RSSAi-yay-yay-yay-yay
Sep 14
Copyright still retained by Scott Adams and original image can be found here
One more inevitable thing that cannot be helped. My joining the brood doesnt help elevate my previous position. 😐
A kid’s dream
Aug 15
Top of my head Garbage, Work No Comments
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… 😉
Welcome to reality! A parody.
May 08
The image below was posted in a yammer group and I felt inspired to write a parody. All resemblance to real life are imaginary. It is not meant to reflect my place of work. Now with the legalese out of the way…
There is work and there is your life-at-work.
The kind of work that has your and your team's fingerprints all over it as documented in the metrics you worked all night and submitted 1 day late.
The kind of work that you'd never compromise on, except with that tiny incident one that we don't really like to talk about as the metrics doesn't agree with it.
That we don't expect you to sacrifice your weekend but expect you to do it anyway because we over committed and under-estimated.
You can do that kind of work here. People here think safety first, where CYA is the norm and security, as we defined it, is the top most priority.
People come here to swim in the deep end but you need a swimmer and diving certification before you can do that. And you need to sign a waiver. Afterwards we still don't let you do it because it is risky and it wasn't an activity approved by HR.
They want their work to add up to something. We don't know yet but the laws of physics say that energy is not lost so it must go somewhere. I think it becomes a paycheck or something.
Something big, at least as was stated in the executive memos. Something that couldn't happen anywhere else except for Dilbert cartoons.
Welcome to the place where dreams meet the pavement of reality. In the wipe out kind of way.
Bashwk to basics
May 07
FLOSS, Work floss, scripting, Work No Comments
It was the first time to generate and send the report. It deals with downloading a lot of access logs, combining them based on certain scenarios, filtering out the cruft, slicing and dicing per service accessed and then tallying the responses to see if they meet the SLA.
The first manual extraction took around 4 hours to create the report for the most critical service. After that, I sat down and created the bash+awk script to do the slicing, dicing and tallying part. It took me 3 hours to create and test the script but after that I can generate the reports for 6 services in 30 minutes, where the bulk of the time was spent in downloading the latest logs (~10minutes) and pasting the data in Excel to create the “bayoootiful” graphs.
I figured if I can automate the rest then the reports can be generated under 15minutes, and I can hook it up on a continuous service so it will send it automatically every night. After that I can work on getting rid of the need to go through Excel if I can find some API to generate it and publish them as PDFs. JFree perhaps but my Java skills are already rusty. I also need something native if possible as I cannot install stuff on the office machines. The zLinux servers are pretty much off limits though I think there is a python interpreter installed.
One thing I can say is that automation and f/loss rocks. The script is too specific and covered by IPR so I cannot post it here but it is something that most scripters should be able to do.
ciao!
I am Human
Oct 01
Garbage, Work agile, rant, Work No Comments
I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today so I need to vent out and nitpick… 🙂
I want to reiterate the advocacy of minimizing the use of the word “resources” when referring to members of your team.
A resource is a finite, inanimate stock or tool. A hammer is a tool therefore it is a resource. My time and skills are resources but I don’t want to suffer the indignity of being categorized as a tool. I am neither a tool nor a resource; and I would appreciate not being abstracted to the same level as a computer. Computers are dumb, they can only follow instructions.
Use FTE to refer to the workload unit, but use team member, colleague, personnel or employee when referring to the human being. Respect the person doing the work. The IT industry may be being overhauled and optimized with automation, but this remains a creative industry and not a place for human automatons. Each member is unique and brings something special to the table.
ciao!
Work-induced vomitting
Aug 08
Garbage, Work Work No Comments
During this lifetime I have heard people say a few times that their work is too stressful that they want to vomit. I didn’t realize that this morning it would be a literal thing for me. 🙁
I went to sleep at around midnight after a healthy dose of boring reading material (aka project work package aka contract) for some big shot discussions this week. At around 2AM I suddenly awoke with a jerk with the words UAT[1] in my mouth and the feeling of having a lot of bile in my throat. Thankfully the trash bin was on my side of the bed so I swiped the cover open and started dry-heaving on it. The icky and rough feeling on my throat was not going away so I ended up drinking a lot of water and munching on fried and salted corn kernels to get the taste of bile away.
