At 54 (...) As to moving, I appear to have pretty itchy feet having moved 45 times in my life
Seriously? As a 32 year old, I've moved 5 times long-distance and 10 if you include the very short term or in-city, non-job related changes and I consider that above average and is looking to slow down and stay where I'm now. Many of my friends have only significantly moved a couple times in their lives. To me it sounds like a case of being married to the job - or at least the job market - going where it's good and not caring much for friends, family or other relations where you've been. No doubt that makes you an attractive worker, you sound like an unbound 20 year old except with 35 years of experience, but I'm not sure many would swap lives with you.
I should have clarified a little I guess:) I'm a Navy brat and spent 8 years in the military myself. So I spent a lot of time moving between San Diego, San Francisco, and Bremerton Washington with little jaunts to Monterrey, Rhode Island, and then Maryland when Dad retired before moving out on my own. On my own and in the military, I moved between Maryland, Alabama, back to Maryland where we moved five times when at Ft. Meade (two on post; old barracks to new barracks, one when we got married and then to inadequate housing then on post housing), Germany, and then to Virginia (again, off post housing (a trailer) then inadequate housing, then on post housing). After leaving the military, I moved in Virginia several times going from Alexandria (leaving the military) down to Woodbridge, Spotsylvania (failed to get a good job so stayed with parents for two years), Fredericksburg (started working in computers), Stafford (commuting to Bethesda Maryland, then Virginia, then Columbia Maryland, then DC) and then Dale City (worked in DC at NASA for 13 years) with jumps to Greece (working for SAIC at the Olympics) and now Colorado.
So a majority of the movement was military related then attempting to get back on my feet after discharge from the military.
The trouble with this and to address one of your comments is that I really never made any friends. I've made acquaintances, work "friends" that, while I remember them as folks I've worked with over the years, I haven't maintained any connections to them as I've moved on. I think the introvert in me plus moving a lot has kept me from making those connections. My current wife has moved something over 30 times and has friends all over the country she keeps in touch with including making trips to visit.
My Dad essentially walked away from his family as after a couple of visits when I was a kid, I didn't see any of them again for almost 40 years. Two years ago a cousin found me on Facebook and I've "reconnected" with them. It's amazing how many cousins I have and didn't know about including one cousin that lives just a few miles away. We visited her last Christmas and they dropped by this Thanksgiving. Last year I even took a motorcycle ride out to visit my aunts, uncles, and cousins. One plays guitar (something I've been learning recently), one is the guy who has the motorcycle riding dog. There's just the one aunt who stays in touch via Facebook and e-mails though.
But I think what you say is true. I don't care about friends and family all that much. My daughters are grown and on their own. I haven't heard from one of them for a few years (she's not computer friendly and doesn't even have a phone, last time I heard). My other one is a computer geek so we're connected on Facebook (and Live Journal and Google+). Heck, we were at the same big company once and she already had my username, the wench:D My wife just bailed to go stay with her daughter for a couple of months. At least at the moment, I don't miss her, if anything it's less stressful at home right now. I'd likely get over it pretty easily if she decided to not come back, I'd be curious as to why of course but I wouldn't be "devastated" or anything.
This, with spades. At 54 I still love mucking about with computers and I'm extremely valuable in Operations. I'm a mentor for my team. I know lots of esoteric technical stuff in part because I was there when it happened. Because I still love what I do, I spend my own time, and sometimes my own money (I paid for a Symantec class out of my pocket so I could get a preferred position in the company) keeping up on tech as well as time at work. Because I'm a bit on the older side, I help keep the other guys from burning out although I skirt the edge from time to time. My linked in "resume" has recruiters calling me or e-mailing me a couple of times a week. Management values me also because the three younger guys on my team all have young kids and are out sick or handling sick kids several times a month. I'm here, rain, snow, or shine.
While I've taken a few "leadership" classes and have considered moving up to a Supervisor role (half manager/half tech), I'm still not there. The classes have given me an even better edge because I step up to take responsibilities to help my manager. My age seems to let me talk a bit more freely with managers, directors, and even Vice Presidents and they listen.
