Category Archives: work

…And Two More Months Have Passed

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This whole work/life balance thing is out of whack, I guess. I come home from work, eat some dinner, watch a video or two on YouTube, and hit the sack. Get up, feed the cats, take a shower, and go to work. On Saturdays and Sundays, I sleep in as much as possible, watch a couple videos, maybe mow the lawn (caveat: sometimes I mow the lawn after work), go play trivia at a pub, do some grocery shopping, eat dinner, go to bed.

This has to stop. I’m getting out of shape, I’m bored, and I’m accomplishing nothing.

So, yesterday and today, I started walking again. Hiked up to Jenny’s house (4-mile round trip) to feed her cats. And I’m going to force myself to start walking in the mornings again. To that end, I’ve rolled my wake-up routine back a half an hour (to 5:25). Did that on Friday, because I had to go to work early, and the cats have already adjusted by walking all over me at 5:30 yesterday and 5:20 this morning.

My wake-up routine, you ask? It’s not really an alarm, as I prefer to be woken up by kitties, but it gives them clues when to do it. At 5:20, the kitchen light comes on. At 5:25, my bedside lamp comes on. At 5:26, the theme from Silverado plays on my Alexa speaker. Rarely do I make it to the music, as the cats take their cue from the kitchen light and pounce on me in search of breakfast.

Call me crazy, but it’s a much nicer way to be awoken than using some sort of alarm clock.

Anyway…

Last weekend saw the first of what we in the Georgia Brass Band hope is an annual Southeast Brass Band Festival. Our board started kicking the idea around last year, and – miracle of miracles – it came together pretty well. We had bands from Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama in attendance (6 total, including us), hired a long-time friend of the band (Dr. Ronald Holtz, who is huge in the brass band movement) to give comments on each band’s performance and award caption prizes (best soloist, most entertaining performance, best hymn, best march), and coordinated with a local high school with a phenomenal band program to use their facilities and let them sell concessions for their band program. It was actually a pretty rousing success, and (another miracle) the GBB came out in the black financially. As treasurer, I’d been thinking that we were going to take a bath on the thing, but we managed to make somewhere between $600 and $1000 for the day through t-shirt and CD sales and band registrations (we’re still waiting for one band to pay up, which is why I can’t say exactly how much we took in).

Our band was not eligible to win any of the awards, but we did get some excellent comments from Dr. Holtz and he confided to our director that, had we actually been competing, we would’ve blown the other 5 bands off of the stage – which we had kind of figured, hence we removed ourselves from consideration.

Originally, we’d ruminated on having the festival move around with different bands hosting each year, but now we’re leaning towards keeping it in Atlanta at least for a few years. Not to be immodest, but it’s hard to believe that any of the other bands in attendance could have better facilities, plus we’ve now got some insight on how to put on this type of event, and we think we can improve going forward.

All in all, it was a good day. I’m glad we did it and I’m looking forward to trying again next year.

At work, I had one of my direct reports leave a couple of weeks ago. He found another job that pays more (I’ve been saying that we need to improve our L1 salaries for over two years), and I was happy to see him moving on – not because he didn’t do a reasonable job for me, but because I’m always genuinely happy to see my directs move up. To that end, I also traded away two of my other directs, last week, to another team. One of them was one of my senior consultants, and I thought he’d come out of his shell a bit more with a younger team which has just been formed. The other is a kid who I think can be a senior in time, but he also needs to be put in an environment where he can step up as a leader, and he wasn’t going to get that opportunity on my team, which is generally composed of consultants who’ve been there longer than he has.

In return, I got one rising consultant from the other team, so I’m actually down to 7 directs and, with project season – when we onboard new clients – ramping up, I’m a bit concerned about how we’re going to handle the increased number of clients with a smaller team; but I’m confident that we’ll figure it out.

My boss has implemented an aptitude test for all of the people who apply for an L1 job, and he had all of the team leads take it to get an idea of how well it does. Turns out that I’m a “medium” fit for a helpdesk job – and the test pretty much nailed my personality, concluding in effect that I just like to get shit done, don’t always follow the standard procedures, and really don’t care what anybody thinks about how I do things. It said a lot of other things that were also spot-on, and I think it’s going to help bring in a higher caliber of candidate for upcoming interviews…..if we can work on that crappy salary thing…

I may try to go camping next week if Jenny is home (she’s in Santorini or someplace exotic like that, and I can’t remember when she’s coming home. If I do go out, it’ll be a solo trip. My buddy Brett and I had a pretty bad trip a month or two ago – actually came to a physical altercation, which I would never have imagined between the two of us – and we’re basically done with each other at this point. I haven’t been out by myself (other than Michigan trips) in several years, but the woods are calling me. Can’t say that the news about a moron killing somebody on the Appalachian Trail last weekend hasn’t been in my thoughts a bit as I contemplate going up to one of my favorite sites in NC that is fairly close to the trail, but I still believe that there’s a much higher chance of getting attacked in my house than there is in getting attacked in the woods.

Cy and “T” cruised through for a visit a few weeks back. It was good to see them, though I was a bit embarrassed at the state of my abode – still need to get down new flooring, put in a new fence, things like that. We had dinner (Jenny came along) and idle chit-chat. I don’t actually remember where we ate, but it was great to see them.

Jenny and I also flew (yes, I flew) to Cleveland a couple of weekends ago to see Dad and Diane – and Kara and her husband Tom on a Saturday evening. Got to meet the new puppy that Dad and Diane have (do not remember its name…I think I’m getting Alzheimer’s), hang around with the important folks for a few hours, and had a nice dinner with everyone at Bonefish Grill. Always great to see you and find out how you’re doing, Dad. Heard you had to visit your physician friends again this week, and I’m sending lots of good thoughts your way.

And now, it being Sunday, I think I’ll take a shower and go play some trivia.

