You are such a geek... » geek

Ode to Becca

admin — Sat, 29 May 2010 14:53:20 +0000

Well this isn’t really an ode in the greek sense, but it is a post about my girlfriend (reference below if in doubt who aforementioned girl I have been following around for a year is)

Like many others in today’s age we met online and played phone and email tag for a month. I was on a business trip to Tucson and her messages and voice were such a welcome escape from the crazy hours and stress. We exchanged stories of growing up, life dreams, and all the goofy little jokes that make us giggle. All I could think about in the desert that trip was, first getting home, second meeting her. I did so in rapid succession

The rest as they say is history, but as we come up on a year of dating I can say there is simply BB and AB, Before Becca and After. Life BB was a mix of black areas and wandering. AB she balances me out, is my confidant and advisor, my business partner and best friend. She accepts me for who I am in every way and I the same for her. In fact she hasn’t peeped about me sitting here writing a blog post, AMAZING! :)

I usually post technical documents on this website and insights into whatever geeky adventure I am on. Sometimes though it is important to know what powers the man who is typing. I love you Becca and thanks for letting me be who I am…

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Software Project Mgmt Reading and Blogs…

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 05:53:06 +0000

As I learned in a sink vs. swim situation, I wanted to share some books and blogs that helped me. UP FRONT LET ME STATE: I am still learning and screw-up ALL the time. I by no means have this figured out and would love to hear what works for you guys. We are all students of the human mind and can learn together on how this works.

Books you need to read from Amazon.com I compiled a list there so you can just purchase in whole or pick what is interesting. If you only pick one book be sure it is the Mythical Man Month. It brought home for me the resource vs. task view of the world. Being able to defend your position and schedules is just as important as being able to create them. Highly Recommend

http://www.amazon.com/wishlist/KFGNUDC6KD6C/ref=reg_hu-wl_goto-registry?_encoding=UTF8&sort=date-added

From blogs you should monitor via Google Reader or various other RSS reader…

http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/08571077781259521426/bundle/project%20mgmt

Specific posts that made me take pause and wonder what I was doing:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics <– I hate to post this because I find myself being the workaholic. Reading this post again reminds me of why I need to step back

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html <– This one made my jaw drop and TOTALLY change course on how I pitched my projects. It became more about knowing my customer and possible customers lingo before pitching the idea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_value_management <– Black magic till I started getting smart on it. Better or worse, DoD loves it and if you embrace the data it can set you free

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks?taxonomyName=Management+and+Careers&taxonomyId=14

Tips for Managing Geeks is a big topic in my world. The models you will read in books apply to MBA and more traditional engineering models. Geeks have nuances, this is my mix of all the sites I have read on the topic and many you guys have heard me say:

Whoever is right most, is the lead. Period.

Know your people! Birthdays, anniversarerys, important events in their lives. Add it to your Blackberry or Google Calendar and setup a reminder. Calling them the day before their 10th Wedding Anniversary does two things: 1 – Lets them know that you see them as more as a FTE/EP and 2 – Reminds them to take time off and buy a card or do something special. Head down during OT periods makes doing that rough.

Share credit. When I started giving my teams entire credit they became more willing to charge the next hill with me. Don’t worry about calling yourself out as having done well. Organic recognition, IE your folks see it will last longer.

Define vision and expectations. Do not settle for less, do not become mushy on your values and DEMAND compliance. Anything less is unacceptable and will be dealt with. Now with that said your expectations are almost always going to be higher than your team can obtain, so let them shoot for the stars and if they get to the moon than you did alright

Lead from the front. Geeks need to know you are a set of useful hands and not a set of beating hands

Do not report out on Monday or call an all hands with geeks. Chances are the weekend will provide a set of fresh eyes and geeks need that to tackle a problem. My advice, push customer and leadership meetings to Tuesday

If you have never programmed or specifically in the language or technology your teams use, then you will have very little credibility. Likewise your teams have never managed schedule or cost and deserve the same lack of credibility. As a manager and leader you provide the overall vision and will gain credibility by showcasing top coverage for them. Not going to meetings, covering scheduling and reporting…geeks hate that crap and will appreciate that they are not able to do the tasks. What you can’t produce in code you can produce in framework and structure. Just be sure you pickout the head person and develop a relationship of trust to augment

Geeks are passionate as evident by their selection of careers. As such there is a challenge to not release as quickly as they report. Chances are the walls will not hold the “my hair is on fire” approach and leaks will occur to your customer or leadership. Let them leak. Because I established a chain of command and RAA (Responsibility, Accountability, and Authority) I always told people “You can take what my staff is telling you and run with it. Until the report leaves my lips or inbox it is all simply hearsay. They have no authority to report and as such your choice to act on their data puts you both in a bad position” That usually woke people up…it puts a LOT of responsibility on you though.

Process and beuracracy exist in any company. Geeks hate it, shelter them as much as possible. There might be 10 steps to get something done, but only show them the 2 you need their input for.

