Gecko Bloggle

Sleep: Daily routine of unconsciousness with vivid hallucinations, and possibly followed amnesia about the experience. – XKCD

I had a blow out last week during the ride in, and have been slowly getting everything I needed back together, which has been “fun” (did you know there’s thread count in tires just like for sheets?)  Nilo was kind enough to bring a new tube to our lunch, and so I made it back home that day, but then I realized that the flat had been due to a mis-aligned brake pad that was touching the tire during stopping just enough to cause a small hole and finally to pinch the tube itself.

So now I’ve got a new tube ($Lunch), new tire ($21 @ MEC), installed my “Mr. Tuffy” tire liners (woo, extruded plastic!) which I’ve had for ABOUT three years but hadn’t installed (maybe now’s a good time, AFTER the blowout?)

After pulling apart my bike, Arwen’s bike, and removed Ripley’s training wheels (they were just slowing him down, I think, in the grand scheme of things), I managed to get everything working properly again.  Need to go look up how to finetune my brakes, ’cause right now they’re a little, uhm… let’s say… passive.  I need them to be able to lock up both tires so I can do that cool move where you lay the bike down and slide under the flames-a-burning semi as it hops sideways down the six lanes of traffic and…

Wait, I think that’s something from Matrix, isn’t it?

I’m saying that when you are ready, you won’t need to brake.

I want to be able to hit my brakes hard enough that my bike disappears from underneath me, and I highside into the back of a Smart Car.

Okay, let’s take a look at the numbers, shall we?  Survey SAYS!

• Avg Speed: 17.1
• Distance: 11.5
• Time: 40:30

So, longer than normal by quite a bit, but I was taking it easy after filling up my brand new tubes at the Chevron (no idea what pressure I’m at, so I dunno if I’m a little under, or what, but I didn’t wanna go over and start my day off with a “Rapid Airloss Situation“!).  The new tires have thicker tread than my old ones, so they’re dragging me a little bit.  Have to adjust my back fender ’cause it rubs when I’m standing in the pedals (from a stoplight, etc).  Bandana helped keep sweat from pouring down my forehead.  That’s good. 

No music this ride, so I was OCDing about every little creak the bike made.  Sounded like maybe there’s a bit of plastic in the front fender that’s rubbing once in a while.  Should probably pull those off and re-seat them.

Couldn’t find a water bottle this morning, so I bought some blue POWERADE Olympic Hockey Berry Blitz carbo stuff for $1.50.  Sugar while riding hot is not a good combo.  Bleah.  17% of my daily carbs in a single drink?  Wooftie.

Was very stiff when I started out, but feeling pretty good now.  Am planning to ride home tonight, but will have to remember it’s gonna be hot (28, radio lady said) so I gotta drink lotsa water.

I need to go to bed earlier, and wake up a little earlier, in order to not be stumbling around the house muttering and swearing until 7:15.  Too stressful.  Means I don’t get to see the kids in the morning, and only get to see them a little in the evening.

Figured out we have a channel at home that lets us watch Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson at 10-ish instead of 12:30-ish, which is good.  Now, if we could just watch the Daily Show and Colbert Report at 9-10 instead of 11, we’d be (literally) laughing.

For anyone who actually, y’know VISITS the blog on the actual domain, you’re probably seeing it change almost daily (maybe I’ll put one of those things that lets YOU people change it for yourselves). Sorry ’bout that.

I found one I liked, and then reminded myself that I hate that “purple/green/blue bars” visual effect that happens after you’ve been staring at white text on a black background, and then switch to white background. Will have to change the theme AGAIN.

I know you’re all crushed.

Oh, and no more “Twitter Posts” to make it look like I’m postier. If I don’t have an actual post, I’ll just not post.

Which should make me post MORE, to make up for the fact that tweets aren’t filling any gaps.

We’ll see.

Warning, geekery ahead, and not the fun “hey, press this button and blow up your computer” kinda way that I often think about, but just some nuts & bolts thoughts about New Jobs, and Units of Work, and Things.  Rambliness.

So, we’re into week four of the New Job (or is it week five?) and after a few weeks of moving heavy cardboard boxes around, and shoving network racks around, we’re now into the cabling portion of our broadcast, in preparation for a whole schwack of people moving from Broadway and Maple to Pender and Bute.

I’ve been seeing a lot of ghosts over the last two weeks, ’cause a lot of the gear we’ve got for the new office came from Nexon, where I worked for six months with some of the greatest crazies in the games business.

I wrote about the closing of Nexon Vancouver before, so I won’t go into that, but I’m not sure I can fully capture how mind-boggling weird it is to see things like the Nexon server racks show up, with their tags still on them that Briggs applied, or the spring-loaded racking bolts that I know either myself, Joe or Briggs put in only a few months ago.