Gotta think bout that work/life balance, ya know.

Updated by Popular Demand

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So I got a short email from Dad the other day, letting me know that I haven’t posted here since last Christmas. That seemed crazy to me when I read it, so I checked – and he is, of course, correct. That being the case, I shall now attempt to compose some sort of update on what’s been going on since then.

Not a lot, as it turns out.

Work has been a beast through this tax season (corporate deadline was last Saturday, and the personal one is April 15, as you probably know). We’ve had some issues with our physical file system, causing extreme delays and disconnections for a number of our clients. Naturally, they don’t understand or care that the level 1 people who are generally the first to respond to their complaints can do absolutely nothing about this – they just want to get pissed off with whomever is trying to help them. As a lead, I’m generally the guy who gets to be the backstop for my 9 direct reports, so I’m getting yelled at pretty much every day.

Making things more annoying is the fact that our systems admin team spent a long time refusing to admit that maybe it was their fault that the systems were failing, and sometime in late December or early January they decided that it must be scripts that other people had written that were causing the problems. A decree was issued that scripts were henceforth forbidden unless they were written by the systems admin team. Naturally, my own scripts – which were being used by most of the level 1 teams – were instantly assessed to be existential threats that had to be killed.

So the SA people wrote their own script to seek out and delete any copies of my scripts anywhere they resided, be it on the network or on local workstations. This plan was not announced, of course, but I had an idea that they might try something like that. Not wanting to lose 6 months worth of work, I deleted all of my scripts, keeping copies both in my recycle bin and on my iPod. These days, I feed bits and pieces of my scripts to the development team, who insist that their web-based portal can be used to do anything that I was doing with PowerShell – though that team tends to take about a month to even consider coding something that I’d regularly throw together in about 45 minutes when the need arose.

With one exception, by the way, none of my scripts do anything other than read data. They tell me, for example, who is logged on to a given server, what a user’s unique ID is (for registry searches), when a server was last rebooted, things like that. The exception to that is a script that deletes unnecessary files that are filling up space on client servers and causing them to fail. What I’m saying here is that 1}These are scripts that are needed to keep things running smoothly, and 2}There is no way they were causing any performance issues for the clients. After a few weeks of those scripts not running and performance continuing to decline, the SA team finally looked inward and discovered the file systems problems (not to mention problems with their own procedures – like running backups without checking first to see if the backup volumes had enough space to hold the incoming backups). A great hue and cry was raised (not to mention wailing and gnashing of teeth) about how this was the hardware vendors’ fault, how it couldn’t have been foreseen, and how they’d fix it after tax season; oddly, no mention was made of restoring my scripts, which were incredibly helpful in efficiently handling the volume of tickets being submitted due to the infrastructure problems. So they remain mothballed, and I – and one of the L2 guys who helped me – remain completely pissed off with the company as a whole and are at this point simply going through the motions at work. He (the L2) is actively looking for another job where he isn’t treated as a scapegoat who knows nothing, and may have gotten one last Thursday. We should know by next week. I’ve been sorely tempted to apply for either an apps management job or a level 2 job (both are currently open positions, and I’m fairly certain that I’d get either of them if I applied), but I’m sticking with management for now. If I have to keep working for longer than I’d like to, that’s where I’m most likely to find another gig.

Have to go help Jenny move some stuff for her dad. I’ll post this now, let my own Dad know, and continue with the drama of the last three months later on.

End-of-the-year Crunch

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Yes, indeed.  The year is coming to a close and I’m in the middle of my “must get everything done before January” month.  There are many reasons that I like the fact that I was born when I was, but the December crunch is not one of them.

I got my driver’s license renewed last weekend.  Also received the letter to renew my tags, which I put off dealing with until today.  Other fun things included paying my auto insurance, renewing a couple of domains, doing year-end reviews for all of my direct reports (save one, who’ll get to go through that on Monday), and I don’t know what else.

As I said, I pulled out the registration letter today and logged on to pay for my 2019 registration, only to realize that I’ve forgotten to get my emissions checked (must do that before registering).  So I guess that’s on the docket for later this morning.

The X-company Christmas party was last Monday.  I did not attend.  Not a fan of 1}hanging out with the people from work, 2}hanging out with the people from work when there’s an open bar.  Not to worry, though.  The X-company gives out really nice Christmas presents to everyone – even those of us who don’t go to parties – and I scored a drone yesterday.  This is cool, because I’d been thinking about buying one anyway to take camping.  From what I can tell, the company saved me about $700.  I’ve been there for nearly two years and I’m not a huge fan of the job, but there are perks.

The GBB has a Christmas concert next Tuesday night, which should be fun.  After that, we’ll take a couple of weeks off and then start getting serious about NABBA rehearsals (we’re going in the Championship Section this year) and about the inaugural Southeastern Brass Band Festival, which was the idea of our board last summer and which – surprisingly – is shaping up to be a pretty good event.  I believe we’ve got 6 bands signed up for it and a great hall in which they can all perform.  That takes place in, I think, May.

It has been rainy and quite cool for the last month, and I must sing praises to my Nest Learning Thermostat.  Picked it up in late summer and have nothing but good things to say about it.  Since switching over from cooling to heating, it’s done a really good job of keeping the house comfortable and – from what I can see – saving me quite a bit of the green stuff.

Forgot to mention that I had my own annual review at work last week.  The first one I’ve had since I’ve been there, and I got “exceptional” marks all the way down the board.  First time that’s happened in about 30 years.  Granted, I think it’s the first time the X-Company has even done reviews, I’m in the first class of Team Leads they’ve ever had, my boss is the first-ever Director of Service in the company’s history, and I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re doing…but still – I got perfect scores and a raise and I’ll take it.  Also had a talk with my boss about restructuring going forward and there’s a decent possibility that I’ll get a bump up to some sort of capo di tuti capi role (floor lead/lead of leads) in the next year.  It will take my one level further away from technology and one step closer to full-time people administration, which is not an idea that I relish; but it is sort of what I had in mind when I took the job and told the hiring manager that I guess I’d start a completely new career with the X-Company.  

