log.andvari.net - Log

October 14 2024

2024-10-14T15:09:00+01:00

Bit of a shuffle in what musical projects I'm working on - two groups I'm with have fizzled (at least, my involvement with them has) and one other is coming up.

One of the bits I've signed up for is playing samples on stage through front-of-house, so I've invested in a Boss RC-5 loop station.

These have seen a resurgence recently, solo artists have been using them pretty extensively to build up tracks (Ed Sheeran put out his own). The basic gist is that you can record a few bars of music through them, then have them repeat and play over them.

One of the other things they do is play back samples - modern ones like the RC-5 have storage you can drop .wav files of a certain type on there. In the case of the RC-5, it specifically wants certain formats -- for folks beating their heads against this, the cheat sheet is:

sox existingfile.wav -e floating-point -b 32 -r 44.1k looperfile.wav

Another bothersome thing about the RC-5 at least is the amount of fiddling to get loops/samples playing the way you want - setting tempo, repeat, the sample name, and so on. Of course, my first instinct is that I'd like to be able to backup and restore everything. Thankfully, you can do this -- if you plug the pedal into USB and go to Setup->Storage, it'll appear as a USB device. The storage is built-in, so swapping SD cards isn't a thing. You can then use rsync to back up and restore.

For setting up your setting and completely avoiding inputting text using a scroll wheel, you'll need to edit the XML file (what year is this?) at //ROLAND/DATA on the device. A lot of the fields are self-explanatory, the main bother being the Loop name -- this is done as an XML element of the ASCII codes of each letter in the name, like so:

```

"My Loop"

77 121 32 76 111 111 112 32 32 32 32 32 ```

This is a bit bothersome, so I took the opportunity to learn some more golang -- check out https://github.com/gerrowadat/looperutil for a wee utility for editing XML files and pretty-printing your setup.

Golang's XML parser is one of those patterns I'm not sure if I love or hate - make some structs that look like the DOM of the XML file, and "magic" happens. Works for my purposes, though.

If you're nervous, then looperutil xmlname "My Loop" will spit out the above, and you can paste it into your editor like a farmer.

Overall, this solidifies Roland/Boss as being still probably the kings of pedals that don't fuck around -- not only have they always been built like tanks, the ways to interact with them (be it stepping on them, or XML) still seems solid since I bought my first OC-2 in...1995 or so?

Now, it only remains to actually get out and play some gigs. As the serially defunct blog author said, "more on that Later"...

July 16 2024

2024-07-16T17:18:00+01:00

Going to be playing a bit of catch-up, since it's been a few months.

Work is still workin' -- I've got some coaching going on, and am still working mainly with one team on consulting. It's been fun times, and the gig is flexible enough that I've gone essentially part time for July and August. More time for...activities!

Since last time, I headed over to Morocco for a few weeks on the bike (shipped the bike to Malaga, and rode via the ferry around the more rural parts, including the earthquake-stricken parts).

It's definitely an eye-opener to see parts of the world that are still so rapidly developing -- someone who's done the trip a few times said that every time they come back, there's less gravel and more tarmac. This is obviously a good thing for most people, but it brings home that there are still parts of the world you should go see before they disappear. It was always on my list to go to Kyiv and Visit Pripyat; guess that's on hold.

Of course, the minute I got off the bike to do any other activities, I managed to nearly murder myself -- I flipped a dune buggy off a sand dune in the Sahara, which landed on my foot, breaking it (not too badly, but enough to be swollen and sore for a bit). No sign f an emergency department out there, so that had to wait a few days 'til it was home time.

That'll learn me to do things. It's July now (about 3 months later) so all back to close to 100%.

Plans for rest-of-year are to maybe update here more? And also keep myself busy with working with teams on fun projects.

April 01 2024

2024-04-01T11:54:00+01:00

A few months further into my "not working full-time and seeing how that goes" journey.

I've picked up a contract for the consulting end of my 'job' since January, that'll likely last til the summer or thereabouts -- it'd been fun doing the good and useful parts of the job I used to do, and being able to leave it alone when I leave work. Because I'm not 'full-time', I can take the odd day when I feel like it (not getting paid, of course), and the freedom of that is pretty good. I'd imagine I landed on my feet a bit with my first contract -- the sponsor is pretty chilled out about how much I work as long as the results we've talked about are happening. As with a lot of this stuff, I'm playing it by ear. Maybe it is normal?

I have a fairly...puritanical attitude to work, which it's hard to shake off. I occasionally get flashes of anxiety that I'm not in a big impressive tenured job that I can keep forever (Like I used to be, right? :-)). So I'm keeping an eye on the market as well, and if something really interesting comes up, I'll take a look. However, being able to do this for a while has been pretty good, especially since I actually picked up some work that's fun times. It's in IT, which isn't a world I've lived in at a technical level for a long, long time. However, the basics are similar -- busy teams, technical debt, trust, fear of change, and smart people keeping the lights on at the core that really do need a push in certain directions. Like with coaching, I get to do the fun parts.

Sometimes I wonder if I'd be better suited to being an IC -- if I've so successfully insured myself to the hassle-y parts of management that my skills there grew and tech stuff atrophied - I've been told I tend to underestimate my technical skills, so it's a thought in the back of my mind that perhaps at some future point I'll do IC again. Not urgent as a thought, but a thought nonetheless.

I've also found myself having to push myself to take time off -- even when public holidays come up (the team I'm working with aren't based in Ireland), I've had to remember and normalise not working. I'm heading to Morocco on the motorbike in a few weeks, so that'll cover me for time off for a while, right? :-)

Overall, I think I'm still learning things about myself that lay immobile for the longest time when I was working full-time - what I'm into, what motivates me, what my fears are, and a sense of normalcy about that being okay and being settled with it without absolutely everything being 'looked after'. A kind of corporate deprogramming, if you will.

November 21 2023

2023-11-21T14:51:00+00:00

The last few weeks were a bit of a hive of activity. I went back to work, started a small business, and went from no-busy-at-all levels of work-related concentration to quite-busy-and-not-very-stressful-yet. I'm going to be doing more than just coaching, but that's for another time.

Earlier this year, I asked J to marry me, and she said alright I guess. We're both very low-key about this sort of thing, so had a wee ceremony as mandated by the state (8 minutes!) and caught a few days away, being fed to an astonishing degree.

J is mostly not online, so that's about all the detail y'alls get -- this is a very nice thing. She has been family for a few years at least by now, so it's tempting to describe this as a formality or delve too deep into this Not Being a Big Deal, No Really. But, it is. I like this lady a lot and now I get to like her forever. Pretty class.

October 20 2023

2023-10-20T17:56:00+01:00

A lot has happened over the last few months, so rather than a big catch-all post, I'm going to do a few posts over the next few weeks.

The last week or so have been my first 'in the office', so to speak, since March. As is patently obvious to anyone who's been within earshot, I'm going to try freelancing for a while. This has involved me getting boring life and company admin stuff set up. But, I digress...

One of the major things I've been working on with myself is the concept of asking permission. I grew up in a very permission-based setting. That's not unusual of course, but I'm used to having to ask if I can do things -- as I went out into the Big Bad World, it has often been a very internalised obstacle for me. I feel like doing a thing might be nice, and there's no real obstacle aside from me missing having a voice sometimes telling me "No". That voice can sometimes feel unkind and capricious, and it's only recently I've recognised it as my own. In the meantime, I'd gotten very good at self-denial.

So, to work on this a bit I planned a longer trip for myself, on the bike. This would involve a wee bit of structure (the first 10 days or so were an organised trip with a group) and then another 3 weeks or so of just doing what I want. What it was supposed to turn into was about 5000km of going where I like.

It mostly got there. It was a pretty nice jaunt around some mountains in Italy, Slovenia, Austria and etc. (The photo is me! It's from Passo Gardenia in Italy, in the Dolomites). The latter part was interesting, since a lot of the structure fell out (I was supposed to go to a wedding in Sardinia, but ended up getting covid instead). I spent the last few weeks getting to a point where I was just chilling out, making my way randomly. Get up, figure out a cardinal direction, book a place to stay, and go.

While I'd like to say that this was a relevatory and life-changing experience, I'm only going to say about 80% of that :-) It was pretty amazing, but I further discovered that it's okay to not want to be on a mad adventure sometimes. I was definitely done by the end of the trip -- which is another good thing to know about myself. But, It was an interesting exercise in knowing what I'm like, rather than forcing myself to be like something.

I have a tendency, when I get into things, to really get into things. I'm still trying to figure out how much of it is for my personal happiness and joy in experiencing things, and how much is performative.

Like many other things that live inside my brain, it's a work in progress :-)

June 19 2023

2023-06-19T23:53:00+01:00

My last few weeks have ended up with me having about 30% of my regular day-job meeting/stuff-I-gotta-do load; due to a perfect storm of school stuff and other adventures (I'm currently collecting driving license categories! Trailer learner permit coming and sitting some theory tests for Truck license).

Other adventures recently was dusting off the campervan for this year - it turned into more adventure than we strictly wanted when the alternator in the van decided to die half-way to where we were going. This territorial Robin quickly reminded us we were only on his turf temporarily.

Next week I get to probably make a poor attempt at lacquering a wooden floor, and burying some cables in the garden that i definitely won't dig up again. Living The Dream. Still Alive. May think about work come....October or thereabouts?

June 08 2023

2023-06-08T23:12:00+01:00

I've mostly ported my homelab across, and took the opportunity to add actual monitoring and actual resiliency. I'll do a post on the janky setup.

I've also (thanks to some kind mastodaoine) gotten set up with restic to some remote storage. I'm glad software like this is still being made. Very little messing about and a well-implemented version of the thing we thought we could do ourselves with a shell script. You know who we are.

In other news, I'm also roughly half-way through a diploma course in Coaching and Mentoring. I'm pretty sure I'll end up using it in any case, but it's one of those things where I also want to try out if it turn out to be a source of energy to me. it certainly was when I was working in a larger enterprise, and it'll be interesting to see if that was all due to being invested in outcomes, as opposed to happy with the method and with helping individuals.

(Sorry for the 'writing prompts' post calling out how I haven't been posting here. I'm trying various methods to gather my thoughts as I sound out how my brain works these days. But that's another post).

May 09 2023

2023-05-09T23:30:00+01:00

In among posts about fiddling with electronics and occasional life updates, here's a life update!

My partner (and now fiancee, I guess?) isn't very present on the internet, and escews social media in fairly impressive ways. But, we've been together for close to 15 years, so we decided to make it official.

I say 'we' -- we still did the proposal and...dare I say formal part of things, but it very much felt like we were taking a further step on a closeness that has stood to us and will endure, I think. We're both very private, and very contrary when it comes to going through motions, so I suspect this'll be a paperwork thing

There's a calm in knowing that no matter where your head takes you, you get to come home to (or, indeed, stay home with) your favourite person.

Even if my head is tired and uncooperative and in 6 different directions (more on that later!), this is Real and Special and Lovely.

Another 50 years or so, then we'll see.

April 25 2023

2023-04-25T01:00:00+01:00

Further adventures in pretending homelab is real work!

This week, I've actually been hacking on getting restic running semi-regularly. It turns out (or at least, I've found by experimentation) that the way nomad does scheduled/periodic jobs means that the periodic jobs don't have access to variables the core job does. I may be doing something wrong, but I also wanted to write come code, so there's a hacky threaded restic job runner over here that I still have to tidy up and document a bit.

My main thing I'm working on is replacing consul. I don't have any need for its more advanced nonsense, and all I was using it for was finding jobs. It has a DNS port it listens on that you can point named at (and I do, here). It can be a bit flakey, for reasons I'm not sure about (and that are proably my fault).

So, I've decided to implement just that fuctionality myself, and rip consul out of the homelab. I'm not quite done yet, but I think nothing is talking to consul at this point. This change and some prometheus changes probably did most of it.

The code is at nomad-dns-exporter and, while terrifying, is still solid enough to run my lab on. It's also got some very basic prometheus metrics to scrape (I cannot prometheus my way out of a wet paper bag at this point, but we'll get there).

