I visited my grandparents' grave on Memorial Day. My grandfather served in the US Army in WW II, and my grandmother is buried beside him. I shared an uncaptioned picture on Facebook of their headstones with flags in the background.
It was a huge opsec failure.
My grandparents' last name is my mother's maiden name, the most common "security question" on the planet. Though I didn't identify them as my maternal grandparents, it's fairly obvious they don't share my last name, and their birth/death dates all but confirm that they're the right age to be my mother's parents.
Everything you share--no matter how small, innocuous, or minimally identifiable--helps create a more complete and exploitable digital footprint. I weaponized data against myself simply by sharing uncaptioned content.
Security questions are almost as dangerous as bad password policies. The ones that are easy to remember are also easy to guess or prize from social media.
Mother’s maiden name: launch this one into the sun. Maybe this was ok in the days before social media, but now it’s way too easy to connect dots through online friendships.
Birth city: over 50% of Americans live in the state where they were born. Some surveys put the number over 50% for still living in the same city. Nuke this question. A guess shouldn’t yield a >50% success rate.
Elementary / High school: Kind of a combo play on the questions above: if you can suss out a person’s city or state and see their friends list on any social media platform, you’ve probably already gotten their entire educational history. I think the only one that might be tough from my past is middle school, maybe. Maybe.
First pet: People generally love to gush over early pet experiences.
The harder ones force me to remember how I answered them originally:
First car: did I list the brand? The model? The year? The sub-model? I might have listed the color on one security question, and not on another.
Favorite color: My children have favorite colors.
Best friend: Uh....when? I only met my current best friend a little over a decade ago, and I’ve been filling out these questions for over 20 years.
Favorite teacher: Bro I trudged through over 16 years of education, and that was over 25 years ago--is that a thing people actually remember?
Favorite food: Again, when? I'm lucky if I can remember what I just had for breakfast.
And don’t go tacking on ‘as a child’ as a qualifier to any of these, because as I bear down on AARP eligibility, everybody under 25 looks like children, and there were times when my budget dictated that ramen was my favorite food.
Until all apps and all platforms accept passkeys, decentralized identity, or other hardware backed authentication (and users learn the vital importance of backing up their app-based authentication configurations), I see no functional way to avoid security questions. Just be careful that the answers to those sacred questions are protected with the same gusto as a bad password.
Showing posts with label Work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Work. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Infosec is a high-stakes game of entropy
Every once in a while I get a little despondent about life in the security field. The shiny will rub off and I'll see the stark reality that my industry is built around the idea that people are awful. Billions and billions of dollars spent annually in hardware, software, and human assets to stop theft, and the worst of it is that if my whole job is to protect Person A's ideas, and your whole job is to try to steal them, assuming I do well at my job our net lifetime contribution to the world is zero.
We are just annihilation and entropy. We are exothermic and high-cost. We are creative but completely untapped for moving the world forward, and literally the only one whose ideas have a chance at succeeding is Person A, and that's only if they're able to afford the battle.
Imagine the world we could have created by now if all 3 of us were allowed to be creative toward a greater good. Imagine if businesses could innovate without fear of attack, if inventors didn't have to work so hard to secure patents just to stop theft. Maybe this comes across as a rant against fiat currencies, but books and movies show us what the human mind is capable of not just imagining, but also bringing to life. We know there have been scientific advances that were directly inspired by media. There was a US general, who, while watching the first "Predator" movie, jumped up and shouted "I WANT THAT!" when the predator became invisible, prompting decades of R&D into invisibity tech. But even that example was intended to be used toward the enormous industry of loss & loss-prevention, because what is a military if not an applied security institution?
But where would we be if all of us could take our ideas and turn them into reality? What medicines would we have? What access to information? What reaches of space?
But instead you just want to steal, and I just have to block. At scale that would suggest at least 2/3 of the planet is involved in some variation of this stupid dance.
Going back to sci-fi, one of the major themes in that genre seems to be that others got their shit together and figured out how to develop toward a common good. Star Trek IV made a big show of us still using money and how damned inconvenient it was, but it's a fairly common trope: societies rapidly advance after "moving beyond money". That's not to say they've moved beyond greed, because greed often underlies the plots of many sci-fi stories, but it's significant BECAUSE it's uncommon in those imagined worlds.
A society that isn't fettered with using 2/3 of its resources to just prevent malice makes for awe-inspiring visuals and ideas. Imagine if it could be ours, and all we'd have to do is stop trying to steal each others' crap.
But then maybe that lack of secure-by-design philosophy, born of centuries of fighting over resources, is why Jeff Goldblum was able to hack the mothership with a PowerBook 5300.
Tuesday, February 09, 2016
Of Licensing and Deployment
For YEARS I maintained my own personal licenses of Microsoft's suite of products through the now-defunct TechnetPlus subscription program. It was genius: for $249/year, I had access to Microsoft's entire product catalog. It allowed me to build my own network at home without falling afoul of licensing restrictions and stay on top of changes in my industry, all without impacting a customer environment. It also allowed me to run critical applications like Visio and Project.
2 years ago, that program died. I'm not sure how upset the IT community really was, but I was gutted. For me it was the best $249 tax-deductible annual fee I could possibly invest my continuing education, and it was just gone. And then last year the licensing expired on my existing installations, forcing me to scramble to back-fill those application gaps.
The first thing I had to do was to re-install Office. I leveraged the company's Office 365 licensing to install Office ProPlus, but no matter what I did, I could not get Visio to re-install. Visio is key to my role in designing and implementing systems, and I couldn't just not have it.
A bit of research revealed an interesting limitation: if you install Office products from your Office 365 subscription, you cannot install other Office products from any other licensing structure. Specifically, Office 365 licenses you to download and install products via click-to-run. The click-to-run SKU's are directly incompatible with EA or volume-licensing SKU's, though there is no warning or message built into the installer to alert you to this.
Once I was able to assign myself the click-to-run Office 365 Visio and Project licenses, installation through the Office 365 Portal was...well, simpler, but not great. I still had to *FIND* the products in the Portal, which seemed awfully inconvenient from an end-user perspective.
Fast-forward to last week, when a client was experiencing a similar limitation, and we got to leverage a pretty cool bit of tech to solve a global issue: a client was facing a familiar issue of unsuccessful Visio and Project deployments, but wanted to alleviate the end-user strain thru Microsoft Intune.
Whereas almost any other package in Intune would require pulling down an ISO, mounting it, tweaking the contents, re-packaging it, uploading it, and then working out the deployment scenarios, the click-to-run installation couldn't be done the same way. There is no ISO to download, and you cannot shoehorn the volume-licensing version into a click-to-run scenario.
A quick search of the Interwebs revealed that others had run up against the same challenge, but there wasn't a lot of good guidance to bridge the gap.
In the end, all it took was the Office 2016 Deployment Tool and a few tweaks to an XML file. The entire size of the download is 3MB, a far cry from the 420MB ISO for VisioPro 2016.
The configuration.xml file will not work in its default state--everything is commented out. Once the comments are removed, though, the EULA is set to accept and the installation is set to silent. The only things to tweak are the specific product name and to add a line for logging, if you're so inclined.