I’m getting more comfortable with my current role as lead – kind of shocks me at times to realize that I’m basically doing the job that my bosses used to do, but I also have the ability to take a step back if I need to clear my head and just work on technical problems.  I have two seniors on my team, one of whom I’m grooming to be a lead himself, so when I want to work on computer problems, I just tell my team to go to Matt with their questions for a while.  It’s working pretty well.

And I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say for right now.  The featured image for this post is of my kitchen in the Cheboygan Cabin last month.  I’d meant to use it for one of the posts that I wrote while in the cabin, but my phone apparently never uploaded the shot.  See how rustic I am!

Week of 10/22/18

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Monday: Thought that I’d try something different this week and put down some notes from each day into a post that will be published at the end of the week.

I played a concert with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t the best thing that I’ve ever been involved with, but it probably wasn’t the worst, either. We had a decent crowd at Gwinnett Infinity Theater, and – in spite of a few close calls – the band didn’t fall apart.

After the concert, I stopped at MicroCenter and picked up a mini Bluetooth keyboard, which I’ve paired to my phone (and am currently using to type this). Together with the WordPress app that I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, my phone is actually becoming something that I can legitimately use for writing. Yes, the KB is pretty cramped, and the shift keys aren’t exactly where I expect for them to be, but with practice, I can probably get up to 60-70 words per minute, which is amazing.

After the stop at MicroCenter, I went over to visit Herb in his new assisted living place. It’s a pretty good setup for him, and is close to Jenny and me. He’s got a small bedroom/office in one room, and kitchen/living room in another, and a good-sized bathroom. Pretty homey, all things considered, and he’s got caregivers around the clock, which is excellent. I helped him get his wireless printer set up and gave him a ream of paper (I’ve got more than I’ll ever use). Jenny was also there, so we visited for a bit before I came home, watched some television, did some laundry, and hit the sack.

Printers were the bane of my existence at work today. About a week ago, one of my firms decided to swap two printers. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, and I would just have to change their names in the group policy that pushes them out to workstations. Something went wrong with the policy, however, and I spend much of last week trying to get things working. Not only did the two printers not swap like they were supposed to, but people started losing OTHER printers. I got a frantic call from the client admin this morning saying that nobody on the second floor of the building had any printers.

So I spent all day trying various things to figure out what the hell was going on. Between 5:30 and 6:00 I think I finally got things working normally. It’s my hunch that the policy was never set up correctly when the firm came on board two months ago. I’m guessing that the on-site people manually installed everybody’s printers and nobody noticed that the policy wasn’t working until something had to change. When I made that change, all of the problems came to light.

It was, to put it mildly, a frustrating day.

I did get a little bit of time during the day to do some more work on a powershell script that I’ve been writing, and that was fun. I’m trying to, basically, rewrite the registry editor so that I can modify specific user hives in remote terminal servers. There are probably a hundred other (better) ways to do what I’m trying to do, but I’ve never used Powershell as much as I should have when I was managing systems, and learning a new language is a nice break during otherwise monotonous days.

Tomorrow will be another stressful day – we’re migrating four firms to Office 365. Two of my guys are in the O365 phone queue for expected heavy traffic, and two others are on a project in Florida, so my team will be severely short-handed.

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Tuesday: The weather took a turn for the cool this morning. I think it was in the low 50s when I got up and hovering around 60 when I left for work. Never got warmer than the low 70s.

Work itself wasn’t too bad. I had to do a few more tweaks for the printers that have taken up much of the last week, but got that out of the way early this morning. The rest of the day was spent closing tickets and helping my team with their own. Also got a little bit of work done on my Powers he’ll script and though of a few things that I can add to it.

Learned from one of my team that our team entry into last week’s Mega Millions drawing actually bore some fruit! We bought 9 tickets as a team on Friday as a part of a team-building exercise (went out to dinner at Dave & Busters), and we won $200. Not a billion bucks, but not bad. Of course, nobody won the whole thing, so tonight’s drawing, as you may know, is the largest jackpot ever at over $1.6 billion. Yes, I do have tickets – bought twenty of the things on my own. If I win, maybe I’ll throw some cash at my team.

I got home fairly late tonight – somewhere between 7 and 7:30 – and didn’t do much at all. Watched some television, washed some dirty dishes, and now I’m in bed. Maybe I’ll be a billionaire when I wake up.

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Wednesday: Not a billionaire. Not even a millionaire. In fact, on the twenty lottery tickets that I had – that’s 106 numbers altogether, I matched exactly…none. Oh well. Back to the grind, I guess.

It was nippy today for a while. Tomorrow is supposed to be nippier, with a high in the 60s. I’m not sure if it got over 70 today, but I was inside for most of the day, so I was comfortable in my Downtown Magnetawan tee and jeans. I had high hopes of closing out a bunch of tickets today, but things kept getting in the way and I honestly don’t know what my final numbers were.

Did an interview from 4 to 5:30. Nice kid, but he won’t be working for us. The three of us who interviewed him were unanimous in our opinions that he has absolutely no computer skills, in spite of his degree in cyber security.

Learned this afternoon that I have to do one-on-one meetings with my team before 11/15 – which in my case means before 11/1. So every day between tomorrow and next Friday will be spent in preparing – gathering metrics, listening to phone calls, reading ticket summaries, etc. Not my idea of a good time. We’ll also be migrating firms to Office 365 every night from tonight until the end of the year, which is going to cause high ticket loads every morning. This is the biggest project the X-Company has ever attempted, and I don’t think it’ll be a lot of fun, but it does need to be done.