If you want to follow along at home, try:

virtualenv .venv source .venv/bin/activate pip3 install -r requirements.txt python3 nomad-dns-exporter.py --nomad_server=ip.of.any.nomad.server

Then test with dig myjob.job.nomad @localhost -p5333 - I shoould probably do smarter things with SRV records or something, but that's it for now. Next up is to grit my teeth and turn down consul to see what happens.

April 17 2023

2023-04-17T07:00:00+01:00

I've been gradually rolling out more homelab updates, including whats turned into a bit of a rebuild and de-flakiness effort. Nothing like a bit of sunlight to realise that things need a proper looking at :-)

It's also been pretty good for my brain, I think -- having the benefit of really looking into and learning how things work properly, rather than hacking on it until it bends to my often fickle and capricious will.

Anyway, this week's make-go-proper effort was starting to use a docker registry for localy cached images. I had been going about it arseways by having a local registry that I downloaded and pushed images to. Turns out A More Properer Way is to configure all your docker hosts to use a registry that's configured as a cacheing proxy. This also means if my home internet is dead, I'm able to move tasks around without it blocking on the new nomad hosts fetching the remote docker image.

The tl;dr, is to set up a registry with proxy.remoteurl set to a remote proxy. here's how i do it at home with nomad -- note that you can't push images to this registry, so I run a separate proxy-only registry. Then add the following to /etc/docker/daemon.json on your docker hosts:

{ "registry-mirrors": ["https://my-local-mirror.local:5001"] }

Probably overkill, but that's probably the point?

#worksonmycluster

2023-04-07T00:14:00+01:00

Now that I've a bit more time on my hands (more on that later) the predictable swing back toward being able to do actual tech fiddling has started (I Hope).

I've been running nomad from Hashicorp as the compute coordinator for my home setup for a couple of years now, and it's been keeping things going in a fairly unobtrusive way, so I'm going to publish a few more of my 'orrible hacks to get it to do as I say at all costs. I find it a lot more amenable to doing things without having to gut its innards or be a YAML savant -- all while being able to actually understand what's going on with my tiny wee brain.

the initial results are and are going to be at https://github.com/gerrowadat/nomad-homelab, and maybe that means I'll update stuff here? Maybe. Anyway, come and see how I do SSL certificate distribution probably wrongly.

November 06 2022

2022-11-06T21:32:00+00:00

It's November! That most wonderful time of the year when your brain and being need a little more maintenance.

Part of my maintenance schedule is taking the worsening weather as a prompt to feel less guilty about not going outside and doing outside things -- i.e. getting to coding and home sysadmin projects before Advent of Code kicks off.

Having ditched Kubernetes at home for various reasons, I've been running Nomad instead for homelab stuff. It is a lot more straightforward for my purposes, and reminds me a lot more of Borg from my time in the chocolate mines.

I'd also been running Consul for service discovery (mostly via DNS interface), and was planning on doing proper secrets management with Vault -- However, Nomad 1.4 added a few nice features, including something that's not as shiny as Vault, but works for my own purposes. So, I was looking to slim back to just Nomad and get rid of the rest of the ecosystem entirely.

After racking my brains for a cool and down-with-the-kids project name, enter nomad-dns-exporter, which is now happily pointing nginx and other various scripts and such at nomad services via DNS, no consul required (unless I turn down consul and discover it is, of course :-))

It's a homelab, so I get to replace some proper software with duct tape, and learned a few things along the way -- so, homelab mission accomplished!

2021 Retrospective

2022-01-01T04:10:00+00:00

2021 was a year. I've seen the receipts.

In summing it up, I guess I'll preface it by saying that this, more than any previous year, was one where the shared experience of being the connected human was a more closely bonded one than ever. The shared experience definitely had a timbre, a scent, a feeling to it, and in most individual examples it was pretty below average. It's rare to talk to someone who said they've had an amazing year and meant it.

It can almost feel like saying that things happened and that they might been pretty good is a source of guilt; as a catholic-raised Irish person, I can tell you a thing or two about that. So, with that in mind, here's how things went, and a few aspirations, thoughts (definitely not resolutions) for 2022.

One thing I should mention, since it kind of encompasses all of this -- I've been seeing a psychotherapist and been back on SSRIs since late 2020. It's not a big thing, it's helped a lot, and I think it's important to mention. It's not a sign of weakness to look after mental health, and to be seen to do so, even if you're meant to be an omnipotent entity (and yes, even if that requirement exists only in your own head).

Work

Probably warrants its own entry? Or a few entries. I changed jobs in June, from being at Google for almost 17 years, to a much smaller place that's in a very interesting growth phase. One of the interesting parts about this was that the new place is fully remote, in a way that doesn't disenfranchise remote workers (i.e. everyone is remote). This has been something I've wanted to do basically forever. It was pretty clear from what was happening at G that they were not taking remote work seriously, so that was one of the contributing factors. Coming into 2021, I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew offices as we know them are from the past. I was kinda done being '8 hours from the mothership', kinda done getting on a plane every 6 weeks ro so to remain relevant and defeat information compartmentalisation, and also kinda done with a lot of things that are inevitable when your employee count goes into 6 figures.

The new place has been great! Due to the remote work piece being built into how they do business, I feel a lot more connected, ironically. I've yet to meet any of my co-workers in person, although it's alleged this will happen in June 2022. Sounds about right :-)

As part of this, I've also been spending some time at a co-working space. I'd be lying if I said I don't miss the office ambience sometimes, so it's good to have the option. Home is still home. Speaking of which...

Home

Home is still as it is. Keeping healthy and sane is a bit of an uphill struggle, as I suspect it is for many. We did manage to make it out when restrictions permitted (we even made it to Finland!). Overall, I'd call this ticking over. There's a degree of 'normalcy' that many people are waiting for the other foot to drop on that I suspect we'll just have to declare someday.

Sadly, the Small Cat left us at easter time, from lung cancer. She showed up at what at the time was my doorstep, 12 years ago, right as myself and J started seeing each other. She was my cat, but also our cat.

One of the things we said we'd do if we ever lost Small Cat (she....didn't like other cats, and barely tolerated our other one) was to start fostering kittens. So, we took in a few litters, and eventually as things go, we met Tortellini, our 'failed foster':

We weren't planning on another tortie, but they tend to find you.

Hobbies, Etc.

I did manage to do a little bit of 'getting on my motorbike and going far away' this year - managed a trip to Scotland with some biker mates, and got just the right amount of rained on.

I've also been studying, practicing and getting ready for the RoSPA test, which is one of the tougher civilian motorbike certifications. I'm hoping to do some blood bike work in 2022, all going well (the test is a prerequisite). It's been a great way to keep up skills and progress.

I also started doing gigs again -- I kinda wound down the involvment with one group I played with, and started playing bass for a Ukelele band in Dublin. Gigs have been pretty quiet since things went south around december-time, but there should be a lot going on there in 2022 all going well.

I also did something I'd been meaning to do for a long while, and joined a shooting club. I've been meaning to break into it for a while now, and it's one of those "just bite the bullet" things (the upfront costs are singificant, and the licensing rules are weird). It's been gratifying to see actual improvement in my shooting over the last few months. Again, more to come on that.

All in all, given the circomstances, it's been a pretty good year. I've had to take calculated risks to do so, and I've most likely been very lucky not to get sick or to lose anyone close to me. It's part of a longer journey, and I'm happier with the amount of control I have over things (macropolicies keeping me at home notwithstanding).

I'd like to get a bit more relaxed about using the advantages of fully remote work -- I think it'd be a shame to have this kind of position and then work from my home office every single day. But, baby steps :-)

I mentioned it on my magical exploding twitter feed, but I feel like there's very much an onld-meaning meme going around that Everthing is Awful and we must not buck this narrative. On balance, things are pretty awful. But, I think we also have a responsibility to celebrate the okay things. The world is giving us pleny of excuses to be morose; let's not help it too much.

To 2022. Because it beats the alternatives!

A Short History

2021-07-22T14:30:00+01:00

I'm allowed one cheat blog post, as a treat.

The twitter thread I posted a while back seems to have gotten some attention. It's reproduced on threadreader but that too shall pass (and I auto-delete my tweets after 90 days), so here's a reproduction.

The SRE book is a history book, not a manual.

SREs, at their fundament, are organisational glue. They are people who are curious and understand how the world works. They turn their hand to things. When things don't go SRE's way, they pick up the pieces and try to fit things back together again.

If you need something well outside the remit of what you'd like your average engineer to do, find the nearest concentration of SREs. Want some business sense? Sure. Need someone to capacity plan? OK. Want some esoteric knowledge about weird systems side-effects? SREs will go learn it, for seemingly no good reason other than because it Must be Known.

If you get a load of these kinds of people together, they can move mountains. If you give them a seemingly hopeless situation, they will pull you out. If you give SREs an innocuous-looking situation, they will tell you which lava flows will liquify, and which will stay solid. SREs will point out the oncoming train, and patiently explain how to turn the train we're on.

This is their common skill: The ability to use the silver bullets of curiosity, pragmatism and bias toward action to grow systems as they need to.

What happens when you get extremely good SREs and expose them to an essentially unlimited pile of money, infrastructure and opportunity? You get a story. The story of the SRE book is the one of what worked for Google SRE early on, in that context. It's a series of parables. There are teachings there, not instructions. It's no surprise that many of the authors of the SRE book were based in Dublin, or Irish -- if you learn by stories, you teach by stories :-)

And so when I say to people that they should take what they read in the SRE book with a grain of salt, I mean that there is truth and wisdom in there, that need skill and wisdom to tease out. The skill you bring as the reader is in deciphering what are the fundaments, the core of wisdom behind the practices described. The ideas you can take away, and reasonably expect to make useful in your own practice.

The circumstances that gave rise to the collation of the SRE book may never be reproduced in our lifetimes. I'll always also maintain that it should be taken as a set of examples of what SREs did when faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, and lived to tell the tale.

And, if you're reading the book and the thought process and conclusions based on the problems described speak to you, a pragmatist, a realist, a curious tinkerer, then you're already an SRE. Leave the book aside, and take what you've learned with you on your journey.

June 13 2021

2021-06-13T16:46:00+01:00

This past week was my first week at elastic.co, where I am now a Director of Engineering - taking on the SRE group and making Elastic Cloud go (Elastic Cloud is essentially the SaaS version of Elastic Search - i.e. you can of course run it yourself, or you can pay us, because tl;dr money is cheaper than opportunity/time and also we'll likely do a better job).

Although I'm 3 days in, it's popped up a bunch of really interesting oportunities and problems -- some I'm /very/ familar with as someone who tells nerds what to do, some are completely not. This is actually exactly what I was looking for. A set of areas where I can both bring the expertise I have, and also be stretched (with a side of being closer to the newer parts of the industry, and being somewhere where remote work is taken seriously).

Of course, this has the side-effect of me being absolutely wrecked at the end of each day, and having to keep tabs on my time and not overdo it after 5 weeks off (the above is a good forcing function: Marble tha cat came and sat on me on my first evening, and it was No More Work time).

There's a mountain of research out there on how to get started at a new enterprise. I tend to consume this stuff and run it through a filter of there being really no subsititute for a bit of cop on. Aside from being only partially successful in general, 'management by numbers' is one of those things that people spot right away, if they're in any way smart (and hopefully they are!).

I'd recently been recommended The First 90 Days, which like most management books have a bunch of decent general-purpose pieces of advice, but are for the most part not to be taken literally. In this case, the book kinda assumes you can sit on your hole for a few weeks to plan, and avoid commitment for your first wee while.

In reality, given how business works these days, there are always going to be things that don't wait. In my case, it was probably the first-day war room for the fastly outage -- yes, I could have ignored it because it's my first day; however, there is a huge amount to learn from observing your new practice's workflows and dynamics, unfettered by them knowing who you are, and how you are :-)

So, as I've said to folks internally, the 90 days plan is of course still a thing -- however, in the meantime I'm practicing what I'm calling "Listening and having standards". That is, the active listening and onboarding you'd expect from any new lead, but with a side of asking awkward questions, and setting a standard for rigour that folks will come to know. Part of being an active global lead is having people know your mind, without needing to hear from you directly -- I don't think it's ever too early to set out your stall, even if it's asking the kind of questions to which the answer either matters to you, or where finding the answer is a useful exercise in and of itself.

