What's it all about, Alfie?

Well... the great times at O'Connor are gone, and may not be seen again for a very, very long time. This year O'Connor has lost nearly two-thirds of the capital it had at the beginning of the year. Most of this is from the flight that occurred after some traders lost millions and millions on bad speculative trading. Someone got the money... don't know who... but WorldCom didn't help us any, either.

This means that as a result of bad trading - really caused by the excessive greed and arrogance of the traders involved, we're facing cuts in IT in excess of 50%. This isn't good... not good at all. And while I've been told my position isn't at risk, how can anyone really believe that in light of such massive cuts. It's only prudent to be looking for another position if the entire organization is undergoing a halving.

But what this really means is uncertainty. Lots of it.

Not that I'm a person that has to know everything... I've learned over the course of the 17 years I've been married that there are plenty of things that I can live without knowing - what's for dinner each night... what the kids have done wrong today... what's on the schedule for this weekend - they all effect me in one way or another, but I don't have to know about each and every detail of the life that swirls on around me. It's enough for me to know that if there's something important going on somewhere someone whom I trust is going to tell me what I need to be thinking about or at least yell "Heads Up!".

The problem here is that although the cuts aren't coming for another few months (first of the year), the place has taken on a Deathmarch-like atmosphere. People are all talking very quietly in groups... lots of news about who's hiring and who isn't... all the things of a place undergoing a mass exodus. This means the one thing that isn't getting done is work.

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem... I mean really... everyone has to be able to let off steam, but work is the one thing that helps me take my mind off issues that I can do nothing about. And this issues of whether or not I'll have a position here in three months is certainly one of those that's out of my sphere of control. Influence - maybe, control - most certainly not.

So there's a lot of playing around trying to ignore the generally bad environment in the IT sector for Financial Institutions in the Chicago area, and that helps, but there's a lot of worry that's not healthy at all. Today The Boss came by to say that we could start work on a project that we've wanted to get going on for a while. Immediately we thought "Hey, maybe this means we're going to stay!", but right away the point was made that this may just be a diversion tactic to keep us busy at something we like until the axe falls. Afterall, there's no value in having us worry, and as long as this project at least keeps us busy it isn't a waste - even if they have no intention of using it.

So we're stuck... with three months to go.

I'd rather have the cuts announced and those that need to move on be given the support that they deserve. Those that stay can then get to the task of getting things squared away for the new year. This, as opposed to waiting for the new year and then trying to make things 'right' as if we had all the time before this to plan...

I know that when I owned a business I may not have been a better boss, but I always put my employees first, and never lied to them.

I have to laugh at the Corporate Folks that administer almost every network I've come in contact with. They treat disk space as if it were gold - each user gets a quota that's smaller than even the smallest easily available hard drives, and then adding extra space is considered to be the last resport as opposed to the first thing to do. I can't imagine why they don't proactively add disk space to file and database servers just to make sure that no matter what's needed, there's space available.

Yes, this adds cost. I know, I've bought lots of drives, and owned a company where I had to watch every penny, but that's no excuse - I still never ran into the lack of disk space that I've seen in every "big" organization I've been a part of. It's just ridiculous. People use their machine's local drives because the quotas on the file servers are too small to allow them to really function. This means critical data isn't backed up, and the risk exposure is greater than anyone seems to want to believe.

Oh well... I can only do what I can do... I believe in having lots of free disk space, and I do. I think my fullest machine may be up to 50%, but that's it. Most are below 25%. Yes, I could have purchased less, but with the costs being so cheap, the incremental cost is so low, it just doesn't make good sense.

So I deal with database servers that crash because they can't find the local disk space for their files, and queries don't run because of insufficient log space... it's a waste of my time, and the company is paying a lot more for my time than they would for a new disk or two... Penny wise, Pound foolish...

OK... so I'm trying to get over the loss of barney and see what's coming up for me. I have several possibilities, but I'm not sure what path I'll be taking.

If money weren't an object, I'd simply get a better, newer sgi box. There are the Octanes which are reasonably priced and could have dual processors with graphics that are just as good. But if money is no object, then the new Fuel or even better yet, the Octane2 workstations are nice.

But money is an object... a scarce one.