Once done, I logged in to the Intune Portal, built an app package specifying the downloaded setup.exe and passed "/configure configuration.xml" as a command-line argument, and published the app. Within 2 minutes I was able to see the package in the client's company portal, and 5 minutes later I was running Visio.
As a demonstration for my peers, I took the same two downloaded files, re-tweaked the xml file to say "ProjectProRetail" in the product name, built a new app package, and deployed Project to myself.
This is the power of integration. I went from no product to a globally-deployable and repeatable solution in under 10 minutes with only 3MB of file-transfer. I am loving the future.
2 years ago, that program died. I'm not sure how upset the IT community really was, but I was gutted. For me it was the best $249 tax-deductible annual fee I could possibly invest my continuing education, and it was just gone. And then last year the licensing expired on my existing installations, forcing me to scramble to back-fill those application gaps.
The first thing I had to do was to re-install Office. I leveraged the company's Office 365 licensing to install Office ProPlus, but no matter what I did, I could not get Visio to re-install. Visio is key to my role in designing and implementing systems, and I couldn't just not have it.
A bit of research revealed an interesting limitation: if you install Office products from your Office 365 subscription, you cannot install other Office products from any other licensing structure. Specifically, Office 365 licenses you to download and install products via click-to-run. The click-to-run SKU's are directly incompatible with EA or volume-licensing SKU's, though there is no warning or message built into the installer to alert you to this.
Once I was able to assign myself the click-to-run Office 365 Visio and Project licenses, installation through the Office 365 Portal was...well, simpler, but not great. I still had to *FIND* the products in the Portal, which seemed awfully inconvenient from an end-user perspective.
Fast-forward to last week, when a client was experiencing a similar limitation, and we got to leverage a pretty cool bit of tech to solve a global issue: a client was facing a familiar issue of unsuccessful Visio and Project deployments, but wanted to alleviate the end-user strain thru Microsoft Intune.
Whereas almost any other package in Intune would require pulling down an ISO, mounting it, tweaking the contents, re-packaging it, uploading it, and then working out the deployment scenarios, the click-to-run installation couldn't be done the same way. There is no ISO to download, and you cannot shoehorn the volume-licensing version into a click-to-run scenario.
A quick search of the Interwebs revealed that others had run up against the same challenge, but there wasn't a lot of good guidance to bridge the gap.
In the end, all it took was the Office 2016 Deployment Tool and a few tweaks to an XML file. The entire size of the download is 3MB, a far cry from the 420MB ISO for VisioPro 2016.
The configuration.xml file will not work in its default state--everything is commented out. Once the comments are removed, though, the EULA is set to accept and the installation is set to silent. The only things to tweak are the specific product name and to add a line for logging, if you're so inclined.
Once done, I logged in to the Intune Portal, built an app package specifying the downloaded setup.exe and passed "/configure configuration.xml" as a command-line argument, and published the app. Within 2 minutes I was able to see the package in the client's company portal, and 5 minutes later I was running Visio.
As a demonstration for my peers, I took the same two downloaded files, re-tweaked the xml file to say "ProjectProRetail" in the product name, built a new app package, and deployed Project to myself.
This is the power of integration. I went from no product to a globally-deployable and repeatable solution in under 10 minutes with only 3MB of file-transfer. I am loving the future.
Friday, March 19, 2010
19 Days? Really?
Has it really been that long since I last posted?
The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind. The sun came out and dried up all the rain. The boy's been in a great mood. Facebook Scrabble occupies HOURS of my night. And of course there's the Wii. Oh, and it bears mentioning that my weekends have been off the chizzain.
And work? Oh my God I've rarely been so busy. I'm in the middle of several pilot deployments right now: Google Apps, WebSense hosted security, SAML 2.0 Single Sign-On. And since we're investigating SSO, it's causing us to re-think our login processes for other hosted solutions.
We're booting our offsite backup storage vendor, too, so that's a major overhaul in the works. And, as if all that weren't enough, I'm rolling out Active Directory to new international sites AND I'm still the only dude supporting the servers.
Busy much?
But it's good, because I'm too busy to let my head really wrap around the fact that it's March.
I have the 10K coming up next weekend, and I had to take almost the last month off from training because of a worsening back problem, but yesterday I got my first chance to run on the street. And that's when the emotions really broadsided me. I was less than half a mile from the end of my foreshortened run when I started tearing up. The emotion of WHY I'm running this thing took over. The fact that I was listening to a sad song about lost love probably didn't help,
though.
So anyway, there's all my excuses for not posting. I would promise a post for the anniversary, but I will be out of town visiting museums with a very special boy. But I'll try.
Hope everybody had a good St. Patrick's Day. I drank far less than I should have, but hopefully I can correct that this weekend.
The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind. The sun came out and dried up all the rain. The boy's been in a great mood. Facebook Scrabble occupies HOURS of my night. And of course there's the Wii. Oh, and it bears mentioning that my weekends have been off the chizzain.
And work? Oh my God I've rarely been so busy. I'm in the middle of several pilot deployments right now: Google Apps, WebSense hosted security, SAML 2.0 Single Sign-On. And since we're investigating SSO, it's causing us to re-think our login processes for other hosted solutions.
We're booting our offsite backup storage vendor, too, so that's a major overhaul in the works. And, as if all that weren't enough, I'm rolling out Active Directory to new international sites AND I'm still the only dude supporting the servers.
Busy much?
But it's good, because I'm too busy to let my head really wrap around the fact that it's March.
I have the 10K coming up next weekend, and I had to take almost the last month off from training because of a worsening back problem, but yesterday I got my first chance to run on the street. And that's when the emotions really broadsided me. I was less than half a mile from the end of my foreshortened run when I started tearing up. The emotion of WHY I'm running this thing took over. The fact that I was listening to a sad song about lost love probably didn't help,
though.
So anyway, there's all my excuses for not posting. I would promise a post for the anniversary, but I will be out of town visiting museums with a very special boy. But I'll try.
Hope everybody had a good St. Patrick's Day. I drank far less than I should have, but hopefully I can correct that this weekend.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Slacker
I'm getting pretty slack with this blog thing again (but to be fair, so are most of you), but this weekend will mark 7 months, and I'm going to be in the midst of a major system migration at work, so numbing my brain in front of a computer will not be high on my priority list on Sunday.
So where am I these days? Still struggling at times. I've started purging again. Last week I completely filled my dumpster with abandoned crafting materials, clothing that was inappropriate to donate, and random objects that had no particular significance. In doing so, I stumbled upon some boxes of clothing that I didn't know about, and within one of those boxes was her scent. Her pre-cancer scent. Or so I believe. Was it real, or did I just want to find it so badly that any smell reminding me of her would suffice to fool my brain?
Then a couple of days later I did it all over again, discarding a plethora of skin-care products, her nail polishes, expired medicines, and old sheets. Once again the dumpster is pretty much full, and it looks like absolutely nothing has changed in the house.
I cry less, and Alastair has really been asking a lot of questions. He made a new friend a couple of weeks ago and asked if Andy loves Amanda. I told him that Andy never met Amanda, but that he loves his mommy. It was a tough conversation to have, and more recently he's been telling me that I'm not allowed to die. Kid's going through some pretty tough emotions right now.