June 06 2021

2021-06-06T00:06:00+01:00

The last few days (among other things) saw a little work on the previous project, as well as taking advantage of having new hardware to mess about with.

My desktop OS journey has a 12-year (or so) mac gap in it -- which is to say that I used to use a window manager and go through all the tweaks and business associated (the kool kids at DCU all used Window Maker, but when I started at Google, they handed me a macbook (the early, pre-magsafe one, circa 2004). I was pretty happy that I could have a desktop that just works, and that I can replace at very short notice. Much of the work I did at Google involved using shells and a web browser, so macs were just fine. I then happily used macbooks until the touch bar, which closed me down overnight. Ugh, horrible.

I then spent 6 months or so trying to work from a pixelbook on Chrome OS. Google's deep integration with chrome and BeyondCorp meant this was a fine machine to use, until it started to do random things, and you can't really do anything to fix it (aside from powerwashing and hoping for the best).

So, for my last year or so at Google, I was back on gLinux, which was fairly standard gnome desktop. I didn't fiddle with it, it just worked, happy out.

Anyway, $NEWJOB sent me a ThinkPad T14 -- this seems to be an AMD equivalent-or-so of the T490 I have as a personal laptop. So, I took to installing Arch Linux, and trying out a few window managers.

Arch, to me, seems to be just a little beyond the amount of thinking I'd like to do about my linux distro. I must say the documentation was /excellent/. I learned new things about the modern linux userspace (systemd is still newfangled to me, and I've only really set up wifi by clicking buttons.). I gave it a shot for a few days, before giving up on sound. So, doable, but more time than I'm willing to put in when good old familiar Ubuntu is waiting there. So, good experiment, but ultimately I have shit to do that isn't dealing with linux on a machine that needs to work and for which there are better options for my expertise/desire-for-hassle ratio.

As for window managers, I had toyed a bit with xmonad a few years back - I know no haskell at all, so it was mainly trying a tiling window manager. This time around, i3wm was a natural one to try. I have to say it's one of those 'exactly what it says on the tin' style things. The only tweaks I've done so far is making i3status say stuff that is useful (and talk to the thinkpad battery properly), and multi-profile/workspace groups stuff.

The latter was done with i3-workspace-groups - it's a hacky enough way of doing it, but works great. The way i3 is setup to be modular and take instructions from various sources is super smart. I want to be able to have separate sets of workspaces for work, home, etc. and this seems to do it. Config is here. Maybe this is old hat for long-term linux desktop users, but I'm personally glad to be back to getting things just-so, rather than using a 'supported distro', so to speak.

The proof of its efficacy, of course, will come on Tuesday. More about that soon :-)

May 24 2021

2021-05-24T22:14:00+01:00

Showed up to a few low-key conferences last week (Multitasking between SLOconf and o11yfest for a few days).

It felt great to be catching up with some folks I hadn't in a while -- not having the GOOG hat on was a refreshing change. It's like the manager/director/VP/whatever hat in any job you're in - you like to imagine you can show up one day and sit backwards in a chair and say you're not a manager/director/whatever for a second, but that's not how it works. So let's say that showing up to a conference as a regular punter and as a Director at a FAANG are very different experiences.

Another good sign is signing up for a few more projects at home. While the month over xmas was home-assistant, then messing with Kubernetes before throwing it out in favour of nomad, this break has been a lot more about really re-charging.

So this week, the bits arrived for one of the few projects I'm allowing myself (aside from home sysadmin). Since I'm a fan of stupidly simple interfaces, I wanted to do a 'traffic light' style interface for presence, that I can plug into Slack, or even other things (Slack is about to become a large part of my day-to-day workflow, as part of a global org, so presence is important). I know I could run Keybow OS on it and mess about with LUA, but where's the fun in that?

The RPi Zero and keybow are dinky! I dunno, I still get a kick out of really tiny things that have a full userspace on them. I might see if I can pick up a small handful of Cherry MX Blue switches, since I dont' mind those three wee buttons being clicky (I run browns in my regular keyboard).

The code I've messed about with so far is here ('anseo' means 'here' or 'present' in Irish). It also gave me a chance to actually learn more about asyncio in Python, which is a feature that appeared since the last time I wrote python code in anger, and looks much nicer than messing around with threads (so far...).

May 11 2021

2021-05-11T17:06:00+01:00

Let's try every week or so? No excuses about no time :-)

The last week or two have been decompressing, switching off. I found/find myself unable to do most of the technical/outside/etc. stuff that would usually count as "Doing stuff I want", in favour of a sort of haze of...meh? It's not even "Oh, woe is me", it's more of a "Nope" to doing basically anything. I take it as the brain trying to heal itself :-)

So, that's what that's like :-) I can already feel things lifting, though -- so I think once there's a little more structure I'll be good to go. I do realise it's up to me to provide it, so that's this week's job.

I have been able to get out a bunch, though. Yesterday was the first day when inter-county travel was allowed, so I made it out to the parents, for the first time since xmas. There is a significant backlog of being fed to be done.

Next week involves putting a bit of structure (i.e. fixing sleep cycle), starting small on some exercise, and maybe making a list of project work to do (I suspect learning about prometheus is bubbling to the top of the backlog). I also need to fix my horrible hacky way of using local disk in Nomad allocs (squint your eyes and behold). Plus other stuff that's now popping into my head that means I should probably go and make that list now...

May 05 2021

2021-05-05T00:50:00+01:00

So, last week was my last week at Google. I'm writing this from the weird void of disbelief where I've not quite settled into the 6 or so weeks of time off I have before the new thing (which I'm trying not to talk about, because I do want to take this time really off).

It seems customary, almost, for long-time Googlers (and especially SREs, for some reason) to go into the reasons why they left. A sort of "Why daveoc is leaving" doc/rant/diatribe, which generally gets people riled up.

In realiy, I could probably invent such a doc. I'm unhappy with many things G is doing -- but, that's not the primary reason (or in the top three) reasons I'm leaving.

In short, if I had to narrow things down, it'd come down to:

I've been at G too long -- I mean in general principles. 17 years is a very long time to do anything. You're not the same as everyone else. You have baggage, either your own or other people's.
I want to see if I can do the things I enjoyed at G elsewhere, and be successful. I mean, I am pretty sure I can, but there's knowing and then there's knowing.
I've always imagined that at some point I'll work remotely properly. 10-15 years ago, I imagined both the technology and work practices would evolve to make it workable. I hoped that this would happen during my working life, and it looks kind of like it has. It's definitely possible to find a company taking remote work seriously. G have been pretty open about not doing that. The office is still king for them, and that's fine. But, I want to try it seriously.
I also feel like I should be more public about what I do - I've had a few external tech talks, but not a huge number -- I've had a number of papers I published internally at Google that people have taken lessons from (one even made it into the book, and some others can be found in sanitised form in my Writing section). I of course had the ability to do so at G, but for various reasons I hadn't gotten into the swing of it.
I happened to find a role that ticked all the above boxes and more.

So, that's it. I continue the journey with bridges unburned, but hands firmly wiped.

Of course, to coincide with being a jobless hippie for a little while, my new bike showed up and got collected today -- just in time for a lovely spell of a few days of showers. Ireland's lockdown is easing to inter-county travel from next Monday, so I suspect this machine will be getting some exercise in the coming weeks. That's about as much as I've figured out about what I'm doing. Which, to me, sounds pretty fine right now.

May 1 2021

2021-05-01T12:15:00+01:00

One of my excuses for not updating this more often is the fiddly nature of making sure I have a working Pelican install. I mean, the real reason is laziness, but that's a handy excuse.

"Woudn't it be great", my insomnia-brain said to itself, "If I could just check a markdown file into git and everything just happened?".

So, a bit of fiddling later, a combination of GitHub Pages and a GitHub Action does just that. So, no more excuses, right?

The repo will give you an idea of how to go about it if you feel like emulating. It still ticks my box of "I have the content in a form that can be used to publish elsewhere if I want", so nerd brain is also happy.

Hopefully longer post incoming, I guess I have some news, right?

January 03 2021

2021-01-03T01:23:00+00:00

I'm now most of the way through the ~month or so I took off work. Around the start of it, I made a few plans, but I also resolved to unapologetically spend much of it just relaxing, and feeling non-guilty about that. It's something I've been working on, and I'm fairly pleased with the results. Sometimes the things you do are for you. It's one of the things I know and then steadfastly refuse my own counsel on.

One of the outcomes was solving a few of the outstanding home and home automation things I've been loking at doing for ages. The above is a Shelly 1 connected to the pinout of my garage door opener. I didn't have much say in what kind of opener and ended up with the kind with an Internet of Shit widget that just doesn't work properly, and a Manufacturer that don't take too kindly to hobbyists by not publishing any schematics. Thankfully, I happened to know that shorting two of the terminals on the back worked the same as a remote control press, and here we are.

One of the outcomes (unplanned, but here we are) of this break was that i've started writing code agin in earnest. I hope it lasts when I go back to work; I partially credit Advent of Code and some nice folks over on the Irish Tech community Slack for that -- but i've picked up on some other stuff as well. (btw, my attempts up until I ran ot of time are on github, including practicing on previous years).

(I guess if this is the last entry for another year or two, you'll know how going back to work went).

December 31 2020

2020-12-31T15:40:00+00:00

My last attempt at doing the Home Automation/Domotics/Whatyacallit a few years back mostly involved buying expensive widgets, determining they are shite, or marketed at US power and outlets, and then discovering that setup and upgrades generally involved one ore more of downloading a random .exe from random websites, soldering, or tracking the ongoing battle between hardware manufacturers and hobbyists.

Thankfully, things have gotten a lot better in the last few years. One of my personal projects in the time off over xmas this year was finally fiddling with Home Assistant, which got done on the houses's brand new Kubernetes cluster (but, more on that later).

It's been, quite honestly, a breath of fresh air. I might be a little unhappy with HA devs racing to the bottom in terms of what market to cater for (but that's purely a selfish concern), but it's...refreshing to see an ecosystem of support build around something.

It also helps that manufacturers like Shelly are openly suporting offline use and flashing their kit to something like Tasmota. One of the key concerns last time was just how flakey it all was - and subject to the whims of manufacturers.

I'm still working on the trickier parts of integrating the random assortment of Internet of Shit devices at home, but this is a very promising start.

December 09 2020

2020-12-09T01:28:00+00:00

So I've set both a really good example (take your vacation!) and a really bad example (Don't leave it all til the last minute!) for work folks, and therefore today was my last day at work in 2020. It's been a year.

One of the things I'm especially looking forward to this time round is taking on projects and doing things in an active way -- a lot of the time, my primary complaint when I take some time off is that I get to the end and feel like I've wasted it. I often feel like I can't get things done because there's some crucial thing I need to box all my time off for. A few months back, someone casually remarked to me that that sounded like burnout. So, taking this time was one of the things I wanted to do.

The other was actually going and doing something about some of the ways my brain worked. That means drugs and therapy. I'd done some advocacy work (where I could) at work around mental health, and even while I was doing that, I kinda realised I felt a bit hypocritical, because I was basically untreated (aside from a few abortive attempts to go to a therapist that amounted to being handed a burned CD of whale noises and being told to google CBT).

So, long story short, I've been back on SSRIs (I was on them for a brief time about 10 years ago), and I'm seeing a much more engaged and useful therapy person. It's been pretty great, actually. I feel a lot more like myself again - like a version that isn't really struggling as much, without the mind racing constantly.

