sometimes you just gotta. even when you don't wanna.

Old-School Dave-Blog #3 - Random 2AM Ramblings

Seeing as it's almost 2AM, I thought I'd let you all have a peak at my life when I was on shift at Bell. As you can see, I wasn't a big fan of it, so I felt that I had to do something about it. At the end of the post, it mentions that I'm "looking at possibilities," which at the time consisted of finding a new job. I guess the only possibility I could see for myself was that if I didn't like what I was doing, I had to do something else. Only later did I find that it is possible to change what I already have instead of just writing it off as a lost cause.

Sometime during that period, I was struggling with a lot of bad repair work that was coming my way. My job was to take broken data circuits, diagnose the fault and direct the repair on behalf of the customer, and a lot of the tickets I was getting from the help desk for a certain type of circuit were almost consistently wrong - not a provider issue, not a broken circuit issue, etc. It got to the point that I was bitching so loudly that my boss got sick of it, took me aside and told me that if I don't like something that the help desk is doing wrong, then fix it. So I did. I took them all in groups and taught classes on how these particular circuits work, where Bell's responsibility lies, and where our own individual departments come in to fix them. Within a week, my ticket load had dropped by 20%.

I wrote the below post before this incident took place, at the time where I was thinking that the only way to deal with my scheduling problem was to find a new job. Once I started to understand that fixing my problems instead of ignoring them was a much better tactic, I started thinking of ways to get around not having a social life because of my job. To that end, I vowed to get myself promoted to a position that allowed for a steady 8-4, Monday-to-Friday workload, even to the point of putting it into my OPR as a goal to accomplish. Within two months, I was the Team Lead. Don't ever say a little hard work now doesn't pay off later.

Enjoy.

Friday, April 20th, 2007, 2:21AM:

So, I'm working this morning. Yup, a graveyard shift. They suck, mostly because there's nothing to do. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm keeping myself occupied (at last count, I'm watching "The Shawshank Redemption", tooling around on Facebook, scratching out this blog entry, testing a T1 for Bell Mobility and waiting on Telus to give me some test results for a PRI), but even though that sounds like a lot, it's really not and it doesn't leave me with much on the go. I have my iPod, so I can listen to music, but no one's calling me for anything, no tickets are showing up in my queue. There's really not a lot of "test centre" things to be done.

That's what I do now, by the way. I work in a network test centre. I take data circuits (mainly T1's, but some 10/100Mbit and fractional T1's) for customers and troubleshoot them if there's a problem, trying to find faults in the physical continuity of the cable.

Anyway, back to this. What sucks about being on a midnight shift is that I'm the only one here. There's not enough to do to justify having two people on, so there's only one. And it gets quite lonely.

Doesn't make for much of a social life either, and that's the worst part. I'd love to be able to say that the company I work for recognizes I have a life outside of work, but I can't. Not in my experience. Because of this stupid shift work I can't make plans based on any kind of consistent schedule, I have to make sure that all my plans revolve around whatever shift I may be working on any given day, and I'm not able to do the things that my friends are doing on their days off because I'm usually working.

For example, this weekend, my roommates and friends are going out to a cabin to celebrate a birthday. I would have loved to go, but I'm working. Yup, I'm working three graveyards in a row and tonight's the first one. I won't be off until Sunday morning.

I have to find a new job.

So, yet again, I'm not able to make myself available for a social occasion because of my job. I hate that. I'm not the most social person to begin with, and this isn't the best way to change that.

Whatever. I'm looking at possibilities. We'll see what happens.

death and perspective

Pray for his family. Everything else has already been said.

Old-School Dave-Blog #2 - Ok, maybe I should explain

For my next entry, I'm going to regale you all with a story from when I was roommates with Tyler. I guess the entry explains it all, but it was pretty funny at the time. Hope it still is.

Saturday, November 19th, 2005, 10:22PM:

I got into work yesterday morning and was just starting my day when I got a call. It was my roommate.

"Did you see my car this morning?!?"

"No."

"For f**k's sake. Somebody stole my car."

Now, you gotta understand the history this car has. When my roommate turned 16, his dad promised to restore him a car. Nine and a half years later, he finally delivers. A month later, I get the above phone call. And all this time, this car has had the crap hyped out of it. I mean, there's been so much publicity on this car that you'd think it was the second coming of Christ. Well, if Christ were a '78 Monte Carlo at least...

Anyway, I told him to call the impound lot before freaking out, just in case it got towed for whatever reason. Turns out it actually was stolen and he had to call the cops. So I promised I'd buy a bottle of something on the way home and then got on with my day.

