For somebody who grew up with major inferiority complex I do talk a lot whenever we have somebody new in the team. I usually have a few pointers and expectations but I am consistent in conveying what my goals as a leader is. This has always been my challenge to my new members:
MAKE ME OBSOLETE. ONCE THAT IS DONE THEN I HAVE DONE MY WORK PROPERLY.
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Yesterday, February 14th, my wife and I ate dinner at home which subsisted of grilled rib-eye steaks, a bowl of marble potatoes in honey mustard dressing, and we actually finished a bottle of White Zinfadel. This morning we had a fairly standard fried breakfast: sunny side up eggs, sauteed corned beef, home-made bacon slices and fried rice with bacon bits. Was it a good Valentine’s day celebration? NOPE.
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Instead of having no internet connection I have a very slow internet. How slow?
— cs62.adn.edgecastcdn.net ping statistics —
53 packets transmitted, 29 received, 45% packet loss, time 52000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4908.713/18702.236/32208.306/7853.188 ms, pipe 33
Yes, that is 5-32 seconds latency! If the site is not familiar to you that is what is being resolved by “pldt.speedtest.net”. That abysmal speed is leagues better than having no internet connection, right? It is as savory as like having a view of the beach from the safety of your prison cell.
Yesterday pixie, my RPi serving as the torrent/dlna box, stopped responding. Rebooting it doesnt help as it eventually reverts to only having the red LED on which I have started to interpret as the system is not yet booted.
I pulled pixie out of its nook and hooked it to my monitor before rebooting it. It showed that the boot process is encountering errors when reading from the SD card. The process stopped while asking for the root password to start the file check maintenance, or Ctrl-D to continue the boot process. I plugged a keyboard and here lies the conundrum: this is a debian system and I have been administering it as the pi user. I have been relying on the sudo mechanism and never replaced the root password so I cant provide it. That realization blows.
No other recourse now but to pull out the SD card and have the partition checked on my desktop. A “sudo fsck /dev/sdb2 -y” command (because sdb2 is the partition assigned to it by udev) and ten minutes of automated fixing later pixie is back online serving its DLNA goodness.
Now I made sure I have changed the root password so this can be fixed without booting the desktop. Come to think of it, I am doing it also on my Ubuntu desktop. 😉
ciao!
The pragmatic in me kicked in and I realized again that problems are what defines our existence. Only the dead are free of them.
With that said I wish your problems will be sur mount able, your challenges manageable, trespasses against you forgivable, and your heartaches forgettable.
Year 2013, bring your best and worst. We already have gone through the millennium bug and the mayan calendar end. We are as ready as we are going to be for the next round. 🙂
ciao!
It started as a small drip
which an incompetent “plumber” sent by the Village maintenance head turned to a warzone slash swimming-pool
good thing my wife knows some good plumber sub-contracting for their company. The plumber was able to figure out that it was the Malunggay tree roots in front of the house that blocked the drainage pipe
so the tree had to go
And now our indoor sink is back to normal. Well it still needs a coat of paint but at least the sink is now usable. 🙂
Morals of the story:
My wife and I embarks in our first out of town trip today for the last 3 years. Our plane leaves at 730 so we were at the airport by 5am to avoid any checking hassle. It was a good thing as the group of passengers ahead of our queue took a while as the counter crew, to their much chagrin, tried to explain to them the concept of “allowable hand luggage”.
We were done with the checking procedures by 545am. With stomachs grumbling, we scouted the food stalls and the choices were a bit meager: a rice/noodle vendor, go nuts donuts, Krispy Kreme donuts, Mrs fields cookies, chaikofi cafe, and two kiosks of a sandwich vendor. The rice-chowing Asian in me made the choices clear: rice toppings for me.
The pickings were limited as most of the menu items are not available. I settled for chicken asado toppings with coke in can, and my wife ordered the two pieces of siopao (asado and bola-bola) with bottled water. The bill was Php310. Pretty steep price so my expectations already rose up.Â
The food came in quickly. The asado came with 3 quarter inch slices of chicken with asado sauce and spring onion bits. The siopao were the size of teacups.Â
The food fare was, for lack of a more positive adjective, “geared towards the international palate”. The chicken was butter soft. Oh wait that was the plastic spoon and fork that came with the meal. You have heard the joke about siopao being made from cat meat? Well this is different as the siopao feels as hot as a cat’s nose. My wife’s first bite was a smorgasbord of flavor: she couldn’t identify the flavor. She ended up not finishing the second siopao so it was up to me to get our money’s worth. I am grateful for the Chili oil in the table because I don’t know if I would have done without it.
What’s good with the food? The coke in can was cold, and the Chili oil has the right spiciness and bite.
What was bad? Everything else. Next time you are in the area, choose the branded franchises as you would know what to expect. And don’t listen to the instincts of a hungry stomach.
The kiosk’s name is “Let’s Chow” with the tag line “mapapa-chow ka” (i think a weak play on the wow expression). All I can say on that is “pu-chow naman o” (my play on a local curse phrase). If I paid thrice the amount of a similar fate from 7-11 then I expect the flavor to be as good.
Since we moved to Pasig to cut down our daily commute time we have decided to offer our house in Binangonan for rent. Most if not all who inquires keeps on asking if we want to sell it instead.
My wife says its the aura. Some houses have this light and welcoming aura while some would imbibe a dark and heavy feeling. Ours belong to the first category but I think it also has something to do with the people who live there. 🙂
More “as-is” pictures here.
I hail from a middle-class family but I was able to play in the houses and offices of our more well-off relatives. During those times I always associated the “table” as a symbol of power and success. My mother is a public school teacher and I attributed her position with her photo clippings and plastic covered wooden table. I dreamed that someday I would have a table of my own that would bear the title of supervisor, manager, or simply put a boss.
In the childish view of somebody who have observed how hard it is to do manual labor, the “table” espouses a position of power; a capacity to make other people follow my whim. I would sometimes pantomime signing papers and giving people tongue lashings. It seemed like an easy life wherein my job entails sitting on a chair and transforming pieces of paper to near priceless artifacts with the simple flick of the pen in my hand.
Fast forward 25 years or so later and I can only shake my head on the foolishness of that dream. I could say that I am a supervisor but my work has not gone lighter than when I started. I am writing this piece after taking a break on my 15th hour since I started working. Those who are higher than me work more hours than I do as they seemingly take on a lot of tasks and projects. If I could talk to my past self I would have said: your dream is good my so innocent friend, but you do not understand the gravity of the responsibility that comes with that luxurious job. Tasks do not come easier as you progress your career. On second thought, jobs worth keeping become more complex and more frustrating.
Salut to all who thinks moving up the ranks mean less work. Cherish your innocence while it lasts.
Btw, I heard CEO jobs are actually easier… 😉