One of the side-effects of this, of course, is that I've started to write code and do some wee projects again. I hadn't felt up to this in a long time. Probably years. It's a good feeling. What's helping right now is Advent of Code, but I've also got a few things going at home. Hence the picture of the haul of RPi stuff -- which I do intend to write some more technical posts on, as I progress. A month off is long enough to form some good habits; maybe logging more stuff is one of them? No Promises :-)

On my list is:

RPi cluster to replace an aging NUC machine, probably running MicroK8s
Some Shelly lightswitches (they run over WiFi, and can be flashed with Tasmota)
Probably other Zigbee stuff, assuming it arrives.
Fiddling with HA
Also fiddling with Mycroft, possibly as a replacement for Google Assistant (Nothing against it as such, but I do want more stuff to work when we've no internet at home).

I note at this point that I do tend to go big or go home on hobbyist stuff. A month is a long time, let's see where we get.

But first, some decompression. And to put up the tree.

November 22 2020

2020-11-22T19:08:00+00:00

Short a quick trip to Zurich in January 2020, the trip I was on was the last time I travelled outside Ireland, until now. I also don't plan on going anywhere until mid-2021 or thereabouts.

Much as all that's been written about how this year has been, one of the largest lessons I take away from it is that it called me and many folks in probably a similar position on some assumptions.

What would happen if you didn't have to go to work every day? Either because you were a remote worker, or just because. You'd have more 'time in the day', fewer excuses about getting exercise and eating healthy, and so on. Notwithstanding that COVID has been a terrible experience for pretty much everyone, after a certain point you have to get to something like normalcy, and see if it's what you expected.

In my case, I put on a load of weight, didn't really leave the house for a few months, and went back on SSRIs. I found a good therapist and I've mostly got the extra few kilos back off again, with more to come. It took a while but I think I am adjusting.

I had always had in my mind that I'd take some time off before I retire. By 'some', I mean maybe a year or two. It always seemed strange to me that people would work until they're in their late 60s, after they've lost the ability, freedom and inclination to do the things they can't do because of work.

I had an imaginary expectation that if I suddeny didn't have to go to work any more, that fulfilment and relaxation would fill the gaps -- in reality, I really hadn't thought about it all that much. If I stopped working tomorrow, I would enjoy the situation for...maybe a month? Two months? I'd then have to do something. My platonic ideal had been having nothing to do, and now I know that just makes me anxious :-)

This past 9 months has been a microcosm of that. My last almost 20 years has been me being on the road every month or two, and that's all gone now. Do I miss it? Honestly, no. I enjoyed some parts of travel, there were good experiences; but I'm really not crazy to get back on the road again. I could take or leave business travel, honestly. I often said before that the amount of business travel I do kinds ruins holidays for me - the minute I go near the airport I'm in work mode. I'm trying to manage the situation, and getting stressed about everything going smoothly, and waiting for the trip to be over so I can go home. So in some ways I am kinda looking forward to travel for travel's sake again. But, I can wait.

I could write more words about the future of work than will fit here -- I think this year has been an accelerant to that progress, but we are heading toward a brick wall where we have to deal with the social nature of humans and how we can't substitute that with technology.

Anyway. Same time next year?

November 09 2019

2019-11-09T14:14:00+00:00

It's been over two years, and while I'm still patiently waiting for the demise of Medium, it only took re-running pelican-quickstart to make my makefiles work again. Plus we haven't deprecated serving static content just yet, so there's that.

Most of the selling points for blog platforms these days is some sort of federation thing, or the promise that more people will read your nonsense, or other stuff that's nothing to do with producing an actual log. It's something LiveJournal got right, in a way.

Anyway.

At the moment, I'm on a train from work on Seattle, to San Jose, which is also near work. In a toss-up between getting a 2-hour flight and sitting on my ass in the bay area for two days, I choose....22-hour train journey. It's being a pretty good opportunity to switch off, when these are few and far between these days, more than I'd care to admit. The very fact that I'm on the (offline editing) blog thing will give you an idea of the extent of the problem I have with disconnecting :-)

I last took the Coast Starlight maybe 8 or 9 years ago, that time from Oakland to Los Angeles. I remember it as a fascinating drive-by of some of the smaller parts of American life -- as someone who's really never visited the USA for pleasure purposes, it's easy to forget it's where millions of people live in small towns, and rolling past and getting a look at that brings me a sense of ease that even with an open text editor (the modern equivalent of a notebook), I can't properly try to express with words. It's a good feeling and I'll take it.

This trip to the Pacific Northwest, short as it was, was also a good reminder that it's a place I enjoy being at. Maybe it's the weather? Or the closeness to nature in the planning of the city. Anyway, it puts me in a mind to having a go at coming here for nonwork reasons. That doesn't happen a lot.

Ayway, that's yisser lot. Like always, I promise myself I'll update this more, if my brain is in the space to do so. And, most likely like always, it never bubbles to the top. Seeya when I see you :-)

An Update on Life

2017-02-06T11:15:00+00:00

The last few months have been a bit hectic, let's say that.

Work

In work, a few things happened. I got promoted to 'Director', which is the top end of the management progression, bottom of executive. What either of these mean, I'll probably never know. About a year or so ago, I expressed a bit of existential angst about how my job had become more about pottering about among the various pies I had a finger in, making generally well-meaning statements and giving advice. I felt like I wasn't getting a lot of work done, frankly. My boss at the time said "This is what a Director does", and that was a bit terrifying. I guess now I know what it feels like (all over again) to go from full-time engineering getting-things done to management, yet done in some other stratum. Your tolerance for delayed gratification has to go up another notch, as the stuff I'm up to now has a 3-5 year timeframe, as opposed to yearly or so, as opposed to quarterly.

It's been fun times thus far. Trying to find the balance between getting stuff done, and being hands-off. I honestly think getting this balance right is one of the primary things that stands in a middle manager's favour - the balance between getting stuck in and not letting the people under you grow, and feeling like you're not really doing anything. It's also a very situational thing. Every time I've gotten promoted in the last 5 years or so, I've thought "Right, that's me I guess. Topped out.". What this means in my head is that I've honestly no idea or concrete advice for other folks who want to go down the same path. Every Director I've ever spoken to about it had a different story. They're not going to tell you how to do it, they can only tell you how they did it.

The other thing that happened is that I guess I'm now head of SRE for Dublin. Again, this role means different things for different people - I'm not terribly figurehead-y in some ways, and I'm lucky to have lots of great folks around me to make sure I get mercilessly taken down a notch if I'm doing not enough or too much of things. I'm also happy to be back into the 'existential terror' mode of operation. I believe everyone should be reasonably sure they can do about 80% of their job. The other 20% are what keeps it interesting. This only happened a month ago, so I'm still figuring it out.

Home

Lots of stuff here as well! I am adulting very much, after a few years of not so much. I am generally bad at adulting so this is good, I guess?

Firstly, and I guess most significantly - myself and my partner of 8 years now live together properly and for realsies. There are various and sundry private reasons why this wasn't the case, and the thing that happened to make this happen is also private, but this is a big deal for me - sharing my life with someone else in so complete a way is a new thing for me (yes, despite being nearly 40, I've never actually lived with someone I was going out with). This has done wonders for my general well-being, in many, many small ways.

Semi-related - we're selling the house I bought almost 3 years ago, and moving into Dublin city proper. This was something I was thinking about for a long while, and the above thing also precipitated it. There are a couple of reasons why this is happening now, which I guess are relevant to most commuter-town folks.

For reference, I currently live about 40km outside Dublin, and I work in about as far east (i.e. the opposite end) in Dublin as you can. I commute by car or motorbike mostly, and it takes about an hour, at best. I've been doing this for 10 years. I had figured this was worth it, as I like having privacy, space, and so forth. Also, the way the property market is, you get about twice as much bang for your buck compared to living in Dublin. Even if there were houses and gardens the size of our current place in Dublin, you're talking most of a million quid, whereas we're selling up for not even close to half that, and doing well out of it. Things are amazingly Dublin-centric.

I guess the reasons break down to:

Commute finally killing me.

It's getting worse rather than better. Economy is recovering, lots of people have cars and need to use them. My commute took 45-50 minutes on a good day 2-3 years back. right before christmas, I had a few days where it took over 2 hours. Fuck everything about that noise. I think having the motorbike took the sting out for a bit, but I realised back in the middle of last year that I was literally driving into Dublin every day, including weekends. Why don't I live there? Good question, obvious answer.

Health (mental and phyiscal).

I live along a main road. There's nowhere to walk if you don't like being run over by a truck. You have to drive everywhere. What this meant in practical terms is that I got little to no exercise, unless I made a point of it, drove to a place, exercised (walking, cycling, etc.), and then loaded up and went home. Back when I lived in Dublin before and moved out to the country, I distinctly remember putting on about 10kg just by missing out on the walk to the bus stop or down the shops. I spent a good chunk of the last 2 years getting literally no exercise. Walk 10 feet to the car, into and out of work, then that's it. I've put in about another 10kg in the lat 2 years, with really no sign of it slowing down. There was really only one way that was going. I'm not a gym person, and I find it very difficult to rationalise or will myself to get exercise that doesn't have a 'point'. I'm the least physically fit and heaviest I've ever been right now. I'm getting to an age where that's actually pretty dangerous. I'd rather wake up now than in a few years when I have my first coronary.

Secondly, it's just secluded. I don't have an active social life. I went to a pub a few weeks back on a whim, and realised I haven't done that in probably a year or more. All the folks I'd go to the pub with are either work peope, or live in Dublin. I already have pretty severe social anxiety, that isn't getting helped by living in a hermitage. So, even if it makes me a bit uncomfortable, something has to change.

Services.

Services for peope who live outside cities and large towns are getting worse, rather than better. Ireland has always been a city-centric (and specifically Dublin-centric) country, and this shows no signs of going in the other direction. Broadband is pathetic (I get about 50Mb on an LTE connection, with a 20GB per day download limit). In the last few years, getting tradespeople to come out to a place has gotten harder as the economy picks up. Case in point, my electric gates broke down a few weeks back. The original installer said "I won't be able to come out to you for at least 3 weeks", and replied "dunno" when I asked what else I could do. Rural Ireland is kind of fucked. By that I mean living outside towns. I could move down the road a mile and probably do a lot better with services - the appetite to go the last mile is just not there.

Because I can.

I've been pretty lucky in that I have a job that pays well, and I really don't have any outlays or expensive habits (aside from Airsoft kit, which granted isn't that expensive in the grander scheme of things, if you compare it to golf or something).

So, I have the ability to live in Dublin, that I perhaps less so had 10 years ago, when I first moved out. So, it's time to embrace the privilege a little bit.

Anyway, all these reasons got written down sometime last year, and we started looking, as well as putting our place on the market. It sold reasonably quickly, and right now we're going to rent for a bit and take our time. I'm going to have to get used to some stuff I used to take for granted (being able to walk! to a shop! public transport! taxis that don't cost 80 quid!), and I'm looking forward to it.

Of course, all of the above manifests itself as my being a ball of abject stress for probably the next 6-12 months. But, it'll all be worth it, right?

June 12 2016

2016-06-12T12:04:00+01:00

I was away last week with work to an offsite at the Club Med, which as far as I can gather is one of those soviet-era collective holiday camps for people who weren't in a soviet. I bet the soviets never had nespresso on demand.

Bizarrely, the weather in Ireland was actually better than in the south of France. No complaints though :-)

This week, the weather at home is fighting with itself -- sunshine and high (for Ireland) temperatures, with "showers" that range in intensity from light drizzle to attempted murder. Will still try to bike it to work as I can this week. Actually the first full week in many weeks, so trying to git 'er done moreso than I have been.

June 05 2016

2016-06-05T19:44:00+01:00

The weather turns and turns. We're well into the season where things spring out, and make you cut them back, or just be happy they're there. Our garden has rhubarb. Enough for a tiny put of jam, or perhaps a Mr. Kipling's style rhubarb tartlet or two.

It also is the season for camping, weekend activities that involve outside, and being on the motorbike a lot more. I was away for much of last week, looking forward to more of the outside, assuming the last week or so wasn't a trick.

May 25 2016

2016-05-25T13:05:00+01:00

Further to the Reddit AMA I was involved in a few years back (I am /u/sre_pointyhair) - "The Guy" showed up at my desk last week.

