be there in July though…

Ok, so here’s the story.

At work, we’ve got exchange calendars. They do everything from meeting and room scheduling to events and outings and all that stuff, with meeting invites carrying along the necessary info to make stuff work in general. It’s pretty slick, but it only works with outlook and outlook web access.

Which is all well and great, except that it means to use it I’ve got to have our OWA page sitting in a browser window open all the time. No reminders, nothing else. See, I’m a Linux sysadmin, and I don’t even have a windows box on my desk. No windows, no outlook.

Now, most places you can get away with doing stuff like that by running Evolution and using the owa interface to interface with exchange calendars and it works, but with our company, there’s some tweak or customization to the login page that causes exchange to simply not work with it. I’m not sure on the details, but it’s a bit of a problem either way. So that route’s out. Also, evolution blows a little bit as a mail client.

So, I thought what I’d do was I’d run thunderbird for email and not worry about calendaring. Which worked great for me for the first three months I was here, until I started having more than one meeting a week and had to actually schedule and keep track of things for myself appropriately. As my daily and weekly complexity levels rose, I needed a calendar. So I turned to Lightning, the thunderbird calendar plugin.

And you know, Lightning was working ok. Not any really huge problems with it except that the calendar was only on the local system, not synced with exchange or anything else. Of course, that meant I couldn’t check the calendar from owa at home, or anywhere else… it was only any good to me on my local system at work. Which wasn’t really great for me, because I keep a slightly odd schedule and need the calendar to reference to remind me what I’m doing tomorrow. So I was still maintaining two calendars — the OWA one and the lightning one, so I could have web-accessibility and still have pop-up reminders and such.

But maintaining two calendars manually is a pain, so I sought out a different solution. The obvious answer was to tap Google Calendars inside of lightning using the lightning GDATA provider to replace the local lightning-native calendar.

And that’s when the headaches really started. You see, Lightning’s gdata provider does something weird, or maybe it’s just lightning itself. Some meeting invitations work perfectly in lightning, directly. They just go into the google calendar, they work, and things are great. But then others, you try to accept them and they crap all over the place. For example, the “accept” button will show up, you click it and nothing happens. Or you click accept and thunderbird freezes. Or you click “accept” and it adds it to the local calendar, or if you don’t have a local calendar pops up a box asking you to pick the calendar to add it to but not listing the google one. But you can still drag-and-drop such invites into the calendar. Just that if you do, it decides to send new invitations to everyone on the attendees list, because rather than interpreting that as “accept the invitation” or “add this event to the calendar” it interprets it at “take this event, add it to the calendar like it’s your own, and send out appropriate invites as specified in the invitation”.

This … you see, this is annoying as hell. The only way I can convince the google calendar to accept the invite without spamming everyone on the list is to basically duplicate the event manually, for myself only. Now instead of maintaining two calendars by clicking “accept” in lightning then “accept” in owa, I’m maintaining two calendars by clicking “accept” in lightning, getting annoyed when it doesn’t work, manually recreating the meeting info, then clicking “accept” in owa. Calling it “retarded” would be offensive to retarded people everywhere.

So now I’m pretty far down the rabbit hole. Most of the events that I’m tracking are in my google calendar, but that means they don’t get the exchange-pushed updates to things like locations and cancellation statuses. And that’s not all of the events that I’m keeping track of, just most of them. And none of this even begins to address things like tying into my phone.

My basic desire is to have a single, central calendar, which I can see from my cell phone, from my mail client on any system I use, and from a web interface. I want to be able to click “accept” and accept invitations. I want to be able to do this without having an extra system just sitting there being my own personal calendar sync system. And honestly, if lightning could understand all the invitations I get and send them all to the gdata provider, I’d have close enough to what I want. Or if lightning could just talk to exchange directly.

I have them. Bongos, that is.

That is all.