Beowabbit

Too busy and tired for a real post, but here are a few scattered impressions:

• I’m going to be directing! I’ll be directing audioboy’s staged radio-play adaptation of the 1954 movie Them!. I am hugely looking forward to my first directing experience, and am very grateful to audioboy and the rest of PMRP for the opportunity. [Note to self: Post this to Facebook, too. Also Twitter, ВКонтакте, Friendster, Orkut, G+, QQ, G--, E♭-major, and Compuserve.]
• Work has been exceptionally busy and high-stress lately.
• That said, I took Friday off to make a four-day weekend which was utterly excellent. Much of it was spent with plumtreeblossom’s company, and I got to see lots of other wonderful friends, and it was generally a wonderful weekend.
• ...marred somewhat by plumtreeblossom’s phone dying. For the second time. She gets it through work and so getting it repaired or replaced has some extra layers of bureaucracy and delay. Given how panicky she and I each get when we’re having phone problems, and how flaky her phone and her service have been, I decided it was time to get us an emergency backup to share, so I did, and I’ll be taking it over to her later today.

I thought my day was full and interesting before the six datacenters in my building (along with a big chunk of the rest of Cambridge, and most of the rest of MIT) lost power. That happened around four thirty. Power came back around six thirty, and we all dived into bringing servers and services back up. I got home around eleven thirty.

One of the highlights of the time while we were waiting for power to come back was watching my boss and another of my colleagues pry open an elevator door so that the people who’d been trapped in it for about an hour could get out.

plumtreeblossom’s building on campus lost power too, but since she didn’t have to babysit a whole bunch of servers as they eventually came up, I think that meant she ended up going home earlier than expected, rather than later than expected. (The T was running during most of the power outage, I gather.)

It was an adventure. I like my adventures in moderation.

There’s an opening for a Linux sysadmin (with a bunch of user support mixed in, including Mac and Windows) in my group.

Stolen from email I just wrote for a mailing list:

My group has an opening for a system administrator (with a lot of end-user support and documentation mixed in). This is at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, based in the Stata Center (most recently in the news because a Dalek landed on it).

We are primarily a Linux shop (currently Debian; probably Ubuntu in the foreseeable future) with a lot of the sort of quirks you’d expect from an MIT lab (AFS, lots of homegrown stuff, people with root on their workstations, etc.). We also have lots of Mac and Windows machines, and the person in this position will end up doing a fair amount of supporting Mac and Windows users, as well as Debian desktop support and system administration.

Our departing sysadmin (leaving for grad school) hopes to have some overlap with the new hire. He has an excellent and patient way with users, good documentation skills (internal and user-facing), a desire to do things the Right Way that will save us work down the road, and the gumption to take on substantial projects, and we'd love to have similar qualities in his successor.

(I forgot to mention in that mail that I’d love it if we found somebody with experience administering email on Linux/Unix systems, since I’m the postmaster and if we don’t I won’t really have a natural backup/collaborator for that. We use Exim, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Mailman, and some homegrown stuff and have a slightly quirky email topology. That’s all optional, though.)

If you’re interested, you should definitely fill out the online form at that link, but you should also contact me (email if you have it; otherwise comment here or direct message here or on Twitter) so that I help make sure your résumé doesn’t get lost or delayed.

Met eisa Saturday afternoon for good conversation, a tour of her new house, a lunch of Brazilian barbecue, and lots of dog time. It was great to see her!

Then met plumtreeblossom at her place after she got home from class, drove to Quincy for Southern-but-less-Southern barbecue at Firefly’s, and then curled up to watch a couple episodes of Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.

Had an exceptional morning together involving sausage and eggs (and genuine Wallace and Gromit brand Wensledyale!). Then headed to Lowe’s in Quincy and then Pemberton’s in Somerville technically Cambridge for spring planting supplies (and lunch), and then watched the last two episodes of Walking with Prehistoric Beasts at plumtreeblossom’s.

Had a productive day today (despite Daylight Savings Time kicking my ass). Except actually it was two productive days: the one that ended at 4, and the one that started at 4 and went till about 10 or so as I fought with a recalcitrant server. The second part of the day involved a lot of effort just to get back not too far behind where I started, but these things happen. I got home around 11. So forgive me if I’m not quite as eloquent or prolific a journal writer as I might be if I actually had two brain cells left to rub together. But trust me when I say it was a very excellent weekend.

And warm and sunny! Did I mention warm and sunny?

plumtreeblossom is out in Rochester visiting her family. She was supposed to be flying back tonight. This morning I got a call from her saying she’d be getting in very late on the bus because flights to Boston are cancelled due to the snowstorm and the trains were all sold out.

A few minutes ago I got a call from her saying that the bus was cancelled. At this point she has no idea how or when she’s getting back to the Boston area.

Tonight after I picked her up was going to be our little Christmas celebration, opening gifts from my family. Tomorrow’s her birthday and we were going to celebrate with dinner. At this point it looks not at all certain that she’ll even be home by any point tomorrow. Poor darling. But wherever she is, she knows I love her.