So I have to realize that with my domain being DNS-ed at easyDNS I get all the things I really need without having to keep barney alive:

• I can have www.TheManFromSPUD.com hosted on sparky with a redirect to the specific URL. barney used to host this site, but with it moved, there's no need for him.
• I can do all my developing on sherman my iBook as it's got apache, PHP, PostgreSQL on it and that's all the development tools I used on barney.

So in the end, it's not really even necessary to replace barney. But as a collector, I feel a keen sense of loss.

I spent some time yesterday looking at the auctions on eBay looking for what things were going for these days. I was surprised to see that there were as many Octane power supplies on the market as Indigo² power supplies. This doesn't lead me to believe that they fixed their power problem. Also, let's face it... any reasonable Linux box these days can beat an aging sgi box. I was collecting it for the cache value, not any real need to have it.

So I was checking out other options such as the ultra-reliable SPARC 20. As it turns out you can get one of them for under $200 with dual processors, plenty of memory and lots of stuff. Not bad, but I already have a SS20, and it's fine and loaded with lots of goodies. So I don't really need one, and the collectible value is marginal as I already have one.

I looked at the HP workstations, and I know that I can get all the freeware (gcc, etc.) I need for one of them, but I'm less excited about having an HP box than I used to be. I've certainly thought about getting a nice Linux box, but that's real money (>$2000) and I'm not ready for that yet.

So it looks like I'll take barney off the desktop and put his parts in storage. If it's possible to bring him back later, I'll probably try and do that. But for now, it's time to say goodbye and realize that as a collector of working computers, it's time to move on and close the book on barney.

I want to love sgi stuff. I really do.

I've had barney my Indigo² for a long time. Heck, I've even replaced the entire box with a newer, updated one and kept the name but recently I've wondered at what cost.

You see, my original Indigo² was an R4400/250MHz box off of eBay and it cost $1495.00 at the time. I thought it was a bargain. And it was. Then that box went through 3 power supplies - at $300 a piece, and it wasn't so much of a great deal. I had fans blowing on it, I tried another $175 High Impact video card set - no luck, the original wasn't bad, and in the end realized that this just wasn't the best box to use.

So I got an R10000/195MHz for another $800 and thought my problems would be over.

They weren't.

The power supply started to go and I talked to the used SGI reseller that I had used for two of the power supplies and the new R10k box, and he said he didn't have any more power supplies around. I'm not the least bit surprised.

For all the wonderful technology that the Indigo² is, I'm now convinced that they just can't run in normal conditions. What I mean is that in the standard, American home, with air conditioning, these boxes just get too hot and they take themselves out.

So I have two perfectly functioning boxes with great capabilities but no power to them. This is very frustrating to say the least.

I've taken out the drives to lower the power consumption, and I've removed 2/3^rds of the RAM to again, lower power consumption, but in the end, once the power supply starts to go it's a gonner and it's only a matter of time before it goes again.

In the end I have to conclude that while it's been a blast, it's over.

OK... the place I work is moving from one office building in Chicago to another office building and this past weekend my servers were moved. Nothing every goes really well, does it? This was no exception. I'm very tired from trying to hammer out the last of the bugs in the move and missing on some very important sleep. Nothing comes easy, I guess...

At the same time, I have to hold myself back from tagging a few goobers at work. Specifically, in this sleep deprived state when I tell a developer that they are hitting the Test version of my code because I can see the logs it's more than slightly annoying to hear them say that it isn't. I'm not asking for a confirmation here, I've already got my own confirmation by looking at Test and Production. Instead, I'm telling them that it's wrong and I'm getting attitude back?

More importantly, why is it that I'm supporting their users? Yes, I understand that it's because I will and they won't, but that's their problem and my burden. There's something terribly wrong with this situation if I'm supporting their users.

It's all about the Prodigal Son - the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Now I'm not trying to fish for compliments, but when an organization or professionals allows such incredibly poor performance then it breaks an implied contract to those that have worked hard and pulled their weight. The implied contract is we have worked and met your expectations - those expectations are for everyone - not just those that really work hard.

When I see professionals doing less than my 8-year-old and not being held accountable, then I have to think that the expectations were really not meant for anyone (i.e. they wanted to have high expectation, but didn't expect anyone to really achieve them), or they have expectations and then when people put out "average" work, they aren't taken to task about the fact that they missed the expectations by so much.