I tied the registry portion of my Power Shell project into the lookup portion of it today, and it’s working quite well. This tool may actually wind up being really REALLY useful for my team.

Got home fairly late again tonight – somewhere around 7 – and make a couple of chicken sandwiches to eat while watching “The Newsroom” on Prime Video. That was it. Sitting in bed now and am about to be lying in bed. Just waiting for the kitties to settle in.

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Thursday: It was indeed a little cold today, with highs in the mid-60s and an unrelenting breeze. Normally, I would love that, but I underestimated the prognosticators and wore a tee shirt to work – did not bring a jacket. Of course, it was completely comfortable in the office, but my breaks outside were cold.

Tried to prepare for my 1-on-1 meetings with my directs for about half of the day, worked on tickets for most of the other half, and had my own 1-on-1 with my boss, where I learned that I’m doing pretty good. We talked about my future plans – whether I’d stick with the management path or jump to an upcoming escalations specialist spot. I said that, in my heart of hearts, I’m a techy; but that I’m determined to see if I can get comfortable in an admin role. That being the case, I do not intend to apply for the ES role when it comes up.

Turns out that I’ve got the inside track to a management promotion as we continue to add level 1 employees. My boss doesn’t want to have more than 12 directs. As we add more L1s, we’ll break them up into more teams, each with a team lead (leads currently report to my boss). The plan is to put another level in between the L1 leads and the Service director (my boss), and that’ s where I’d go. The leads would report to me and I’d report to the service director.

As I grow more comfortable in this role, I can see where that position would be more to my liking – dealing with intelligent technical leads without having to also deal with the daily grind of dealing with newbies who may or may not have a future in tech. Certainly something to think about.

We also talked about our respective personalities and how we approach our leadership positions. Turns out that both of us harbor inner thoughts that we’re frauds, which is oddly comforting. So I’ll soldier on and continue to work on my leadership and motivational skills (or lack thereof), and will continue to try to make this a new 2nd-act career.

At the end of the day, my friend Schuyler and I dug into my Power Shell project and tweaked and played until after 6:00. That being the case, I didn’t get home until close to 7:00. Made a shepherds pie for dinner (very good), did some dishes, and watched a hilarious mockumentary about a terrible survivalist. It was called, I think, “Tex Montana Will Survive.”

Got in bed with the intention of watching some college football, but it appears that it is not on a local (non-cable) channel, so I guess I’ll just go to sleep.

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Friday: A cold, drizzly day to end out the work week. At least I was smart enough to wear a rain coat today.

Worked on tickets for most of the day. Had one 1×1 meeting at around 11:30 and got some coding done late in the day, but for the most part, I zoned out to tunes and worked on problems. Had one guy not show up for work – he sent me a picture of the side of his car, said that he was hung up and waiting for AAA. 2 hours later said that AAA had just picked him up (this was a also at around 11:30), but he never came in. Very smart guy. Good guy. And this is his third unexcsused absence in two months and the second this week. We’ll be having a meeting on Monday, which I do not want to have. But… I wanted to manage people, right?

I got home by 6 o’clock or so and it was 60 inside the house. Hated to do it, but I was sort of tired of being right on the verge of cold, so I turned on the heat (set to 68). It’s the first time I’ve had it on since probably March, and the earliest that I can remember turning it on. My Nest thermostat needed something different, though, and I’m interested to learn if it handles heating as well as it handled cooling all summer. The heat has been off for the last hour or so, so I’m not overly concerned yet about my natural gas bill. Plus, we’re supposed to rebound and be back in the 70s by tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I don’t have many big plans for the weekend. Going to fix Jenny’s toilet on Sunday – replace a flapper, I think – and will probably start organizing things tomorrow for my trip next week. Will probably also go somewhere tomorrow afternoon to watch some football, play trivia, and hoist a few. At some point, I need to buy toilet paper and clean my master bath.

Call it the weekend of the toilet.

So I’ll wrap this up now and call this experiment of nightly updates to my blog, using my phone as a monitor and a tiny Bluetooth keyboard as an input device, a rousing success. Had I known how much I could use the phone for if I attached it to a keyboard, I probably would’ve picked up the latter years ago. It will definitely come in handy on off-the-grid vacations in the future.

With that, I close this entry and prepare for sleep. I’ll pick up this tome next week!

Still Alive!

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So it’s been a while. Figured I’d try to catch up on things while I’m sitting at Tires Plus waiting for new tires. Also testing out a WordPress app on my phone, which may allow me to post more often and, hopefully, will work well enough so that I can use it when I’m in Michigan in a few weeks.

I guess that’s the big news for now. I rented a cabin at Cheboygan State Park again this year, and I’m planning to stay there from November 9th to the 16th. It’s a lovely spot and I’m really looking forward to having a week by myself in the middle of nowhere to decompress and think about things. That week will come immediately on the heels of a week in Toledo, where I’ll be on a project for work. Not looking as forward to that, but it works nicely financially, as I’ll be reimbursed for mileage for around 1300 miles out of my entire trip.

Work has been somewhat exhausting as of late. The X-Company really built up the numbers in L1 support staff this year, and I’ve now got 10 direct reports and am expecting 1 or 2 more by the end of the year. Having been back in the management gig for nearly a year now (the last time I had directs was around 2006), I’ve sort of settled in to it. Managing people is, for me at least, much more stressful than just dealing with misbehaving computers. I get particularly annoyed when one of my people feels the need to take an emergency day off because, “My kid threw up,” but I guess I’m not allowed to admit that. I also have a few scenarios every day when I’m deep in the heart of working a problem which has been escalated to me and I get interrupted by someone who needs help with something that, to me, seems incredibly obvious. Maybe not the solution, but definitely the troubleshooting steps required to find it.