As to moving, I appear to have pretty itchy feet having moved 45 times in my life so changing location isn't all that much of a hindrance to me other than packing up all my gear when it's time to move again.:)
But mainly it's because I truly love working with computers. And I've been into computers since I opened the Sinclair back in 1980 and started keying in Life.
It's one of the problems with self-checkouts. I can go to Home Depot and pick up several hundreds of bucks worth of tools and just swipe my card on the way out and be done with it. On the off chance it's too busy and I go through the checkout, the clerks check my signature maybe 50% of the time. While it's on the backs of the merchants, it's obviously not enough of an impact to force signature checks.
Just to respond to the 'foaming over long uptimes' portion of your comment. I and my team are not obsessed with uptimes. I am adverse to just rebooting systems to "fix" problems without at least investigating. Sure a reboot will restore the server to a good state, but ultimately it doesn't actually "fix" the problem. And I do regularly check systems for zombie or defunct processes. We have issues with OpenView agents on the Linux systems having defunct processes which was fixed recently with an update. And one system has a perl script written by someone at Oracle for reports that gets about 100 defunct processes a month. For a majority of the systems though, the defunct listing is zero. However, should investigation determine that it's as you say, I don't have a problem with rebooting to clean up memory.
On the other hand, rebooting servers should be a straight forward task, and should be automated - So I gather that your excuse of being short staffed was just a lie to get your way.
While it can be automated, it still takes resources to verify the systems came back up correctly and work to resolve any issues that crop up. Someone has to babysit when it happens. The systems have to be staggered because they're high availability so we can't be one sided too long. Which just means we'll have someone watching reboots once or twice a week. Add in the difficulty of getting approvals to do this and it really is a resource issue.
Well, the real problem are the DBAs. Certainly I can stop and start the Oracle processes without much trouble but the DBAs insist on a reboot and since they "own" the systems, they have most of the say in the matter. I'm glad I was able to prevent it from being a monthly "reboot all the Oracle servers" as the DBAs insisted it was healthy to reboot them periodically. It was a fight to keep it from happening though. They weren't listening to my technical answers so my biggest leverage was that we're short staffed and don't have the time to work on projects _and_ reboot 30 or 40 Oracle servers a month.
I use Windows 7 at home because I have four monitors. In my attempts to install Linux on my system, I find I'm only able to use one monitor. The docs I've found on line to use multiple monitors are pretty much for a dual monitor setup and not for dual card dual monitor per card setup. So it's a hassle to go through all the work to try to get it working when Windows 7 natively supports four monitors and lets me rotate them to support my layout. One center monitor, one flipped 180 and above it, one to the right rotated 90* and one to the left rotated 270*. So I have a couple of other systems that I can ssh to (cygwin is installed on the windows box) and I have virtualbox where I can startup ubuntu or freebsd when needed.
Most books are already cheap? Really? Most e-books I've been interested in are more expensive than paperbacks and a buck or two cheaper than the hardbacks. Since I can't resell them or buy them used and there's no guarantee they'll last as long as a hardback, I find them far too expensive for my tastes. I'd be interested in a lending type of situation much more than buying the ebooks outright. I don't have to rebuy all my dead tree books and there's no worry about books going "out of print" so they'll always be around. All I'd really want would be an inventory of books I've read both so I don't check one out that I've already read and also so I can easily find a book I'd like to read again.
Never had that happen. I do that as a matter of habit and keep track and I've only received spam on three occasions. One when I registered with a forum and neglected to flip off the "display my e-mail address" flag on my account (Simple Machines forum). I blocked the e-mail, reregistered with a new e-mail and flipped off the bit. Second from a forum I signed up for and received one spam to the address. And the worst was from a site where I had a short subscription (3 or 4 months) and closed it but they sold the list and that e-mail gets no end of spam. It's blocked but I still see hundreds of attempts a day for that address.
But the other 150 or so addresses have never been spammed. Not once. I have received spam on my whois e-mail of record though ("want to buy the 'same domain' that matches your.us/.org domain?").