I overcame one of my stupid mental blocks and decorated the house for Halloween. Not as all-out as in some years past, but we put out a bunch of skulls, candles, and even a few lights (in his room).
Tomorrow I'm taking the day off to spend with him. We get far too little time together, so I'm super excited about it. Then Saturday will be hell-day at work, followed (hopefully) by heavy consumption of alcohol.
Hope everybody has a great weekend. Go squeeze your kids, your spouses, or your favorite pet. Except fish.
So where am I these days? Still struggling at times. I've started purging again. Last week I completely filled my dumpster with abandoned crafting materials, clothing that was inappropriate to donate, and random objects that had no particular significance. In doing so, I stumbled upon some boxes of clothing that I didn't know about, and within one of those boxes was her scent. Her pre-cancer scent. Or so I believe. Was it real, or did I just want to find it so badly that any smell reminding me of her would suffice to fool my brain?
Then a couple of days later I did it all over again, discarding a plethora of skin-care products, her nail polishes, expired medicines, and old sheets. Once again the dumpster is pretty much full, and it looks like absolutely nothing has changed in the house.
I cry less, and Alastair has really been asking a lot of questions. He made a new friend a couple of weeks ago and asked if Andy loves Amanda. I told him that Andy never met Amanda, but that he loves his mommy. It was a tough conversation to have, and more recently he's been telling me that I'm not allowed to die. Kid's going through some pretty tough emotions right now.
I overcame one of my stupid mental blocks and decorated the house for Halloween. Not as all-out as in some years past, but we put out a bunch of skulls, candles, and even a few lights (in his room).
Tomorrow I'm taking the day off to spend with him. We get far too little time together, so I'm super excited about it. Then Saturday will be hell-day at work, followed (hopefully) by heavy consumption of alcohol.
Hope everybody has a great weekend. Go squeeze your kids, your spouses, or your favorite pet. Except fish.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Overcoming Fear
I talk a pretty big game. I live and die by VB script, but when it comes to scripting, I feel much more comfortable querying than modifying. I'll pull information from Active Directory all day long, but please don't ask me to batch-mod 1000 users. I'll probably barf in abject terror. What if it goes wrong? The scripts generally run so fast that I can't stop them before they complete. What if I inadvertently disable 100% of user accounts on the domain, or delete an entire OU (I've seen both happen)?
But yesterday I took the plunge. Because of some buffoon's inability to properly code his/her software, I had to remove the dashes and parentheses from all phone numbers in AD. Easy enough to query, not so easy to modify, especially for the timid.
But I found a few tricks, cringed and hyperventilated while testing on a couple of accounts, and then closed my eyes and pressed the "Nuke" button.
Ho. Lee. Shit.
202 instantaneous changes, and no glitches. So I expanded it to all 10-digit numbers (essentially all US phone numbers). Again: no glitches.
So now I'm positively giddy. Today I undertook to change postal addresses in bulk. Every user now has his or her site's mailing address, including international (which meant learning about ISO 3166 A-2 country codes).
I am in nerd heaven right now.
But yesterday I took the plunge. Because of some buffoon's inability to properly code his/her software, I had to remove the dashes and parentheses from all phone numbers in AD. Easy enough to query, not so easy to modify, especially for the timid.
But I found a few tricks, cringed and hyperventilated while testing on a couple of accounts, and then closed my eyes and pressed the "Nuke" button.
Ho. Lee. Shit.
202 instantaneous changes, and no glitches. So I expanded it to all 10-digit numbers (essentially all US phone numbers). Again: no glitches.
So now I'm positively giddy. Today I undertook to change postal addresses in bulk. Every user now has his or her site's mailing address, including international (which meant learning about ISO 3166 A-2 country codes).
I am in nerd heaven right now.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Merry Christmas
I just got hired! The position is contract-to-hire, which means I'll work for a contracting company for 90 days and then be hired directly by... Tredegar!
My first day is 1/5/09.
My first day is 1/5/09.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Anat 101: What is a Patella?
Seriously, if you don't know, look it up before proceeding: patella.
I attended a very informative sales meeting / product demo on Wednesday. The product will provide a lot of useful features for us, and allow us to prove it when we say busted shit ain't our fault.
But the guy doing most of the demo told a story that really destroyed his credibility.
A few months ago he hurt himself playing basketball. He was in excruciating pain, but figured that he'd finally torn his ACL, making him a "real" basketball player. So he went to a doctor who assessed the situation and said she was fairly confident he had only dislocated his knee cap, and that she could reset it for him with no real problem. He said that he'd rather get a second opinion first, and went on his painful but merry way.
The 2nd doctor told him that he'd "busted" his patella and put him on the long slow road to recovery.
Then came the curious grandstanding, meant to show that sometimes the advice you get early on can lead to greater harm down the road: "What if I'd taken that first doctor's advice? What kind of pain would I be in today? I mean, it wasn't my knee cap: it was my patella! It had nothing at all to do with my knee cap!"
Um.
Wow.
I attended a very informative sales meeting / product demo on Wednesday. The product will provide a lot of useful features for us, and allow us to prove it when we say busted shit ain't our fault.
But the guy doing most of the demo told a story that really destroyed his credibility.
A few months ago he hurt himself playing basketball. He was in excruciating pain, but figured that he'd finally torn his ACL, making him a "real" basketball player. So he went to a doctor who assessed the situation and said she was fairly confident he had only dislocated his knee cap, and that she could reset it for him with no real problem. He said that he'd rather get a second opinion first, and went on his painful but merry way.
The 2nd doctor told him that he'd "busted" his patella and put him on the long slow road to recovery.
Then came the curious grandstanding, meant to show that sometimes the advice you get early on can lead to greater harm down the road: "What if I'd taken that first doctor's advice? What kind of pain would I be in today? I mean, it wasn't my knee cap: it was my patella! It had nothing at all to do with my knee cap!"
Um.
Wow.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Sometimes Life is Exciting in Non-Baby Ways
Home:
We got our new TV on Wednesday. We opted for the Sharp Aquos 46" LCD (LC-46D64U, if you're interested), and we're feeding it with a Sony PlayStation 3 (80GB), TivoHD, and the component-output of my Onkyo TX-NR801 receiver.
All of this replaces the old 27" tube Magnavox, Sony DVD player, and Tivo Series 2.
To make the installation right, we got a wall-mount and I just finished ordering all the accessories necessary to put the cables behind the wall. And since I'm going to that trouble, I'm finally going to hide the speaker cables, too.
And if I'm going to go to all that trouble, I might as well get my network ports rigged up to the other side of the room. I found this really cool replacement toe-molding that's actually a hidden cable-tray. That should allow me to deal with some nasty exterior-wall issues.
And if I'm going to all of that trouble, it's probably time to completely re-wire the house for networking, phone, and cable. To that end I'm researching telecommunications racks, patch panels, signal distribution units, and all sorts of other super-cool geek toys. I'm hoping to run conduit up through the walls to the attic and rain down network connections to every room.
Aw yeah: things is gonna get nerdy.
Work:
VMWare, Citrix provisioning, 64-bit SQL cluster, Spotlight on Windows, Hyena, Rapid Deployment Services, HP C-class blades. Just a few of the new geeky toys we're playing with, and the list keeps growing!