I haven’t gotten to get out much this year. Did go up to Whigg Meadow two more times since that weekend when Brett and I discovered it. Both trips were really nice (I hiked up both times, rather than subjecting my car to the terrible drive), though I did get absolutely soaked the first time – caught on the trail in a downpour with no rain gear.

I’m still looking for the perfect place to buy some land for a tiny cabin to live in in my old age. Have not found it yet, and I’m again wondering when I’ll be able to actually do this. I looked at my 401k yesterday and see that in the last 2 weeks I’ve lost everything that I gained during the first nine months of the year. Wouldn’t call it depressing, but it’s certainly not encouraging.

…

And now it’s the next day. I did get my tires put on, and had the front end aligned, which makes my car feel like a new car. Very nice. Jenny and I went to a Gladiators hockey game last night. Once again, we saw them playing the Orlando Sun Bears, which I think is the team that we’ve seen play every time we’ve gone. And once again, the Gladiators lost. We have a bad hockey team.

After I got home last night, I saw that I had an email from Dad. It had been written while I was sitting at the tires place, and it mentioned that he misses seeing updates to my blog. Well, here you go, Dad!

I guess the last little bit of news is that I’ve got a concert with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony later this afternoon. We’re performing the Suite from West Side Story, the Candice Suite and something else that I don’t recall right now. The band has been sounding pretty good for the rehearsals, which is different for this group.

So, we’ll call this test over. This app appears to do a pretty good job of allowing me to update my blog on-the-fly. The Voice Control isn’t all that great, but it’s faster than typing on the little phone keyboard. I do have to go back and correct things fairly often.

I don’t know how it will do with inserting pictures, which will be important when I’m in Michigan, but I’ll try that out later.

The Taxman Leaveth

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Today’s featured image is one that was obviously taken quite a while ago.  The boys were still babies – I’d guess in the 4-months-old range – and Boo was still the biggest kitty in the house.  She is now dwarfed by them.

I was going to feature a panoramic shot that I took at Lake Huron last year, but it was just too large to be considered, so I’ll embed a smaller version of it here:

Now that that’s out of the way….what have I been doing with myself lately?  The answer to that is, basically, not a lot.  Settling into my life as an L1 lead at the X-Company is a bit challenging, having not had direct reports in over 10 years.  Last week, I completed three annual review with members of my team; somewhat awkward, considering that two of the three have been at the company longer than I have.  The toughest ones are still ahead.  I get to sit in judgement of two guys who basically trained me.  One of them can be confrontational at times.  Not looking forward to that, but it’s part of the gig.   I’ve also been doing a number of interviews every week – the L1 teams are going to be growing pretty dramatically, and we’ll probably end up hiring 20-30 new folks over the course of the year.  At least I’ve got a say in who the new people are, which is nice.

I’ve also been doing quite a bit more coding (which is what I really want to do anyway), putting together some scripts for my team.  I have to keep all of them on the down-low, as we’ve got a petty tyrant in an L3 role who doesn’t like for anybody to automate anything if they don’t report directly to him.  That being the case, I’m just very quietly writing, tweaking, and perfecting a few bullet-proof scripts for everyday tasks and letting a few of my folks use them until they become so engrained in the daily grind that it’ll be hell for the person who tries to take them away.  The new idea going around the L1 community is that the tyrant will say that my scripts are not allowed in our environment before magically releasing his OWN scripts a week later that do exactly the same thing.  Apparently, he’s done that in the past.  Should it happen, I will call him out on it.  Publically.

Tax season ends on the 17th, and everyone at the X-Company is looking forward to that.  With our growth and the merger and our infrastructure and development teams’ bad habit of rolling out changes without fully testing them, the last several months have been a long nightmare.  My main problem client (the one who sent at least two letters from their lawyer to complain) have formally announced that they will be leaving after the season (and the people praised the Lord), so I’m really looking forward to the 18th.  In the immediate aftermath of the season, the vast majority of CPA firms go on vacation for at least a few weeks, which means we’ll have the chance to clear out all of our old tickets, regroup, and get ready for the next season, which starts around August.

We’ll also be entering “project season,” which is when people like me go on the road and set up new clients.  The only project that I’ve volunteered for so far is one in Chattanooga (not THAT firm in Chattanooga…a different one) on the week of May 28th.  I didn’t realize when I signed up for it that that week includes Memorial Day, so I’m honestly not sure how that’s going to work.  I don’t know if I’ll have a day less to set things up or if I’ll get a comp day for working on the holiday or what.  In any case, I’ll be in Chatty for 4-5 days, away from the office and hopefully enjoying myself.

The GBB competed at the North American championships last weekend – and got thrashed.  It definitely didn’t help that we were scheduled as the second band to play in our section – the early bands generally get screwed by the judges, who are hyper-sensitive first thing in the morning and have to leave room for higher scores for later bands.  It also didn’t help that, frankly, we’re just not as good as we have been in the past.  We ended up coming in 12th out of 13 bands.  It was the first time since we started competing in around 2007 that we didn’t win or place 2nd – and we’re planning to move up to the highest section next year, so it was a bit of a wakeup call for the folks who were really pushing for that move.  Scores, should you be interested, are posted here.  Interestingly, the San Antonio Band, which won the section with a phenomenal score, was founded by two former members of the GBB who moved to SA several years ago.  They benefitted, I am told, from their late-in-the-day performance.  Since we played so early on Saturday, I hit the road almost immediately after our performance and didn’t hear any of the other bands.

So that was last weekend.  The week before that was devoted to rehearsals every night – preparation for the competition – and the weekend prior to that was Easter.  I had an Easter gig; that’s nice, but it pretty much spoiled any weekend plans I may have wanted to have.