Alas, I was away, and he had to make do with doing the unspeakable things we do to keep servers running from my desk for a while.

Thankfully, nothing exploded.

Imperfect Machines

2016-05-19T23:33:00+01:00

I finally got my grubby mitts on an actual dead-tree copy of the SRE book. I've wanted this to exist for many years, and it's finally out there. I wrote a chapter on working with teams with high interrupt loads where the team consists of humans. It's a paraphrase of a paper I wrote a few years back that's used internally across a few teams.

Much as we all need to get grunge work done, often the 'fair' way to divide it is unfair to everyone individually. People work best where they get to do one thing well for as long an uninterrupted session of time as possible. It's a concept that I get pushed back on quite a bit, as it's dangerously close to claiming human can't multitask, and people love to claim they can. But, it's a pretty simple concept that's worked well where applied. Polarise time, sanity may well follow.

April 30 2016

2016-04-30T19:14:00+01:00

Back from a few days in Prague and beyond, at Border War. This was a very decent one - and I ended up not being as wrecked as I thought (due to the previously mentioned unfitness). Did about 45km of hiking over the 3 days of the event, which is a lot for me.

This (as usual) has sparked plans for more trips. Work has been busy (in a good way) for a while, so plans for non-work are spinning up, which I guess is the real sign of spring (I've got things I could be doing for about half the weekends until July already).

More of this sort of thing, plz.

Border War Prep 2016

2016-04-16T21:54:00+01:00

Some of the gear that's being shipped to Czech Republic (or Czechia if you don't please) for Border War next week. I and 20-odd other tubby nerd militia follow it all next week. This will be my third time in as many years, and probably the unfittest I've been in about that time. Let's see if I manage to hold my own or expire (It's 3 days of camping and about 30-40km of hiking with a load of gear on you).

Thankfully, the weather looks to be clearing up and staying cleared up, which means a bunch of motorbike commuting (and gadding about). This is a good thing for the brains.

April 11 2016

2016-04-11T00:42:00+01:00

I almost signed up for a medium account. A brief moment of madness before I realised that the likes of medium accounts are also transient. Reminded, again, by my recent de-facto abandonment of G+ as a thing to publish things on. I am not a crackpot, our outlets for writing are transient and we're in danger of not having a narrative at all if (some of us) don't self-curate :-)

In since-last-year news, things are progressing, for certain values of progress. As far as the Internet at large is concerned, I now have about twice as many people who have the good|bad|indifferent fortune of being in my organisation at work (I know, "my organisation", right?). Things have gotten really busy since about the start of this year, but in a good way.

It is my solemn belief that the average person should know how to do about 90% of their job. Thereabouts.

I also wrote a chapter for the SRE Book. Not on anything technical of course. On manager-nerd stuff. A dabbler in code and people. It was a paper I'd had sitting internally for a while, that is now seeing the light of day, in edited form. I am glad this book exists, as I have honestly believed that what we're doing is capital-I Important.

I also get on. I get on okay. How are you?

February 17 2015

2015-02-17T20:59:00+00:00

The weather's turning. It's one of those nice times of year when it's cold and mostly dry, but without a winter in front of us. Things are growing at home and we're seeing what pops up on our first spring in the new place.

So, on Valentine's day, I reminded myself of how much I love myself, and got a new motorbike. It's the little things. Love you lots babe xoxo.

I'm currently in London, doing a short trip for work. Have managed only short trips so far (to Zurich, and now here) -- I've a few longer trips coming up, but they should be mostly uneventful. I don't have the appetite for long trips any more, to anywhere. There's too much at home.

As the weather gets nicer, I also mean to get fitter (i.e. fitter than not fit at all). The house buying moved us further out from work, and introduced stress that means I've been off the self-powered bike for a while. I've a pretty big Airsoft Event coming up in April, and not dropping dead from running for a few hundred metres would be just great. I'm funny with exercise in that I can't stick to it unless it has a point. So, bike commuting was great. Gym, not so much.

Of course, I say this after inhaling a Pretty Nice Burger in a local place here. Whoops-a-daisy.

January 11 2015

2015-01-11T15:30:00+00:00

Domestic weekend! The first week back at work was one of those stealth first-weeks-back, where the first part is relief that nothing exploded in my 3 weeks away, and the rest was EVERYTHING HAPPENING. But it's the weekend now, and Amazon has a fancy Karcher window vacuum on sale. A window vacuum, if you don't mind. It actually worked, which restored my faith in branding (I wouldn't have bothered with one and would have declared them bullshit if Karcher hadn't been making one).

Somoene mentioned Medium to me last week, as a means to 'tweet a thing with more words than a tweet'. Over the years, I've used a bunch of things to keep an accessible log. I used to use LiveJournal until some russian mobsters bought it. I used to keep up with people on some NNTP groups, or via email. I don't really do email with people any more, which is a shame in a sort of compresed-time way. Remember when we used to write letters? I don't.

So, I'm pretty sure that some HTML files in a directory aren't going to get deprecated or fall out of favour any time soon. I can carry a means to reproduce them anywhere with me, I can rejigger them to some other format if the world moves on, I can use some other form of syndication, because I have the originals in markdown. You could argue that it won't fall out of favour because it isn't in favour, and you'd be right :-)

I sometimes think about how temporary a lot of social media is. People from the older school of personal journaling or websites came into it with an expectation that it'd be a record of their travels through life. It really hasn't become that, and I think that's fine - it is what it defines itself to be, which is a moving set of goalposts. Will Facebook be around in 40+ years, when I hope to be still here? I don't know, and neither do you. Will it offer a means to search for the times I talked about a particular thing at any point in the past? It doesn't even do that now!

And, just in the interests of fairness, neither do G+ or twitter in any meaninfgul way.

But, all this is a huge distraction from how I need to clean my kitchen.

January 01 2015

2015-01-01T02:05:00+00:00

So, every October or so, I ask HR at work for a report of people on my team (I have somehow tricked The Company, or they have tricked me, into being responsible for about 40 people) who haven't taken enough vacation, since we can only carry over 5 days. Due to accounting messing about for my leave earlier this year, It turns out I had 17 days left, and could only carry over 5. "Whoops", I thought.

So, I took 3 weeks off. My leave in the summer was good, and overdue, but stressful and punctuated by having to call people, stand over people as they do jobs, worry about things going well (Ever had to hope a plumber has a steady hand drilling a hole in a 500 euro ceramic sink, as you race to a kitchen suppliers to get parts they forgot to send out and you needed today? That was a fun tuesday morning). A lot of it felt a lot more like work than I would have liked. So, this time round, I made a small list of "Things I will feel like a failure as a person for not getting done". I then promptly did about half of them, then declared "Fuck it, it's Christmas" and sat around enjoying the outcome of the previous time spent working. It has been glorious.

2014 has been one of the more eventful years in the last few. Of course, I moved house, for the first time in almost 10 years. The above picture is my workbench for doing electronics messing and airsoft, which only got unpacked and set up this week. This will give you an idea of my approach to moving. I still have a roomful of boxes.

I also did more of my "Doing things is better than not doing things" stuff. For me, as an on-again off-again GAD sufferer, this has brought about an amazing sense of well-being. The alternative to figuring out how to be alive like this is the slow death of coasting through life without ever challenging yourself. I'm doing it in small way. I'm not about to take up lion-taming, but I'm doing my bit. I did the mandatory training and started riding a motorcycle, which was a big unnecessary thing I thought would help, and it has. It's easy (and especially easy for me) to rationalise away any thoughts of doing things that aren't strictly necessary - it's a defence mechanism against failure. I'm trying my best to do things when my brain goes "Bleh". I'm also trying my best to fulfil a few of the "Wouldn't it be cool if..." ideas I often have and then squirrel away for 'later'. There's no later.

Hopes for 2015? I'm trying hard to have specific ones. It's not something I think about a lot, and the 'five year plans are for losers' attitude that got me through my 20s has worn thin a little bit. So, I'm still thinking about it. I hope I can do more stuff that I've only thought of doing but then threw away the idea before. I hope I can figure out a reproducible way of making myself happy. I hope I can be a better partner, a better manager, and a more open person without stressing myself out or being uncomfortable all the time.

It starts with doing things. Because that is, after all, better than not doing things.

December 07 2014

2014-12-07T13:48:00+00:00

The last of this year's travel is ongoing. I haven't had a weekend in NYC in a while, and it's managed not to snow this time. A decent day yesterday walking around the park and times square in the rain, and visiting MoMA for a bit.

This week is more synergy - a meeting of managers from all over to talk about The Company's storage, the teams that run it, and various other bits. It's the stuff I'm interested enough in that it doesn't feel like work. Good times.

Here until thursday or so, the heading home to a bunch of time off for xmas and new years. I've alwys taken the two weeks surrounding xmas and new year's off, for my entire working life. Of course, this means that the week before the week before xmas always ends up being an exercise in clock-watching (yes, even if I do like my job. It's not quite at the level of 'xmas every day' just yet).

So, this year, I took that week off as well. I'm sure nothing bad can come of this.

November 12 2014

2014-11-12T22:15:00+00:00

Home again, at least until next month.

You'd almost think they missed me.

November 4 2014

2014-11-04T22:02:00+00:00

Excellent korean BBQ is a lot less cheaty than sausage and stodge.

As hoped, got a bunch of stuff done on the plane, and managed to not have an awful flight. I can tell my sinuses aren't going to like it later, but for the moment I can take solace in meat.

Mountain View is as it usually is, except it feels a lot more like it's reached its tipping point as far as straining the local infrastructure goes. People don't want to live near the office (because let's face it, Mountain View itself is a bit of a shithole), so they end up commuting >1h from San Francisco (which is also a shithole) every day. At some point, being in the centre of the universe gets outweighed by a declining quality of life. Hopefully something creative happens, since I don't think it's a problem unique to The Company.

One more day in the office, then hitting the red-eye to NYC tomorrow night. I expect that to be a less pleasant flight, but at least I'll then be in NYC.

October 21 2014

2014-10-21T21:36:00+01:00

At a work conference in Munich, which I've never been to before. From what I have seen of restaurants here, it is a Paleo disaster, so I've been pretty cheat-y so far.

As middle-european cities go, it's pretty nice -- ageing but efficient train service, pants-shitting taxi rides from the airport at 220kph, and good food and company.

I get to spend essentially no free time here, but maybe I'll come back sometime. For now, I get to go back home for a week, then do a short-in-duration but long-in-distance jaunt. The joy.

October 18 2014

2014-10-18T14:30:00+01:00

More inactivity! Mainly it's been ridiculously busy in work, mostly around performance reviews and a number of things sneaking up on me. They're sneaky, those things.

Doing a little more travel before the end of the year -- Munich, London, Mountain View and New York (twice). Yay. I've been very travel-light this year, so I guess I gots to pay my dues.

In other news, I own a motorbike now! It's a 2004 Honda NT650V Deauville. It'll do for now - I meanly needed a bigger bike after I discovered that the 250cc bike I was on was hardly pulling me, and I found it way, way easier to ride the school bike (an SV650S). Of course, I'd pick a day with gale-force winds to pick it up.

I've also booked my test, on advice of the instructor - I did an insurance assessment and was given a grade equivalent to 'has a full license and is a daily rider'. Which had the nice side-effect of 30% off my insurance. Let's hope I can keep that up when I don't have a dude following me and roaring at me over a radio.

October 05 2014

2014-10-05T11:51:00+01:00

Trying to keep this thing up by doing worthwhile things. That was the idea, right?

I've been trying Paleo for the last few weeks, with a drop of about 1.1kg per week so far. Seems normal enough for exercise free diet change (from previous experience), and it's a bit easier on the palate than just caloric reduction or other stuff - we'll see how long it lasts. I've noticed a bit more energy certainly, and less feeling bloated and horrible. The first couple of weeks off work really took it out of me, and the brain can't really perform if the body isn't keeping up. It's too far out to be cycling to work any more, so diet will have to come first.