Play:
I've replaced all the suspension bushings in the rear of the Miata, and now need to do the front 8, repack the bearings, and bleed the brakes.
I'm in the market for an enclosed trailer to tow the car, and then it's off to VIR in March for 2 days of track attacking!
---
These are some exciting times for me. All super nerdy, but a lot of fun as both technical and physical challenges.
We got our new TV on Wednesday. We opted for the Sharp Aquos 46" LCD (LC-46D64U, if you're interested), and we're feeding it with a Sony PlayStation 3 (80GB), TivoHD, and the component-output of my Onkyo TX-NR801 receiver.
All of this replaces the old 27" tube Magnavox, Sony DVD player, and Tivo Series 2.
To make the installation right, we got a wall-mount and I just finished ordering all the accessories necessary to put the cables behind the wall. And since I'm going to that trouble, I'm finally going to hide the speaker cables, too.
And if I'm going to go to all that trouble, I might as well get my network ports rigged up to the other side of the room. I found this really cool replacement toe-molding that's actually a hidden cable-tray. That should allow me to deal with some nasty exterior-wall issues.
And if I'm going to all of that trouble, it's probably time to completely re-wire the house for networking, phone, and cable. To that end I'm researching telecommunications racks, patch panels, signal distribution units, and all sorts of other super-cool geek toys. I'm hoping to run conduit up through the walls to the attic and rain down network connections to every room.
Aw yeah: things is gonna get nerdy.
Work:
VMWare, Citrix provisioning, 64-bit SQL cluster, Spotlight on Windows, Hyena, Rapid Deployment Services, HP C-class blades. Just a few of the new geeky toys we're playing with, and the list keeps growing!
Play:
I've replaced all the suspension bushings in the rear of the Miata, and now need to do the front 8, repack the bearings, and bleed the brakes.
I'm in the market for an enclosed trailer to tow the car, and then it's off to VIR in March for 2 days of track attacking!
---
These are some exciting times for me. All super nerdy, but a lot of fun as both technical and physical challenges.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Broke Down, Busted, Brutal Week
I'm submitting a timesheet for 64.5 hours tomorrow. I don't often get overtime, and when I do, it's generally 3 or 4 hours in a week. A couple of times I've submitted 50 hour timesheets, but this week I worked over 1.5 weeks in 6 days.
My Life in Hell started Tuesday night, with a fun-filled evening of backing up 162GB of data, replacing one rack of old & busted servers with a new rack of shiny new servers, and moving an extremely heavy RAID system. I was at work until 1am, and when I tried to leave work, I learned that my car (the Miata) was busted, too. I couldn't engage any gear with the car running, and the car wouldn't start with a gear engaged. The problem? A leaky clutch slave cylinder. I had a coworker help push me out of my parking spot, then push my car to a running start, whereupon I jumped in and wrangled it into gear. I couldn't bring the car back to a complete stop without killing the engine, which would mean getting it back to a running start, so I had to run a red-light on my way home.
Fortunately, the Miata's transmission is very amenable to clutch-less shifting, so I got home quite safely (it was, after all, after 1am, so there was very little traffic). I remembered on Wednesday afternoon that I have access to the Mazda Motorsports Development Program, which gets me steep discounts on parts, so I ordered up a new slave cylinder and a braided stainless clutch line.
But the week was just warming up.
Wednesday afternoon began the joy of conference calls. We were migrating a set of systems from being hosted locally to a remote site, which called for testing in a staging enclave, removing the systems from our domain, dropping the remote systems in the production network, joining them to the domain, and then ensuring connectivity.
Only nobody ever bothered to analyze the infrastructure systems to see what hurdles we might encounter. As soon as our proxy servers were stood up in the production network, we lost them. Countless hours were spent on a "war line" with reps from our site, their site, and even some outside experts who tried to lend a hand.
I got home every night from Wednesday to Friday sometime between 5 and 6 pm, got on conference calls from 7 to 8:30, and then back on more calls around 9pm, which would, in turn, end at around 10 or 10:30. Friday I got to work early, still trying to troubleshoot our busted proxy servers, but finally with a plan.
It was 10pm Friday night before I finally got one of our load-balanced proxy servers working correctly, and much later before I got the other busted one taken off the network.
Then Saturday morning I got up and tried to get to the one remaining system to get configured and redeployed. It wasn't until several hours later that I finally get a tech on the phone and got him to reset the system before I could log onto it. 5 hours after that, the system was essentially hosted.
Throughout the week, I think I saw my son for a grand total of about 6 or 7 hours. Saturday was better, but I was on the phone while interacting with him, which is less than ideal.
I'm so pooped I think I'll be in bed by 9:30 tonight. But first, I have to get through my 7pm conference call. Fun.
My Life in Hell started Tuesday night, with a fun-filled evening of backing up 162GB of data, replacing one rack of old & busted servers with a new rack of shiny new servers, and moving an extremely heavy RAID system. I was at work until 1am, and when I tried to leave work, I learned that my car (the Miata) was busted, too. I couldn't engage any gear with the car running, and the car wouldn't start with a gear engaged. The problem? A leaky clutch slave cylinder. I had a coworker help push me out of my parking spot, then push my car to a running start, whereupon I jumped in and wrangled it into gear. I couldn't bring the car back to a complete stop without killing the engine, which would mean getting it back to a running start, so I had to run a red-light on my way home.
Fortunately, the Miata's transmission is very amenable to clutch-less shifting, so I got home quite safely (it was, after all, after 1am, so there was very little traffic). I remembered on Wednesday afternoon that I have access to the Mazda Motorsports Development Program, which gets me steep discounts on parts, so I ordered up a new slave cylinder and a braided stainless clutch line.
But the week was just warming up.
Wednesday afternoon began the joy of conference calls. We were migrating a set of systems from being hosted locally to a remote site, which called for testing in a staging enclave, removing the systems from our domain, dropping the remote systems in the production network, joining them to the domain, and then ensuring connectivity.
Only nobody ever bothered to analyze the infrastructure systems to see what hurdles we might encounter. As soon as our proxy servers were stood up in the production network, we lost them. Countless hours were spent on a "war line" with reps from our site, their site, and even some outside experts who tried to lend a hand.
I got home every night from Wednesday to Friday sometime between 5 and 6 pm, got on conference calls from 7 to 8:30, and then back on more calls around 9pm, which would, in turn, end at around 10 or 10:30. Friday I got to work early, still trying to troubleshoot our busted proxy servers, but finally with a plan.
It was 10pm Friday night before I finally got one of our load-balanced proxy servers working correctly, and much later before I got the other busted one taken off the network.
Then Saturday morning I got up and tried to get to the one remaining system to get configured and redeployed. It wasn't until several hours later that I finally get a tech on the phone and got him to reset the system before I could log onto it. 5 hours after that, the system was essentially hosted.
Throughout the week, I think I saw my son for a grand total of about 6 or 7 hours. Saturday was better, but I was on the phone while interacting with him, which is less than ideal.
I'm so pooped I think I'll be in bed by 9:30 tonight. But first, I have to get through my 7pm conference call. Fun.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Do you know where your children are?
10:30. I'm stuck at work. 2nd night this week, and I know I'll have to work Saturday, too. Fun.
