Aszurom

http://www.rawrcast.com/2011/05/the-daily-fan-did-you-see-that/

My podcast (Bad Movie Podcast) got top billing in the Rawrcast roundup of B movie shows.  It’s nice to be in the same club with the other two shows that were featured, since they’re done by actual paid professionals. 

     I suffer from a crippling defect.  Given a range of too many good choices, I have a crisis.  Even for trivial things - in fact I think moreso for trivial things.  Let’s take the example of a restaurant menu.  I can sit and stare over a menu all day, and never be able to pick just one thing.

     Too many equally valued options is a tar pit for me.  Decisions are hard enough already.  The worst is a completely open, no list of choices item like my wife calling me and saying “what should I make for dinner?”  Well, damn.  How do I know what you have on hand in the pantry?  What is less effort, or more fun for her to make?  Do I really give a shit what it is, so long as it isn’t on the list of things I don’t like?  Do I know what all the options are?  I can’t really make a sound decision without being confident that I’m aware of the actual possibilities, can I?

     Wouldn’t life be so much easier if we just had 6 set dinners + 1 night out a week? Here’s my proposal:

• Mon:  Salad, Soup, Sandwich.
• Tue:  Asian night - stir fry, pad thai, mu-shu.
• Wed:  Italian - pasta, eggplant parm, grilled veggies with sauce.
• Thr:  Taco night
• Fri:  Indian because I bought her a $50 cookbook for it.
• Sat: Leftover rodeo

     Now, here’s the thing: This whole arrangement costs me no further mental effort.  There are no decisions to be made.  Dinner is on auto-pilot.  I would expect that Steve Jobs wears the same shirt, pants, and shoes every day because he has discovered something that works, requires zero thought, and he doesn’t get bored of it.  The idea is to put it on auto-pilot and forget about it.

     She can’t cope with it.  It’s boring. Boooooring. Oh so dreadfully so.  Whatever.  It’s not really about my dinner menu though.  It’s about the life of an un-decider who is crippled by the awesome task of picking one single option out of a field of equally good ones.

     If I was truly OCD, I would probably be a list-maker or a spread-sheeter.  I could imagine myself with note cards or post-its spread out on the table in front of me, trying to wring out some final drop of decision-juice from an impossible array of possibilities. Luckily, I’m also lazy.  When faced with the hysterical blindness of looking at too many options, I will quickly realize it’s a no-win game and just play eenie-meenie-miney-moe and get it over with.

    Hell, I have enough trouble just picking definitively what movie I’m going to watch for the Bad Movie Podcast every week.  You want to talk about a menu of awesome choices.  I have to choose from like 1,000 movies I’ve never seen but strongly suspect could be contenders.  It’s HARD.  Super hard some weeks when I’ve narrowed it down to a few aces.

     Eenie-meenie-miney-moe to the rescue.

I wrote up a description of my current job skill set, areas of expertise, and whatnot. This is what I arrived at:

Storage Admin: Designed, implemented and manage EMC Clariion SAN. Manage LUN provisioning and fiber channel path switching. Migrating to iSCSI connectivity. 

VMware Virtualization Admin: Created VMWare ESX deployment from ground up - now encompassing 3 ESX servers, 50 guest servers, consolidated backup scripting, and Virtual Infrastructure.  Migrated from ESX 3.0 to 3.5 to ESXi 4.1.  Also manage pair of VMware Server v2.0.2 development and test environment servers.  All OSX laptops have VMware Fusion or Parallels virtualization, to support running Autocad and various end-user apps. 

Windows Admin: Active directory, Exchange 2007, Server 2000, 2003, 2008 R2.  Group policy administration. User, group, and file security administration.  IIS 6 and 7, component services, SSL certificate upkeep, FTP, and windows clustering based load balancing. Multiple terminal services servers for remote and telecommuting staff. 

Apple OSX Admin: I have used OSX as my primary system administration workstation platform for the past 5 years. I manage all windows hosts and provide all user support from the Mac platform.  