Management speak should be avoided like the plague. There is no socializing, synergy, energizing, leveraging, or “long poles in the tent” in their worlds. Save it for above blog posts where I mention knowing your customer lingo. Geeks don’t care

Train your folks. Every person is usually hand selected, but if you want to grow them then you must feed them. In a bell curve we discipline the bottom 10%, train the 80%, and expect the top 10% to be amazing. When you train the bottom 90% you are reinforcing that it doesn’t pay to be the top dog

Nokia N900 Demo Unit

admin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:47:26 +0000

I think in part to my tweets of N900 lust and desire, Nokia contacted me to see if I was interested in a demo unit. After validating the email was NOT from Nigeria I quickly responded with a “YES PLZ SEND MEZ FONE!”

Why the gadget lust when I have a top-of-the-line iPhone? Easy, I am a geek. While I enjoy the hell out of having nice and easy to use devices, deep down I want to tinker. My original move to Mac was because I didn’t trust myself to have a Linux or BSD machine with me on the road. Every waking moment would be spent tweaking the kernel or compiler options for just a little bit more speed. Bleeding Edge, you betcha.

Linux though has become a lot easier to use as of late. My days of Debian 1.3 are long gone and it has evolved to grandma levels. Can the same happen on a phone? The n700/800/810 I once owned were not able to.

The geeky things I care about:

SDK that allows for quick-n-easy cross compiling of code
Active user community
nmap/kismet/libpcap based tools available
IM client with encryption
Terminal
Multiplatform support

The shiny-side things I care about:

Skype support
Syncable media player
Browser that can surf standard web
Google Voice Support
App support
Multi-touch
Maps
Sync with the cloud

Things that annoy me:

Steve Jobs
iTunes
DRM
No published spec

When the device arrives I plan on walking through the device with each of those areas. I will pop the SIM card from my iPhone and turn it off for the period of time I have the demo unit. Results to follow in the coming weeks.

http://myn900.files.wordpress.com

Travel Days for 2008

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 04:13:39 +0000

Why stop a geeky tradition?! Here is 2008′s travel graphs. This year I did hit the 2 full trips around the Earth. I am not sure what 2009 holds, but I had a 30% increase in travel and I only have 17% to go before it is a full 100. Here is last years stats: Travel Days for 2007

Similarities between Santa and System Administrators

admin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:26:19 +0000

Santa is bearded, corpulent, and dresses funny.
When you ask Santa for something, the odds of receiving what you wanted are infinitesimal.
Santa seldom answers your mail.
When you ask Santa where he gets all the stuff he’s got, he says, “Elves make it for me.”
Santa doesn’t care about your deadlines.
Your parents ascribed supernatural powers to Santa, but did all the work themselves.
Nobody knows who Santa has to answer to for his actions.
Santa laughs entirely too much.
Santa thinks nothing of breaking into your $HOME.
Only a lunatic says bad things about Santa in his presence.

How I will get dates now :)

admin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:17:55 +0000

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-07-06/

Geek and Backup Pride

admin — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:50:24 +0000

Geeks pride themselves on the ability to institute good backup routines. We laugh in the faces of those poor souls who scream and yank hair as they watch their data disappear into the ether. Tonight I realized that a fresh slate might not be such a poor thing to do once in awhile.

My hard drive is full on the MacBook Pro and it is driving me crazy as I attempt to work on some virtual images. I did what any geek in my position would do and wrote a short script to hunt down where the space had disappeared to. I found it in a folder called Annulment. Annulment. I had come up close and personal with my backup routine and knew that I better inspect before simply deleting.

It had been years since I looked in the folder which I had encrypted for some reason. That should have been an indicator in and of itself but I decide to unencrypted anyways. Deep down I guess I will forever be a pack rat and the rat had found his old hole now. Slowly the file names began to remind me of what was in this folder and it brought tears to my eyes. Let me state that it isn’t that I am not over the whole ordeal, I am. What is amazing if you line this up with yesterdays post is that we do well to block out the bad. When you find your 3 year old backup routine the bad comes front and center.

Why do we keep mementos of a past we despise? Everyone has something in the closet, a shoebox filled with letters from a high school sweet heart, a picture of that time in the military. We keep things. I tried to think back to what was my reason for going as far as to encrypt and store this archive. What were the thoughts on my mind 3 years ago when I went through all this trouble. It seemed that reading through the documents and emails did little to remind me of why I was this stupid.

Then I opened one inauspicious file that truly ripped into my heart. To respect her privacy I will only post the snippets that pertain to this 2:45AM writing:

-I’m still young, at heart, and I want to go out and experience the world. I want to dance in every country…smile like there’s no tomorrow.

-it’s a connection. Where did it go? I have no idea. So I’m looking for it…

-I keep thinking that maybe I shouldn’t get out of the military. I’ll miss it too much.

That is why I stored this file. The one document named mine. This was her journal I had happened across as I undeleted the files from a laptop. It really wasn’t a journal as much as it was a long letter she never sent to me. I am not sure she ever intended to send it to me but tonight it was as if she had. What really hit me was the “experience the world, smile like there’s no tomorrow.” I kid you not, I have used that exact line in the past month as justification for the crazy life I live now.

