half a cat

I’ve managed to update some long lingering photos:

• The Summer 2006 Huber Wedding

• New Garage & Brewing

• D.C 2006 Trip

Hrm — perhaps a few quickies as well

• Turkey Day was a 3h drive “Up Nort” to one of Moms sisters’ places — very nice spread and a great meal. Marinated wild turkey…mmm! That is a long drive for a meal though…
• Long weekend - so nice. I’m refusing to even turn the work laptop on. This is driving me a bit nutty, but I’m dealing with the withdrawl symptoms nicely.
• In Vino Veritas: Gotta get the Cab/Merlot bottled this weekend — by next Oct with 10 months in the bottle, it should be damn good.
• Lots of good news on the Cray front. This is a huge validating win for us and really should help move Cray back to the front of the pack, if not breaking away from the peloton someday entirely, for real HPC offerings. Wankers with your “clusters” need not apply. By-the-way, anything below a 30TFLOP system now immediately registers as “small” with me — I know, a bit snobbish — deal with it.
• The year of road trips starts in under 30 days. Oy. We are driving back to MT with the dogs for Christmas — I’m praying for a smooth trip both ways. If all goes well with the dogs, we’ll be repeating this trip 4 times next year — 3 weddings and then Christmas. If all does not go well, we’ll be repeating the trip with the addition of drugs for the dogs. Modern pharmacology is not without its benefits.
• Boston - I’ll be there Saturday May 26th through early morning Tuesday June 2 for the Liza’s wedding - I’d love to catch up with a certain Herr Schwan & McDonald provided they can be troubled to drink beer.
• The Violator: Just go watch. This, Ladies & Gentlemen, is my future brother-in-law. I couldn’t be happier.

That was the best t-shirt seen in the recent trip to Philadelphia.

So - wedding updates for the abnormally nosy or just plain voyeuristic:

• Location: Leaning towards the old Depot at Oscar’s in Billings — sight unseen yet, but it sounds neat.
• 2nd Best Man (As I’m the one doing the marrying, I should be the Best man) : Kris
• Groomsman ..mmm, gonna have to come up with a different title there, that sounds like they should be making a horse pretty. Not that I mind that comparison. Marcus,
• Master of Ceremonies: Lou Becht. Seriously — is there anyone better for the job ?
• Date : Oct 6 2007. Wow. I have a wedding date.

So — what else has been going on ? Work. Then some work, and a bit more work, I took a poop, showered, slept a bit, then a ton more work. I might have done some more work in there somewhere. Oh yeah — then there was that one day that I worked a lot. Then I mowed the lawn — cause lawn’s don’t talk

I’ve been working on a “Lustre issue” at Sandia - nights, days, and weekends for ~3 weeks now. This is right after the 2 weeks of Army fun and 3 weeks of ORNL fun. Results: ORNL upgraded to the largest open science in the U.S., narrow-cased the Army with one of the other engineers on the File System team here at Cray, and Sandia’s issue #1 fixed and issue #2 being worked way below Lustre. There are a lot of folks who I should thank for either showing me more about Lustre or helping me work out other interactions and issues with the XT3. I’ve already done so personally, so I will protect the innocent here.

BTW - I saw an IOR perform writes at 34 GB/s on Lustre. Holy @#$@#! For the supercomputer illiterate - that is like throwing 8 DVDs across the room every second. Yeah, we got some mother@#$ing performance on a mother@#$ing supercomputer.

Oh yeah, and one very exhausted and burnt out Nic. I’ve gotten some very nice emails from mid to senior level managers about my work, and the freedom to take the time I need to “work from home” and regroup. Have I mentioned how much I love working for Cray ? I have been really working hard to make sure I am making the most of this opportunity. I really am starting to feel like I can move more and more into being a real “developer” on Lustre and I think I can move into a technically senior position in a few short years.

Well — I’m going to have another beer and pass out. I think tomorrow is clean the office, sleep and make beer day. Maybe I’ll mow the backyard too. Anything could happen!

This will be short and sweet. Albuquerque sucks. The food was pretty good - but the town is just dingy, dirty, and unkempt. So far my best description is a “West Philly of the Southwest”. BTW - the people I did meet and interact with were very nice and quite humorous. Thankfully they have the internet there and I can just work remotely next time.

