melog-20130421-03.log

physicists are "on a roll" lately. they discovered the higgs boson particle and may have now found indirect evidence that dark matter isn't just some idea people pulled out of their asses.

fascinating.

melog-20130421-02.log

time management for system administrators is a book i've been going through from time to time. it has been helpful in the past few weeks.

system administrators are IT professionals who have the primary job of caring for computer systems that provide services for users.

computers run 24x7-- including holidays and on your scheduled vacation. so then . . . being a system administrator is often advertised as an 8-5 M-F position, but servers can crash or require preventive maintenance outside of that window. old school employers still want to know why you didn't come to work at 08:00 sharp, but you were up at 03:00 installing patches . . . or you worked saturday or sunday performing extra work.

i always felt like i was never getting anything done, but i was always working, working, working. i didn't realized that my time management needs were unique because a system administrator has to manage a 24x7 responsibility, an 8-5 job description, and then possibly a demanding home or social life all at once.

time management for system administrators has really helped me these past few weeks. I've gotten more done without feeling that my efforts are useless or that i'm trying to complete an infinite task.

the book doesn't just help me manage work, but home life too. for the first time in a few years, i've finally replaced all the florescent lights in my home.

and . . . i just might get some server patches done today. i've been putting that off for a good while. you know . . . patches are necessary until they break production services.

thank the lords of kobol for snapshots!

melog-20130421-01.log

what is it about lawn mowers? i have two, so it's twice the trouble to just to get one started.

soooo sleepy, but nobody will let me sleep . . .

melog-20130421.log

i'm exhausted from helping my wife with a short paper and running errands all day. my niece is also spending the night, my wife let my daughter sleep in our bed and my son crashed in the living room. i feel a bit displaced in my own home.

i took my son to the eye doctor today. she told me that he has intermittent extropia which basically means my son's eyes function independently of each other and as a result, he sometimes doesn't get to enjoy the stereoscopic experience. in other words, he doesn't see 3-D very well. i don't mean just at the movie theater-- i'm also mean with everyday living. no wonder he stumbles around more than i'd like. he has issues with depth perception.

you'd hardly know it, but sometimes he does have the moments where he seems accident prone. now  i know why. so, when he put on the 3-D glasses at the doctor's office and couldn't see the pop up images, i began to really wonder what was going on. now i know.

the doctor told me to look into visual therapy, but stated that we don't even have anybody who practices that in our state, otherwise she'd refer me to one.

i saw on where a few studies have been done expressing that people with this condition are three times more likely than the average person to have mental illness by young adulthood. wow . . . that made me feel warm and fuzzy. mom already deals with clinical depression . . . at first glance it looks like the cards are really stacked against my boy. he's all of a sudden taken up the desire to become good at basketball. i'm short . . . his momma's short . . . he's got hardly any depth perception . . .

yet, you know what? i can't stop believing that he'll be ok. he still bought a new basketball today after hearing the doctor tell him that he'll have trouble with sports. he seems to really have found a way to adapt to his condition. so, maybe it won't be too much of an issue.

but now i understand why he tripped and fell a lot in soccer.

anyhow . . . i won't discourage him. if he really loves the sport of basketball like he claims he does of late, depth perception will simply be another problem that he'll learn to work around.

time to take a hot shower and find some corner of the house to sleep in. i took a training class last week, so i've got a lot of work waiting on me. yeah . . . and i gotta do server patches later today, too.

boy, i'll be glad when things slow down.

melog-20130419.log

Whoa. Been a while.

My daughter asked me if there could be life out there besides us and if we would be "the aliens" if we found other life.

I showed her pictures from the Hubble deep field telescope and explained that our planet sits inside of a solar system, that sits inside of a galaxy like one of those in that picture. I tried to help her get an idea of how big everything around us is.

Then I responded to her question with a question: Do you think it's possible that other life might exist since our universe is so big with so many galaxies like ours?

I admitted that we probably couldn't ever encounter life because the distance between the stars is so vast and the window of opportunity to encounter other life capable of meeting us is so small. But, ironically, the opportunity for life to form elsewhere in this universe is enormous.

Her question got me to showing her videos and then I remembered a blog post that depicted the atmosphere in relationship to ground level. That got me thinking . . . I haven't blogged in a really good while.

I worry about a computer system that doesn't have any logs to report. It's too quiet. Seems like the logs ought to show something somewhere. I get nervous when I look at logs and don't see anything at all but a time stamp of the last reboot that happened half a year ago.

Anyway, that got me to looking over old posts. I remembered why I did this. It's not to entertain others-- though if that happens, that's an added bonus. I did this to clear my head and to create artifacts for me to find again years later so that I may reflect. In other words-- this is my diary of sorts. I see that totally ignoring this endeavor is a mistake even if blogging seems to have gone out of style (Thanks for that, Facebook-- and you too, Twitter).

melog-20120315.log

i've had my head in the sand for a while. i haven't blogged, or read any blogs. i took out time to study for my redhat certified system administrator exam. i traveled down to tampa and took a four day course back in december of 2011. i studied my ass off for that test. i went to class, went to the hotel, ate at the hotel, studied. then slept.

i never turned on my tv once.
i never went out of the balcony door to my room to see the water or to mingle with the parties going on right outside my window (those steel drums playing outside were so hard to resist!)
hell, i didn't even notice the balcony door in my bedroom until my third night at the hotel!
i didn't surf the web, unless it was to better understand a test objective.

well . . . on that friday, i took the exam. i learned that the most valuable lesson was to not get rattled during the exam. that was the best tip i received from another co-worker who took the exam, but unfortunately failed it (though he got really close. he'll get it next time, i'm sure).

i finished all objectives with only three minutes left on the clock (exam was timed).

i felt good about it-- but you don't get the results immediately.

i flew home and waited all evening.
i waited all day saturday.
i finally gave up late saturday night.

sunday morning, i got an e-mail.

passed!

i got a pdf of my certificate to print out at my leisure along with a certification number that can be authenticated by the official redhat website.

maybe i do know what i'm doing-- a little.

now, i can breath a little.
at least, until the next certification exam comes my way . . .

melog-20120313.log

today is my birthday. but, i only mention that for context.

my mother gave me a birthday card today. within it, she gave me a check for an amount of money that i will not disclose here.

but, more valuable than the check was her words on the card which read:

it has been a joy being your mother!

i was quite touched. i could tell that she was proud of me and my choices overall. i have a family, i work for a living, and i (so far) have stayed out of the prison system. none of my other male siblings can say all of these things together. i think that gives my mother a sense of relief that maybe she at least got parenting right with one of her kids.

but, i also hear something sad in her words. i felt as though she was telling me goodbye-- as if she is keenly aware that her journey in this life is drawing to a close. she knows that soon she won't be able to walk along our side any longer as our mother, or stand off from a distance and watch us venture out into the world for which she hoped to prepare us.

one day, i told my mom that my peers and I frequently repeat the same conversation about our parents.

she smiled and quipped-- what? you talk about how much we still get on your nerves.

"no", i told her. "we always talk about how we worry more and more about that day when we'll have to live the rest of our lives without you."

we both fell silent, acknowledging the inevitability of it all.

i love you mom.

i'm so glad you sacrificed all of your energy loving me, too. i only hope i can be half the parent that you were to my kids.