And my primary e-mail gets a crapload of spam of which I spamassassin a majority of into a spam folder.
It looks like it makes it easier to clean than the Zalman I currently have. The fan is in the center of a loop with the fins between the fan and the pipe so it's a little harder to get in and clean out the misc dust and cat hairs.
Oh well. If we can broaden the selection criteria I have a few more candidates including the development manager who asks if operations hires competent people and the project manager who says engineering is the logical career path of a technical person so the engineers are where the smart people are:rolleyes:
Most of my problems are related to being forced to use IE or needing to use Visio. I have an RDC connection to a terminal server but they won't put project or visio on the server. Again, the laptop still has its uses. I'm particularly amused that I still have my old laptop; so much for recovering a Windows license:)
My solution is to just keep the old laptop around but not use it for anything but that specific task. So it sits in a drawer and every month or so I have to break it out, turn it on, and check out the console for the server that stopped responding to the network for some reason. If it doesn't get on the 'net, there isn't much of a chance of it getting infected.
Granted but I do from the system I use to access the DRAC. The issue is that my Windows box has to stay at a specific version of the JRE in order to continue to access the DRAC. So upgrading the JRE isn't possible. Fortunately I've received a new laptop so the old Windows one just sits until I need it to access the DRAC.
Unfortunately I run into areas where I am unable to upgrade the JRE due to incompatibilities with newer versions. For instance, in dealing with a Dell DRAC, the old Chassis says it'll support 1.4_5 something or other or newer. The problem is with the exact version it works fine but upgrading JRE on my system causes it to fail and refuse to start up the console java app. So I have a Windows laptop at my desk that is kept at that specific version of the JRE so I can continue to access the chassis until it's replaced. It's just one example but it's one I have to deal with on a periodic basis.
But I don't see how, if the boss isn't using the output of the envelopes to determine who gets fired. Per the article, he's using Secret Shoppers reports to determine who gets the axe. He's certainly being an idiot for trying to make a game of firing someone but as far as I can tell, he's not actually collecting envelopes, opening them, tallying up the votes and then firing the guy (or gal) with the most votes.
And it's not like he couldn't be influenced by the names during the first vote as long as he's taking the Secret Shopper results to determine who to fire. Certainly if he saw the same name 5 times and then the Secret Shopper report said he had his hat on, he would perhaps be harsher than if he just went by the Secret Shopper results. Unless every Secret Shopper ding results in a firing of course. Then the influence isn't there.
Perhaps. Most likely I was taking the message at face value. Envelopes are sealed and put in the guys mailbox to be opened when the next person is fired. At least for me, I'd sign the seal but I'm used to doing such things. Again, as I said, that does give him a list of folks that might be an influence the next time a secret shopper comes in as to whether the guy's fired or not. I can't believe that wouldn't be somehow influential.
Not arguing with whether it's a shitty game or not. Just that what everyone (or most people) seem to be replying to isn't what seems to be happening.
And my wife and I did the secret shopper thing once. It was ok but we had to go to fast food places most of the time and we really don't do the fast food thing all that much.
It didn't seem like spying was involved. You know which ones of your coworkers don't follow the rules. The hat, cell phone, talking folks. He wasn't talking about turning them in, not even placing a bet. Based on what you know, you pick who you think will fail and put it in an envelope. When the next person is caught breaking the rules, the envelopes are opened and the winner determined. They get the 10 bucks. Now the boss does get a list of folks who might be breaking the rules for the next go-round but he had secret shoppers going through the store and taking their responses (hats, cellphones, etc) as a method of choosing who is fired.
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At 54 (...) As to moving, I appear to have pretty itchy feet having moved 45 times in my life
Seriously? As a 32 year old, I've moved 5 times long-distance and 10 if you include the very short term or in-city, non-job related changes and I consider that above average and is looking to slow down and stay where I'm now. Many of my friends have only significantly moved a couple times in their lives. To me it sounds like a case of being married to the job - or at least the job market - going where it's good and not caring much for friends, family or other relations where you've been. No doubt that makes you an attractive worker, you sound like an unbound 20 year old except with 35 years of experience, but I'm not sure many would swap lives with you.