Linux Admin: Trio of Debian based servers providing Git repository, Apache webserver with OSS ticket system, and Cacti SNMP graphing roles.  I manage a Linux based Pen daemon virtual appliance that provides session stateful load balancing of 10 .NET application server pools.

Network Admin:  CCNA certified.  Troubleshooting field office WAN connections, VPN tunnels, virtualization network settings, and inter-site connectivity for 5 factories, various national field offices, and telecommuting users.

Backup Admin: Architected and operate backup system in disk to disk to tape environment.  BackupExec 12.5, VMware Consolidated Backup, MS SQL simple mode backups, robocopy and rsync scripting. Currently using Cybernetics miSAN virtual tape library to LTO3 tape. Researching replacement with deduplication appliance and snapped replication to offsite cloud or colocated remote NAS device.  Have hands-on experimentation with Barracuda, Doubletake Recovernow, CA Arcserve D2D deployments.

DR Architect: Created a DFS-R and VPN field office to SAN mesh design for business continuity of the largest regional offices.  Company has offices covering all continental states.  This system was a very low cost means of ensuring data safety in the event of physical or data disaster in a field location. Yearly testing of main datacenter total-loss recovery incidents at Sungard facility.

Infrastructure monitoring: Bandwidth, storage space, scheduled scripts, data replication and de-duplication management.  24x7 monitoring and instant response to service, hardware, LAN and WAN outages. Implemented a combination of ActiveExperts RTM, Cacti SMNP graphing, and homebrew scripts for monitoring.  I do considerable log analysis with Perfmon.

Scripting and automation: I have written service monitoring, task reporting, and text parsing and manipulation scripts in DOS .bat files, Perl, Powershell 2.0, Bash shell, and I am beginning to dabble in Python for a cross-platform solution.  Wrote a Perl log parser and IP banning script that interacted with the Spam Assassin installation in Kerio Mailserver.

End user support: I provide all helpdesk support for a staff of 350 sales, engineers, and plant personnel.  All levels of OS, software, and hardware support for HP, Dell, and Apple devices.  Laptops, desktops, printers, network equipment, and iPhone / iPad support.

I also have spectacular Googling skills that almost never fail.  And, Pokemon? Caught ‘em ALL.

Time to mow the yard for the first time this year.  Dead tractor battery.  Well, ok, it’s 4 years old so I can see that.  I go get a new one.  

Tractor with new battery is making a ZZZZING! noise from the starter.  Odds of the starter and battery dying in unison, like lemming lovers going off a cliff hand in hand, are pretty slim.  So I investigate.  Fuse isn’t blown, but the wiring is HOT. Ask me how I know.  I do what any mechanic would do… I start Googling.

Turning up nothing, and getting more frustrated. I go out and push it up the hill into the front yard where I’ve still got some sunlight. Then I see it… the red wire is on the side of the battery with the (—-) on it. Well, the polarity of the battery and the tractor are backwards, but Wallyworld only had this one type.  So I hit up Lowes.  Sure enough, there are two amp ratings on 12V batteries.  They reverse the terminals apparently to keep you from doing what I have just done.  I really need to get a light in that shed so I can see things like this.

Battery exchanged, and it fired right up.  I was a bit concerned that I might have let the magic smoke out of the solenoid or some other bauble under there, but it seems ok.

Lesson learned.  Batteries aren’t all the same terminal outs.

Just finished watching King Kong Escapes. It’s like a Godzilla movie with no Godzilla in it. Now, let me ask you… if you had to mine something, would you do this with a drill or would you build a super complex robot monkey to do that job? Right. Now, if that robot monkey broke down, would you then try the drill plan, or would you go kidnap King Kong and hypnotize him to get him to do the mining? Right.

Also, Dr Hu, I would like to let you know that there is no land under the North Pole.  You should be mining in the South Pole sir.  

Toho’s Kong suit has the biggest, most obvious zipper I’ve EVER seen in a kaiju movie. Sheesh. And if you think it looks bad dry, wait until you see it soaking wet. It looks like a drowned hair-turd.