That was pretty weird, but I didn’t know the chairs were coming.  The weird custom-green stackable meeting room chairs, or the adjustable chairs with the squishy armwrests, or the rolling whiteboards, or the cool pull-this-and-flip-the-table-up tables.  I know all that stuff was going to auction, but I didn’t think it would end up where *I* am.  I think some of the stuff went to Joe at his Uther job, so that’s gotta be surreal for him, too.

Okay, all that aside, I’ve spent the last month with the construction crews (the mom of the crew boss makes a butter chicken that is to die for, although we do refer to it as being “cursed” because the day we were brought some just for the three IT guys, the giant purple network switch decided to freak out), the painting crews (seems like they all bring iPods and various speaker systems to hook up to them) and the electricians (who are obviously brilliant beyond the basic “don’t get your arm blown off by crossing these two wires” needs of the job).

The electricians always have 99.3 TheFOX radio blaring, but I don’t think they actually listen to it.  It reminds me of working for the glass/window place in North Van ‘lo these many years ago, where 99.3 was always on, but everyone I talked to about music had tastes that ranged far beyond CFOX’ top 40 classic rock of the 60-through-90s.

The crew boss for the electricians?  Big bear of a guy who listens to epic techno on his laptop whenever nobody else is hanging near where he’s working.

All really nice people.  Funny.  Bright.  Building things. Creating, even in these “difficult economic times.”  I don’t know why I thought they would be more surly.  Maybe the crew(s) at Blackbox all these years ago were seemingly grumpier ’cause EA was giving them a hard time about money and speed?  I guess Blackbox is shutting down pretty soon.  Wish I could be there to watch it go dark.  Wonder who’s going to take it over?  Microsoft?  The execs could all have their old offices back again, and I bet the feng-shui wouldn’t even have to be redone.

So yeah, everything’s coming together.  Carpets are in.  Rooms are painted.  It’s starting to look more like an office, and less like a paintball arena.  The Very Large Number of rendering slaves are in the racks, imaged, and (mostly) renamed and ready to go.  Every one of those pizza-box-style systems has a custom-cut cable to avoid having a networking cabling nightmare (go Google “cabling nightmare” if you don’t instantly know what I’m talking about).

Today though?  Today kicked my butt.  I didn’t get a case of the Mondays, I got a truckload of the Mondays.  With coupons.  Got my butt kicked by making custom cables using Category 6e spool, which have a little pastic “spine” in them to help keep the four pairs of wires from getting tangled (and thereby reducing cross-talk on the cables) and they’re a little more stiff than normal “household” cables, and that’s all fine and good but oh my GOD do they hurt your hands to crimp into the plastic clips.  I think I’m fighting a little bit of a cold, too, or something, ’cause I got to the site at 8:45am and by Noon I’d put 12 cable ends on. 

ENDS.  That’s SIX FREAKIN’ CABLES @ 30mins each.

I was a mess. Wasn’t measuring properly, kept having to re-crimp stuff because ONE of of the eight possible wires inside the clip wouldn’t pass a simple continuity test, and it takes a bit to figure out which end of the cable is at fault (there’s no way for us to test one clip until the other one’s been crimped on, and there’s no way to re-crimp or un-crimp, so it means cutting the clip off and starting over again, AFTER figuring out which end is the likely culprit).

When my manager appeared next to my elbow and said “You look haggard.  Go for a break for a bit” I damn near hugged him.  It was 3pm, and I’d just realized that the “smart shortcut” I’d tried to take had just cost me about 20 feet of cable, and meant I’d be able to make ONE patch cable instead of two, and that I’d be having to crimp the cable at a height of six feet, in low light in the server room.  There’s no technological shortcut for doing this, and I’m a big fan of techie shortcuts.

I gotta tell you, I really miss the BIX punchdown walls at EA and Nexon.  No crimping involved at all (well, no crimping by IT folks).  Costs more, yes, probably quite a bit more, BUT if you have the room in your network closets/rooms (we don’t), and can possibly pull it off from your budget, DO IT.  Save your technicians from muscle fatigue and having them wonder if that sudden sharp pain in their right bicep is a cramp of some sort, or if they’re going to die of a heart attack because the tester shows that pins 3 & 4 are mashed (both light up at the same time instead of individually) and pin 6 doesn’t light up at all.

Why, yes, I am whining, thank you for noticing.

Thought about calling Arwen for some words of encouragement (that was literally what I was going to call her and ask for), but knew she would be picking up Ripley at school, and would be juggling stuff at home shortly.  Decided I needed some food.  Badly.  Had some lunch, drank one of those gigantic 99cent cans of iced tea, and felt my soul slide back behind my eyes a little again.  Another ten minutes of watching people shop and eavesdropping on someone’s iPhone-conducted business at the new Urban Fare and I was ready to go again.