I should have clarified a little I guess :) I'm a Navy brat and spent 8 years in the military myself. So I spent a lot of time moving between San Diego, San Francisco, and Bremerton Washington with little jaunts to Monterrey, Rhode Island, and then Maryland when Dad retired before moving out on my own. On my own and in the military, I moved between Maryland, Alabama, back to Maryland where we moved five times when at Ft. Meade (two on post; old barracks to new barracks, one when we got married and then to inadequate housing then on post housing), Germany, and then to Virginia (again, off post housing (a trailer) then inadequate housing, then on post housing). After leaving the military, I moved in Virginia several times going from Alexandria (leaving the military) down to Woodbridge, Spotsylvania (failed to get a good job so stayed with parents for two years), Fredericksburg (started working in computers), Stafford (commuting to Bethesda Maryland, then Virginia, then Columbia Maryland, then DC) and then Dale City (worked in DC at NASA for 13 years) with jumps to Greece (working for SAIC at the Olympics) and now Colorado.
So a majority of the movement was military related then attempting to get back on my feet after discharge from the military.
The trouble with this and to address one of your comments is that I really never made any friends. I've made acquaintances, work "friends" that, while I remember them as folks I've worked with over the years, I haven't maintained any connections to them as I've moved on. I think the introvert in me plus moving a lot has kept me from making those connections. My current wife has moved something over 30 times and has friends all over the country she keeps in touch with including making trips to visit.
My Dad essentially walked away from his family as after a couple of visits when I was a kid, I didn't see any of them again for almost 40 years. Two years ago a cousin found me on Facebook and I've "reconnected" with them. It's amazing how many cousins I have and didn't know about including one cousin that lives just a few miles away. We visited her last Christmas and they dropped by this Thanksgiving. Last year I even took a motorcycle ride out to visit my aunts, uncles, and cousins. One plays guitar (something I've been learning recently), one is the guy who has the motorcycle riding dog. There's just the one aunt who stays in touch via Facebook and e-mails though.
But I think what you say is true. I don't care about friends and family all that much. My daughters are grown and on their own. I haven't heard from one of them for a few years (she's not computer friendly and doesn't even have a phone, last time I heard). My other one is a computer geek so we're connected on Facebook (and Live Journal and Google+). Heck, we were at the same big company once and she already had my username, the wench :D My wife just bailed to go stay with her daughter for a couple of months. At least at the moment, I don't miss her, if anything it's less stressful at home right now. I'd likely get over it pretty easily if she decided to not come back, I'd be curious as to why of course but I wouldn't be "devastated" or anything.
This, with spades. At 54 I still love mucking about with computers and I'm extremely valuable in Operations. I'm a mentor for my team. I know lots of esoteric technical stuff in part because I was there when it happened. Because I still love what I do, I spend my own time, and sometimes my own money (I paid for a Symantec class out of my pocket so I could get a preferred position in the company) keeping up on tech as well as time at work. Because I'm a bit on the older side, I help keep the other guys from burning out although I skirt the edge from time to time. My linked in "resume" has recruiters calling me or e-mailing me a couple of times a week. Management values me also because the three younger guys on my team all have young kids and are out sick or handling sick kids several times a month. I'm here, rain, snow, or shine.
While I've taken a few "leadership" classes and have considered moving up to a Supervisor role (half manager/half tech), I'm still not there. The classes have given me an even better edge because I step up to take responsibilities to help my manager. My age seems to let me talk a bit more freely with managers, directors, and even Vice Presidents and they listen.
As to moving, I appear to have pretty itchy feet having moved 45 times in my life so changing location isn't all that much of a hindrance to me other than packing up all my gear when it's time to move again. :)
But mainly it's because I truly love working with computers. And I've been into computers since I opened the Sinclair back in 1980 and started keying in Life.