Now if this were a co-ed softball team out for a game every Saturday afternoon, I'd say that it's no big deal, we're out for the Fun and Sun. But when we're supposed to be professionals at this, it's entirely different. Professionals are supposed to be professional and not get attitudes, or whine, or complain... they are supposed to be good enough at what they do to continue doing it under severe and challening conditions. But what I'm seeing is what I once would have called a bunch of babys.

There's a lot going on these days and it's hard to make time to write in the Journal, but I'm taking a little time out now to fill in a few details.

Apple is making some seriously foolish moves with charging $129 for the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.2, and removing the free iTools email accounts that Steve has promised will be free for life. Since Apple exists due to the loyalty of it's customers, and only those same customers are going to be hurt by these moves, it just doesn't make any sense that they'd charge so little to offset the horrible public relations that this will cost them. But then again, smarter people have made dumber mistakes... I guess Steve's just due for a couple of big ones.

I've taken the time to reformat my iBook to use the HFS+ filesystem from the UFS filesystem. I'd heard that the performance is better, and there are certainly a lot of programs that can't be installed on UFS, so I decided to take the time and reformat the box. At the same time, I used the iBook image disks to make it out-of-the-box compatible. Not bad at all. The CD-RW made it pretty easy to back up what I had and re-install it on the new build. Not bad at all.

The performance improvements are significant. Installing new software used to take a long time. Now it's exceptionally fast. The change is very minor to me - mostly in case-handling of filenames, but I can live with that for the speed. Very nice upgrade.

Work is going well - at least as well as can be expected when I have to deal with the kinds of people that I have to deal with. For the most part, the people at the company are OK, it's the vendor's people that are almost too hard to believe. This vendor has an 'in' with a powerful person in the company and because of that they feel that they can pretty much have free run of the place. They can't, and they're learning the hard way, but I'll make sure that Karma is conserved... they'll have to change how they deal with us sooner than later.

Home additions/remodeling is going slowly. Liza has decided to add a pool to the backyard this year, so she's trying to get everything coordinated and get it in before the first snowfall :). I'm sure we'll love it and the kids will be in it every single day they can. It's a big bonus for all the parties that the kids will have. I'm really looking forward to it.

I was approached by a headhunter for a company here in Chicago. It's doing something I really like - cluster computing. Golly... I do love having machines solve really big problems - even if it's for the financial industry. It's certainly a possible move, I'll have to see what they look like in the phone interview and see how much of the job is in the face of clients and what their expectations of the job are. Could be really nasty if the face-time is most of the job, and it's a suit-world. That would make me quit no matter what the job was. But I'm trying to keep an open mind when people come calling with jobs.

OK... I know it's been a long time sine I've updated the journal, but that's due more to my work level than lack of anything interesting happening to me. Things at work have been really hopping and then there's the kids and all their activities and with the end of school, things are only getting more hectic.

Office Space is on TV as I type this into my iBook, and it's strangely appropriate that such a movie just happened to come on Comedy Central as I was talking about how work was going. Coincidence? I think not.

So... work has been busy. New releases with a lot of new functionality and hopefully a lot of stability enhancements so that we don't have to worry about mid-day reboots. We'll have to see how that plays out this coming week, but I'm pretty confident that we'll be looking at a better system than we've been running. In any case, it's nice to get a release out that I've been working on for more than a month. That's a very long time in Trader-years.

We've also been making progress on a few other Black-Bag projects that are very close to bearing fruit. While they still have a little bit to go, it's nice to see them progressing nicely and know that when they do get completed there is going to be some really nice functionality that they'll add to the system. Probably just a few weeks now.

As for me, things are quiet today without the kids and Liza - they're off for a mini-vacation but I need to stick around for work tomorrow as I'm liable to be in at least a few meeting that need my presence due to activities this past week which didn't go as well as they should have and at the same time went better than could have. This means I'm missing the mini-vacation but at least this way I have a really good chance of taking at least part of this coming Friday off and that'd be really, really nice.

WWDC is happening in California now, and while I'd like to go, I can thankfully read up on all the happenings on the web. It's really amazing for someone like me that remembers the ARPAnet before it was the Internet, and to see just how far it is we've come. Amazing.