Now I can, with credibility, say that I can relate next time I hear somebody say they are sick and tired of their work that they want to vomit. 🙂
[1] User Acceptance Test
ciao!
The most Murphy’s day of my life… so far
Jul 17
Rubbish, Top of my head life, sentiments, shithappens, Work 2 Comments
In a nutshell, Murphy’s law states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong and at the most inopportune time. This day for me seems to to be the most literal example of that law and it seems to crown a really crappy week:
- My “so called” team has never been complete the whole week.
- Nothing seems get to the state that can be called as “done”.
- Screening of the “fit to contribute” recruits across the company isn’t going well.
- Issues germinate like dormant spores and each one comes unwrapped with a tag of “URGENT: RESOLVE IMMEDIATELY OR GLOBAL MELTDOWN IMMINENT”
- I have had the introduction to the project incident report template and mastery of accomplishing one in a single week.
- I got tagged for not finishing the work I wasn’t even scheduled to do on time even if it would supposedly only take a few hours (and which task isn’t supposed to get done in a few hours?)
- A little storm called “Basyang” decided to kill the power and water supply in our area w/c forced us to stay in an overpriced hotel-esque place. This reminds me that I need to create a mini-review for that place.
Those are just some examples for the week and just for today:
- My “change” can’t be completed because it hasn’t passed UAT execution because…
- The environment decided to crap out the whole week and be excessively stubbon today that no requested build from me ever finishes successfully. It doesn’t matter that I went to the office earlier than usual to get the testing done.
- I got tagged for not being prepared to present items in a meeting attended by the client. It doesn’t matter that the list items magically appeared in the list and it hasn’t really come into my attention.
- My change suddenly had a twin ticket that I wasn’t aware of, and the approach is still dubious as it smells of too much patch-me solution.
- Everybody is too busy to submit admin requirements. And that is because I really don’t do anything each day but be a PHB and think of useless things to assign to my team.
- I said I will leave at 7:30PM, announced to the powers-that-be that I will leave at 7:30PM, and then get stuck in ten thousand little important tasks that made me walk the hallway with the powers-that-be at 8:15PM. The powers-that-be are on their way to a meeting that I declined because I need to go leave at 7:30PM!
And to top it all off, I still don’t feel like I am contributing anything. This is the feeling that I really, really hate. Life is getting consumed by work that is starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth because I don’t feel empowered nor ingenious enough to really make a difference.
Oh life… I just need to accept that this is one of my “Shit Happens days & it will keep on pouring”.
ciao!
Installing RTC 2.0 on a Windows Server 2003 machine
Oct 12
Non-FLOSS, Technology, Work SCM, Work 4 Comments
Installing RTC 2.0 client on the Win2003 machine provided by our customer is proving to be a challenge of patience and futility. I spent the better half of the day trying everything I can think of but:
– Using the bundled launchpad doesnt do anything: everything just quits without any warning or error.
– Invoking the launchpad using the parameters in the autorun.inf file () doesnt work.
– Invoking launchpad\launchpad.bat terminates with a wrong variable expansion.
– Invoking the various installer executable inside the win32 sub-directory produces a “Missing file install.xml” error and then will show the Installation Manager window. Unfortunately it cannot install anything even if the preference shows the repository to the RTC 2.0 extracted files are detected as “connected”.
I know the installer works because we have installed it fine on our WinXP workstations. The md5sum of the file in the Win2003 machine matches the one in our XP workstations.
Ready to give up and log a RTC bug, I did some more fiddling to gather more information and tried to download the web install even if it is going to be painful installing RTC on a slow and erratic connection. I got the same results.
Then I noticed that there were lots of files named install-[something].xml in the win32 directory but no install.xml file. An idea hit me and created a copy of the “install-client.xml” and renamed it to “install.xml”. I then executed the win32\install.exe and everything installed as expected.
And that concludes a whole-day wrangling on getting RTC 2.0 installed in the Win2003 server. Sometimes the best solutions are really those that hide under our noses. 🙁
ciao!