Motorbike stuff is still in the pant-shitting terror mode for a lot of it, which I hear is quite normal and healthy. I know I see it in the car as well, but inconsiderate arseholes are legion on Irish roads - people should have to spend some time on a bike or motorbike to understand this. On the other hand, we've had some great weather the last few weeks, and I'm enjoying the hell out of the long straight bits. Back in this week for some more refresher lessons.

Have also solidified travel for the next while - going to Munich, London, Mountain View and NYC before the end of the year; in short trips for the most part. Also, got a ticket for Border War next year - I'm so there I'm not even here.

September 16th 2014

2014-09-16T14:15:00+01:00

Away in Zurich for a few days with work. Partially to meet a bunch of people, but also to get into the practice of being away from home in small doses. I've a few more trips coming up (London, Munich, etc) that'll also help.

I've been dealing with a bit of low-level anxiety about leaving the house empty - it's a good bit more secluded than the old place, which means I don't like leaving it alone. For this and a few future trips, I have someone going in there pretty much every day (or living there), but I just have to deal with it -- Alarm systems, CCTV, home automation only go so far. If stuff happens, it happens. Bizarrely, in my head it's the cats I'd be more worried about. Stuff is just stuff.

I was in Zurich in June, but didn't get to see any of it -- so I'm getting around this time by walking. I really like old european cities, where people actually use the space. It's one of the things I don't like about Dublin -- people don't look like they're using the space and kind of scurry around between Things They Gotta Do. Hard to explain. What I have learned is that I need a comfortable pair of walking shoes, and to become less of a fat sack of shit (I stopped getting any regular exercise right when I bought the new house and stress took over. Need to reverse that trend.)

I got to do some gaming over the weekend at Heckcon, which was nice - I've been trying to do a little more of this, since it was one of the things I consciously enjoyed that I just petered out with doing. I'm getting set up for Gaelcon in a month or so, and may even run a game. There's also a set of people that I only really run into at cons, and it'll be good to get kept up.

September 12th 2014

2014-09-12T21:11:00+01:00

Second week back, and seeing what my job ends up looking like for the next while. Think 'busy'. I'm trying to nail down travel until the end of the year, it being increasingly impossible. I'll be in Zurich for a while next week, and after that is anyone's guess.

Other delightful happenings: Someone working on another building in the campus our building is in managed to reverse a van into the motorbike. The only real damage was to the airblade windscreen, which got broken pretty much clean in half (see picture). After removing the remains, I discovered that all it was really doing was redirecting wind into my face, and riding the bike got a bit nicer to do. So, thanks clumsy van driver I guess.

September 7th 2014

2014-09-07T21:11:00+01:00

First week back at work - done!

Things have been more physically tiring than otherwise. I've been trying to nail down the next couple of months travel wise, and managed to make it into work on the bike two days out of five, which was good. That's been helped along by some good weather, and unhelped by some impatient drivers (that get caught on my helmet cam and youtubed).

This weekend saw some Airsoft, and some moving of larger items from the old house. It's not quite the insuroutable chore I've assumed it would be any more, a couple more trips will do it, I think.

August 31st 2014

2014-08-31T21:30:00+01:00

Last day of leave, and a day of normalcy and domesticity. Mainly hung around and enjoyed the last of the days since the end of June, when I last went near work. Tomorrow will see some hectic times, when I figure out what's happened while I've been away. If I've been doing it right, very little! The best work disappears, as they say.

These few months off have given me a bit of time to think about larger things -- I've gotten a lot of stuff done, and have thought about a lot more stuff. My brain has not been terribly healthy these last few years, and part of what I hoped to figure out was what I might end up doing (or not doing) to make it be a little healtier. I had a couple of bad signs, like mood swings that weren't linked to any external stimuli, that mean I may end up seeing a professional again at some point. However, on other fronts things are a lot better.

For one, I've finally acknowledged that I'm actually not made happy by being lazy. The last proper frame of reference I had with enough time to introspect on it was college and soon after, where I could do stuff like spend a week playing Baldur's Gate, or similar goofing off. I often stressed myself out in recent years because I don't seem to get the time to do that sort of thing any more. However, given the opportunity to do so, I found myself not really able for it - the thought of not doing something productive, or not doing something at least worthwhile outweighed the stress for not being able to goof off (if that makes sense). So tl;dr: The marathon laziness sessions I get stressed about not doing are actually bad for me when I get to do them. I don't like them. The reason in my head, at least, seems to be that the part of my brain that wants things is a bit disconnected from the part that enjoys experiences and feeds back. It also probably means that I did some growing as a person without really noticing. So, I got to rationalise away a source of stress :-)

For another: this leave almost acted as a catalyst for realising what I'm going to do, ever, and what I'm not going to do. For a long time, I've had in the back of my brain "Someday I'll do X", where X is a thing that's completely possible for me to do now. Someday I'll go travel in a particular place. Someday I'll learn a particular skill. It'll happen in the empty space that I can retionalise away as "When I have time off work". I just had time off work, and only got one or two of these things done (the motorcycle thing, and some other social things I may go into later). Now that I'm back at work, I realise: there is no later. Unless you're prepared to make a long list and wait for retirement (and hope you make it in one piece and are able-bodied enough to tick them off) you're just not going to do these things. You sweep them away forward into a fold in time, which usually means 'never'. So, if I find myself going "I'd like to do X sometime when I've time", the time is now. Or soon. Make plans.

I've been extraordinarily lucky in my work life - I have a job I love doing, that pays well and is flexible about lifestyle. I have a Significant Other that is the world to me, and that I want to share my life with if I can. I have most of my life left to make of it what I can. The last thing I need is self-denial and some-other-time'ism holding me back. I need to keep that in my head as I get back into a routine, so it doesn't become too routine.

Of course, if I could find my work ID, this would all be a lot more straightforward.

August 23rd 2014

2014-08-23T22:24:00+01:00

Not a lot got done today, which is as it should be. Went for a wee motorcycle ride, which turned into a spin to, and around the phoenix park. Getting more confident and enjoying it more now that there are fewer moments of pant-shitting terror. More of this this week, I think.

August 22nd 2014

2014-08-22T19:06:00+01:00

I think this is the last of the work on the new house. Today, the painting of the exterior finished, the plumbing was finished inside, and the garage/shed got alarmed (we quickly calmed it down). Just in time for a week left in my time off work!

All that's left is to clear out the old house of stuff I care about, and point the "Make ready for new tenants" ray-gun at it, care of the local letting agent. Hopefully I'll get that done early next week, just in time for a few days off with nothing to do before going back to work.

I think, all in all, that despite the house move taking up a big chunk of my 2 months off, I'm still an awful lot happier with how things have turned out than if I'd kept trying to do it while working full-time. I can't imagine having done all this properly with only evenings and weekends.

I'll do a proper write-up of thoughts on this at some point, this margin cannot contain, etc.

August 20th 2014

2014-08-20T01:20:00+01:00

Sleep cycle being fucked up. That's the holiday sensation I know so well!

Last weekend, I was at a large (well, the largest of its kind in Ireland), Airsoft game, which meant a lot of driving and walking around, and not a lot of sleep. My feeble hu-man body is still getting over it, via some seriously lazy weekdays.

Tomorrow should see the beginnings of the hideous sickly-yellow colour the previous owners painted the outside of the house disappearing, to be replaced by a hopefully less sickly light green. I am not pretending to be even remotely competent at painting, so we're getting someone in to do it.

Me, I've been taking the last few weeks of my leave to spend time with favourite lady, enjoy the new place, and get to some nerding -- I've been messing about with LightwaveRF and getting it working nicely with my existing z-wave setup (and learning LUA and writing more golang in the process). More on that later.

August 10th 2014

2014-08-10T18:21:00+01:00

A week between updates, but it's been a reasonably busy one. Still moving a bunch of stuff from the old house, still trying to get out on the (motor)bike every day or so (in between impressive rainshowers).

Friday was a small get-together with some folks, as a bit of a "Yep, I definitely live here now" wake-up call. The smaller touches are also happening, like home automation and the like. I think tis is possibly the first day I've been able to sit in the office and get some solid nerding done. I'm currently experimenting with using LightwaveRF stuff for light switches, since their switch gear is a bit cheaper and more predictable tan z-wave (which I'm using for everything else).

This week, I have to sort out some smaller bits (like the CCTV company that have left me waiting a solid 3 weeks to finish an install. Bad show, MAC Alarms). Also, some more moving (I still havent'e mptied the old house. The last big job is getting that rented out).

Back to the nerd-mobile.

August 3rd 2014

2014-08-03T11:40:00+01:00

Updates getting more infrequent, so I should make it my business to do more interesting things, right?

Thursday and friday were the IBT course, which I passed, making me apparently eligible to ride a motorycle of any size without restriction, as long as I wear a newbie hi-vis. That seems kind of terrifying.

Yesterday, I picked up the rest of the bike gear/PPE, so all I'm missing now is a bike. And for this rain to feck off so it's safe to ride it.

This week looks like it's moving the rest of the stuff from the old house, and finding a rental agency that wants to turn the old house from a mess into paying tenants. Possibly interspersed with bike shopping, but there's no rush on that.

July 30th 2014

2014-07-30T16:20:00+01:00

Thge last few days haven't felt like particularly urgent ones, which is good -- I think I'm winding down the urgency level overall, and the time off work is kicking in. I had originally intended to take a month off, and was convinced to take 2 by a co-worker. In retrospect, only taking a month would have been a mistake. I think I'm only really getting into things now, 4 weeks in. Having to go back to work next monday would be bad.

The computers/gear/network gubbins are mostly set up in the new place, which makes things more tolerable entertainment-wise. The software side of it will come together - I use some dodgy python scripts to do a lot of the automation stuff, and will have to do stuff like turn downloads off while I'm at home (Internet connection going from 200Mb->6Mb), and various other bits.

The next few days are a bit busier, my bike training is tomorrow, and Favourite Lady gets home as well. Hopefully updates will pick up.

July 27th 2014

2014-07-27T23:12:00+01:00

26 and 27 have been days off. I said before about needing to take 'days off' from the moving and the Stuff I Gotta Do - these days turned out that way.

Friday night, I got one of the annoying headaches I get if I get too tired or stressed, so that, if nothing else, was the sign that it was time for a break. So, yesterday and today was mostly lounging around, being amused by the cats noticing things. There's a lot more wildlife outside the windows of this house (more kinds of birds, rabbits and hares, and a local cat they haven't seen yet). It's been a tiring experience when you've got lots of things to notice.

Ping has stopped hiding, at least, which is encouraging. She's more of a creature of habit, and didn't explore the house at all the first day. She's currently trotting around smelling things, so that's good.

Tomorrow, I get to do some delicious physical labour, moving things from the old house, and moving lumber and various bits from the back garden to the site of the skip I really must get for it one of these days.

This week is probably the first week with nothign house-related scheduled -- the only thing scheduled is my IBT course on thurs/fri, and some nerd stuff on thursday evening. That'll do.

July 25th 2014

2014-07-25T13:19:00+01:00

Yesterday was Moving Day for small cats everywhere. As predicted, Stranger didn't care and just wanted her head scratched, and Ping stared bloody murder and found some hiding places.

Overnight was uneventful, aside from the CCTV making noises at 0330 and complaining about SMART errors. Guess it doesn't like being on its side. Whoops.

Today, I am generally being around so the cats can have some semblance of normality, and I can catch up on lounging. Some goodies arrived from Vesternet so I'm going to take a ook at that later.

For now, I'm reading The Finder Library and enjoying the sun while it lasts. The cats are making various sorties into the rest of the house and being hilarious.

July 23rd 2014

2014-07-23T09:38:00+01:00

Yesterday, some dudes in a JCB showed up outside the gate to fill in a giant pothole that trucks and buses had been disappearing down for the last few months. It is my understanding that I should figure out who caused this to happen and then vote for them.

The very last of the work on the house drags oooooon. Today, an electrician does a number of small jobs, which sorts that out (and turns the tiny pointless room containing the entrance to the attic into a decent comms room). Tomorrow (hopefully) a plumber gets to drain and rebalance my radiators in order to fix a tiny drip from one of the radiator valves. The CCTV also gets finished off either today or tomorrow.