Cray, Inc. apparently…. It has been a while since I’ve posted some good poop humor…

So — I was standing in the hall near the restroom — the same hall that leads to the kitchen and lunchroom btw — talking to a fairly senior software manager and one of the lowlevel software guy about lord-knows-what and all of a sudden there was this “PRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT” noise that came flying out of the men’s restroom. Through the closed solid wood door. The conversation stopped, we all kinda glanced at each other and then in unison burst out laughing. The phrase “give ‘er hell” was said and we walked away — not wanting to see who came out of the bathroom. There are some things that you just don’t want to know.

Because I think this way — that kinda made me think back and wonder about some of the other “bathroom events”. There seems to be either an issue with the water/coffee/deli machine OR swamp-ass is much more prevalent than we think. I’m pretty sure at least 4 times a week I’ll be in the bathroom (I really use it much more often…) and hear someone really letting one fly. If you are lucky — just a little “prrt” - but at least once a day you hear someone having a “movement” that could be described in the mildest terms as a week-long-tequilla-binge-meets-30-day-challenge-to-eat-4-bratwurst-a-day-while-drinking-giardia-laden-new-jersey-turnpike-shots. I’m really understanding now the flushing power of public toilets — sometimes you need a firehose to sink these battle-shits. What is really wondefull is how unashamed people seem to be with these conditions. Most times if you have this problem in a public restroom — you try and spread out the “frrrgggugglllefwopfwop” so that it doesn’t sound like a underwater rocket taking off. But not these folks — hand to god, I’ve heard actual straining and grunting. Give ‘er hell indeed! Oddly enough — rarely do smells enter the picture. Perhaps the fans really do work - btw, rarely is not never. Good heavens…

Now a question for the lazyweb — is this common for all workplaces? How about women ? These are things I need to know.

This is almost the perfect weekend — almost because the weather is doing a nice job of being crappy. I tink it has been in the 60s and overcast all weekend. The bonus to this of course is a lot of time spent testing the finer points of Quantum mechanics - specifically that of whether two materials ever actually touch. In this plane of existence I’m speaking of my ass and the sofa. The evidence is not quite conclusive, but the dents in the cushions seem to indicate that I have a significant electron cloud which is impacting the atom spacing in said cushions. That is the beautiful thing about Heisenberg’s principle. I know exactly where I am but no idea of where I’m going. Or do I Shrodinger the whole mess and only really know which atoms are my ass and which are from the sofa by observing the separation ? Wouldn’t that be a kick — if one could somehow take electron energy transfer from the sofa to become more energetic? Hrm — it seems that may already happen in reverse, given the propensity for sofas and napping. Is my sofa going to spontaneously combust some day from the absobtion of so much energy ?

Anyhooo…. Most of the weekend has been spent watching World Cup games. I’m not planning on watching all of them - Tivo only has instructions to record the England, U.S, and Spain games. I may have to alter that if any of them go tits-up before the elimination round. I have had two consecutive mornings of coffee, sofa, blanket and el World Cupo. Currently Mexico is trying to convince Iran to bring their “war faces” next time. I’m hoping to see one of my 3 teams make it far enough to get me interested in the final games. I do find myself really wishing I had HD TV at this point - but only with a HD Tivo. Soon, but must pay off other bills and purchase a house.

Speaking of said house…it is looking like time to re-evaluate the finances and determine exactly how much of my income I really want to spend on a house payment. From the initial look at the current rates of exspenditure, I won’t be able to afford a house that I really like. Boogers. I’d really really like to get a nicer house because I don’t fancy myself moving in the next 10 years again unless something really strange happens. Yes, I like my new job that much

Speaking of said job (and here starteth the rantingseth) - I’m starting to get a bit miffed at the old job, where I started to think that I wasn’t bright enough or skilled enough to do actual Lustre hacking — network, kernel, disk layer, super-complex distributed networking programming. Yes, I’m not going to design the next great filesystem, but I really am starting to think that I can make a pretty good swipe at debugging and understanding the code base. Time will tell It just pisses me off that someone or worse yet — myself — convinced me that there were limits to my skills in this area without actually exploring them.

Ok - the old elbow is starting to kill me here from some retarded furniture re-arranging last night. Just a final note to those Right Coasters - I’ll be in Philly Jun 30th, July 3rd-4th and in D.C July 1st-3rd. Be there or get sprung.

Cheers!

Woooot!!!!! Daddy has a new job!!!

The very gracious folks at Cray have extended me an offer to work in the Filesystem group as a Software Engineer III. Sweet! I will be working from the Medota Heights, MN location — so all you Mpls/St. Paul folks get ready, I’m a moving on in! Cray is a fantastic company, I’ve worked with them and their hardware for the last year or so. I am hoping my experience translates nicely into a easy transistion there. I will be working to help support Lustre and other filesystems on the Cray hardware line, so watch out CFS — I’m Baaaaack.

