The Empirical Manifesto

Sent my boss an email at 0715 asking her if she'd pick me up at the dealership. She hates it when I walk. I knew it would go straight to her blackberry. She used the opportunity to call me and bitch about being notified all night long on a threshold problem we were having on a server. Rather than fix the problem, I VPN'd in and removed her from notification. Just as good, short term. I entered a work-blog entry concerning the change, which made me late, but I made it past work, and to the dealership in an unprecedented 8-minutes! It was such a gorgeous day, I decided to walk after all. I only got a quarter of the way when my phone rings, and a horn honks simultaneously. It's my boss. "GET IN THE CAR! HURRY!" She's stopped on a four-lane divided road, traffic coming up fast behind her now that the light has changed. I run across two lanes and jump in her minivan, aka, the Delta Flyer. We screech away from the curb and by the time I get my seatbelt on, we're through the guard shack. She asks me what I did yesterday, the day she was out. I spent all day reconfiguring my workstation, and finally got it the way I want it. The Ultra10 is now running Ubunutu server with XFCE and the "ALE Panther Gtk2" theme with shading and my OSX backdrop as wallpaper. It looks damn good. I spent a large part of yesterday decommissioning some old boxes, and prior to turning them over for surplus, I usually strip everything out of them. EVERYTHING. I'm expected to remove the drives for destruction, but I stockpile SCSI cards, memory, NICs, fiber-channel cards...everything. Anyway, I came across a Creator3D and remembered that the U10 had a UPA slot (Neither the RAVE's nor the Netra t1125 can accommodate a UPA framebuffer) so I snatched that up, re-cabled the flat panel monitor, stuffed that bad-boy in there there, and BAM! Excellent resolution. Thank goodness. Linux does NOT like the Raptor GFX. It's 1030 now, I call to see if my car is ready as I have an 1100 lunch date with celtmanx. The car won't be ready until late this evening. WTF? You said it was going to take less than an hour? "That's if you waited on it, sir. We had others who were waiting." Grrrrrrrr. I called drax0r "When are you going to get here?" He says about 1100. That usually means before 1300. I call my wife, "Hey! Want to go to lunch with celtmanx and I?" She mentioned that he'd said it was to be boys only, so she already ate. Plus, she just returned from McKinney. I explained my dilemma and she offered to come back out, but she wouldn't have made it. I sigh a heavy sign and approach my boss. "Can I borrow your car?" NO! she bellows. "Will you take me to The Jalapeño Tree? I ask her. She already has her purse and keys in hand and asks what's up. I explain who I'm meeting, and why. She promises to keep it on the down-low. I shudder at the thought of people making a big deal about these things. As we're pulling in, I suggest she join us - since we're already here, and it is lunchtime. celtmanx was already there, and I'd suggested we meet at either 1100 or 1300 to miss the rush, and we were, in fact, the first ones there. I'd skipped breakfast in anticipation of the fajitas. Lunch was fantastic, and I felt several hours slip by as I both became more relaxed as we were having a good time, and more nervous because of all the work which wasn't getting accomplished. You see, I was supposed to have been deploying software on all the development servers prior to moving them into production. I thought I had until Friday, when in fact, I was supposed to complete the project by tomorrow. Oops. I thought I made it clear that if anyone altered the server to my status, I would walk out. You'd think celtmanx would know me better than that. Sure, enough, here they come! Clapping and singing. I took off watching the confused staff from the ante-room window. When I returned to my seat, my friend presented me with a gorgeous box of Dominican Montecristo cigars, the soundtrack to Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, Apollo & Dualla Minimates, and two Hallmark "Keepsake" Star Wars ornaments. Thanks dude. And thanks for making that drive. We got just a couple of pictures in, then back to the plant - we'd only been gone an hour! It was now noon. I decom'd the boxes, was trying to troubleshoot a binary executable issue on a remote HP/UX box, and for reasons I can't remember, drax0r changed the ulimit on our web server while troublshooting something, then immediately backed it out. While I was editing a file to add a umask entry, I was asking him, "What's ulimit for?" and rather than set my umask to 002, set my ulimit to 002. Yes, the app wouldn't start. I blame drax0r Either way, while I was trying to discover the reason behind the crash (systemwide ulimit was normal) it dawned on him and volia! Of course all this passing of time meant I didn't get my dev boxes completed. He took me to get my car just before 1900 and we left for home. I got on the highway, and traffic was stopped. As far as the eye could see. Then my fuel light came on. So I took the first exit to get off the higway and take a parallel surface road in. I spent another half hour on that 2-mile stretch of road. I left work without finishing the dev boxes because I wanted to be able to play with the kids before putting them down, figuring I could log in after their bedtime. But no. It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to drive 12-miles. I was exhausted. And it was already the kids bedtime by the time I got there. I promised them we'd play the next day. I stayed up until 0100 working on the dev boxes. But once I layed in bed, I couldn't sleep. drax0r had bought me a Monster drink at some point during the day, and it kept me up past 0200. I awoke at some point in the morning (late) and eventually made my way to work where I hammered on the same installation steps for eight-hours straight. When I got home, the first piece of the new desk had arrived, and it was MASSIVE! Much larger than it looked on the showroom floor. I'm going to have to rethink & re-engineer my layout. drax0r was up unusually early (after sleeping no less than 19-hours I might add) so we drove in together for work (right after I connected a keyboard & monitor to my RAVE to change its IP - for some reason I couldn't get the tty to work; i.e. http://darkvoyager.com (the old one) is now up and running again, however temporary this might be)) where we both immediately downed a Monster XXL Billabong huge 24oz can. I can already feel the energy coursing through my system. Once again, I'm high. Business lunch and LaserTag at the Main Event in Plano, TX at 1100 hours today. I'm going to reach critical velocity here very soon...