Still, I am an awful lot more moved-in than I was. The cats are used to me disappearing for a few days at a time, so them moving later in the week is fine, I think.

July 20th 2014

2014-07-21T12:46:00+01:00

I have moved, the cats have not. This means they get really needy when I'm in the old house. See above for an example: I sat down and Ping immediately sat on my arm.

House business: More furniture has arrived, the blinds and CCTV are being installed tomorrow (if people show up). Then the Cats may move, since all that's left is some electrical work.

Other business: Went to see "Monty Python Live (almost)" in VUE in Liffey Valley. Some nice touches added to the older bits, and they knew which bits to go Just Too Far on (and it was either abundantly clear that Cleese didn't want to be there, or he was putting it on really convincingly).

July 17th 2014

2014-07-17T23:17:00+01:00

If you ever want to get funny looks in an electronics shop, break out a measuring tape and start measuring microwaves. I got an incredulous "They're all standard sizes" today in Power City, while standing in front of a load of microwaves that were clearly Very Different Sizes. Our old microwave (which I actually saw on sale for an eye-watering amount) is too big for the fancy flippy arrangement in the new kitchen, so I got one that physically fits, and performs the one function of a microwave I've ever used ("Nuke on full power for N minutes"). The old microwave was also a browner, grill, and worryingly had a button marked 'Chaos Defrost'. So it gets flogged/donated/something.

Also today was the BER assessor looking at the house post-renovations. His only on-the-spot recommandations were something like "Eh, there are still one or two bulbs that aren't CFLs, and that's about it". So that's good. This assesment means free gubmint money to cover some small part of the heating/insulation work.

I was planning on tomorrow being a day off, but the solar installers never showed today, and some furniture is arriving tomorrow, as I found out today (2 weeks early!). Maybe I'll gt the weekend off?

July 16th 2014

2014-07-17T09:35:00+01:00

I own a sealed copy of Katamari Damacy for the PS2. You find these things out when you're moving and doing a cull of crap. Why do I own this? I don't even own a PS2 any more.

This was probably most of the day. That, and being asleep. I've found that between one thing and another, I'm still having to get up in the morning. This is, as they say, not what I signed up for. Going to have to sort that one out.

The evening saw some shooting of people, and then to bed for a delightful 5 hour nap, in time for getting up for the last of the builders (turning on the solar system, and the BER assessment).

July 15th 2014

2014-07-15T21:48:00+01:00

Today turned out a good bit more productive than expected. Headed up to Newry for some shopping (Well, for a particular item), then got back and did some painting -- Blinds are arriving on Friday hopefully, so the reveals around the windows needed to be painted before then. Good old Magnolia. The safe bet.

This evening is my first night spent sleeping in the new house. I have to say it feels a bit strange not to be surrounded by other people in houses attached to mine. Getting used to the noises of a new house, the random settling and banging noises throughout, the outside noises seeping in. Compared to the house in Clane, it's deathly quiet.

Tomorrow, I'm actually not sure what's on the cards. I've been asked to do some driving instruction, and will be going shooting people in the evening.

I also need to book some training. Check out what I bought in Newry:

July 14th 2014

2014-07-14T21:48:00+01:00

Eating an actual meal in what was essentially a building site a week or so ago is a strange experience.

In any case, today was waaaaay less productive than I thought it would be -- the last vestiges of Builder disapeared (the skip full of old stuff), and I got a new freezer. Aside from that I played a bunch of Hearthstone, which I'm not sure I like yet, and moved a few small bits from house to house. Tomorrow will be probably a writeoff too, going to do some shopping...

July 13th 2014

2014-07-13T21:48:00+01:00

As old-house starts looking less like a house, new-house starts looking like a way better house than old-house.

Today I bought new glasses, discovered that my prescription hasn't changed in 3 years (which I think is good), and then unpacked some nice chairs and a table we ordered a while back.

Then, back to old-house, and coming home to this:

I suspect tomorrow may be a mostly-day-off. I need to get back on the bike again, and this weekend has been hectic. Weekends and weekdays haven't blurred into a meaningless amalgam just yet, so I need to get on that!

July 12th 2014

2014-07-12T20:39:00+01:00

Busy day yesterday (and less busy today) so catching up today. The large furniture parts are moved, and some other stuff was delivered (this is a table and chairs). Lead times on furniture are up to a month or so, so this'll keep happening over the next while. I was able to get a little bit done, but these are mostly still boxes in a corridor.

Later, headed into Swords to a birthday thing for an Airsoft-buddy. I'm not usually a pub person, because I usually have a work or driving excuse, but I figured that this is the closest to a complete absence of an excuse I'll have, so I actually showed up. The plan was to be dirty stopouts, then up in the morning for some shoot shoots. That worked out delightfully, followed by some helping J and Oli move, followed by crashing on their spare bed for a while.

Home now, and having to face the terrifying prospect of an evening without television (it's still here, but I'm not arsed plugging it in). Tomorrow, there are some new-house bits to do, and some more J/Oli moving (their old place is close to Croker, so we have to wait for the bogger concentration to die down in the evening).

July 10th 2014

2014-07-10T23:57:00+01:00

2nd Van Day, and the old house is even barer. This will probably be my last sleep there. The cats get to stay here a while longer, until I have some painting and DIY and other non-cat-friendly stuff done.

The new house has what we assume is a colony of wild rabbits nearby, we usually scatter one or two whenever we walk around the back. They came in handy today when we left out some cuttings from a tree in the front, which they duly disposed of by nibbling and running around nervously.

Tomorrow I get solar panels turned on, and get to make a lot of phone calls (one of which will be about my being largely unable to make mobile phone calls in the new house. So Rural.).

July 9th 2014

2014-07-09T23:32:00+01:00

Starting to move. First, large furniture items, so rented another van from another place, and moved bed, TV stuff, various other bits. A slight oversight means I don't have a functional bed anywhere. Thankfully, I have a nice couch. It feels a lot more real and the house in Clane feels a lot more bare.

Later, headed up to Bellurgan for a site walkaround and meeting about a large Airsoft game, The Rionegro Insurgency, I'm helping with running next month. Five weeks to go, and surely more about this as the time gets nearer.

Sleep time. I have the Van tomorrow again, so will get the last of the large stuff moved, and can then move smaller bits at my leisure (this is the theory).

July 8th 2014

2014-07-08T21:46:00+01:00

A simple day in one way. Helped J move cats and possessions, rented a van and negotiated extremely tiny streets with same. Only managed to knock the wing mirror off once.

Afternoon-food in Woodstock, which never disappoints. Om nom.

Heading out in the morning to pick up the van for my own move, of at least large pieces of furniture that don't fit in the jeep. Oh joy.

July 7th 2014

2014-07-07T22:40:00+01:00

Another late morning. I am entitled. The only useful thing that happened today was painting one of the bedrooms. Tomorrow I get to drive a giant van around, helping J move to a new place. I then go get a different giant van for a few days to move my larger items. It's giant van week! So excite.

July 5th 2014

2014-07-06T14:36:00+01:00

No photo today. If there was, it'd be a soiled lab coat with some scary-looking weaponry on it. Went to an afternoon/evening/overnight Airsoft game, with a Walking Dead theme -- I got to stick on a lab coat and pretend to do unspeakable things to walkers in a loft. This went on until 3am or so. Good times.

I'm only out of bed now, which gives me a low-level anxiety about wasting the day still. I've been trying to intentionally take some days off from "Things I have to do" for "Things I'd like to do", and this may end up being one. As of tomorrow, I have No Excuse Whatsoever to not move house, so today may well be not doing anything.

July 4th 2014

2014-07-04T12:02:00+01:00

After a slight hiccup on the home stretch (a plumber having a go at drilling a hole in a ceramic sink, and succeeding against all odds), the house buildings works are done, finished, kaputt.

Now it's time for minor DIY plus moving, no more excuses. Also furniture shopping. Joy.

July 1st 2014

2014-07-01T22:47:00+01:00

Skipped a day, yesterday being mostly lost to what I'm assuming were sinus headaches, but which could have been stress or tiredness or a combination of both. Last time I bought a house, I ended up on a treadmill in a local clinic having some heart palpitations checked out. So things are going pretty well, considering.

Today was Kitchen day, the installers arriving first thing (as well as the Alarm guy, so now my alarm will send me a frantic SMS message if it goes off). After only slight mishaps (the hole in the ceiling for the extractor fan was measured based off old plans, so was a bit off. Whoops) I now have some of a kitchen. The main bits (sink, hob, oven) will go in hopefully tomorrow.

I also had new washer and drier delivered, and got to hear an entertaining rant from the delivery guy (apparently 'Robertstown' is some vague amalgam of a couple of townlands that can mean any where from just outside Naas to Enfield, so about 30 square km). A happy throwback to living in town is that I'm able to give directions to my house via well-known local pubs.

I also primed/sealed some plaster reveals in the rooms I didn't have profesionally painted, and hung some curtain rails. Aren't I a clever primate. I also now own a spirit level you could beat someone to death with (which, in fairness, is a critical criterion for any hand tool).

Tomorrow, since the actual tradespeople don't arrive until the evening, I'm going to take a day off house stuff. I actually haven't had a proper lie-in since my leave started, so I'm going to try that, then see what happens.

June 29th 2014

2014-06-29T20:13:00+01:00

My capacity to think of a witty title for every day is going to run dry eventully, so let's try this for a title convention -- protip: posts with the date as a title probably either have limited re-sale value or were boring in the first place :-)

Today I went and played some Airsoft, then met J in IKEA and picked up a few small bits (no furniture yet, or at all from IKEA if I get my way), then headed home via seeing the new floor. This was the last unfinished surface in the house, the walls and ceilings having been finished yesterday post-windows.

Since it was a big floor (spanning two rooms), we decided to go fairly swish, and weren't disappointed.

Must Do Things

2014-06-28T19:00:00+01:00

I'm guessing it's going to take at least a week to figure out that I don't have a schedule. Sadly, house renovations mean I actually do have a schedule of people showing up for the next week or so.

Today, I failed to sell an Oven, and succeeded in buying a new Airsoft gun. So there's something.

I also lit the first fire in the new house, coincidentally because I needed to dry the place out for a floor that's being laid tomorrow.

Last Day O' School

2014-06-27T22:37:00+01:00

Finished up in work today, not in again until the 1st September. Wandered around doing some house stuff (measuring windows for blinds, seeing if stuff needs doing tomorrow).

Next wek, the interior painting gets finished, along with the new kitchen arriving tuesday, and the last of the floors going down. We're then well into 'no excuse' territory :-)

Googlers who are following this: I should warn you -- it's not going to involve much highbrow insight until I sort out this block and tackle. Right now, this is "My Project", if you've read the excellent Nerd Handbook article.

I'm also going to be doing something essentially every day, as much as I can. I'm considering adding Disqus so people can comment, but in the meantime, email me.

For now, though, I'm tired. It's been a logn day of work. Time for a new start tomorrow.

Ow

2014-06-24T21:26:00+01:00

Finally (I am a male Irish person, after all. We're allergic to health professionals) went to the Physio today for a niggling problem I've had with one of my calves for the last while. What I thought was a bit of stiffness due to lack of exercise and a need to HTFU is actually Achilles Tendinitis, which is a lot more scientific of a diagnosis. Icepacks and stretches for a while. Just in time for wanting to use my calves a bunch, yay.

Also, figured out the last big renovation job on the house (a floor in two of the rooms). A good bit more than I was expecting to spend, but should be commensurately nicer. All things going well, we could be done by end of next week. Could be. All things going well. Yep.

Don't Forget: You're Here Forever

2014-06-23T19:28:00+01:00

Some zealous schwag-merchant deep in the innards of The Company was a month early with this -- probably giving me some time to mount it over the mantel of my plush leather and mahogony office before the big day.

