Events

Or so the story goes. I believe that this must be a “real world” curse for those of us who may have had mundane and regular days. Inciting those days to become real things can be a blessing and a curse. Most of all though, its a blessing. Work has become doubly interesting and I found myself in the unusual position of being able to make a respectful demand of Visa. Its interesting, fun, and stressful. And I have not decided. In fact, I’ve decided not to decide. Is that being decisively indecisive or what?

I don’t know if I blogged this before, but I hit my weight goal. Its been a year. I started last May 20th or so I believe. I topped the scales then at 275 pounds of happy beer guzzling and burger swallowing me. But I had back aches, strained this and that. High blood pressure which was really bad. I’ll just say a word for going to see a Doctor if you are the usual American Male. Go. If you are over 40, Go. There are too many things which can happen. My friend DaveR; with every reason to live did not. Go seek out the physician and listen if she tells you that the time has come to look whatyou are inserting into thy stomach. Bad things cause bad things.

I’m probably doing about 1700 cals a day now but its not so much the cals but its what I eat. Only a little meat and not even every day. More salads and lots of fruit. Veggies once a day or so. Now I am at 181.5 and I feel pretty good. Definitely better than a year ago. I’ll just try to get my friend Ed to move forward. Ed you owe it to you, kids, wife, world.

The job thing has inserted stress; but one funny thing at Visa is the classic level of most people’s computing experience. People I talk with complain bitterly about Windows and its virii, malware, spyware, bad things. I tell them “why not try something else?” Get a Knoppix or a Live Ubuntu CD. But its too hard. Its easier to just be miserable. After all, Linux does not work on desktops or laptops and its only really meant for servers. The last time I booted a Windows desktop here was a Virtual One and since Amazon was kind enough to release the Linux MP3 client with easy dependencies to satisfy for the most part; iTunes and its silly “all or nothing” thing does not befuddle me any longer. Now I buy music, sync music with rsync. Yes… I don’t even use the original iPod firmware. Thanks to Rockbox. My iPod has signed its declaration of independence away from iTunes and Windows as well. But I am speaking to those that choose to be deaf. Its far easier to just bitterly complain than to try something else.

So, I’ll just go away into my corner with my Linux systems that don’t work.

I bet you all have felt the tension and stress between doing the vacation thing and the work thing. I’m dedicated to the place I work and always feel like being there, doing the right and good things. But family wants vacation time as well. It came to a point for me over this next week. Its Easter Break and kidlets are free to irritate and hound us each day. We planned a trip to the snow and mountains to get them to a new place where they could make everyone miserable.

Then work came along for me. It came down to me stating to my boss, “give me more to do, this work on building out requirements and planning for new datacenter environments and I’ll do it justice”. I found it difficult to then qualify that and say “but not this week”. Perhaps its my own need to make a statement at work that I provided something of value and a service. I still have about 7 months left on my contract there and I want to stay around. Visa is an interesting place to work and the people seem to like me.

Its not a small company; but I did interview at one about a week ago after they requested it. Let me just say that I am not impressed and I won’t link to them because they don’t need that. Here are my rules for the road when interviewing going forward:

1. If you decide to hire me, great! I’ll be a resource and I’ll be there through thick and thin.
2. If you decide not to decide, great! How about calling me and letting me know? Perhaps its just me, but these techno-recruiters and talent people seem to have no real ethics and principles and we are all but meat on the shelf.
3. If you decide I am not your cup of tea, great! How about a call? Its common decency and its part of communication.

Its funny because I was asked what I thought leadership qualities were for a project manager. I’m used to this question after being asked it a doodlezillion times. We both agreed on the answers. Me and their big guy. But it comes down to communication. And what is communication? Its not one person speaking and the other listening folks. Each person has to have a vested interest in the dialogue. But after agreeing with this, it dawned on me that they have no qualms about violating what they feel is the necessity of a good manager. So, its not me for them. I won’t mention their name or linkage; but here’s a clue. If you get invited to work for an up and coming open source company, run to the hills folks. I’ve been there and done it for years. Its the path of eternal hell and damnation but it sounds so good that you anticipate the trip. Tip to the grand communicator there. Practice what you preach; bub.

I’ll go chew my gum and stick it on another bedpost, ok?

It seems to me that the vast majority of hosting services providers are flaky. I see ads for multiple gagglebytes of storage space, unlimited this and that. That is the measurement indicator of the quality I would gather. I’ve been to two now that left me severely under-impressed.  One is LunarPages and the other is Site5. In the case of LunarPages, I think they have the technical part down; but their help desk and support offerings pound sand. Lets take an example:

I send email to support@ and ask them a thing. They respond with something not even close to what I asked and then they tell me if I send a response it goes to the bottom of the support queue. I say… What? But my ticket was open earlier. I ask to close the account. They send me 5 emails asking for the same information but under different help desk queue items. No wonder they are all screwed up. Advice for LunarPages — Hire someone that understands support! You are judged by the support you give. How do I know? Because that is what I’ve built for a large financial institution.  At the end of it all you are not only judged by the great technical service offering; but people will resonate (or not) on how you treat them. LunarPages simply does not treat people any which way.