In other news, I’ve been spending most of this holiday break at work. (When nobody else is around is a good time to do upgrades.) I have to say, I really love being at work with no distractions and nothing in particular I have to do in the evenings; being able to get in when I feel like it, sit down and focus solidly on one project all day, and leave feeling accomplished when I’m hungry or tired or just slowing down. I feel like I accomplish so much more in a quiet uninterrupted day on a holiday weekend than on an ordinary workday. And despite the fact that I’ve gone to work every day, it really feels like a vacation. I really enjoy my job.

I am sure ready to have my honeywuzzle back, though!

 Lots going on over the last few weeks, and I’m so behind in reporting it that I’m just going to do bullet points, in something approaching reverse chronological order:

• My beloved honeywuzzle plumtreeblossom is cooking me eggs and ham and toast for breakfast.  Om nom nom!
• We saw Despicable Me last night and really enjoyed it.
• I feel like I’m hitting my groove at the new job, and feeling really good about it.
• Talked to bcat1 recently; she and the babies are doing really well.  They’ve started rolling over and are just starting the process of learning to crawl.  My mother silverlibre is going to visit in August, while papa spacechicken is visiting family in Canada.
• The festival went really really well! We sold out most of the nights, which is unusual.  (We usually sell out one or two.)  The cast party was lots of fun, but judging by the scandalous things I’ve been hearing, we may have left a bit too early.  As I posted earlier, I have photos from the show plumtreeblossom directed up, and hope to get photos of the rest of the shows up soon.
• Oh, speaking of photos, yesterday after going in to work for an upgrade I took a bunch of photos of the building I work in, also to be posted soon.  Practical it’s not, but it sure is pretty.
• I love living in Boston.  cathijosephine and I have been going to a series of free outdoor classical concerts.  Now that she’s done with the semester’s classes, plumtreeblossom can join us for some of them.
• I’m really enjoying the summer, with walks along the river and lots of good outdoor time.  plumtreeblossom and I are going to the beach next weekend.

I’ve got loads more to say, but that at least lets you all know that I’m still here and still having fun!

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages.

So, as I have mentioned, I will be moving to MIT towards the end of this month.

That means my group has an open Unix/Linux sysadmin position. Want one?

( More information. )

If this sounds interesting to you (or to someone you know), ping me, and I’ll put you in touch with my boss.

[I wrote this a few days ago, but have held off until posting it by now because I wanted to make sure everybody in the chain of command at work was in the loop before it hit the gossip circuit.]

Starting at the end of March, I’m going to be working at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This is going to be delightful in a lot of ways which I don’t have time to list, but two among them are (1) that I will be working with bubblebabble, and (2) that I will be working in Kendall Square, which is on the Red Line partway between my place and plumtreeblossom’s, which in turn is probably going to trim close an hour from my round-trip weekday commute. [EDIT: Google Maps doesn’t think it’s going to be that dramatic, but it’s certainly going to be a more restful and somewhat quicker commute.]

And I am excited to be working on a larger scale in a more complex and varied environment than I have been so far.

(Current hip status: beowabbit is currently very hip.)

Going to work was a really stupid idea. My theory was that if I’m going to be in pain and discomfort anyway, there’s no real advantage to not being at work for it. What I didn’t count on was it taking almost two hours for me to walk from the parking garage to my office building. (Admittedly, I’m counting the three times I sat down on benches.) That normally takes 10min if I stop to buy an apple and a coffee on the way.

However, the campus police were very kind and sent over a Safety Patrol van to get me back to the parking garage from my office when I left (early), and the drive back to Quincy was uneventful and less painful than the drive from plumtreeblossom’s to work had been.

On the way home, I stopped by the drugstore and got crutches. I’m not sure they’re an improvement over the cane. They’re better for standing still for long periods of time, and they’re much quicker, and they’re more stable, so there are fewer of the nasty surprises, but they are much clumsier to handle, harder to keep from falling when I set them aside because I can’t hook them on things (and bending over to pick anything up is not so much happening at the moment), and while the cane basically left me fine most of the time with occasional moments of serious pain when I stepped wrong or had to rebalance, the crutches basically hurt just a bit on each “step”. I think the crutches are probably net worse on my hip. If I feel like I can go out tomorrow, I may buy a second cane, and try the two-cane approach. (Assuming, of course, I’m not magically all better tomorrow.)

I left a message for my doctor’s office as soon as I got in to work today, but haven’t heard back yet. At this point, I don’t think it justifies an ER visit, because my best guess is that medical science is going to tell me to suck it up and wait, and in the meantime keep my weight off it and take lots of painkillers, which I am already doing. (Well, modulo the stupidity of trying to go in to work today, but I’ve learned my lesson. Thanks, plumtreeblossom; you were right. On the other hand, I got lots of sympathy from my co-workers.)

In other news, my flowers are still beautiful, and my kilt still makes me very very happy.