After I got home and we got into the bottle (hence my grammatical difficulties below), we watched some more episodes of Scrubs and toasted the radmobile. A little while later when we were good and toasted and Tyler had gone upstairs to pass out, we got a call from the police.

It seems the radmobile was involved in a high-speed chase with the cops. They didn't say what the people in the car were on their way to do, but what they did find in their possessions were four bellaclavas and a handgun.

Apparently there wasn't a whole lot of damage to the car, but the police wanted to keep it for a bit while they CSI-ify it. After that, the insurance company wants to get their grubby little mitts on it while they assess the damage before cutting Tyler a check.

Stay tuned...

Old-School Dave-Blog #1 - Operational Performance

For the next little while, I'm going to be looking back at an old blog I used to write and publishing a few select posts from it here. This one in particular, about my first review when I worked for Bell, illustrates a few things about where I'm at now in my career/life. It's interesting to look back a few years and see a lot of the same issues, and how it relates to what I'm doing to change some things. Enjoy!

Thursday, November 24th, 2005, 9:48PM:

I hate review time at work. Since this is my first one at this particular company, I got to see whether or not the past six months have been worth my while. I guess it went ok.

The shit-kicker is, my boss has left the company. Today was actually his last day, and one of the things he wanted to get out of the way before he left was the reviews for the whole team. He wasn't really doing the whole review though, he was just prepping the person who was going to take over for him. Kind of like a mid-year review, even though it's the end of November. So I go into this meeting with him, flush from running back and forth from the printer for the last half-hour (all first thing in the morning, mind you), carrying an armload of paper 3/4 of an inch thick thinking I have to prove to him, with hard copies, that I'm a good hard-working employee and he shouldn't have any reason to doubt that.

So after all that, after sweating bullets all night and all morning, after the months of agonizing self-doubt thinking that I'm nothing more than a hack and I'm not going to prove anything to him and he should just fire me and get it over with - AFTER ALL THAT - he only looks at one document. Not only that, but we spend more than half-an-hour talking about all the things I have to get done before the end of the year to properly meet my performance objectives. Because in another three weeks, I'm going to have to do this all over again before my reputation will be finalized.

See, I didn't get this job the old fashion way - well, maybe I did in this day and age - but I didn't just apply and rely on my natural charm and expertise to beat out hundreds of other applicants and wow the shit out of my boss. No, my dad set this interview up for me. At the time, he was VP of Operations at this company, so I was a bit of a shoe-in.

So all the time that I've been here, there's been this nagging thought running through the back of my mind: "Do I really belong here? Would I have been able to get this job without my dad's assistance? Or are they all just humoring him by letting me play IT monkey for a little while? I should just get out of this industry altogether." Well, today I was going to find out, one way or another. I wanted to ask them for some real feedback - not just a cursory pat on the back and a thumbs up with fingers crossed behind their back. I guess I really didn't have to, because as I was listening to my boss discuss with me how I was doing on some of the more obscurely-worded points of my OPR, I realized that maybe I'm not doing so bad after all. At one point, my boss even said he was "pleasantly surprised" at how I just kind of hit the ground running.

Understand, when I talk about the people at the company humoring dad by letting me play IT monkey for a little while, I wasn't serious. Nor do I really think that's what's going on; rather I've just been so wracked with self-doubt over the last few months that I've almost convinced myself it's the truth.

Maybe that means it's time to strike out on my own. Hmm...

age is relative...or is it? no, it's not.

The only conclusion I can draw from all of this is that I'm old, and anyone older who tells me differently is full of shit.

I'm in Vancouver right now, sitting on my sister's computer (I guess she doesn't feel the need to be hospitable and buy a wireless router for her guests), because yesterday, I drove all afternoon from Calgary to visit my other sister, who has flown in for a week from England to visit. On Saturday night I packed my things, cleaned the house a bit, and then went to bed, but sleep eluded me. Don't ask me why. I normally don't have trouble sleeping, especially not when I have something to wake up for (being unemployed for two months doesn't really leave you with a lot of reason to get up at a decent hour, but that's for another time), but I guess because I had to make a nine-hour drive after church and end it with a visit with my family, I was keyed up and couldn't nod off.

