2009 - already?

Hard to believe it's been two months since I've posted. A lot has happened in the past 8 or so weeks, many of which really deserve their own posting, so I'll just lightly touch on what's been going on personally and professionally.

Tonia and I celebrated an amazing 9 years of marriage last month. I can't begin to express what that means to me in words. She's the best wife a guy could hope to have. She's put up with me, helped me grow, encouraged me, pushed me, been a great step-mom to my son, and a wonderful manager of our home. I repay her by doing stupid stuff, and for the life of me can't imagine why she chose me.

Nick continues to learn to be a teenager - and I continue to learn how to be the parent of a teenager. We're entering one of the biggest transitions in his life, and our relationship. As such, roles are changing. My job needs to change from being more the coach or manager that gives him direction and instruction, to that of the encourager and cheerleader he needs to help apply the things he's learning in his own life. It's an interesting and challenging time for certain, but a defining time as well. My son is becoming a man.

For me, I continue to struggle to make positive change in my life (details later). It's a daily, sometimes hourly, question whether I'm up or down about life in general. My last physical had some disturbing news about the progression of diabetes. I need to make significant lifestyle changes now, or this disease will kill me sooner rather than later. So it's a constant battle internally to resign myself to the fate of the disease, or to learn how to fight harder.

Professionally, the scope of my job has changed significantly. I'm now in the systems department, focusing primarily on security and PCI/DSS compliance. I welcome the new challenge and hope this process can help our company move forward. It's an exciting time as it feels like we're on the verge of turning a corner. Several things we've been working toward are falling into place, so 2009 should be an exciting year.

The Worship Team is going pretty well. We've made significant progress in the quality of what we do. I LOVE to play, but more than that, playing with a purpose of leading our congregation's hearts and minds into the presence of the Throne is also a great responsibility. I'm honored to be able to participate at several levels from planning, to running sound, to playing instruments.

For goals this year, health has to be top priority. I'll make a detailed list of goals for my next post, I think.

Happy 2009!

Mac Withdrawal and Linux Laments

If you hadn't guessed by reading previous posts, I'm a pretty big fan and user of Apple computers and the Mac OS X platform. My main machine is first generation MacBook Pro that I purchased a little over two years ago. It's become my almost constant partner as I take it nearly everywhere with me. Not only is it the ideal work computer, it's an excellent personal computer, too. In two years, I'd had very little to complain about with this machine.

It. Just. Works.

I plug in a camera, it opens up iPhoto and asks me where to put the pictures. I plug in a camcorder, it opens up iMovie and starts importing the video. I plug in my Verizon eV-DO card, it asks me if I'm ready to connect. I plug in an external monitor and it asks if i want to mirror or extend my desktop. There's very little in the way of getting things done.

Last Wednesday, however, my beloved machine wouldn't start up. The night before, I'd worked on music for church until the wee hours of the morning. When I finished what I was doing, I clicked on Time Machine and told it to backup immediately then went to bed. Time Machine does automated hourly backups - I just got in the habit of doing a backup every night before bed long before Time Machine came into being, and haven't stopped. The next morning, I came into my office, sat down at my desk and grabbed my mouse to wake up my Mac- like I do every morning.

Nothing happened.

"Oh dear," says I, "wonder what that's all about." I tried to reboot, nothing but a gray screen and startup sound. I unplugged it and removed its battery for a few minutes, then tried again. Same results. My "oh dear" got a little stronger. Next step, I decided, was to bring the thing to Genius Bar at a local Apple store. I'm fortunate in that there are two stores within 20 minutes of my house, and two more within an hour. Anyhow, I got on Apple's website with my spare laptop, found that the Boulder Apple store still had Genius Bar appointments available, so I made one.

I made my way to Boulder and was greeted by a friendly guy at the Genius Bar. He fiddled with my machine for about 20 minutes trying various key combinations, attempted to boot it from their network, and then with an external hard drive. He decided that since the machine would respond with the gray screen and sounds, that it was probably just a bad hard drive, so he ordered one and said it would take a few days to get the drive and get it installed. Inconvenient - but tolerable, especially since I purchased Apple Care when I bought the machine and this work isn't costing me anything more. I then beat a hasty retreat from Boulder back to civilization.

Meanwhile, I still have to work. I work for a technology company from my home office, so a well-connected computer is absolutely essential - which is why I keep a spare laptop around. My spare is an IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T43. It's a few years old now, but still serviceable. I got it really cheap because it had, ironically, a bad hard disk. I replaced its hard disk and installed Ubuntu Linux on it some time ago. I keep the machine updated, and regularly use it as it spends most of its time in the living room for those times when you just have to look up what other movies that actor you're watching on TV was in on imdb.com.

Now since this is a backup work machine, I already had lots of things configured for what I need to work like Pidgin IM client, ssh configs, vmware console, softphone for our VoIP system, and so on. That and everything on the machine hardware-wise seems to work fine - including wired and wireless networking. But that's where the fun stops.

I mentioned above that I have a Verizon eV-DO card - what a great invention. I plug it in and bascially anywhere there's cell coverage, I'm able to get online. I've already mentioned how easy this device was to get working with my Mac: plug it in, click connect. That's it. Using it under Windows (on my wife's work laptop) was a little more difficult - had to install a driver and some goofy program to use it - but once that's done it's a matter of starting that program, sticking in the card, and clicking connect. Now to the Linux machine. I searched the internet for someone who's done this and found a blog with instructions on how to make it work. It invovles using the command line to probe the usb subsystem for the device, watching what happens when inserting the card by watching a logfile, writing a script, and editing a couple of config files. When you're done, there's a menu item on the network monitor applet that allows you to connect or disconnect from the network. However, there's absolutely no indication that you're connected nor any indication of the signal strength, so when when you click connect, you just get to hope it works by starting your browser (or email client, or terminal program, or...) and hope you have a network connection. It's worked well since I've had it configured - but man, what a pain to get setup and working. I can't imagine my mom, wife, son, going through this to get a peripheral device working.