Anyway, WWDC is going on and there are a few nice surprises coming out of there for the Apple fans in the crowd. I like the news of the new
ProjectBuilder and InterfaceBuilder tools. I am interested in the new GCC 3 which should make it a lot easier to get FORTRAN and Java as compiled languages on the OS X platform. I like the updates to the tools just because new features are fun to play with even if you don't use them everyday. So there's a lot to be happy about with the news. Of course, there's no real specific details on what's happening, but it's nice to know what'll be coming soon, even if I don't know exactly when.

On the work front, there's another interview with another Hedge Fund and that may turn into something interesting, but I'm not holding my breath for it... too many uncertanties, and I've learned too much about Headhunters to get too excited about anything until I see an offer on the table. But from what the headhunters have told me, it sounds like an interesting place to work.

OK, I'll admit it... I'm not the best waiter in the world.

I'm most comfortable moving right along, getting things done and feeling like I'm making progress even if I'm not doing a lot of really important stuff. I like cleaning up the House - it's not the most exciting thing, but it beats being bored. Don't get me wrong, there's a time for relaxing and I wish I had more 'down' time, but while I'm at work, I'd rather be busy.

If I'm not busy, I think about all the time I could be spending on another activity, project, thing, that I could be working on. It's almost like I'm trapped - I can't leave work and I can't do anything other than work at work. When there's nothing to do, it leaves large gaps in the day and those are pretty hard to fill.

Sure, I can catch up on a little surfing, but that's not something I'm going to do for hours on end - I just don't have that much fun following links. I could read a book, but that's a little obvious, and I don't want the folks I work with to think "Hey! Why does he get to do that and I have to slug it out!" Well... the answer is clear - I've gotten everything done that I can do and I'm waiting for others to complete their work before I can move on. But that's still a confrontation that I'd rather avoid if at all possible.

So I wait.

In the end, things will pick up but until then, it's a painful thing
to do.

Last Friday I was dealing with a vendor that I haven't had the best luck with when dealing with problems in their code. Typically, their company policy has been that we (meaning I) must be the problem and we just aren't using it in the way it was intended. This in interesting as we are their only customer, but let's forget that for now and get to the real problem - me. I get way too bent out of shape when I deal with these people. I get upset because their calm, cool, demeanor as they say it's all my fault reminds me of the sales person in the Monty Python skit The Pet Shop. And I'm the guy with the dead bird!

OK... there it is. I've been able to find why it bothers me so much. I love Monty Python, and I can so understand the incredible frustration of the guy with the dead parrot. Here he is, trying to get someone who sold him a dead bird to care that he sold him said, dead, bird. Put in these terms it's clear why the person is calm - he knows that there's nothing he has to do. He has all the cards - the other guy has the dead parrot and he has the money. All he has to do is to not say or do anything illegal and chances are, the guy will leave. Give them nothing to fight against, and there will be no fight.

This is such an interesting philosophy! I have to agree that prior to writing this down I hadn't seen it in this light. Now that I see it in this light, I'm not sure what the best approach is to solving this problem of mine is. You see, I still have the horribly built code (dead parrot) and unfortunately I can't just bury it in the backyard. I have to live with it.

If I were to take a page from their playbook I'd pass this along as a nice, living parrot and let the users figure out that it's dead. But this has a problem - the customer won't ever go into that Pet Shop again, and I can't have the users thinking I'm no smarter than the Pet Shop employee, so I need a better alternative. Hmmm... what can it be?

What I need is to have something that the vendor wants - that I can control, be just as dead (useless) as my parrot and then we can trade - I'll give you a live cat if you give me a live parrot. Interesting idea... now what can they want that I can say is alive when it's as good as dead to them? Hmmm...

Got it! I did some tests on their code and it's in a terrible state - memory problems, and their hurried design of the new updating scheme has got some serious problems. So I've suggested another way to achieve the same ends, and all they have to do is to unroll the changes due to the new updating scheme and put in a new feature for me and it'll be working like a charm. Wonder if they'll take it...

What really helps is that I know I'm the guy with the dead parrot... whenever they start to get to me now, I just have to giggle as I know I'm the guy holding the dead parrot, and the trick is to try and have at least a little fun with the ex-parrot... the one that is no more...