Monday, October 02, 2006
You don't have to go to the Fair to ride a roller-coaster
What a week.
It started last Tuesday, and there's no need rehashing what happened that day. It proceeded through Thursday, and went ruthlessly into Friday, when I was scrambling to help bring new systems on-line.
I got home on Friday with a lot of positive energy, though, and mowed the back yard, edged, bagged the clippings, vacuumed the upstairs, and helped Amanda pack our cars with yard-sale stuff. It was a pretty good night, and we had a nice evening.
Saturday was a bit hectic. She got up early for the yard sale, which was at her mom's house. We got Alastair up, got him ready, and she headed off. I followed, knowing that I'd be running out to a MINI drive immediately after helping set up for the yard sale.
We got to her mom's house late, I raced to empty the car and find places for things, and kissed her goodbye. I got to the MINI meeting place (Barnes & Noble @ Short Pump) right on time, and Christian, Tony, and I headed west.
Our destination was Route 56, which is wicked curvy between Vesuvius and Tyro. Click for a map. The problems were two-fold: 1. The weather was bad out there (rain, low temperatures: bad for our cars' setups) 2. I wasn't as excited about the drive as I had been.
It hadn't been too long before the drive that Amanda's family rescheduled their yard sale for the same day, and I had been hoping to help out with the sale. It wasn't tremendously fair that Amanda would need to look after the boy while dealing with hagglers.
So I was less than thrilled on the drive out, and made up for it by driving way too fast. We made it from Richmond to Afton in exactly 1 hour (down to the minute), and then hit slow-moving traffic on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I had forgotten that I'd have to go almost 30 miles on the Parkway before hitting Rte 56, so I was getting really tense.
Then, when we did turn on to 56, a very slow SUV was right in front of us. We suffered behind the guy for about a mile before pulling over for a potty break. For about the next 4 or 5 miles, we saw no traffic, and took some very wet turns at some very dangerous speeds. Several times I stopped to make sure Christian was still behind me (completely stock car--even tires--and no track experience), and a few times I had to slow way down because of gravel on the road. We turned around before getting to the bottom of the mountain, where speeds increase and turns get even sharper, and headed back. When I hit the Blue Ridge Parkway, I lost my cool and drove as fast as I could to get home. I made the trip back from Afton in just under an hour and got to the yard sale just in time to help pack up.
Amanda and I took Alastair home, put him down for his nap, and got packing for our trip to Norfolk, VA, for my company's cruise on the Spirit of Norfolk (a 3-hour booze cruise).
We hit the road at about 4:30pm and made it to the parking garage in Norfolk at 6:43pm. After about an hour of standing around, we got on the ship and set off. It was a really good time. We had listened to some good music on the way down, were relaxed, we were drinking tasty drinks, and the food was good.
We enjoyed looking at the naval vessels (I more than Amanda) from the observation deck, and we spent a good amount of time hanging out with Lewis and his girlfriend Faith (and his friends Dave & John).
When it was over, we got back in the car and headed back to Williamsburg, where we had reservations right next door to the outlet mall (score!). We stayed up late, watched Dane Cook's comedy routine, and went to sleep around 2am.
The next morning, we had a wonderfully relaxing time laying around and being lazy. We wandered out, did some shopping (super cute outfit for Alastair's first Christmas), had lunch with Shana, did some more shopping, and then got gut-punched.
Leigh (Amanda's mom) called and said she'd gotten a cryptic message from the chaplain at MCV. No word on why he was calling, but she immediately assumed that we had been injured. Since we hadn't she tried to track down her mom, who just moved to Richmond a couple of weeks ago.
It turns out her mom Birchie had been in a serious car accident at around 11am, shortly after leaving Leigh's house. Birchie had put Alastair down for his nap around 10am, had some coffee, and headed out to drop some stuff off at GoodWill. On her return, she ran the red light at Parham & Broad (there's speculation that an aneurysm might have caused this: Birchie was a tremendously conscientious driver). She was broad-sided, her car spun several times, and wound up in the median.
We know she was conscious when she arrived at MCV, because Leigh's number is unlisted, and the chaplain wouldn't have had any way of getting the number without being told.
Of course, we were in Williamsburg when the details were just starting to come together, so Leigh couldn't go to her mother's side (she was watching Alastair at her house). We made a beeline back to Richmond, picked him up, and she raced down to the hospital.
For the next 3 hours, we got a stream of phone calls asking about her health, updating us on minor details, and everything seemed ok. There were reports of a broken hip, possible head trauma, and tests being performed.
Amanda's dad was driving in from Utah, too, so we were relaying information to him has we got it (Leigh's cell phone was off since she was in the hospital, so he couldn't get in touch with her).
Then around 9:30 we got a call that she was going to be removed from life support. Whoa, what? Removed from life support? None of the information we'd received up to that point even indicated she was really badly injured! I called my dad and asked him to come over and sit with Alastair so that we could go to the hospital.
We met Amanda's father at his house and took him down to the hospital. When we got there, everyone was milling around out front. Evidently the doctors weren't ready to extubate her: they wanted to run a test to see the extent of the brain damage before letting her go.
So we went home. All jacked up on coffee and adrenaline and nerves. Sleep came slowly and fitfully, and this morning Leigh called us to say that Birchie had passed away some time between 4 and 4:30 in the morning. She never stabilized enough for the test.
Funeral arrangements are being made now, and we'll be heading back to Grundy some time this week.
It's been a hell of a week. Please keep Amanda and her family in your thoughts and prayers.
It started last Tuesday, and there's no need rehashing what happened that day. It proceeded through Thursday, and went ruthlessly into Friday, when I was scrambling to help bring new systems on-line.
I got home on Friday with a lot of positive energy, though, and mowed the back yard, edged, bagged the clippings, vacuumed the upstairs, and helped Amanda pack our cars with yard-sale stuff. It was a pretty good night, and we had a nice evening.
Saturday was a bit hectic. She got up early for the yard sale, which was at her mom's house. We got Alastair up, got him ready, and she headed off. I followed, knowing that I'd be running out to a MINI drive immediately after helping set up for the yard sale.
We got to her mom's house late, I raced to empty the car and find places for things, and kissed her goodbye. I got to the MINI meeting place (Barnes & Noble @ Short Pump) right on time, and Christian, Tony, and I headed west.
Our destination was Route 56, which is wicked curvy between Vesuvius and Tyro. Click for a map. The problems were two-fold: 1. The weather was bad out there (rain, low temperatures: bad for our cars' setups) 2. I wasn't as excited about the drive as I had been.
It hadn't been too long before the drive that Amanda's family rescheduled their yard sale for the same day, and I had been hoping to help out with the sale. It wasn't tremendously fair that Amanda would need to look after the boy while dealing with hagglers.
So I was less than thrilled on the drive out, and made up for it by driving way too fast. We made it from Richmond to Afton in exactly 1 hour (down to the minute), and then hit slow-moving traffic on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I had forgotten that I'd have to go almost 30 miles on the Parkway before hitting Rte 56, so I was getting really tense.