So this weekend is really the first time in quite a while that I can relax a little bit.  Not much, mind you.  I need to mow the lawns and do some housekeeping, and I’m also in the middle of a long-term project of cleaning and organizing my garage.  So I’m going to do all of that stuff and get some sleep.  Next weekend, however, I’m headed to the woods.  Have already taken off next Friday in anticipation of this.  It will probably rain, of course, but just being able to kick back and sleep in the woods next to a stream will be fantastic.   And I might finally get to test out the car camping setup that I came up with late last year.

The Amazon Echo Dots that I mentioned in my last post have continued to be a source of fun for me.  I updated a number of the rooms in the house – and the garage – with Phillips Hue lights, and the Hue and the Amazon systems work really well together.  One cool thing about Hue is that it is aware of my phone location – so it will automatically turn off all of the lights in the house when I leave, and will turn on the garage and kitchen lights when I come home.  Since my garage door light gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, I’ve been coming home to a completely dark house.  It’s so much nicer to drive into a lit garage – and having the house light up for me is also pretty excellent.

That’s just the Hue system.  With Amazon/Alexa, I’ve also setup a number of routines – for example, the system turns on various lights in the morning and begins broadcasting NPR and the weather for me, then tells me what’s on my calendar for the day – and I’ve have had some fun playing “Jeopardy!” every night after work.  Also put in a couple of bluetooth speakers, and – thanks to my Amazon Prime account – I can tell the system to, for example, “Play Yorkshire Building Society Band,” and it’ll just kick off a random selection of that band playing throughout the house.

Being able to say, “Alexa, add toilet paper to my shopping list,” is pretty nice, since I have a terrible habit of forgetting what I need three seconds after I think of it.  Same with to-do items (“Alexa, put clean the garage on my to-do list”).  Definitely helpful for an old fart with a spastic memory.

The best things, however, are the various sleep sounds that I can have it play.  Not surprisingly, “Wind in the Trees” and “Icy Snowstorm” are my favorites, though I have over 50 white noises that I can tell it to play while I’m lying in bed (or, to be completely honest, when I’m not lying in bed); and I know – by checking my sleep patterns – that running those sounds at night is helping me sleep better, if not for longer.  My typical night used to consist of 2-3 hours of “restful” sleep and 4-5 of “light” sleep.  Those numbers have reversed since I started playing sleep sounds.  Also, if I concentrate, I can come close to believing that I’m in the woods when I play the “Wind in the Trees” sounds.

At any rate, I plan to add at least two more Phillips Hue lights (outside the front door) and am considering replacing the fluorescent tubes in my kitchen with some sort of recessed Phillips lights, and I’ll continue to experiment with gadgets and IFTT scenarios for the Dots.

So I guess I’ve kind of caught up with things, and I must now go tackle the lawn.  After that, I might do some shopping, then start in on housekeeping tasks – or maybe I’ll just go to a bar and play video golf.  It’s the weekend, dammit.

Finally.

 

It’s Finally Saturday

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I percolated some coffee last night.  I’m not positive, but I think that was the first time I’ve ever done so when I wasn’t camping.  While I do love the speed and convenience of my little pod-based coffee machine, there’s something about percolating that I’ve always like; and something nudged me to brew a pot when I got home last night.  It was good.  It’s also good this morning.

Spent some quality time lying in bed with the cats this morning.  5:15 came incredibly early, so I got up to feed the cats (Ocean Whitefish today – Boo was not pleased), then went back to bed for a few hours.  I would dearly love to spend most of the day there – checked my sleep activity yesterday, and I haven’t gotten more than 7 hours in two weeks – but I’ve got a concert with the brass band at Kennesaw State this afternoon.  Next weekend is also booked with band stuff, all NABBA-related rehearsals.  Friday night, Saturday morning, all day Sunday.  I suppose I should be looking forward to that.  To some extent, I am; but I really just want a weekend with nothing planned.  Preferably a sunny one (it’s raining again today and is forecast to do the same tomorrow) so that I could head for the woods and try out the new car-camping setup that I put together several months ago and have yet to try.  I’ve got a new Napier rear-gate cover, similar to the tent that I’ve used for a few years, but without the tent.  It just slips over the back of the car, and provides a screen window and a very shallow awning.  Also picked up a couple of door window condoms – I think they’re supposed to be used to keep sun off of babies or something, but they also function as fast and sturdy door screens (to replace the netting & magnets that I’ve been using).  The only thing I’m still looking for, to have what I think will be the perfect car-camp setup, is a kid-sized memory-foam mattress.  The air mattress that I normally use is great, but I’d like to get something a little firmer and less prone to leaking.

Had a pretty decent day at work yesterday, although I learned in the late afternoon that the client who had previously sent a letter from their lawyer has now sent another.  They’re unhappy.  I get it.  They want to get out of their 5-year contract.  I get that, too.  I really sort of hope that we just let them go.  I’m tired of hearing their complaints, and I’m tired of them blaming me for stuff that I can’t control.  I’m told that I’m not mentioned by name in this second legal missive.  That’s a good thing, I guess.

Still thinking about retirement and how to go about it.  It’s dawning on me that I may have to postpone it for a bit – mainly because of the cats, although if I can put up a big enough shack, they should be fine.  Questions about pooping (mine, not the cats’) have me vexed for the moment.  I know I’m hiking & camping guy, but I really don’t want to just have a composting toilet as my primary john.  I’d be completely happy with a pit toilet in a separate shack, but if I do go to the place in SC that I’ve been thinking about, I don’t know if that would be allowed.  If it would be, I’d have to find out how much it would cost to put it up.  Understand that I don’t want just a hole in the ground with a wooden one-seater over it.  I’d want a cement vault, as you might find in some decent wilderness campgrounds.