[John]
It's one of the problems with self-checkouts. I can go to Home Depot and pick up several hundreds of bucks worth of tools and just swipe my card on the way out and be done with it. On the off chance it's too busy and I go through the checkout, the clerks check my signature maybe 50% of the time. While it's on the backs of the merchants, it's obviously not enough of an impact to force signature checks.
[John]
Just to respond to the 'foaming over long uptimes' portion of your comment. I and my team are not obsessed with uptimes. I am adverse to just rebooting systems to "fix" problems without at least investigating. Sure a reboot will restore the server to a good state, but ultimately it doesn't actually "fix" the problem. And I do regularly check systems for zombie or defunct processes. We have issues with OpenView agents on the Linux systems having defunct processes which was fixed recently with an update. And one system has a perl script written by someone at Oracle for reports that gets about 100 defunct processes a month. For a majority of the systems though, the defunct listing is zero. However, should investigation determine that it's as you say, I don't have a problem with rebooting to clean up memory.
[John]
On the other hand, rebooting servers should be a straight forward task, and should be automated - So I gather that your excuse of being short staffed was just a lie to get your way.
While it can be automated, it still takes resources to verify the systems came back up correctly and work to resolve any issues that crop up. Someone has to babysit when it happens. The systems have to be staggered because they're high availability so we can't be one sided too long. Which just means we'll have someone watching reboots once or twice a week. Add in the difficulty of getting approvals to do this and it really is a resource issue.
[John]
Well, the real problem are the DBAs. Certainly I can stop and start the Oracle processes without much trouble but the DBAs insist on a reboot and since they "own" the systems, they have most of the say in the matter. I'm glad I was able to prevent it from being a monthly "reboot all the Oracle servers" as the DBAs insisted it was healthy to reboot them periodically. It was a fight to keep it from happening though. They weren't listening to my technical answers so my biggest leverage was that we're short staffed and don't have the time to work on projects _and_ reboot 30 or 40 Oracle servers a month.
[John]
You must not deal with any Oracle database servers. They leak like a sieve.
[John]
Could be. We have a registration mark in the parking lot outside our building.
[John]
Sorry, should have said. I have a pair of Radeon 4700 video cards.
[John]
I use Windows 7 at home because I have four monitors. In my attempts to install Linux on my system, I find I'm only able to use one monitor. The docs I've found on line to use multiple monitors are pretty much for a dual monitor setup and not for dual card dual monitor per card setup. So it's a hassle to go through all the work to try to get it working when Windows 7 natively supports four monitors and lets me rotate them to support my layout. One center monitor, one flipped 180 and above it, one to the right rotated 90* and one to the left rotated 270*. So I have a couple of other systems that I can ssh to (cygwin is installed on the windows box) and I have virtualbox where I can startup ubuntu or freebsd when needed.
[John]
Most books are already cheap? Really? Most e-books I've been interested in are more expensive than paperbacks and a buck or two cheaper than the hardbacks. Since I can't resell them or buy them used and there's no guarantee they'll last as long as a hardback, I find them far too expensive for my tastes. I'd be interested in a lending type of situation much more than buying the ebooks outright. I don't have to rebuy all my dead tree books and there's no worry about books going "out of print" so they'll always be around. All I'd really want would be an inventory of books I've read both so I don't check one out that I've already read and also so I can easily find a book I'd like to read again.
[John]
Never had that happen. I do that as a matter of habit and keep track and I've only received spam on three occasions. One when I registered with a forum and neglected to flip off the "display my e-mail address" flag on my account (Simple Machines forum). I blocked the e-mail, reregistered with a new e-mail and flipped off the bit. Second from a forum I signed up for and received one spam to the address. And the worst was from a site where I had a short subscription (3 or 4 months) and closed it but they sold the list and that e-mail gets no end of spam. It's blocked but I still see hundreds of attempts a day for that address.
But the other 150 or so addresses have never been spammed. Not once. I have received spam on my whois e-mail of record though ("want to buy the 'same domain' that matches your .us/.org domain?").