Then, when we did turn on to 56, a very slow SUV was right in front of us. We suffered behind the guy for about a mile before pulling over for a potty break. For about the next 4 or 5 miles, we saw no traffic, and took some very wet turns at some very dangerous speeds. Several times I stopped to make sure Christian was still behind me (completely stock car--even tires--and no track experience), and a few times I had to slow way down because of gravel on the road. We turned around before getting to the bottom of the mountain, where speeds increase and turns get even sharper, and headed back. When I hit the Blue Ridge Parkway, I lost my cool and drove as fast as I could to get home. I made the trip back from Afton in just under an hour and got to the yard sale just in time to help pack up.
Amanda and I took Alastair home, put him down for his nap, and got packing for our trip to Norfolk, VA, for my company's cruise on the Spirit of Norfolk (a 3-hour booze cruise).
We hit the road at about 4:30pm and made it to the parking garage in Norfolk at 6:43pm. After about an hour of standing around, we got on the ship and set off. It was a really good time. We had listened to some good music on the way down, were relaxed, we were drinking tasty drinks, and the food was good.
We enjoyed looking at the naval vessels (I more than Amanda) from the observation deck, and we spent a good amount of time hanging out with Lewis and his girlfriend Faith (and his friends Dave & John).
When it was over, we got back in the car and headed back to Williamsburg, where we had reservations right next door to the outlet mall (score!). We stayed up late, watched Dane Cook's comedy routine, and went to sleep around 2am.
The next morning, we had a wonderfully relaxing time laying around and being lazy. We wandered out, did some shopping (super cute outfit for Alastair's first Christmas), had lunch with Shana, did some more shopping, and then got gut-punched.
Leigh (Amanda's mom) called and said she'd gotten a cryptic message from the chaplain at MCV. No word on why he was calling, but she immediately assumed that we had been injured. Since we hadn't she tried to track down her mom, who just moved to Richmond a couple of weeks ago.
It turns out her mom Birchie had been in a serious car accident at around 11am, shortly after leaving Leigh's house. Birchie had put Alastair down for his nap around 10am, had some coffee, and headed out to drop some stuff off at GoodWill. On her return, she ran the red light at Parham & Broad (there's speculation that an aneurysm might have caused this: Birchie was a tremendously conscientious driver). She was broad-sided, her car spun several times, and wound up in the median.
We know she was conscious when she arrived at MCV, because Leigh's number is unlisted, and the chaplain wouldn't have had any way of getting the number without being told.
Of course, we were in Williamsburg when the details were just starting to come together, so Leigh couldn't go to her mother's side (she was watching Alastair at her house). We made a beeline back to Richmond, picked him up, and she raced down to the hospital.
For the next 3 hours, we got a stream of phone calls asking about her health, updating us on minor details, and everything seemed ok. There were reports of a broken hip, possible head trauma, and tests being performed.
Amanda's dad was driving in from Utah, too, so we were relaying information to him has we got it (Leigh's cell phone was off since she was in the hospital, so he couldn't get in touch with her).
Then around 9:30 we got a call that she was going to be removed from life support. Whoa, what? Removed from life support? None of the information we'd received up to that point even indicated she was really badly injured! I called my dad and asked him to come over and sit with Alastair so that we could go to the hospital.
We met Amanda's father at his house and took him down to the hospital. When we got there, everyone was milling around out front. Evidently the doctors weren't ready to extubate her: they wanted to run a test to see the extent of the brain damage before letting her go.
So we went home. All jacked up on coffee and adrenaline and nerves. Sleep came slowly and fitfully, and this morning Leigh called us to say that Birchie had passed away some time between 4 and 4:30 in the morning. She never stabilized enough for the test.
Funeral arrangements are being made now, and we'll be heading back to Grundy some time this week.
It's been a hell of a week. Please keep Amanda and her family in your thoughts and prayers.
Friday, September 29, 2006
It wasn't just Tuesday
This week just won't quit. I think I'm going to classify it as The Worst Week Of My Adult Life.
The only good news to come out of this week is that I bought some really cool new music, and today, for the first time ever, I played a 2-turn game of pool: Lewis broke and got 5 balls in, then I ran the entire table. All 7 of my balls and the 8 ball.
But that comes against a backdrop of work, house, and automotive misery. So whoopdedoo.
The Mars Volta is weird. But I like it.
The only good news to come out of this week is that I bought some really cool new music, and today, for the first time ever, I played a 2-turn game of pool: Lewis broke and got 5 balls in, then I ran the entire table. All 7 of my balls and the 8 ball.
But that comes against a backdrop of work, house, and automotive misery. So whoopdedoo.
The Mars Volta is weird. But I like it.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Yesterday and the Evil Wicked Horrible Rotten Very Bad Day
Yesterday wasn't much fun.
It began decently enough, with me running late, as usual. I realized quickly, though, that I had an 8:45 appointment, and that I wasn't going to get to work until 8:30. There was a bit of paperwork I needed to get taken care of before the appointment, along with running a process on my computer.
I got the paperwork done, but the process wound up taking almost an hour. Damn. So I canceled the appointment, only to realize it had actually been scheduled for 9:45. I could have made it with time to spare. Grrr...
But when I first got to work, my boss's first words to me were "What did you do to the servers last night?" Great. Good way to start the day. And, of course, she was flanked by one of her peers and her boss. So I'm immediately on the defensive, and of course I had personally done nothing. Come to find out, someone had moved one set of systems to production that had Test GPO's applied. So the production systems got brand new patches in the middle of the night and rebooted, rendering the environment unstable.
That took hours to unravel, and in the meantime, we had users accusing us of insulting them by not freely giving them enough space.
Finally, my boss came to me and told me that I'll be rebuilding systems on Saturday the 14th, not working on Monday the 9th, and that I had disappointed her by not volunteering to rebuild a server last night. I'd had enough, and I went home.
I got home, saw my boy for a while, and decided to go ahead and do my oil change. I was due for one, and with this weekend's drive to the mountains, I wanted to get it done. I got the car up in the air, drained the oil, changed the filter, put it back on the ground, put the new oil in, cleaned the air filter, and added WaterWetter to the coolant. I felt good. I'd accomplished more than I set out to do, and was in a much better mood than I'd been in.
Then I came back to work. On the way, I noticed that my back window was wet. There was no good explanation: I hadn't driven through water; nothing had dripped on the car; there was no rain. I got to work, thought no more of it for the next 3.5 hours, and then drove home. I lost traction getting on the highway, and didn't think that was right, since I hadn't bombed the turn too hard.
Then I ran the rear window wiper and left a huge smear instead of a clean spot. It was oil. I stopped at a service station and cleaned the window off, hoping that it was just some spilled oil that had gotten on the subframe while I was filling the car.
Oil continued to coat my rear window.
I got home, sat sulkily through some TV, and when I got up, my vision went starry for a minute. I felt horrible and went to bed feeling weird and depressed. I was sure I'd cross-threaded the oil-filter housing or somehow cracked the oil pan.
Yesterday sucked.
This morning I went out and pulled the oil-filter housing off. The gasket had been shredded when I put it in. I dug through the trash and found the old one, put it back in, used my remaining 1.5 qts of oil, and went to the car wash. No more leaks, but the back-side of the engine and the entire under-carriage are covered in oil, so my car stinks like burning oil.
