Life has been chaotic the last several months. Work, home, family, friends...it's been an up and down side to side rollercoaster of a ride the last few months.
Alan's job got out-sourced. Luckily, he found a short-term contract to pay the bills. And who knows? Maybe it will turn full time and he and his wonderful spouse will be back in Louisville with only a minor hiccup to their original plans. Hooray! (I'd like to point out that Alan was just ditched by the same employer that screwed me and is presently destroying the souls of a number of high-quality nice-to-know computer geeks. Bastards.)
In other news, I'm apparently a terrible friend. Or at least one more person on this earth thinks so. Oh well. Can't win em all. Suck.
Work has gone from stupid insane busy, to quiet during the holidays, back to stupid insane busy. I'm presently: writing automated recovery code for "automatic" data replication technology; planning another SAN refresh touching the half I didn't touch last year; repurposing an entire data center from legacy to spanky-shiny new area for testing and development; growing our environment from 200TB to 300TB in the next four months; migrating 30TB of data then sending 18TB of it to two other cities; deploying at least two new storage-management sofware packages; evaluating a third storage-management software package; probably deploying backup and/or storage encryption techologies; and on and on. Obviously I should have enough to do this year...
The house has been driving us crazy. First a handrail through the wall. Then a minor leak that became a moderate leak that became a just-shy-of-disasterous leak. And now I just signed a loan for a complete kitchen remodeling project: new cabinets, new appliances, new nearly everything. AIGH! But it should be lovely though...by April, the Geek Manor kitchen should finally reflect the "enjoys cooking for and feeding friends and family" aspect of its residents. I'll be sure to take before, during, and after shots of the destruction/construction process.
Smacky got to sing Lord Of The Rings Symphony with the Louisville Orchestra. I didn't get to hear it because the seats cost a small fortune. Bastards.
The holidays were nice (yeah, I said as much recently, but more holidays have happened since then). Hectic, but at least filled with family and friends, new and old. Yay. And I got a flash for the camera. Now my pictures actually stand a chance of looking even better as I learn its proper place in my photo-taking arsenal! I got a few really nice ones of Chili and his woman-thing. And a couple decents ones of other folks. If i ever get off my duff, I might actually post some of them!
On the Google front, I'm not going to work for them any time soon. After they called, I interviewed with them a number of times, for two different positions. In the end, the offerings they had just weren't quite a great fit for me, particularly given how good my present gig is. They were very nice people, even if their hiring/interviewing process was a bit chaotic. The interviews were challenging and enjoyable, and I think I might like working for them someday, if my present career skill-set and interests ever more closely align with positions they may have in future. In the meantime, I'll just love my current job, and be happy I have it and don't hate it.
I'm thinking of starting a Home-O Fun Day. Not sure of particulars, but some guys at work and I have this idea where we all throw home-projects into a hat, draw one, and we then descend on that person's house to complete that project. After we're done, we enjoy a meal and a few drinks, hang out, and generally feel good fo having helped someone out. And in the end, I'll end up with the extra hands I need on the occasional house project. Whether Home-O Fun Day is a work- or friend-based thing, I think I'd like to get it started...probably should start sending out emails to Home-Os I know.
I'm sure there is more, but I feel the urge to curl up with a good book. (Having just finished Zelazny's entire Amber series, I'm presently diving into Heinlein's For Us, The Living. I'm really liking it...particularly since I just finished Flatland not too long ago, and the literary style is not dissimilar.) More as it is news. Hopefully I'll get to hang with some of the Louisville nerds sometime soon...sheesh.