Ironically, I'll not be in work for the big day -- I'm taking all of July and August off, so generally chill out, catch up on being lazy, and have more than 2 weeks off for the first time in my working life. I figure after 15 years or so I'm probably overdue.

Generally, my list of things to do for the two months amount to:

Move into new house.
Rent out old house.
Ride my bike a bunch.
Maybe get a new hat.

This seems like a solid set of objectives. I have vague plans to write more code, play more music, replay some games I've been meaning to. Anything after that seems like overachieving.

So, this week saw lots of mail show up at the office, some of which is being squirreled away for hacking on later. Today, the Spark board arrived, which will be fun, if I decide what to do with it at some point.

The idea of being able to talk over the network to stuff that's not supposed to is fascinating (which is why I've also picked up some z-wave toys for the new house, which I'll get to). This will be fun to mess with.

Ta-ta

2014-06-21T17:13:00+01:00

Having nothing to write about but "I made soup!" is something of a dampener on things (I didn't make soup).

Part of the point of this log is to capture some of that upcoming leave of absence I'm taking from work - I'm taking all of July and August off, and this is my last week in work before turning into a pumpkin.

The general idea is that if I've got nothing to write about every day or two, then I should probably be doing more stuff. I've put off a lot of things over the years, I should at least clear some things (I haven't made a list intentionally - that kind of invites disappointment, I think).

So, today was mostly sleeping and dealing with Jetlag. Tomorrow, hopefully less so.

Excuse the Dust

2014-06-19T17:06:00+01:00

Still fiddling with Pelican -- it's got a reasonably nice codebase, but the devs don't appear to be all that responsive. I've had to patch a few of their outstanding pull requests already to get things working just-so, this one most notably. Also some fiddling with setting up a lightbox for images, and importing old stuff from Blogger.

Today in NYC wasn't as oppressively hot as yesterday (and probably about the same as at home. I think I might have missed the Irish summer in my 3-day trip away). At least they're less apologetic about air conditioning here.

One more day here and I get to go see if my new house is still standing.

Alive and Thinkin'

2011-05-26T13:55:00+01:00

I am alive. Apologies to folks who were following the electronics stuff -- the short version is that it worked, although I didn't get to use it 'in anger' as such. The other thing I learned is that when traveling through UK customs on the week of a royal wedding, having a small plastic box with wires coming out of it and a 9v battery strapped to it with tape is not a clever thing to have in your car (thankfully the customs official had a sense of humour).

Since then I've been doing a bunch of for-money work, and only took time out this week to relax. I occasionally take a week off to hang around at home and get 'life administrivia' done. Think of it as a concrete block on the see-saw of work-life balance.

I've been playing around a bit with generalised messaging for domotics updates. I'm thinking of a centralised controller that can accept events from various signals, such as the Current Cost meter, a wifi device coming in range, or a small IC hanging off the doorbell circuit, for example. A lot of these devices don't have particularly fully-functional network stacks, so I'll have to bite the bullet and get the handful of ZigBee radios I got recently working. Doorbell will be the fun one, I think. My house already has a (private) twitter account, and DMs me for various stuff (unknown hosts grabbing a DHCP lease on the network, etc.). Adding more stuff to this is the idea.

I'm also interested in the idea of cloud applications with local storage or local encryption keys -- so all your data is stored encrypted on the server side, and only you have the keys, so the content is decrypted at render-time. Stuff like 1password does this with secure stuff like password databases, but I think web browsing machines are zippy enough to do this for userdata. I have to see if it's been done already (it probably has), but I want to do some fiddling with it.

So yes, same old. Too much science to do, never enough time.

Finding Day

2011-04-03T10:15:00+01:00

One year ago today, a very small ball of fur decided to mew outside our front door in particular. We let her in and looked after her for a bit, and eventually decided she could stay.

We're not sure exactly how old she is, we're guessing se was about 6-7 months when she came to us, but I guess her finding day is as good a day as any to be happy she's around.

Happy finding day, Ping.

And All the Hills are Rainbows

2011-03-07T02:51:00+00:00

Various intricacies of how my job works these days means I work with people in a bunch of offices. They're not all in the states, but Mountain View and Irvine are two offices in California I do go to occasionally. When I was planning a trip to both late last year, I said I'd look at alternatives to flying for an hour (SFO->SNA). After doing some digging, I found the Coast Starlight, which is an Amtrak train that goes from Seattle to Los Angeles, and stops in Oakland and San Jose. It so happens Oakland is a short BART ride from SFO, so I said I'd give it a go.

I honestly am ambivalent about the TSA, and being groped and what-have-you. I realise there's no point in getting angry in Airports, because the people there are just trying to make a living. I'm also ambivalent about saving on flying (the plane goes whether I'm on it or not). I just like trains, and this one promised 12 hours or so of good geography and comfort. I got myself a 'roomette', which is apparently what you're allowed call a small cupboard with a seat in it, and it turned out to cost about \$130, which is cheaper than some air fares SFO->SNA.

It also doesn't help that SNA is referred to in muttered tones as 'Disneyland Airport'. It's right beside Anaheim and the home of The Mouse, so it's usually packed with kids. The look on a co-worker's face when they called for people-who-need-extra-time-or-have-small-children, and half the airport marched onto the plane will stay with me always.

The train itself is good and comfy. Tea, coffee, juice on each sleeper carriage, and a bar and observation carriage which is decent for hanging out, and "has" "wi-fi" (said wi-fi could well have been using the train driver's 3G phone as an uplink, and meets the minimum federal requirement to be called 'wi-fi'). The food is/was reasonably decent, and some of the views are very pleasant.

12 hours is a bit of a hike, so it's not recommended if you have actual places to go, but it's miles more pleasant than the solid 4 hours or so of wangling door-to-door it'd take to fly, and also trains kick ass.

I'm in LA for the night, and continuing by train to Irvine tomorrow, where I will again endure the hilarity of having to rent a car to cross the road from my hotel to the office. Go California!!

Not bad, as Castles go

2011-02-28T18:48:00+00:00

Myself and Favourite Lady took the weekend off to head to Dromoland (warning: terrible website will make all your orifices bleed rage). It was nice to get out to that part of the country again. Roomservice breakfast while reading the sunday papers is one of the best things ever.

We also had the opportunity to visit Bunratty Castle, which I'd last visited as a tiny nipper when my dad used to bring school tours there. We saw some chickens begging for scones.

Then we saw some of the old biscuits known to man. Shows how the old Kimberley/Mikado/Coconut Cream combination has stood the test.

Today, I'm flying off to the Bay area for a few weeks to issue barked instructions to nerds. I have a few posts lined up about the electronics stuff I'm doing, but they can be spread out over the next few weeks so I can resume when I get back. Inventing is interesting.

(I'm writing this from the Delta Sky Club in JFK, which gets a solid meh out of ten. The normal-person waiting area has iPads).

Hibernating

2010-11-24T13:20:00+00:00

'Tis the season, apparently.

One more stint of travel before the long and well-anticipated 2 weeks off work for xmas. I've only had one unbroken year in the streak of taking these 2 weeks off before in my entire working life -- I get very grumpy if it doesn't work out.

The last few weeks have been progressively colder at home, so the heating has been bumped up a notch and the Slanket has been seeing more and more use. That tiny roundy cat you see above is also starting to disappear under the duvet for the day when I'm out. Outside, it's got that damp, crisp thing going on. I think I've gotten back to liking this time of year. The last few have been not so good, for reasons I got basically sorted out this year, so in a way I feel like I'm missing something by going away (that and Favourite Lady, of course).

I've been doing a little more Airsoft, when I can. You tend to only really get the serious players out these days, so it's a little less annoying. I've also gotten my ticket to Berget for next year. I didn't go last year because I bought into the lame idea that I have to bring an entire squad, but I think I'd like to head along even with one or two people I know this time.

Work has been progressively more involving. I've been getting a lot more code done recently, and am trying to find a balance between direction-setting and getting-hands-dirty for the project. I'm encouraged to find I still like getting my hands dirty, but there's always last-minute phone calls to encourage people designing software to not pull the theoretical hot saucepan down on top of themselves which impinges on Make Time, as we're to call it these days.

I've also been looking again at Domotics -- I've picked up a Scooba, a few Roombas, and am looking at lawn and garden automation for next year. I'll do a proper post on this at some point. Making Things Talk is a fascinating read so far, it may be the first paper book I bring on a plane in a few years.

Speaking of which, I'm off to California on Sunday. I'm spending a week with the Analytics development team (I manage the Analytics Frontend SRE team), and then am in Seattle for 3 days with the Analytics Backend SRE team. It's my first Mountain View visit in a good long while, almost a year in fact. It'll be good to see videoconference peeps for realsies for a change.

Barcelona

2010-11-15T16:04:00+00:00

Sagrada Familia has scrubbed up nice, hasn't it? The whole centre part of it was building site when I was there last, so this is a step in the awesome direction. We even missed the pope by exactly a week, as he came along to consecrate it (they need a level 11 god-botherer to consecrate something this bug, since he's high enough level to know the spell, and can only cast it once a day).

Barcelona is still nice. People use the city, which is a far cry from anything I've seen in Dublin (Dublin has character, but that character needs a few auld shcoops to loosen itself up and usually finds a way to wreck anything out of the ordinary).

November is also a reasonable time to go. It was t-shirt weather throughout, except for the top of the tourist bus. We didn't get enough time to do all the touristy bits, but got some successful shopping done and felt like it was a weekend well-spent nonetheless. We'll probably be back.

Roll on the next thing we're doing!

Braaains

2010-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

Work this past week has been a long trial of getting back up to speed after Tel Aviv. Even though it's pretty much a regular week, catching up my brain from all the stuff I promised to do, and getting back into the stuff I was doing when I left had just about happened by today, basically.

I'm currently looking into full-spectrum/white lighting, for home and work. November is usually a bad brain month, in general. This year, I've been continuing my theme of doing things pro-actively by attempting to spend at least some of it outside the country (I'll be in Barcelona next week, and heading to California at the end of the month), and the aforementioned lighting. It makes a discernable difference to overall mood if I'm working under one for the day.

The one bad thing, of course (and the reasons why hotels use low-light yellow bulbs) is that it shows up every speck of dirt and dust in the room. Once you can deal with this, I heartily endorse this event or product. You feel less like you're holed up in a fortress of solitude, and brighter lights (properly shaded) are in general good for your eyes.

I've been doing other brain stuff recently, which I'll get into. The moral: making your brain work is damn useful if it's what pays your bills.

Tel Aviv

2010-10-25T13:19:00+01:00

I'm spending this week in Israel, in The Company's Tel Aviv office, doing some ninja work on Analytics production -- a bunch of stuff gets done out of here, and I'm helping out the nice people here to keep their services stable and non-annoying. I'm on the 26th floor of a giant office building, and the view is amazing.

Tel Aviv beats my record for "Furthest east on a traditional world map", the previous record held by Dubrovnik. I don't get to do a lot of touristing this time, but they're at least threatening to bring me to Caesarea later in the week. I also get to possibly walk around and see Jaffa/Yafo on friday.

Didn't bring a more beefy camera than the Nexus One, so only a handful of photos this time.

Now You're Square, Part Deux

2010-10-19T22:22:00+01:00

It's getting to be toward the end of the year, time to resurrect the old monolith.

I've been considering moving to Wordpress, but wordpress is far too annoying to set up, and I realise that most people read/skim via RSS and don't care about delivery mechanisms. It's like putting letters you write to your bank manager in lovely scented paper envelopes you made yourself.

I've been doing a lot of travel recently, most recently to Seattle (again) and Italy. Was also going to be going to Lisbon, but got my annual dose of brain mush right before. I'm heading to Tel Aviv next week, Barcelona with a Nice Lady in November, and Seattle in November too. I'm personally responsible for crying icebergs.

I'm not going to pretend like I'm going to update this more often, but let's just say I'd like to. I'm feeling a little more like I'd like to remember some of this stuff, and we won't have USA assorted biscuit tins full of B&W negatives in 2050.