Multiple gigs of storage space does not make up for wishy washy service and Site5 was actually better. I don’t have really bad things to say about them.  I think they all over-sell, over-hype, and over-promote.

On to the one I have chosen which is a small piece of citrus fruit. They don’t give you multiple tb’s of disk space; but they also don’t cut any support corners. They offer a service and a delivery. My approach has been now to create two web pages including my primary blog and a fun site here that will be my stopping place. My goal is to centralize email and services at a single place. Email is gmail.  They even rhyme. Web services I got tired of providing for myself. It does not work for me to have things scattered to Yahoo, Hotmail, my mail. Bring it all together. I also chose OSA for their integration offerings. Email, parked domains, forwarding are all bread and butter of hosting companies. But I want one that actually values me and I am not only known as the recipient of numerous different support emails that when I respond go to the very bottom.

LunarPages, my advice for you is to smarten up. Learn something from the legions of people I bet that are leaving. They want more; or perhaps even less. But do some customer service along with your technical service.

This is the new reality folks. We must standardize, centralize, and focusize. To do this, we bring variant things together. If we do webmail, imap, pop, we bring the various and sundry together into a single house. The Gmail house. Here is how it flows for me. Tell me if you face the same.

I have about 4 different email accounts. They’re scattered to Yahoo, Hotmail, various domains. I want a email presence like a web presence though. It should be the same but able to deal with change. Ideally, I want a hosted environment where I can add, subtract, and even adopt more. A hosting solution provider would appear to represent the best. You can park domains, add those domains perhaps at register.com or godaddy or wherever. Then write email addresses for the parked domains. Each cPanel allows one to park domains. Think of a parked domain as one that has long-term parking enabled but you can still move the car around, make it turn its lights on. Change its status. I’ve been to a few hosting providers in search of the grail. I’ve found one that I think works and the price is decent and I like their minimal approach. But here is the list of features I think you will want:

• You want a central email address that will be yours no matter what. ISPs can come and go. Their domains may crash and burn. Have a place over and above that still lives. Data centers call this redundancy. Lets call it human redundancy.
• You want to have a central place that will collect email. Pick a place you can reach, that provides rules and filters, multiple identities and allows a measure of freedom. Hint: This is gmail for me. Gmail offers that freedom.
• Analyze how you want to use gmail. Do you want a single point of focus for the many places you have out there? Learn how to write forwarding rules. As an example, on my FreeBSD hosted ISP shell system, I need to learn the glories of procmail if I really want things good. If not, I can use a .forward file. On a cPanel hosted site, I have a set of tools. The tools can create email addresses from the many parked domains. Create forwarding rulesets. Allow me a flexible point of presence on the wild and wooly ‘net.
• Finally, understand the limitations and uses of what you are aiming toward. You want a single identity; but its flexible. It can be added to and subtracted from; but email can always reach you there.

For me, these forces and factors coalesce to gmail. Gmail is grand and glorious and not fully baked.  Google tells me its still beta. Yet it far outshines whatever it is that Yahoo! mail brings to me. It does IMAP. IMAP is the grail also folks. It lets you see and share the mail. The use of the hosting solutions provider is not to provide IMAP but instead to provide a focus point that you can reach independently. The goal is a centralized ‘net identity for work, play, research.

You can get there too. Chart out the many places you use on the internet. Web, mail, webmail. They can be brought together. For me, its gmail. For you, it may be a Linux virtual slice from a slicehost or someone.

Finally, go play. Find the force and let your skywalker revel in it. But be aware that the force is malleable and changeable. Adopt and adapt. Be good habilis.

Why is that I have not noticed this before? Now I have to retrain and refrain. I wish Scribefire would make a release that would be double space proof. Its hard to break a lifetime of spacing out (or double spacing out). Writing blog entries suddenly got a bit harder and I will need to go back and reread each post if I am concerned with the quality of my production. Come to think of; this blog has no real or implied quality. So its okay to have non-breaking spaces strewn throughout. Sometimes I feel like a non-breaking space myself.

Perhaps if I was writing for some big media conglomerate, I would actually give a damn. Now I sorta give a damn. Its annoying at the least because I was taught there should be two spaces at the end of each sentence. Writing that way and insisting on using parallel structure has been the dilemma I have faced since graduate school in anthropology. Why, oh why did I learn to write that way? Because the graduate dean had the power.

Meanwhile, my Sierra Broadband card rocks on. Its a solid networking performer on Linux and I love the flexibility it gives me.

Now I need to attend to a few other things. The kids want to go on vacation. The wife wants us to go to the snow. I have some questions about work. Its all about life. I told my wife this story of a work colleague and his wife when they went to see Into the Wild. They both walked out after feeling overwhelmed and affected. He turned to her and asked if she enjoyed it. She said “yes but never take me to see it again”. My wife thinks it has an affect on people that seems to go on. Perhaps Sean Penn knew this and often movies are made which take us to this other place away from awards and fancy clothing and walking the red carpet. Instead we walk another carpet and we see things that are hidden and they make us better. Or at least make us ask a whole series of other questions about what exactly it was we accomplished and how we did it.