Havens sanity check

I'm definately suffering from obsessive compulsive behaviour with getting a gentoo build "just right". Finding ways to reduce the clutter, clear orphaned files and keep a system as "clean" as possible are starting to take up a signifcant part of my conscious brain.

The challenge is to find the right set of applications that will allow me to work the way I want and need to whilst getting rid of unecessary dependancies and applications I simply dont use. Traditionally I pull in a lot of dependancies via global USE variables (I have one of the largest make.conf files on the planet which is actually not something to be proud of ...).

So when I should really be doing new stuff, such as continuing in my pursuit of Python/Perl and other programming learning that I have neglected for far too many years, instead I am doing what is commonly called "pencil sharpening" i.e. putting off those noble pursuits and instead distracting myself with the environment and not the work. Or hell even posting to this blog comes into that category.

Sometimes it sucks to be me. Maybe one day I'll get the balance right!

Just like the seasons, Autumnal change has come into play. For the second time in my career I have been made redundant. If I tell you that I worked for one of the main Exchanges in the Finance sector then this may not come as a huge surprise in todays climate.  As always things are not so clear cut, the company has a programe of replacing senior staff with interns and Juniors, whilst maintaining enough directorial experience to manage the new staff. In effect replacing experience with cheapness. It is a great time to be new to the Finance world but not so great for those who've been there a few years. It was however this program that affected my position.

However much the logic urks me, I leave with no regrets. I've implemented some major projects covering some amazing technologies, I've managed staff across two continents and gained countless material for my C.V. And most importantly I've made a few friends.

So onto the future. I now have the unenviable job of finding a direction (something I have never been good at). When time and effort invested into a company lead to no thanks or recognition then its time to focus on something more worthwhile. What that is I don't yet know but I'm sure I'll blog about it once I do.

In the meantime family and friends will get renewed focus and hopefully a living will come that matches these needs.

Happily building a replacement server tonight but its turned into "one of those nights". Firstly I upgraded the chassis as it was overheating in the old chassis (or at least I thought it was). The new chassis is very nice though. Then it kept crashing when compiling a kernel so after messing around with a surrogate machine to rebuild the kernel I finally worked my way down the list of things to check until I reached memory error checking. Ran memtest and one of the memory modules failed every single test completely - totally toast. I'm impressed the system worked at all! So like the good little systems person I immediately went online to order some replacement (a nice new pair of 2GB DDR DIMMS) ... with ECC ... ooops. I now know how annoying it is not to be able to cancel my order at 11:20 at night. The ECC's should work in this system (its a non-ECC system), guess I'll find out soon enough. Another day another set of computer related mishaps.

Burnout is a funny thing, its sometimes very hard to distinguish from depression and anxiety, primarily because both are included in its process.

I've been burntout on and off for around four years now, it comes and goes and sometimes I'm able to out run it by doing something new and interesting. But eventually it catches me up.

Symptoms for me are lethargy and apathy followed by anxiety (usually over the lethargy and apathy) as my conscience kicks in which usually makes the situation worse.

Causes are many and of the kind that we all experience daily;

• A feeling of lack of control over our worklife. For me this means being told to do things that I know in the long run are a bad idea and will reflect badly on myself and my team. Its very stressful being forced to adopt a new system that is worse than the old and then being the one taking all the flak when that system then fails. Sadly that happens all to often.
• A lack of respect from others and for others. Sometimes you meet people that are just not suited to their current job. Sadly you're rarely in a position to do anything to alter that fact. Even more depressing is when you then spend a significant proportion of your time fixing their mistakes and once again taking flak for them since by association you are in the same team. Distancing yourself is not always an option and eventually this leads to a feeling of lack of control and respect by all parties.
• A lack of reward for hard work done. Few people will openly acknowledge that they do a bad job and so this is a very subjective issue. This closely ties in with lack of recognition. In the industry that I work in (IT systems) when we are working at our best and there are no issues we are almost invisible. Its only when things break that we once again appear in the public eye. So when things go well for a long period of time and the CEO openly states that he really doesn't see the need for Systems people as everything just works anyway you start to question why you bothered. When this then travels down the line and you are told that unless you sell yourself and your achievements in a very public way that there will be no bonus or pay review ... well if I had wanted to do marketing I would be in a different position right now.