Which all brings me to my point. We switched places. I hated her for choosing the military over me and for wanting to be young at heart. Why was it that I was the younger one and yet I felt more mature? Here I am 3 years later married to my job. The big difference of course being that I am not married now, but there is no chance I could be. That is the one thing I learned from her. That is one thing I learned from God. You can only serve one Master.

I haven’t the foggiest idea where I am going in life. Heck I can’t figure out what I will do tomorrow or what country I will be in on Monday. All I know is I don’t want to live my life like she wanted to live ours then. I am going to make some changes. It is time to open up and let God really put me where he wants me. I have very little play for the this year but it is about time to make some changes for the next year.

Geeks pride themselves on our ability to store files forever. The Egyptians sealed away tombs of carved walls, God gave Moses commandments on tablets, and I store encrypted files on a dual redundant backup plan. I understand why we store things, you never know what treasures and gems you will find buried in the dark.

login: Looking Back on Debian 1.3

admin — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:30:17 +0000

Back at the tender age of 12 I picked up a magazine at the Base Exchange. This magazine contained a CD. This CD contained Debian 1.3. All was well in the world…

I remember reading with such excitement about this amazing new Linux (yes I pronouced it wrong, I was a geek living in Germany) and how it was free. Free you say!? I had just spent the past year lusting for Windows NT for no other reason that it was enterprise ready. I had no clue what that meant but I knew it was something I couldn’t learn. Much in the same way as I would look with much glee on the SGI pictures in magazines with no hope of ever affording the 12,000 dollar machine. Such was life for a youngster.

That is what made Linux so exciting for me. It looked kind of like those funny Sun boxes and it was what HACKERS used so it had to be cool. With no understanding of what installing Linux met I dropped that CD in and used rawrite for the first time to create the boot floppy.

Then it died. My perfectly working Windows 95b edition machine died. Well I thought it had died when really all I did was blank the partition table attempting to do an install. All of this came back vividly today as I retraced that install on my MacBook Pro in vmware.

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The first thing that struck me was how much I remember watching the screen rush by in a flurry of kernel messages. I was amazed at the vast complexity of a free operating system. At the age of 12 I had no understanding of cfdisk and setting up partitions. This go around I flew through it knowing there was no Windows 95 install to blank on accident. When you compare this install process to the one of Debian 3.1 it is hard to believe that in those 8 years the routine was the same. While comfortable it all but symbolizes the troubles Debian has had facing the Ubuntu folks.

After the LILO issues being cleared up (THANK GOD FOR GRUB) I rebooted removing the virtual floppy. The virtual-BIOS beeped and there came a 2.0 Linux Kernel. I had played with Linux around the 1.8 days with Slackware but never could get the machine to boot. Watching the Virtual Machine boot gave me the same joy as it did all those years ago.

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By far the most daunting task from those days for my non-Unix mind was dselect. All I could think back then was how many choices there were. The amount of software avalibale was daunting and I had no clue what too pick. This go around was similar but with a different perspective. It was daunting to see the version numbers. XFree86 3.3. Netscape 3.01. You have to remember this was before KDE/Gnome. Forgetting the time-frame I was working with I jumped to a virtual console to setup my apt configuration. Apt wasn’t there. I freaked out looking desperatly for the package online before remembering that Apt didn’t release until the 2 series of Debian. Due to there being no ISO images for the install anymore began the process of mirroring the deb’s to my NFS server and using it for the rest of the afternoon. It was a learning process to remember such a raw and unpolished build and how the install process for packages occurred.

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Time passes and technology moves. My fascination with Vintage computers and Operating Systems stems from the era of change. In today’s computing world the players are condensed and the technology owned by large companies. The install screen mentions donating (no paypal link either) to the project of 200 volunteers. 200! Debian has grown into the basis for some of the greatest free software projects ever. Perens and Murdock are staples of the technology world now. Deep down the kid inside of me will never die, the excitement for seeing great people do great things never changes. I recommend you go find your first Operating System and take a walk down memory lane. Who knows, maybe it will help you remember just how far things have come.

Workout and Food Log

admin — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:42:34 +0000

Let me start by saying I LOVE thedailyplate.com and use the thing (as the name suggests) daily. Recently they added an option to export all your data to spreadsheet. Being the geek I am, I quickly began sorting and plotting the data. I highly recommend you do the same. For me this wasn’t a weight loss plan as much as a weight level plan. I am right where I want to be on the circumference of my waist, 145 pounds @ 29″. Not too small, not too big. Some of the more interesting numbers to come out of all this:

I work out 76% of the time, or 5.3 days a week average
The average American consumer 3800 calories a day

- I consume 1624.2 a day not counting workout
- Net 1154 with workout
Days I ate 3800 was zero
- Highest day was 3700

All of these stats are pretty interesting. I workout a good bit and watch what I eat. Tadda! If you want to see my spreadsheet click here.

Speechless

admin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:24:04 +0000

Other than the language and video games, it is so so true…