I’ve also decided that I want a hot shower, which my friends who’ve retired early have so far forgone.  They’ve been bathing in a tub resembling a small horse trough and heating the water with a huge heating element.  Yeah.  No.  I want hot showers on demand.  Propane could do this, I guess.  Or a tank-less water heater.

It’s basically all coming down to “what am I allowed to do, and what will the start-up costs be?”  I’ll continue to work it out in my head and then start putting things on paper before deciding if and when I can actually take the plunge.  It’s always in the back of my mind.

Today’s featured image, by the way, is – I think – one that I took during a weekend in Waukegan a few years ago.  Amy and I spent a good part of an afternoon at a little coffee shop and took a shot of the wall.  Or maybe it’s a stock photo, but I don’t think so.  I can’t imagine why I would save it if it is.  Nah.  Pretty sure that I took it.

Since mentioning a few weeks ago that I intended to start walking in the mornings again, I have yet to actually do so.  I’m usually dog-tired in the mornings.  I guess that getting out of bed and walking for 45 minutes or so would help with that, but I just don’t have the energy or the desire to bundle up and go out into the (relative) cold.  Maybe next week.

Well, I must do something productive before getting ready for the gig.  Still working on the football site, and I have to figure out why the images from my migration blog aren’t showing up in my media library on this one.

Need to start taking back my guestroom, too.  It’s still full of boxes that got thrown into it when Mary moved in.  Really want to clean that room out and make it usable again. It’s a nice room.

 

Consolidation

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I think I mentioned a few days ago that GoDaddy had completely screwed up my website.  If I didn’t, well…they did.   And I, being the go-getter that I am, decided, basically, “To hell with them.”

To that end, I signed up with a new host, and you’re seeing the first tentative steps that I’m taking towards getting everything off of GoDaddy.  My new hosts have – wait for it – actual daily backup service.  They have integrated WordPress service.  They allow subdomains (and if you’re here, you’re on one of them).  And they seem to have pretty fast servers.  So I’m moving everything here.  My blogs.  My forums. My sandboxes.  Not only that, but I’m pulling in all of my OLD blogs, too.  How cool is that?  Remember the original “Stuff Nobody Reads”?  It’s here.  So’s “Frowzy Noise.”  And the ever-popular “Lives of Our Days.”  With the exception of a few very short startup attempts, everything I’ve ever written in blog format is now under this virtual roof.

I’m sure the historians will thank me, although I still have to bring over some photos that are still on the migration site.  If you peruse posts, you’ll see a lot without photos, even though I may reference photos in them.

Today’s featured photo, by the way, is an old picture that I found of Chamberlain.

I’m also moving the football forums here, though that’s going to take quite a bit more effort than this did.  I had them set up, briefly, but realized too late that I’d made a few stupid mistakes, so blew away what was there and I’m starting over.

Oh – I accepted that job today.  The Level 1 Lead for the X-Company.  It’s not a huge step up, but it’ll be an extra $4K a year.  That will be helpful for retirement.

 

march madness

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So then.

After two months of blogging silence, I’ve decided to see if I can put something in here every day this month.  That’s right!  31 straight days of completely meaningless drivel, brought to you by the magic of my Microsoft Surface and the idiocy of my somewhat malformed mind. 

Some of you may recall that I managed to do this “post a day” thing successfully a few years ago.  At least I think I did.  I came close at any rate.  I’m not sure what I managed to write about for that month, just as I’m not sure what I’m going to write about this month, but I guess I can start with catching up.

Not too much to say on that front.  I’m still in the same stupid job and I still despise it.  There is a slight glimmer of hope in that area, however.  A month or two ago, I started discussing the idea of moving from operations (a mind-numbingly boring job with a complete lack of anything resembling a steady schedule) to analysis (which, although the title sounds even MORE mind-numbingly boring, involves working with databases, writing code, creating applications, and having a normal Monday-Friday gig).  This new gig would still be with the same company, working with the same data, maybe even doing some of the same things as I’m doing now – but I’d have a boss who “gets it” (insofar as creativity vs. stasis) and I could stop stressing out over my schedule.  Those are two pretty huge deals.   On the down side, I’d go from being a level 2 manager to a level 1B manager, which means nothing to anyone, I’m sure; what it boils down to is that, while my salary would remain the same, my bonus would be calculated at 2% less than it is now. 

Not really a huge deal to me, to be completely honest.  A bit of an ego slam, as I’ve been a level 2 for the last 10 years, but that’s about all really.

So when the job was finally posted a couple of weeks ago, I applied for it.  The application process itself was sort of cool, because I haven’t actually put a resume together in close to 25 years, and I have to pat myself on the back here and say that I’ve got a pretty damned impressive resume.

After submitting the application and telling my potential future boss about it, I decided it would only be right and proper to let my current boss in on the scoop.

He was less than thrilled.

Now, this is really sort of strange.  I started with this guy last May.  In late July, I had my mid-year review with him, at which time he said to me, “I get the idea that, had you known more about this job when I offered it to you, you wouldn’t have taken it.”  I agreed with him completely.  Told him that I was incredibly underwhelmed by the work, by the schedule, by the attitudes in the group, and by the management style of his team leads.  I stopped short of telling him that I didn’t like *his* management style only because, frankly, he doesn’t really manage anything.  He delegates it to his team leads.

One of my latest works d’art.  I call it “Orange Lake.”

After telling him all this, I received my typical “meets and may exceed expectations” rating…and was informed that no one else on his team rated any higher.  I’ve never really understood the whole concept of “may exceed” on these ratings, btw, but that’s beside the point.  What surprised me most was that I could sit there and tell him to his face that I think the job sucks and that the management team that he put together (and, one would assume, directs) is a large reason for that – and in response to this, he’d give me his highest rating.