The office NTP server
Jun 16
Fun Stuff, Garbage, Work palmface, Work No Comments
I started the day in a bad mood, again due to draconian IT policies in the office but this real-life instance made the day a bit better and worse at the same time.
Noticing that I am always a couple of minutes early for international conference calls, I asked my counterpart for their local time and found out that my system clock is 12 minutes in advance. I asked around and found that we have varying system clocks so I asked Mike, a junior member of my team, to log a support ticket for the steps to configure our machines to synchronize with an office NTP server as I know the local domain server has that service. I know because I already did it once using w32tm on my previous project but I can’t remember the name of the server that I used. Besides, it’s the support personnel’s job.
After some time, I was already in the call. I noticed that somebody was hovering near my station. He said something about a clock so I let him do his stuff on my machine since I only need the phone. I had to restrain from laughing when the support engineer started moving my trackball like a wireless mouse. Since if I let this continue I might blurt out laughing in the call, I just pointed to the clock and when he nodded I took over the trackball and double-clicked the system tray clock. I was already wondering what options are there for NTP synchronization since I already inspected it a while ago and didn’t see anything.
And then the unthinkable happened, the support engineer adjusted my clock by 8 minutes and pressed the Apply button. I was shocked but couldn’t say anything as my Madrid counterpart was discussing something important. I just heard the engineer talking to Mike about closing the ticket so I frantically waved my hand to get their attention, and hastily scribbled the characters “N T P ?” in a scratch paper. I just let Mike do the talking as I needed to focus on the call.
After the call I asked Mike what happened and he said the engineer stated that he just took a look at his system time before coming over and synchronized all of our machine clocks. Our system clocks are still surprisingly different (duhh!) but the engineer apparently said that it’s OK to have some discrepancies. Millisecond discrepancies perhaps may be alright but a full minute? And I didn’t know that we have a gifted engineer in the company that has his body clock attuned with the network’s NTP server.
I feel so safe in the reliable hands of our support personnel. /lol
ciao!
I am tired and not satisfied…
Apr 16
Rubbish, Work office politics, rant, Work 4 Comments
I have just came out from a long OTy[1] weekend, and when I said long I meant a 19-hour rally with 3 hours of sleep. All because the project I am with has once again been selected for a security audit and an internal audit will be conducted today.
The unplanned rally is caused by the short notice given to the project and the not-so-good state of our security documentation. Before somebody starts that it is our fault for not updating the security docs as we go along then please give us a charge number for that kind of work before you start pointing fingers. In typical corporate wheedling and cajoling, they (meaning the powers that be, or the power trippers as i call them) say that these should be part of the “continuous improvement” (CI) budget of the project. REALITY CHECK: WHAT CI BUDGET? We are on a fixed time arrangement with the client and just trying telling the client that “we would allocate a portion of the time you bought to spend on security work that is not part of the contract you signed, and thank you for understanding.”. Couple this with the fact that we are running overbudget for the things that the client actually paid for! It doesn’t take a super sleuth to figure out that we are between a hard rock and a PHB.
To make matters worse, I am not satisfied with the output because we are tasked to churn out security documentations “aligned” with the corporate “version”. No thank you because
- I don’t believe the return of investment on those documentations is significant.
- The template documents provided are either not enough or an overkill.
- The person who created those template documents should stop using PCP. Reformatting them to look professional entails too much work.I reserve the right to save my co-team members from the atrocities of using too much colors in a document, and loud ones at that.
- If I am going to churn out security measures, then I will at least have the decency of believing those are practical and not just for show.
Why did I go through it? Because of pressure to pass the audit since the whole office accreditation can go up in smoke for failing the external auditors, and I don’t have the heart to add more stress on my manager. She already has enough problems on her plate regarding the project going over-budget and CMMi (yes, that effectively makes it a four-letter word) demands for full compliance.
19 hours and we aren’t even halfway the 100% completion mark. I know I told my manager that what we are targeting now is just damage control but it is really disheartening whenever I see the completion ratio for the project. And after that I also need to consider going back to reality that I am also over-budget on the client deliverable that they want me to submit by end of this month. 🙁
End of rant for now. I need to check what else I can finish before the internal audit today.
[1] OTy, n., Short for O-Thank you, the free version of overtime.
ciao!