Squick me gently with a chainsaw!

[jsbowden]

I'm taking Friday off to hang out with evilxyzzy, who is flying back to the Right Coast to hang out for the weekend, and since I've drank three quarters of a bottle of an Aussie Cabernet (Black Swan...not as good as a California Cab, but still pretty damn good, and cheap too), I might very well be calling in hungover come tomorrow, but you know what? I'm not sure I care. Work has been drudgery lately, and a nice long five day weekend might just be what I need to get back into my groove.

The only thing of any real significance I've done in the last week was clean out multiple user databases (Windows AD, NIS, Postini, and RSA token users) of ex-ployees and add a new one who started this morning. I hate being in maintenance mode. I need a nice new, shiny, and most of all, BIG, network to build from the ground up. There's nothing like taking a bunch of disconnected inert boxes and making them into this nice happy collection of machines all running different OS's and nicely interoperating with each other transparently to the end users. I love doing that kind of stuff. That, and taking broken networks and cleaning them up. I've been in my current position for 5.8 years now, and the network pretty much runs itself these days. If I wasn't so damn good at my job, I'd have shit to do. I don't even have to change tapes out but once every 2.5 weeks or so anymore.

I miss the big chaos of NASA; there's nothing like a pair of flat Class Bs with everything from Win3.11 to the biggest boxes Sun, SGI, and Cray all make fighting over bandwidth on the LAN. Too bad the pay sucked and the environment was hostile. I miss the fun of making ATM, OCn, FDDI, SONet, Ethernet, Token Ring, Novell, etc, all talk nicely to each other. Too bad the telco/ISP sector is still in the toilet.

I'm telling you, the .gov contracting biz is fucking boring. Once you make things meet spec, they hate change and making changes becomes an Olympic Event of Paperwork Shuffling and I'd rather eat my own head. Even working for ODU CS was enjoyable when I could ignore that my boss was a complete asshole and I got paid less than peanuts; at least we had cool shit and a big network to experiment with.

Comments

[robeli.livejournal.com]

whispers - NASA is in Hampton Roads

[carpone.livejournal.com]

So, is that a good or bad thing? I'm indifferent since I left 11 years ago.

11 years. Bleh. Now I feel old.

[robeli.livejournal.com]

He wants to go back. I'm indifferent to Nova and Hampton Roads - both are fine, but both have their complaints as well. He really doesn't like it here - we stayed for the schools and for our house to build some equity. It's now at the point we could walk away with about 250-300K - you know what that would buy us in Hampton Roads. We'd have no or very little mortgage depending on the house we bought there. Heck - we could probably get away with both of us working part time!! Now that his company is part of Ratheon getting a job there should be easier too. Orginially we were going to stay here till Evan was in middle school, but now we're seriously thinking of moving back in the next 1-3 years.