By the time December rolled around and my year-end review was due, I held back even less.  Told him not only that the job and his team leads STILL sucked, but also that I really didn’t understand large pieces of things that I’m supposed to understand, that I don’t particularly care to understand those things, and that I’m frankly completely unimpressed with the product that we’re supposed to be supporting.  I should mention here that I was originally signed up to be in the “friendly” trial for this product; but, after seeing what a complete balls-up the whole thing is, I opted out of the trial.

Naturally, after completely ripping everything about his company for my year-end, I was awarded a “meets and may exceed” rating and given a 3.5% raise.

Two weeks later, I put in for the new job.

As of yesterday, when he and I had a little chat about things, I’m not going to be released to the new job.  We again discussed the fact that I really don’t want to do what I’m supposed to be doing, he again mentioned that he really wants me to stay on his team, and we’ve temporarily agreed that I will continue to keep the same title, sit in the same seat, and report to him (or his team leads) – but that the work I do will be whatever is needed in the position that I applied for (database reconciliation, writing programs, troubleshooting, etc.).  In a backroom discussion with the potential boss, I stressed that, in order for me to make this arrangement work for her, I have to have a schedule that meshes with hers – which is a normal Monday-Friday, 8-5 thing.  She’s agreed to bring that up with my current boss.

And if he doesn’t go for it?  Well….there’s another job about to come open in IT and I’ve already been doing a lot of things related to that job and have been sucking up to the IT director for the last 6 months,  And THAT job would be a promotion – which means that my current boss is not allowed to block me from taking it if it’s offered.

So I’ve got that on the back burner.

If everything falls through?  Well, it might be painful and it might take some serious planning and I might have to live on beans and rice for a while; but quitting is ALWAYS an option.  Been there, done that, got plenty of t-shirts.

And on that happy note, we’ll call this entry done.

TWD

year’s end…world’s end?

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So two weeks has passed and I am once again in bed and have once again spent the last 20 minutes playing with my paint program working on “The Cypress Swamp,” which is sure to garner world-wide interest among artistic circles.  The lines, the colors, the…swampiness of it simply cannot be understated.

It is a Saturday morning, but the cats didn’t really care about that and rousted me from a most delightful slumber at 5:45 this morning.  Little bastards have really got to figure out the whole “day of rest” thing at some point, but I’m not holding my breath.  So, after feeding them and the outdoor critters (Buddy and Brooks are still regulars, though I haven’t seen Daphne in quite some time), I put on some shorts and a jacket and set out for a walk.  Got about 8.5 miles in and came up with a new path that has potential – though I was certain that I was going to be road kill during one mile-long stretch with neither sidewalks nor shoulders.

That took a couple of hours and I got back to the house and back in bed by about 9:00 (for those of you doing the math, yes – I killed an hour watching television between the cat feeding and the walk); and I’ve spend the intervening 3 hours catching up on email, booking a hotel in Waukegan for next week, reading my messageboards, and – of course – painting “The Cypress Swamp.”

The last couple of weeks at work haven’t been half bad, actually.  I finished up with my year-end review stuff (didn’t have the actual review, but wrote down all the stuff that I think I accomplished in the last 12 months and sent it to my boss) and spent most of my time working on my automation projects – one of which will be used by me tonight when I go in (at midnight) for yet another upgrade procedure.  The last time I did this, I didn’t get out of the office until 9 in the morning.  Here’s hoping that tonight is not a repeat of that fiasco.

A lot of my effort for the automation stuff has been focused on trying to connect to and get information from a number of UNIX servers.  So far, I’ve managed to connect to the things and send a few simple commands; but I’m still having trouble with more advanced stuff that, while extremely simple to type at a terminal, is proving to be a real bugger to program.  I have a few ideas about the problems, though, and will no doubt spend most of tonight’s upgrade session trying them out.  I think I mentioned in my blog post on the night of the last upgrade that, no matter how long the whole thing takes, my part – thanks largely to my automation – lasts all of about 5 minutes.  The rest of the time, I’m just sitting there on the phone, amusing myself in whatever way possible, and waiting to see if I’m going to have to roll back my five minutes worth of changes because the people taking 9 hours have screwed something up.

I played the last of three Red Kettle gigs last night and was extremely disappointed in the other 4 people who were playing with me.  I’m not a world class musician or anything, but I find it hard to believe that any supposedly talented person can get lost – and stay lost – while reading Christmas carols that, on average, last for about 45 seconds.  Time after time last night, however, one or more of the people in the quintet missed repeats and became hopelessly confused.  Not to toot my own horn (both because I’m not that good at tooting it and because it’s kind of like bragging for not falling over when taking a step), but I was the only one of the 5 who didn’t get lost….and even had I done so, I wouldn’t have wasted the rest of the tune floundering around trying to “fit in” to a carol that any 4-year-old can recognize.

The RK gigs, at any rate, are over for another year.

The Cypress Swamp

Did I mention that my work schedule is changing again as of tomorrow?  Yeah.  It is.  I’ll be going M-F, 8-5 now. This won’t last long.  Word is that the schedule will change AGAIN in mid-late January.  For the record, yes, I *did* bitch on my year-end stuff about the complete lack of a standard (or even non-standard, but at least long-lasting) schedule over the last year…and I don’t particularly care if my boss takes offense at the fact that I blamed the lack of such on his leadership skills.  The year-end stuff is supposed to be when you let your boss know if you have any problems with him.  I’ve never had any before, but this schedule thing is really chapping my ass.

Waukegan next week?  Yes indeedy.  I still had a couple of vacation days to take, so I burned next Thursday and Friday (Friday being 12/21/12) and am planning on driving up Thursday morning and spending a few days with Amy.  Still not sure if I’m working on Christmas or New Year’s day, but the early word is that the call center will be closed – which means that I won’t be.

Not that it matters, of course; because, according to the ancient Mayans, the world will end on 12/21/12.  So at least I’ll get to die in a northern state.

That’s a good thing, right?

TWD