I also beat a hasty path to Advance Auto and bought another 3 qts of oil (synthetic, so it ain't cheap). All in all I lost about 3 quarts of oil to that chopped gasket, further proving that multi-thousand-dollar devices are almost invariably taken down by $.05 parts.
All seems to be good now, and with the exception of some possible oil on the right rear tire, I'm ready for this weekend's mountain run!
It began decently enough, with me running late, as usual. I realized quickly, though, that I had an 8:45 appointment, and that I wasn't going to get to work until 8:30. There was a bit of paperwork I needed to get taken care of before the appointment, along with running a process on my computer.
I got the paperwork done, but the process wound up taking almost an hour. Damn. So I canceled the appointment, only to realize it had actually been scheduled for 9:45. I could have made it with time to spare. Grrr...
But when I first got to work, my boss's first words to me were "What did you do to the servers last night?" Great. Good way to start the day. And, of course, she was flanked by one of her peers and her boss. So I'm immediately on the defensive, and of course I had personally done nothing. Come to find out, someone had moved one set of systems to production that had Test GPO's applied. So the production systems got brand new patches in the middle of the night and rebooted, rendering the environment unstable.
That took hours to unravel, and in the meantime, we had users accusing us of insulting them by not freely giving them enough space.
Finally, my boss came to me and told me that I'll be rebuilding systems on Saturday the 14th, not working on Monday the 9th, and that I had disappointed her by not volunteering to rebuild a server last night. I'd had enough, and I went home.
I got home, saw my boy for a while, and decided to go ahead and do my oil change. I was due for one, and with this weekend's drive to the mountains, I wanted to get it done. I got the car up in the air, drained the oil, changed the filter, put it back on the ground, put the new oil in, cleaned the air filter, and added WaterWetter to the coolant. I felt good. I'd accomplished more than I set out to do, and was in a much better mood than I'd been in.
Then I came back to work. On the way, I noticed that my back window was wet. There was no good explanation: I hadn't driven through water; nothing had dripped on the car; there was no rain. I got to work, thought no more of it for the next 3.5 hours, and then drove home. I lost traction getting on the highway, and didn't think that was right, since I hadn't bombed the turn too hard.
Then I ran the rear window wiper and left a huge smear instead of a clean spot. It was oil. I stopped at a service station and cleaned the window off, hoping that it was just some spilled oil that had gotten on the subframe while I was filling the car.
Oil continued to coat my rear window.
I got home, sat sulkily through some TV, and when I got up, my vision went starry for a minute. I felt horrible and went to bed feeling weird and depressed. I was sure I'd cross-threaded the oil-filter housing or somehow cracked the oil pan.
Yesterday sucked.
This morning I went out and pulled the oil-filter housing off. The gasket had been shredded when I put it in. I dug through the trash and found the old one, put it back in, used my remaining 1.5 qts of oil, and went to the car wash. No more leaks, but the back-side of the engine and the entire under-carriage are covered in oil, so my car stinks like burning oil.
I also beat a hasty path to Advance Auto and bought another 3 qts of oil (synthetic, so it ain't cheap). All in all I lost about 3 quarts of oil to that chopped gasket, further proving that multi-thousand-dollar devices are almost invariably taken down by $.05 parts.
All seems to be good now, and with the exception of some possible oil on the right rear tire, I'm ready for this weekend's mountain run!
Thursday, August 31, 2006
A Fabulous Birthday Week, Thus Far
First, I'll say that updates every 8 days is pretty sad, so my apologies.
This week has been a blast. It started last Thursday at 1:45pm, when I left work to go pick up my new "old man" chair: a leather recliner. It's so comfortable and dreamy soft. I'm looking forward to spending hours reading in it, hopefully with Alastair in my lap.
Then dinner at Mom's Siam with Jamie Shewan that night. Alastair sat in the window in his clip-on chair and flirted with everyone.
Friday was fab: got to spend my first work-free workday at home since early February!
Saturday, Sunday: more of the same. Lounging with Amanda and Boy. I love my family. We had lunch with my mom and grandmother on Saturday. That was a hoot. Mom gave us a watermelon; we're a little scared (neither of us has ever dealt with carving a watermelon before).
Monday was a great birthday. We got up leisurely (Alastair let me sleep until after 8am), Amanda made me the tastiest waffles ever, and we drank lots of coffee. I opened my cards and presents and had a wonderful day with my family.
Dad and Randy took us to Maggiano's for dinner that night, and while Alastair was much noisier than usual, he was a little angel, charming all the people at the tables around us.
We left the restaurant just as a crazy storm was starting, and even though we pulled up to 3 feet away from the back door, Alastair and I were soaked by the time we got inside. Poor little guy.
Last night I got my friends together and went go-karting at G-Force. Fun, fun, fun. I'd been once before, so I had a slight advantage, but it was great to get Mr. K, the Cronins, and Mr. Harper out for a night of speed. We had so much fun, we did it twice. There was this one fat chick in the 2nd race who was ignoring the blue flag (the one that means "get over, slow-poke: faster traffic is behind you") and actually blocking me. She tried to cut me off twice after the hair-pin, and both times I had to bump her out of my path. Who got the blame? Me, of course. When we looked at lap times later, she was never even within 2 seconds of me, but thought we were having some serious NASCAR showdown.
Today I've felt a bit under the weather, but I'm hoping to be back in prime shape for Saturday, when hundreds (if not thousands) of MINI Coopers will descend on King's Dominion. MINI Takes The States is coming through with the JCW GP MINI Cooper S, and it's sure to be quite the spectacle. Alastair will be spending the day with his grandmother.
Not much else going on; I'm leveraging some bizarre contractual policies to get a week and a half of vacation while only using one vacation day. We're not allowed to earn overtime this month (August) because the contract has run out of hours. My company pays us a bonus for the overtime we've accrued in a month. If I get overtime, but then take a personal day, I lose 8 hours of accrued overtime for the month. So, we try not to take personal days in the same months when we earn overtime. Vacation days don't count against our overtime, so any days off are generally taken as vacation.
I came into August with 3 personal days left, and worked 12 hours of overtime last week by Wednesday. Since I can't keep it, I left early Thursday and didn't come back Friday. We get our birthday as a paid day off, and there were only 3 days left to August. 3 days of personal time got written off.
But this weekend is a 3-day weekend. Who would want to come back for one day before a 3-day weekend? So I took 8 of my remaining vacation hours and wound up with a very nice 10.5 day vacation. Tidy, no?
Bizarre company and contractual policies, but sometimes they work out for us.
Off to bed, now, where I'll read some Aubrey/Maturin for a while before drifting off to dreams of Amanda and Alastair (although I've had some crazy crack-whore dreams about monsters and cheetahs this week).
Dang: now it's Friday. So much for keeping the interval down to 8 days...
This week has been a blast. It started last Thursday at 1:45pm, when I left work to go pick up my new "old man" chair: a leather recliner. It's so comfortable and dreamy soft. I'm looking forward to spending hours reading in it, hopefully with Alastair in my lap.
Then dinner at Mom's Siam with Jamie Shewan that night. Alastair sat in the window in his clip-on chair and flirted with everyone.
Friday was fab: got to spend my first work-free workday at home since early February!