And that was the crappy part - I was up at 6:30, at the church by 7 and played two services after what was basically an all-nighter. I then, without diversion, jumped in the car, hit the road and drove across BC, finally arriving at my destination later on that night. I drove alone. I would have loved some company (as I'm sure my fellow road-mates would have as well, seeing as I almost ran a couple of them off the road, being tired like that), but no one needed to go to Van, I guess. Plus, I didn't really tell anyone until the day I left, so there's that...

And holy crap, did I feel like dump at the end of it. That's ok though, because I get to do it all again on Wednesday when it's time to go home to Calgary.

drinking the apple kool-aid

PC vs. Mac commercials aside (those ones are just too easy to make fun of), I constantly find myself shaking my head at some of the things that come out of the mouth of the Apple marketing machine. Now, a lot of this comes free courtesy of fanboi sites like TheAppleBlog (check out this pathetic piece of ass-kissery), but most of it comes, of course, from the horse's mouth.

Now, I'm not a Windows apologist by any stretch - I have an early-2008 MacBook Pro and I love it. It's become my primary computer, relegating my old Windows PC to the position of glorified file and media server for my PS3. It's safe to say that my experiences with Windows at a consumer level have come to an end. I do, however, come from a Windows background and have extensive expertise with it, so when I see things like "Restore Deleted Items to Original Folders" being marketed as a refinement and enhancement in Snow Leopard, I have to shake my head. This is coming from a company whose operating system lives or dies by it's comparison to Windows, so where has this "feature" been for the last decade? It's been a part of Windows since 1998 at least. If I were Apple, I wouldn't be bragging to anyone about adding this feature like it's the second coming of Christ - I would have just added it and moved on.

I saw Apple's keynote speech that opened WWDC last night. I thought it was rather lackluster and boring. A lot of the stuff that they spent time going over had already been announced with a lot of detail in earlier broadcasts, or were made available on tech blogs like Engadget or Gizmodo through reports from beta testers, so I was underwhelmed. The one thing that really stuck out in my mind, however, wasn't an announcement about a new product, or a new feature of a coming-soon product, or even live demos of Snow Leopard or iPhone 3.0. No, when Bertrand Serlet, Senior VP of Software Engineering at Apple, got on stage and to talk about Snow Leopard, he started by taking shots at Microsoft for their dropping the ball with Vista. Now, I'm not one to stand up and defend Vista - it's a shitty product, no question. Even Bill Gates thought it was a bad OS, and said as much - but when Bertrand says things like Windows is built on "old technology" (ironic, considering what NT stands for - you nerds know what I mean), I just shake my head.

You see, by doing basic math, I can count the number of years that the NT codebase (which all consumer and business versions of Windows have been based on since Windows 2000), has been around - if you use the from-the-ground-up rebuild of Windows 2000 in 1999 as a starting point, the code base has been around for a little less than a decade. If you count the original Windows NT 3.1 release, then it's only another seven years. So, in less than 17 years, we've gone from New Technology to "old technology." That's a long time in computer world, isn't it?

I know, I know - for anyone who can do a side-by-side comparison, it's easy to tell that the original NT 3.1 has little in common with Vista, but bear with me, because it's actually a relevant point.

You see, what Bertrand is not telling you, all in an effort to get off a cheap shot that anyone with half a brain in the industry will remember more for being wrong than funny, is that the codebase that Mac OS X is built on is even older. In fact, it's decades older. OS X is built on Berkley Unix, or BSD, which has has been around since the mid-70's, and has it's roots in the original AT&T Unix operating system from the 1960's. So...which is the one based on old technology?

And yes, I know that the original BSD project looks nothing like OS X, but the reality of it all kinda ruins the joke, doesn't it? How ironic is it that he tries to pull this one off in a room full of software developers? These are the very kind of people that have to know the underpinnings of how OS's work more than anyone else in the world. I guess the room had it's share of sheep though, as the joke actually got a laugh.

But this is exactly what I'm talking about when I talk about drinking the Kool-Aid - Apple is conveniently glossing over some very critical points when they try and market their product as an alternative to Windows. There is almost always something critically wrong with their Mac vs. PC commercials. The joke I talked about above fell flat. In short, every time they try to talk about all the ways that OS X is better than Windows, they look like idiots.