Thankfull this ends a very anxious (and broke!) job search for the last 6 weeks. I’m ecstatic that it is over, but I do have to say that not doing much for 6 weeks was a right nice vacaction. I’m going to be starting the new J.O.B. on the 13th of March and I am so looking forward to working and earning my moohlah again. I now have a very hectic week and a half to get my current residence packed up and cleaned, then hang around Billings for a week to wrap up some paperwork stuff, then on the road and moving here around the 9th or 10th. Wee! Thankfully Aunt Red has offered for us to hang out at here place until we get settled and find a new place. I will most certainly be taking her up on that offer!

Well — I better get back to enjoying the minus 10F goddamned weather here in MN. Yeah, stay inside has a nice sane ring to it.

Some days just rock. I started off today by waking up to an alarm, something I do maybe maybe 10 times a year. I am a firm believer that getting your schedule in order and allowing your body to wake up naturally is light years better than cursing like a drunken sailor at a small electronic box every morning. I prefer to cuss at them all day

Anyhoo.. woke up, shower & shave, coffee, then moved towards clothes - dress shirt & trousers with a wool dress coat. I was given a ride to the airport (coffee in tow), hit security right off as I had checked in online, then off to the gate to get some good coffee-drinking-iPod-jamming-reading-book lovins before boarding. Arrived, hit Budget for my car (this is where the day started to get really good) - I was due a compact car, but somehow scored a Ford SUV thingy with leather interior. Something about wearing a dress coat and driving a leather interior that makes a man feel good.

Ahh yes — so the real reason for the trip was an interview. It went quite well, blah blah blah. Pretty standard fare for a tech interview, lunch, etc. Back in the SUV (btw - I HATE these fugging things. They are SO the new mini-van;popular with soccer moms and neutered men. They just have bigger tires and bumpers…) Got a nice surprise while there when the sales dude from my old company walks in. Sometimes the planets align just so - it was good to see him and catch up a bit. Hit the aeropuerto for the flight back, enjoying the ability to just drop the car off and run - I love direct billing. More Ipod & book, interrupted by some people watching. Women in SLC are tall. Huh. Came home, was picked up at the ‘port by the lovely gf. What is it about sexy women driving your truck to pick you up that just well… you know. Back to the shack and chilled on the sofa with dog, girl and beer. Mmm good!

Fire, kerosene laterns, Indian food (homemade of course!) for dinner, more hound-scratching and some tivo lovins. Backrub for the gf, quick email check, now off to my leather chair and the fireplace to read some more.

Some days just rock.

Update Sampling my latest beer concoction - porter with coffee & chocolate. OMFG. Yeah, that good. It is still really young yet, but I envision me trying to dance with the dog if I drink too many more of these.

So, everyone is right - the waiting sucks. We are in week 3 of the great unemployment fest, and frankly I’m getting a bit annoyed. I’ve heard from 4 different companies that they are “interested in talking to me about an opportunity”, after which I send off the resume to be forwarded to HR. HR apparenlty stands for “Hole of Relinqushment” - kind of like getting put on “Ignore” on the phone. I am 99% sure that these delays are not due to any personal issue with me, rather the sheer volume of data and items that need processing in these said HoR departments…but that 1% is annoying - especially when one does not have much to do and ends up with his brain re-hashing events and scenarios ad nauseum. So, yes waiting is a real PITA.

In the meantime,I’ve uploaded a few more photots for your visual enjoyment:

• little man (Portana’s wearing his Seahawk jersey during the first playoff game. He’s a hillarious little kid — it was really interesting to see how he and the Bogart interacted. Talk about mutual fear for a while, but after the initial scare, some chasy-chasy and petting was had.

• Dr. Jacks’ No. 7 Go-Kart. What more fun can you experience than metal fabrication while drinking?

Ok, so last Monday was a bad day - I got laid off. Fuck. I’ve delayed writing about it as I wanted to get my thoughts in order and just hang out and scratch in front of the TV for a few days. (Just going to toss this in here — save me the comments telling me to “hang in there”, etc — I’m doing pretty good :P) It was put to me as a “shift of resources” - I will take that at face value and not ponder why it was me specifically. It was a pretty pleasant conversation — save for that bit about me not getting paid to do stuff any more — and I am not harboring any ill will towards the company….yet I reserve the right to be bitter at some future date.