So now I have my T43 that can connect virtually anywhere, and all my software working, I'm ready to use this as my main machine, right? Well, almost. On my desk, I have a laptop stand and a Samsung 19" monitor. Nothing fancy, in fact I bought it at Sam's Club. Anyway, plugging this monitor into my Mac and using it as an extension of its screen was super easy, just a couple of clicks after plugging it in the first time, and now every time it just works. In windows, it's just as easy. Plug it in, go to the display properties, and fiddle with things until it's how you like it. Linux however... well, I wish I could tell you, because I still haven't gotten it to work. I even spent time installing windows on the stupid thing to see if it was even possible - works fine. This evening I found an article about this laptop's display and how to hack the /etc/X11/Xorg.conf file to make external monitors work right, so I'll be attempting that tomorrow. Looks like I'm about to get an unwanted education in the intricacies of X11 configuration.

Don't get me wrong. I love Linux. We run our business on a farm of ~60 servers, all running Linux. I believe in the product, the philosophy of Open Source Software, and especially in UNIX and UNIX-like platforms. It's fast, flexible, stable, secure, scalable, configurable, interoperable - all the things you want in your infrastructure.

On the desktop, however, it's still an OS for the geeks who don't have a problem with hacking at system internals in order to make stuff work - or for closed hardware environments where things that will trip people up just can't be added to the system. I'll continue to use it, and will work through the problems I come across, thanks mostly to the user community. But, when someone asks me what kind of computer to buy, I'll tell them "Buy a Mac."

Grumpy Gus

Part of my job is being available 24/7 in case something bad happens with one of our systems. Something bad happened tonight at about 1:00AM and I'm still up nearly 2 hours later because I've not yet come down from the adrenaline rush. I'm not really happy about it.

We use a monitoring software system called Nagios that keeps an eye on critical services and servers, and then lets us know via email and text message if something breaks. I have my phone set to a really loud and annoying ring tone to ensure I wake up if there's a problem. This also means my wife, dog, and cat are on call with me as they wake up when the blasted thing goes off, too. Sometimes, my wife is never able to go back to sleep. She doesn't say anything, but she does let me know when she can't go back to sleep.

I'm pretty grumpy about the whole thing tonight. Got paged, got up and went to the bathroom and while I was in there, the phone kept going off. Turned out our sysadmin happened to be up and tried to rectify the problem, but our datacenter vendor didn't have him as 'authorized', so he was sending more messages trying to get me up.

When I realized he was sending the messages, I bit his head off.

Not good.

I was able to get tonight's problem taken care of, but at what expense? I've potentially alienated an employee, my wife is annoyed and up, and here I sit almost 2 hours later - still wired from the event. With my poor health, this kind of emotional stress and lack of sleep is quite literally killing me.

My boss has titled his blog "Life and Liveliness" with this description:

Life and Liveliness is a concept taken from Scott Peck's book 'People of the Lie'. The basic idea is that everything we do, say or take part in either adds life and liveliness or takes it away. A life that is enjoyed, is full of liveliness. It's just a question of choosing to get there.

I can't say that these experiences add life and liveliness - in fact I can say without question that they take it away.

It's time to choose correctly for a change.

Getting Things Done

Fernando posted recently about concepts from a book called Getting Things Done that have helped him organize his life. Reading through his post, I realize I'm suffering from a couple of key points: First, the capacity to deal with and prioritize many incomplete projects, and secondly, procrastination.

My company always has many projects happening. I'm feeling overwhelmed almost to that point of not knowing what to do next. Couple the massive amounts of project work we have to do with maintaining daily operations and then reacting to problems as they arise, and I don't feel like I'm moving projects along as efficiently as they should be.

It's an eye-opener to me that procrastination can be attributed to not clearly seeing the the very next thing that must be done to keep a project moving. That fits in nicely with one of my current goals as a manager: provide clarity. One of my boss's key tenets of management is that it is management's responsibility to provide clarity so people can do their jobs. This concept pulls that all together for me. I need to learn how to break down tasks into smaller detailed tasks - quickly.

I've ordered the book.

Why I run a Mac

I haven't yet posted about work. Currently, I'm Director of Customer Services for a small Software as a Service (SaaS) company. Our services are designed to facilitate fundraising and relationship building for ministries. We support our product on three major platforms: Mac, Linux, and for those unfortunate souls still stuck with it, Windows.

Our company is part of a growing breed of organizations who've realized that walls, bricks, mortar, and especially cubicles, can get in the way of productivity and bringing life and liveliness to their staff. Sometimes this is termed as working in a virtual office, telecommuting, or working from a Small Office/Home Office (SOHO). Whatever you call it, though, I think it's wonderful. Myself or anyone in our company can be productive virtually anywhere there's internet and cell coverage available. That means I can live and be anywhere that brings me life - and still do the work I need to do to contribute to society and tend to my family's material needs and wants.

And with a single Mac computer I can develop, test, demonstrate, and use our products in the environments our clients will.

Why Mac computers? Well, other than the fact that Macs work better for most people than other computers out there, Macs offer one thing that no other computer does. The ability to run Mac OS, Linux, and Windows. Simultaneously. Virtualization products from Parallels and VMWare make this possible. For a company like ours that believes you ought to be able to live and work in ways that suit you, as well as add value to an organization, offering our product in this way only makes sense.

So that in addition to all the other great stuff you've heard about Macs (they just work, they're more secure, they last longer, they're easier to use...) makes it the only computer I'll buy, or recommend.