Finished the next 90 minutes of work without incident.  Bit of a blur, really.  Don’t think I broke anything, but it wasn’t exactly a case of “any well-executed technology tends to look like magic” either.

I rode home (the blocks are short, but uphill, and there’s some sorta “red wave” with the lights going on), had some yummy dinner, and then slept for about an hour.  Arwen put the kids to bed.  Don’t think I really said more than five words to either one of them before I crashed out.  Woke up, wandered around the house for a bit.  Asked the manager if he needed me to come back in tonight to get some more stuff done (the list of what was needed to be done today was long, and I got exactly NONE of it done), but since he said no, here I am.

Left my stuff at the office, so I can’t fill out the evaluation thing for the Mole Hill board I’m supposed to have done for tomorrow at 6:30, so that’s my lunch hour gone, and I don’t even wanna get into the drama around housing here at the Hill again.

But that’s tomorrow.

Tomorrow is another day.

Started a new job (2mo contract) last week, and so I’m just trying to figure out where I’m going to fit into the mayhem I see in front of me.  Nice people that I’ve met so far (all five of them or so), and the new location looks like it’ll be a good environment.

There’s work to do, I can see it happening all over the place, but don’t quite see yet how *I* can help get very much of it done yet. It’s like standing outside a diamond mine, with backpack full of tools and explosives, and I can’t figure out where the entry is.  My “intruder complex” is kicking in, so I have to battle that old demon.  Been a long time.

It should get better after the location change is done for these folks, and I’m trying to help with that as much as possible, but again… diamond mine.

In the meantime, or rather, the other OTHER thing I’m not doing any of is writing, even though I don’t normally write anything anyway (Arwen’s the writer in the house). She recently mentioned a call for submissions online for a particular topic that involved interaction between a god and a mortal, and all I can think of is that sketch comedy by Radio Free Vestibule in which God gives the message to Kevin that people of Earth need to “change thy ways or perish.”

“…or perish. Got it.”

“You Should Probably Write That Down.”

“Do you have a pen?”

“No… Well… Yes, But It’s Really Big.”

And I simply can’t write anything about the topic at hand, because my brains keep trying to end conversations or paragraphs with “Yes, but it’s really big.”

Funny, but no.

And then there’s this, which made me giggle in the same way most of the XKCD.com stuff does.

A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt. -G.K. Chesterton, author (1874-1936)

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want — good or bad — BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. When you’re finished, if you’d like to continue the chain, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON’T ACTUALLY remember about you.

Anyone who knows me knows I enjoy chasing viruses through the darkest recesses of a workstation, and learning what weird and wonderful new way things are hiding themselves (or reinstalling themselves), and I know it can go sideways and get scary really really fast.

And then you move up and up in the ladder of technicians, across the line into guru or mad scientist land. You start pulling craziness from the magician’s hat, only it’s not always a cute little bunny you pulled out of that hat, like people might have expected you to. It’s this horrifying multi-legged gibbering *thing* that came from the deep blackness of the net, and it might eat every machine in a 50-foot radius if you don’t handle it properly. And nobody knows how to handle it properly, and everyone who knows enough about such things knows enough to be a little scared.  –  JBurton

Was reading a post over at Pelalusa that the virus/malware that ripped through VSB’s offices and classrooms faster than pinkeye is still a problem, even though it’s been four weeks since initial infection.  This is a known piece of malware, and I’m assuming it’s viral (spreads by itself, using a known vulnerability in Windows).

So why can’t they get rid of it?

Click here to read more.. »

“Boom, headshot!”

{Something the gang at EAC IT used to yell out whenever someone was terminated that we didn’t particularly care for.  Something I was tempted to yell out when I was laid off last year.  Given what’s been going on in the gaming industry of late, you’ll forgive me a little gallows humour.}

Click here to read more.. »

Just a quick note to say hi, and let all y’all know I’m still alive, and that there’ll be a new podcast over on the other blog in a week or so.

Also, if you need something to occupy you for a few minutes, check out what happens when a bunch of people put together a dataset for something non-computer-related.

Like Michael Jackson’s white glove during the “Billie Jean” performance in ’83.

http://www.whiteglovetracking.com/

You’ll have to excuse the look on my face, that was like the 9th photo with the flash, and I was starting to see big purple blotches eveywhere.

Movember 14th 2008

Oh, and I don’t have a receding hairline, I just have a humongous freakin’ HEAD.

Here’s the rest in (what I’m hoping is) some sort of chronological order.