Thats just a handful of things that have contributed to my personal burnout and the same issues do appear when working for different companies so its possibly endemic to the industry (or endemic to my perception at least).

I've started reading around the subject and found what appears to be a good initial article on the subject.

Four Strategies for Dealing with Burnout takes what appears to be a fairly irreverent look at the subject but it did contain an interesting snippet that I'll take away with me:

"Lack of self-care is the cause. Restoration of self-care is the cure." The road back home to ourselves has three milestones along the way: awareness, acceptance, and action.

I'm not sure yet what I need to do to restore and care for myself but I'm going to try and find out.

Bad literary puns aside we are in dire need of a thunderstorm! Its a close and muggy day here with the sky hanging very low and a hot humid breeze the only thing really moving in this lethargy induced stupor.

 Where to start; Winter came and went and was lovely in both its Snow and the most amazing New Years spent in the luxurious scenery of Donegal county.

I changed companies without moving an inch as we became a part of NYSE-Euronext, certainly looks good on the C.V. although in reality most of the changes have been minor ones (so far at least).

I continue to play Warcraft after a 3 month break from serious raiding my addiction pulled me back in and I rejoined the very successful guild I had previously been a part of.

Finally, I actually managed to lose some weight !!! Nearly 3 stone off and only 2 more go before I hit where I want to be. Lets hope I keep at it.

This is mostly an "I'm still alive" post although I detest seeing that in post subjects and hopefully avoided it enough to make this semi-interesting at least

 I've decided that I'm going to start phasing out my gentoo usage in favor of Ubuntu, I finally reached that place where my time is in too short supply and something had to give. I'll still be running it on my main work desktop and servers, but the myriad of laptops I maintain will slowly be phased over. I'm very impressed with where Ubuntu has got to, the addition of pulse audio support for decent sound mixing finally swayed me, hopefully judicious use of aoss will finally allow me to mix sound successfully in a reliable way. Watch this space I guess.



 

What a morning to wake up to, crisp clean air and the most intense blood red sunrise I've seen in a long time. I love Autumn and given that my long wool coat is back out and in use I do believe her many colors are upon us.

With a morning like that you can't fail to be in a good mood so I find myself bounding around happily for once. Autumn has always been my favorite season and I hope I'll see a few more sunrises like the one this morning before 2008.

So life ... well it still involves a heavy dose of gaming. The black temple world of warcraft post I made previously has progressed to the point where there are only five more bosses/encounters to finish and the game is effectively done. Suddenly all that time invested seems to have had a purpose and I'm actually quite proud of the achievements we are making. I've heard it quoted that less than 3% of all players get to see the inside of the black temple (a totally unsubstantiated figure). If that figure is correct then I wonder how many of those people go on to clear the first four bosses ... this is why I feel I've actually achieved something.

Work is somewhat crazy atm, only two system administrators and around 100 machines and lots of development projects == very deep sleep at night. There's some interesting bits of tech floating around though although once again HavenHosting is left ticking away on its own quite happily (not a bad thing but there are new features I would love to implement eventually).

I'll keep this post short and sweet as always, its time for the morning ritual of coffee, email and gentoo updates (a somewhat theraputic triumvirate for some reason).

Here's hoping you get to see a good sunrise too also.

A bit of a brain dump this morning, lots of things have been milling around for a few weeks - I was away in the beautiful South West of Ireland last week and as always a break gives you time to condense thoughts and let them mull for a bit.

First up, world cup rugby starts Today. First game is France Brazil I think (poor poor Brazil), its a no brainer regarding the outcome but it will be good to see some of my favourite sport back on TV.