Saturday, Sunday: more of the same. Lounging with Amanda and Boy. I love my family. We had lunch with my mom and grandmother on Saturday. That was a hoot. Mom gave us a watermelon; we're a little scared (neither of us has ever dealt with carving a watermelon before).
Monday was a great birthday. We got up leisurely (Alastair let me sleep until after 8am), Amanda made me the tastiest waffles ever, and we drank lots of coffee. I opened my cards and presents and had a wonderful day with my family.
Dad and Randy took us to Maggiano's for dinner that night, and while Alastair was much noisier than usual, he was a little angel, charming all the people at the tables around us.
We left the restaurant just as a crazy storm was starting, and even though we pulled up to 3 feet away from the back door, Alastair and I were soaked by the time we got inside. Poor little guy.
Last night I got my friends together and went go-karting at G-Force. Fun, fun, fun. I'd been once before, so I had a slight advantage, but it was great to get Mr. K, the Cronins, and Mr. Harper out for a night of speed. We had so much fun, we did it twice. There was this one fat chick in the 2nd race who was ignoring the blue flag (the one that means "get over, slow-poke: faster traffic is behind you") and actually blocking me. She tried to cut me off twice after the hair-pin, and both times I had to bump her out of my path. Who got the blame? Me, of course. When we looked at lap times later, she was never even within 2 seconds of me, but thought we were having some serious NASCAR showdown.
Today I've felt a bit under the weather, but I'm hoping to be back in prime shape for Saturday, when hundreds (if not thousands) of MINI Coopers will descend on King's Dominion. MINI Takes The States is coming through with the JCW GP MINI Cooper S, and it's sure to be quite the spectacle. Alastair will be spending the day with his grandmother.
Not much else going on; I'm leveraging some bizarre contractual policies to get a week and a half of vacation while only using one vacation day. We're not allowed to earn overtime this month (August) because the contract has run out of hours. My company pays us a bonus for the overtime we've accrued in a month. If I get overtime, but then take a personal day, I lose 8 hours of accrued overtime for the month. So, we try not to take personal days in the same months when we earn overtime. Vacation days don't count against our overtime, so any days off are generally taken as vacation.
I came into August with 3 personal days left, and worked 12 hours of overtime last week by Wednesday. Since I can't keep it, I left early Thursday and didn't come back Friday. We get our birthday as a paid day off, and there were only 3 days left to August. 3 days of personal time got written off.
But this weekend is a 3-day weekend. Who would want to come back for one day before a 3-day weekend? So I took 8 of my remaining vacation hours and wound up with a very nice 10.5 day vacation. Tidy, no?
Bizarre company and contractual policies, but sometimes they work out for us.
Off to bed, now, where I'll read some Aubrey/Maturin for a while before drifting off to dreams of Amanda and Alastair (although I've had some crazy crack-whore dreams about monsters and cheetahs this week).
Dang: now it's Friday. So much for keeping the interval down to 8 days...
Friday, December 02, 2005
Why I suck
I missed November. There's no excusing that, but it was an exciting month with thrills and chills, and honestly I found very little time to update this thing.
Alastair:
MINI:
Work:
Anyway, Amanda has at least two baby-showers in the next week or so, my car's in the shop for a new windshield (stress fracture--should be covered by warranty), and I'm finally hanging the new kitchen light that we bought in August (or was it September?).
It's busy-beaver time.
Go see "Walk the Line".
Alastair:
Amanda and I took a month-long class called "Confident Childbirth". We learned all kinds of things that we'll undoubtedly forget, including what can go wrong or right in childbirth, relaxation techniques, breathing methods, and a wide variety of things to keep you from sleeping at night (with pictures).
We also took a one-day class called "Newborn Nuances", where we learned how to change diapers and basically tend to a newborn.
We received our child-seat and its two bases (thanks, Randy!). We learned from fitting the child-seat that we won't be coming home from the hospital in the MINI. It forces the passenger-seat all the way forward, which will not be comforable for a woman who's just given birth.
We also found out last night that our preferred crib and furniture are no longer being made. That's fun. Every time we find something we like, if we don't buy it that day, it gets sold out or discontinued (or both) before we get around to buying it. I think it's a government plot.
MINI:
I got new wheels and tires at the beginning of November: Kosei K1-TS 17x7 wheels in silver (14.1 lbs) with Kumho ECSTA MX 215/40R17 Max performance summer tires. The tires provide a shorter radius than stock, so acceleration is improved, and are lighter than the Avons on my SSR's. Overall weight is up only 0.1 lbs over my old setup, and the real upshot is that there's no more rubbing on the wheel-well liner. Yippee!
I put these brand new wheels / tires to the test (after only 80 miles of use) in an autocross. That was kind of foolish. I wasn't so much steering the car with the wheel as with the brakes and throttle. The car was virtually uncontrollable, and yet I kept it on course, and never hit a cone. That came with a price: terribly slow performance. Oh, well. There's always next year.
The real coup de grace, though, was just last weekend. Mr. K sponsored me for a day of track driving at VIR (www.virclub.com), one of America's top road courses. I got four 30-minute sessions with several other cars, and managed to keep up with the pace car throughout the day. I learned how to heel-toe on the fly, flung the car around quite a bit, and had more fun in the first half of that day than I've ever had in the car.
The second half of the day was another matter: we had a different--and far slower--pace-car driver. Whereas we'd taken the uphill S'es at 95 mph in the morning, we were taking them at 55 or 60 in the afternoon. Yuck. That, coupled with the apparent lack of skill from some of the other drivers, lead to some very boring driving in the afternoon. Granted, running up the the very edge of the road, heel-toeing hard, and slinging the car around in a tight arc was still fun, but not nearly as technically challenging as it had been.
I learned a lot, and really hope I'll have an opportunity to do it again.
Work:
By far the biggest time-suck in November.
We received word early in the month that something very very big was coming, and that "Thanksgiving might be canceled". Great. As the something got closer, it got bigger and bigger. I imagine it was the mental equivalent of watching a devastating tsunami approach, and knowing there's nowhere to go.
Anyway, I was eventually led to believe that I would have very little to do with this activity, until Friday the 18th. On that date, with only one hour left in my work day (and three work-days left until Thanksgiving), I got a call that boiled my blood. Turns out that a huge amount of work was being abandoned by another department, and they needed me to get it done. Now, the premier social event of the year was scheduled for the following night, and I was told that I might have to work through the weekend if I expected to get Thanksgiving DAY off.
I sat at my desk, stewed about it for about a while, and finally just decided to make it happen. Unfortunately, the tool we were supposed to use was hopelessly broken, and the developers were nowhere to be found. We called, we complained, and they sent us an updated tool. It was worse. Finally, I had to reverse-engineer some guy's software and rewrite major parts of it, which we in turn distributed to all of the other sites that were struggling. I wound up getting out of work after a 14-hour day, got the rest of the weekend off (mostly), and got my Thanksgiving.
It was a very busy time, and I'm glad it's over. The downside is that all of the other work was postponed until that project was over, and now we're trying to figure out what got ignored.
Anyway, Amanda has at least two baby-showers in the next week or so, my car's in the shop for a new windshield (stress fracture--should be covered by warranty), and I'm finally hanging the new kitchen light that we bought in August (or was it September?).
It's busy-beaver time.
Go see "Walk the Line".
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