Burvil's Life: Sanctification in Progress

Seems like these updates are getting less and less frequent….

Well, we just had a farewell party for an intern at work a while ago. I wanted to get him a ‘chicks dig unix’ shirt from thinkgeek, the same one I got for koine a while back. However, it seems from this google search that they didn’t sell too well and went on the clearance rack, and are no longer available. Oh well.

I find it odd that I’ve met a lot of people who bash Windows, but when an alternative like Macs are suggested, they make up excuses. I have a coworker that’s like that. We have mostly unix/linux boxes in our data center, but the company provides Windows PCs. When he bashed Windows recently, a coworker and I suggested for him to get a mac. After a debate about how macs were expensive, and us countering that he could get a mac mini, or that there wasn’t enough software and us countering with examples, he just didn’t want to hear it anymore. But he’ll still bash Windows True, the company doesn’t really support Mac on the desktop, but I’ve asked for it in a recent survey. Until then, I at least have my powerbook.
Saw the Badgers play a good game yesterday vs. Michigan. Was close til the third quarter. At least a good learning experience for a relatively young team.

Susan and I have been going to First Baptist Church of West LA. It’s fairly well-rounded and biblically sound. The senior pastor went to Master’s when it was Los Angeles Theological Seminary; his expository preaching style is a lot like Macarthur’s. Yet, the one thing we sorta miss is same-gender accountability, so we’ve been going to CBS.

Wow, almost 2 months since my last post.

Well, let’s see, came back from Taiwan a couple weeks ago. My cousin got married, and it was good to catch up with family and meet some of Susan’s family, too. It was typically in the 90s when we were there, although the humidity made it feel worse. Supposedly it just started to get really hot in the week or two before we got there. First time at a traditional Chinese wedding ceremony – read and heard a lot about it, but never actually seen one.
It was there that Susan and I were asked to bow before our ancestors. No incense or anything, but it was still a little awkward as a beleiver; that my relatives might see that as worship, giving my relatives the wrong idea of what worship is. It made me think about what worship is at the core. I prayed about it and found Romans 12:1, “I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship.”. So, since it wasn’t like I was worshipping my ancestors, just giving my respect, much like I would do if I visited Arlington National Cemetery and paid my respect to fallen veterans. It definitely wasn’t like I was offering my body as a living sacrifice, as Paul writes in Romans.

Other than that, work’s been pretty busy. We’re working on getting some servers migrated to new racks, since we’re outgrowing the old ones. More and more of the management of these boxes is coming to us, and there’s always new projects coming down the line. We’re trying to get as much of this done as we can before football season starts – can’t have people complaining about not seeing a game. Guess that must bring in more than NBA or MLB games. Oh, and since I’m on call pretty much every other weekend, I’ve put in for a laptop. I hadn’t wanted it, since I value the time I’m not at work. But considering my new responsibilities, I figure it would actually give me more flexibility. Nonetheless, it would still be nice to get out one of these weekends in a park, far out of cell phone range, far from a Wi-fi connection, and without the Blackberry.

Well, the first week is done. Nothing I hadn’t expected – a lot more boxes to manage (and tons of reading to go along with that ), as well as a faster pace of things. It’s a usual adjustment process. Been learning a lot, too – there’s stuff here I haven’t worked with before. Kinda feels like I’m starting undergrad again.

Nonetheless, there are some things I miss, like:

• Being a true local admin on my own desktop (they really tie down the security on these machines – even so far as taking out the floppy and CD/DVD drives so you can’t boot off them),
• MacOS support,
• The 9/80 schedule,
• A (relatively) big office (I have a cubicle now).

Well, after three going-away lunches, a poem I read about folks in my department and how unique it is, and five packed boxes, I can finally say I have a sense of closure to this job. For now, at least It was nice to actually get some sleep last night after cramming all these last minute things in at work this past week. I seem to have a skewed sense of how long things will take – I kept thinking I was just about done wrapping things up, when something else kept popping up that I forgot.

One of the top questions I’d been getting from people as I leave is – ‘So, can I get free service or discount if I mention your name?’ Well, you can get free service calls. Sorry, that’s about it. But hey, if you are in fact continually having problems, that might actually a solace, not having to pay for someone to come out and troubleshoot your setup. I start on Monday, so I’ll find out details in the coming week and post it then.

In the past week, I’d talked to so many people that knew who left the company and came back. I can see why – it’s not just the benefits (which I found to be quite generous) – but there’s something about working there that’s warm and welcoming, and makes it hard to leave…. and once you do leave, you realize how different things are in other companies. Well, we’ll see where God leads me.

Well, I had a nice going away lunch with some sysadmins at my company last week, and there’s another one this Thursday with my own department. But the reality of switching hadn’t really, really start to set in until my manager sent out a mass email, and a coworker sent another mass email to my division announcing this week’s going away lunch. Not that I could really go back on my word at this point… I guess it’s just nervous anticipation of what lies ahead – looking forward to it, but somewhat anxious, too. Sorta like when I left DC – there’s part of me that will always be with the people I served for four years.

It also struck me that each profession seems to have its own jargon that could be really misconstrued, or even blown out of proportion. For example, I’ve worked at multiple jobs before, but this time around, when I got the email regarding paperwork for my _termination_, it struck me as odd why such a word was chosen. Maybe it has to do with the fact that this is the longest I’d ever been at one company. But it made me wonder – who started using it when referring to ending a period of employment?

Not that I would favor a wholesale change in words like this. I still find it ridiculous that LA County would deem the use of master/slave on hard drives offensive. Likewise, there is software like this where they refer to a backup server controlled by a master server as a device server, not a slave server.

But again, in the end, it’s just words….

Well, so I finally get to work in an environment that uses a real, enterprise-level backup software that has real command line functionality. Yup, the complete opposite of Backup Express, where I had to keep bugging their tech support to get any real response, and even then, the scripts they gave me they didn’t really support, as they say using their command line can corrupt their catalog database. I mean, the support folks were really, really helpful and knowledgeable, but I’d just been fed up with the lack of command line support and scriptability. I put in a support case for this, but didn’t sound like it would be integrated into the product anytime soon. Nonetheless, in the environment of the job I’m leaving, there aren’t that many machines, so doing backup was somewhat bearable.

The new job wil be a 24×7, on call environment … a return to the job I had a couple years ago working in a data center. Less of a commute, and plenty of opportunities to learn new stuff. I start May 8th. Dunno how often I’ll be able to update this blog, though.

Documenting what I’ve done in the past four years has been a little tedious – even though I document my day-to-day stuff, I still need to put it in all in one thing. It makes me realize how much I’ve learned in the past four years … it’s really God’s work, not mine. One thing that hits me as I look at old code I wrote – not that I don’t remember what I did or that the code or comments don’t make sense – but that I was pretty inefficient the way I did things. In fact, in some cases, it wasn’t just inefficient, but, well… stupid

Oh, and the impact of leaving has really been hitting me – I’ve never really thought of workplace as a family, but that had really started to change in the last year or so. I realize it’s hard to leave our comfort zone, but I think God wants us to do that sometimes so we can grow. I think it’s one of those times now.

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Now that I have my old site migrated to the new server, I’d submitted the new site to search engines, asked people to update their links, and so on. So I thought this cartoon was kinda amusing Maybe I’m a B-list blogger, I dunno. Not like it matters.

Granted, the crossposting still needs a little work, but at least I can actually do it now…

I’m posting at http://www.burvil.org, using another plugin.

Cross posting to xanga – does it work? As of this writing, it didn’t work for DJ – http://wordpress.org/support/topic/55892.