I can't do a blog post without including something of my major time sink addiction in it ... so World of Warcraft is going well. Despite my pledge to cut back hours I went and joined a very very hard core raiding guild which has pushed my hours play back into the realms of silly. Fortunately its more focussed time wastage as raiding is four nights a week which at least gives my better half an indication of when she might see me. There is method in my madness in choosing to do this though. I was begining to feel like all the hours spent on WoW were in vain and wasted, joining this new guild at the time I have joined has allowed me to explore pretty much all of the end game content thoroughly. Come sunday night I should hopefully be fully Black Temple attuned (the very very last bit of the game) and since that has been my aim for a long period of time I will finally feel that the time spent achieved something.

Its not all negative though, seeing a 25 man raid group and the dedication and time it takes to organise and play at this level has really taught me a lot. I've led a lot of gaming groups in the past but the organisation and dedication I see at this level of gaming far surpasses anything I am likely to see in the work place ever. Its tough at the top but its so very very satisfying also.

Finally I'll move onto the somewhat unloved aspect of my life at the moment. HavenHosting continues to plod on as reliable as ever, but I've put a lot of thought into where I want it to go next. Its good to have aims so here are some of mine:

• Reduce the price point in stages to make it more affordable whilst offering the same or increased feature set.
• Move away from the fixed bandwidth/month model and move to a distributed bandwidth model (i.e. all server bandwidth is fairly distributed amongst all users).
  
• Upgrade software to latest versions, this includes apache1 to apache2, mysql4 to mysql5 and mbox mail system to maildir. Finally also update the billing software.
  
• Look at replacing DirectAdmin with a hand coded alternative based off LDAP authentication

So a nice small list, all achievable except possible the last part. There's lots of cosmetic changes I want made as well including sad things like changing the bash and vim color schemes (hey it makes me happy ok!). As well as migrating from CentOS to FreeBSD or Gentoo as the hosting system of choice (lots of thought needs to be put in before this change is made - particularly regarding gentoo and its shaky future right now).

Certainly some of these changes will happen soon, particularly the upgrades. Will this garner me any new customers ... we'll see. Hopefully word of mouth will do its thing. Everyone seems happy so far at least.

Right back to paid work, the weekend awaits and there's stuff to do before it gets here.

Experts-Exchange is a site with all the answers delivered by the community for a price. And no the money doesn't go back to the community.

Given that premise I have no ethical issue with helping myself to the community answers for free, here's how you do it.

• Install Firefox (you were using this already right ?)

• Install GreaseMonkey (a script that allows you to modify web pages using small javascript scripts).
  

• Add the following to greasemonkey: userscripts.org/scripts/source/8614.user.js
  

Ok thats step one, step two is to install adblock plus.

Now add the following image to your adblock image blocked list:

http://css.experts-exchange.com/xp/images/answerOverlay.png

You're all done, go visit experts exchange and you should now see the solutions without having to pay.

Although the title sounds like this should be an opinion piece this is actually just a list of blogs that I read.

 I just finished reading a blog post titled 10 tips on leading a balanced life and figured I'd list some of the blogs I've been reading lately.

•  Neilgaiman - a great author and a very interesting blogger, here's hoping that stardome doesn't change him too much.
• LifeHacker - tech focussed blog on productivity and "cool" stuff.
• LarryTheCow - Syndicated gentoo blogs, mostly tech with a bit of real life thrown in.
• The Medium is Not Enough - TV blog, ever since this guy introduced (and hooked me) to Friday Night Lights I've followed what he has to say with interest.

There's at least 10 other blogs I dip my toe into but I'll not flood you with meaningless links. Four sites isn't too much to check out so go take a look and see what I like to read in the day.

 

There's a fairly disturbing thread on kernetrap covering the woeful implementation of atime usage on linux. 

 Given that I've not yet migrated all my systems to XFS I figured I'd make some change, this should particularly benefit my aging P3 1GHz dell laptop which tends to grumble a lot whilst hammering its hard drive.

 Rather than re-invent the wheel I used a nice guide on the Ubuntu forums, I'll have a play over the weekend and see if it makes any noticable difference.

I've already implemented the changes on one of my file servers so we'll see how that works out as well.