And my primary e-mail gets a crapload of spam of which I spamassassin a majority of into a spam folder.
[John]
It looks like it makes it easier to clean than the Zalman I currently have. The fan is in the center of a loop with the fins between the fan and the pipe so it's a little harder to get in and clean out the misc dust and cat hairs.
[John]
It's why I used puts();
[John]
Oh well. If we can broaden the selection criteria I have a few more candidates including the development manager who asks if operations hires competent people and the project manager who says engineering is the logical career path of a technical person so the engineers are where the smart people are :rolleyes:
[John]
You don't even have to bring him back...
[John]
Most of my problems are related to being forced to use IE or needing to use Visio. I have an RDC connection to a terminal server but they won't put project or visio on the server. Again, the laptop still has its uses. I'm particularly amused that I still have my old laptop; so much for recovering a Windows license :)
[John]
My solution is to just keep the old laptop around but not use it for anything but that specific task. So it sits in a drawer and every month or so I have to break it out, turn it on, and check out the console for the server that stopped responding to the network for some reason. If it doesn't get on the 'net, there isn't much of a chance of it getting infected.
[John]
Granted but I do from the system I use to access the DRAC. The issue is that my Windows box has to stay at a specific version of the JRE in order to continue to access the DRAC. So upgrading the JRE isn't possible. Fortunately I've received a new laptop so the old Windows one just sits until I need it to access the DRAC.
[John]
Not allowed to virtualize Windows (I've asked). They're trying to reduce the number of Windows licenses in the company (I have a Mac :) )
The last update was applied. This was end of life'd two years ago.
Hahahahahahaha. Believe me, we're trying to get old hardware replaced.
[John]
Unfortunately I run into areas where I am unable to upgrade the JRE due to incompatibilities with newer versions. For instance, in dealing with a Dell DRAC, the old Chassis says it'll support 1.4_5 something or other or newer. The problem is with the exact version it works fine but upgrading JRE on my system causes it to fail and refuse to start up the console java app. So I have a Windows laptop at my desk that is kept at that specific version of the JRE so I can continue to access the chassis until it's replaced. It's just one example but it's one I have to deal with on a periodic basis.
[John]
But I don't see how, if the boss isn't using the output of the envelopes to determine who gets fired. Per the article, he's using Secret Shoppers reports to determine who gets the axe. He's certainly being an idiot for trying to make a game of firing someone but as far as I can tell, he's not actually collecting envelopes, opening them, tallying up the votes and then firing the guy (or gal) with the most votes.
And it's not like he couldn't be influenced by the names during the first vote as long as he's taking the Secret Shopper results to determine who to fire. Certainly if he saw the same name 5 times and then the Secret Shopper report said he had his hat on, he would perhaps be harsher than if he just went by the Secret Shopper results. Unless every Secret Shopper ding results in a firing of course. Then the influence isn't there.
[John]
Perhaps. Most likely I was taking the message at face value. Envelopes are sealed and put in the guys mailbox to be opened when the next person is fired. At least for me, I'd sign the seal but I'm used to doing such things. Again, as I said, that does give him a list of folks that might be an influence the next time a secret shopper comes in as to whether the guy's fired or not. I can't believe that wouldn't be somehow influential.
[John]
Not arguing with whether it's a shitty game or not. Just that what everyone (or most people) seem to be replying to isn't what seems to be happening.
And my wife and I did the secret shopper thing once. It was ok but we had to go to fast food places most of the time and we really don't do the fast food thing all that much.
[John]
It didn't seem like spying was involved. You know which ones of your coworkers don't follow the rules. The hat, cell phone, talking folks. He wasn't talking about turning them in, not even placing a bet. Based on what you know, you pick who you think will fail and put it in an envelope. When the next person is caught breaking the rules, the envelopes are opened and the winner determined. They get the 10 bucks. Now the boss does get a list of folks who might be breaking the rules for the next go-round but he had secret shoppers going through the store and taking their responses (hats, cellphones, etc) as a method of choosing who is fired.
[John]