• Saying that Macs are immune to virus' is simply not true, and only serves to highlight the sad fact that their market share is so pathetic that it's simply not worth anyone's time to write virus' for the platform. Besides, everytime I hear someone say that, I'm reminded of how the Bush administration would say that America is safe from terrorists because no one has succeeded in hitting them again after 9/11 - just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean you're safe. It just means it hasn't happened yet.
• OS X isn't any more secure from hackers than Windows is for the very same reason.
• Contrary to popular belief, Windows actually doesn't crash any more than OS X does, at least in my experience. Putting aside Vista for a sec because, let's face it, it's a hack and a failure (which hasn't actually BSOD'd on me, for the record), and look at XP, which was Microsoft's latest and most successful operating system for the better part of this decade. In all my years of using XP, on many different hardware configurations, even at it's worst, I have had it BSOD on me for something other than a hardware component failure - and I'm not talking about bad drivers, I'm talking about a physical failure - maybe twice.
• Mac's crash. Don't tell me they're uncrashable, because it's a lie, and it shows me that a) you don't know the first thing about software development, and b) that you're talking out of your ass. Besides, why would they build this into the OS if it didn't crash?

I will admit to being excited about a lot of the under-the-hood enhancements they're talking about in Snow Leopard though. Proper multi-threaded computing, if it works like they want it to, is a total game-changer. Combining it with their OpenCL platform of GPGPU computing makes me hot. You think working with two cores is fast? Or four? Eight? That's nothing - if OpenCL works like I think it does, then general purpose computing calculations (stuff normally done by the CPU) will be offloaded to the graphics processor when it's idle. Can you imagine the possibilities? I'll give you a hint - NVIDIA's top-end video card has 480 cores spread across two GPUs!! These are the kinds of graphics cards that are capable of calculations that were only possible in computers the size of a room just a decade ago.

The other big thing to come into Snow Leopard though, Exchange support, is unnecessary, cumbersome and a bit two-faced, if you ask me. It's unnecessary because, as was Bertrand's number one reason for plugging it in his speech, a lot of Mac users like to take their computers to the office and look at their mail there. I'm sorry, but as someone who's spent his time on the IT support side of the fence, if I found any of my users plugging their unsecured, unauthorized computers into MY corporate network, they'd be shut down faster than they can enter their username and password in the oh-so-easy Exchange setup screen. Unapproved personal computers present a MAJOR security risk to a company's network. Besides, what kind of sucker would want to use their personal computer at work? Strike one, Bertrand.

I think that having three separate apps (Mail, iCal and Address Book) using the service is a bit cumbersome too, considering that Outlook does it all, and very well, in one app. Yes, I know it's an extra expense for a Windows user, but come on - who but a business user is going to use the business features of Exchange? And if you're using it for work, when are you ever going to pay for it out of your own pocket?

And what about two-faced? Follow the line of reasoning with me here - Exchange is a Microsoft product. Always has been. It only runs on a Windows Server operating system. Microsoft's server OS is built on the same codebase as their consumer OS's, like Vista. Mac OS X is, according to the product literature, superior to Windows in every way. So the only logical thing to do is...incorporate a critical piece of business infrastructure into the core OS?

No, I'm not saying that it's wrong to include Exchange support - it's a good thing. It opens the door for Mac's to be start being adopted by businesses on a larger scale, although I personally think that won't really happen until Microsoft makes a proper Mac version of Outlook (and no, Entourage doesn't count), but it also shows that they're only too willing to countermand the logic of their marketing plan. If they're willing to do that, then their marketing plan is wrong. That's it, folks. It's wrong.

I love my Mac. I think it's great. The number one reason I love it though, is not because of the operating system, whose interface really isn't that different than Windows. It's not because everything "just works," which, for the most part, it does, though not always the way I want it too. This, incidentally, is the number one reason why Windows has such a bad reputation - they build so much user-friendliness and ability for the user to do almost any task with so many different permutations and combinations that the margin for error grows almost exponentially. No, the number one reason I love my Mac so much is because Apple did the smart thing and took over direct control of the hardware design and manufacturing to build true quality into their product, and then they filled it with custom-designed software that takes direct advantage of that build quality. Out of the box, I can take my laptop and create studio-quality, multi-track music, whether it's recorded or created using samples. I can design a webpage that actually looks cool and is easy to edit. I can import raw video footage in high-definition and create near-professional-quality movies, and then author those movies onto a DVD. This is the kind of software package that would cost thousands of dollars anywhere else, and it's essentially free to anyone who buys a Mac. I love it, and if Apple spent less time telling us what it's product can do compared to Windows and more time telling us what it's product can do for itself, I think it would be even more successful.

evil dead: the musical

Saw Evil Dead: The Musical in Calgary tonight. It was really good. Cheezy, corny, full of great one-liners and splatter. The first three rows got soaked in fake blood. Overall, it was a great night.