So! What does this all mean? New job time - of course, and a very likely relocation. Salaries in Billings are no where near what I was making and it would be a huge hit to my career as a whole. I would love to find another job that would allow me to work from home (no matter where I call home, like the Pub with free wirless during WorldCup games… just warning you…), but they are very rare. I do have two very promising opportunities and a few others that I am looking towards for future imployment. One of which is a “lifeboat” from CFS that I am really really really hoping works out. I would be working in the same field on the same software with some of the same customers — a trifecta for me if you ask. Here is the teaser for those regular readers: I’m crossing my fingers for a move to the Twin Cities area or Seattle. The former being slightly more desireable for traffic reasons (riding the Sledeghammer or HD in Seattle does not sound fun). I’ve also got a bit of family there that would make the transition so much easier. I will keep you folks posted if any paperwork gets involved. Right now I have nothing in writing that makes me think I won’t be working at UPS come March.

The next job is going to have to be better than the last — getting laid off is not going to change my opinions on what I value in a job. I am almost looking to have an office to go into — working from home is great, but I truly do think that it is less than optimal in anything but a very small company where the level of communication is low. I also want benefits. Call me crazy (crazy!), but medical, dental, etc are not an option anymore. I also want a bit more mature company that the last one, perhaps with better management. I really enjoy the self-driven work environment, but I feel that coupled with working from home it devolves into a situation where I was getting burnt out too easily and disenchanted with the work. Personal problems? Oh sure - but I do think that either closer management — or at least involving the employees into some sort of structured environement — would help alleviate these issues. If nothing else, they would be noticed and dealt with a bit earlier. I have some strong opinions on the former company that I will not voice here, it would be massively inappropriate and probably harmful to all of those involved. If people from that company wish to hear what I have to say, email me offline and I can flesh out my thoughts there.

So …you ask…what have I been up to? A lot of nothing on some days — boy is that a luxury! I’ve also been quite glad at my recent re-budgeting, I think that will allow me to track and spend in a much more sane manner now that I’ve got a limited income. I took a whole day yesterday to go help work on the ’shop’ go-kart - I did a ton of welding and got the new front-end all ready to rock. That was SO much fun, save for laying on my back and welding overhead — slag burns fugging hurt. I’ve got a good swat at the laundry and the regular house cleaning too — for once I’ve not got a huge backlog of those types of things to do. I’m also starting to cleanup and start packing — might as well get ready for the inevitable. If nothing else, I’m looking at moving to a less expensive place come June. Oh yeah, and going to the gym. It burns us!

Well - that does it for now, more TV to watch.

This weekend was interesting.

Friday night was very relaxing and needed. The Portana picked me up after we both finished up work earliesh — like 4.30 pm or so. We headed down the Copper Colander to drool over the real kitchen gadets and appliances. The store is pretty solid, but it was missing my favorite brands for knives and cookware. I’m a big fan (for no reason really) of the Henkel 4 Star and for really good reasons the Calphalon One cookware. I’ve got a few of both and have been extremely happy with them. After CC, a nice dinner at the 11 cafe, then headed out to the new Furniture Row to gawk at stuff. Nothing much of interest, save for a $174 bean bag (it was not $174 nice, more like $75), and a really nice $300 leather coffee table that might have to come home with me some day. I think I found my next mattress set too, but that is a year or 3 off. A stop to the Petsmart and Costco for Dog, Cat, and Bird food, toys, bedding, etc. Sigh, little buggers are expensive. Cute, yes but expensive.

Saturday night… gift exchange with my usual group of friends. There was a ton of Elk related foods (Kris got one too!) and the usual liberal quantities of booze. I made some Tandoori drumsticks for the crowd, seemed to go over pretty well. A good time had by all, and some quite interesting gifts. One was a dildo-catcus, died green and needles for spines. I am still shaking my head over that one. We all drank enough, some cough cough more than others. Thankfully I had a lovely person to give me a ride home. At least I think that is how I got home.

Sunday morning sucked. I was quite well hung, and not in the Enzite way. Recovery was a bit slow in coming, but a nice long day of sofa denting was a proper reward for doing battle against the evils of alcohol over-production. Watched a ton of football — some good, some bad. It was a nice relaxing day and I’m glad to get back to work for once

BTW — did I put out some sort of sign? Today is the second time in as many weeks that I’ve gotten an email asking me if I’m interested in a new job. I’m not looking, really, but the offers are flattering and it does give me some options should I choose to move along there. Intersting days…