The way things are these days, you’d think that I, like I would imagine many other people in the world, would be thinking about money, the recession, the potential for war between countries who have been flirting with the bomb, my mother and the sale of her house, poverty in Africa, and the general suckage (is that a word?) in the world.

But no, I’m not thinking about those things.  What’s on my most most of the time is software development and programming.  I’m constantly thinking about what I’m good at, what I suck at, and what I need to do to get better.  Is that selfish?  Let me answer that - yes it is very selfish, but I don’t necessarily believe that selfishness is always a bad thing (part of me can relate to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Rational Self-interest).

The question though is not “is this selfish?” Rather, the question I’m putting out there is “is this normal?” There are enough things going on right now in my life, dealing with situations and people that I find simply unreasonable, that I’m finding it hard to identify what is “reasonable” any more, because what I see as unreasonable seems to be the norm for the majority.

So is it wrong to think about my career and personal development during times of stress? I feel it to be instinctive to focus on your strengths during times of uncertainty, but what do others out there think? Do you feel that in times of stress, you should cut away from what you’re used to and try something new, or go on vacation? Or do you believe that it’s the perfect time to share with others, give back to your community or family and try to increase your karma (if you believe in such things)? These courses of action are not mutually exclusive, but it helps to identify what needs focus if they’re not jumbled together.

If this post seems a little incoherent, it’s 1am, and my eye-lids have been drooping constantly since I started typing.
Have a good night all :)

I woke up early this morning with a mission on my mind, to finally organize my server rack the way I’ve always been meaning to, but for some reason (*cough*laziness*cough*) , I never got around to it.  I had recently bought some new hardware to re-build a system which I thought was dead, but which turned out not to be.  I didn’t really feel like returning the hardware, because this was the chance to build an up-to-date server to migrate all my VMs over to, which is something else I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time.

In any case, I finally got around to re-organizing my server rack today, and I’m proud of how it turned out.  With that accomplishment in hand, I decided to install our living room air conditioner (starting to get a tad warm, especially for computer systems). I headed out to Home Depot and purchased some wire mesh, or “screen” as one of their reps called it. Last year we found that we had a lot of mosquitoes and small flies coming in through the air conditioner. Considering it was a fairly inexpensive one, I figured that I got what I paid for. I decided to turn my $100 air conditioner into a $300 air conditioner, but adding on some custom filters in order to block any debris which it may collect through it’s many open vents. The roll of mesh cost around $15, and was easy enough to cut and shape. The end result turned out better than I had expected, and so this year I expect we will have a lot fewer bugs getting in.

And so the air conditioner was installed - this too had been completed.  I was on a roll and feeling good.  I decided then to try my hand at building my new server from scratch.

I had an old rack-mount server case¹ which I gutted, and started building the new server in there.  The new components included a new motherboard - the Asus M3N78-VM, an AMD Athlon 1640 CPU, and 4GB of OCZ Dual Channel SLI Ready RAM. The Micro-ATX form factor of the motherboard made it super easy to fit into the monster rack-mount case. With a few simple connections, I was ready to test boot-up, and things should have been smooth from there. It wasn’t.

The system wouldn’t power on - at all. My first mistake was that I plugged the front panel connectors into the wrong pins on the motherboard. No sweat, figured that out, and moved forward. Switched it on again, saw the motherboards “SB Power” LED come on (which was a good sign), fans started spinning, thought I was getting close, but nothing. I couldn’t get it to POST anything, no errors, warnings, or beeps at all. I decided to rip out all the peripherals and go bare-bones in order to isolate the problem. Still nothing!! Removed RAM, nothing.. Removed the CPU, nothing. So at this point, aside from being frustrated, I’ve been able to narrow it down to one of two things, it’s either the motherboard, or the power supply. The power supply should be fine, because it worked with the old hardware that I had in the case originally. However, there is a chance that the power supply isn’t compatible with this motherboard in some way.

If it’s not the power supply, then I’ve received a motherboard that was DOA. I’m hoping this is the case! I’d hate to take this thing back to Tiger Direct tomorrow, have them test it out, and find out that it’s just fine. That would be both embarrassing and frustrating.

Anyway, after all these triumphs and frustrations, I decided to finish off the night with a double shot of Tequila, and damn did it go down smooth :)

If this blog post seems at all incoherent, it probably has to do with the fact that its late, and I’m tired.  Oh, and maybe just a little to do with that double shot of Tequila.

1. solid steel, heavy beast [↩]

At work these days, because I’m the only developer on my “team”, I’ve been in the situation where I’m extending (which includes extensive, and often times ridiculous rounds of debugging) other peoples code.  Many of the projects I’ve inherited weren’t written to be maintained by anyone other than the original developers.  I’ve long ago come to accept that most programmers are not passionate about simplicity and elegance, and therefore write endless reams of code that over-complicate simple problems.

Now at VMware, I do work around some severely intelligent people, but unfortunately they are not developers, so I don’t work with them.  Because of this I often times rant to them about the ridiculousness of a given situation; and they’re smart, so they understand the problem technically, but because they aren’t working with me it would be hard for them to empathize with my frustrations.

I love reading Paul Graham’s essays every once in a while, because he seems to be able to understand and articulate my frustrations so well.  One in particular that I’ve been re-reading is Great Hackers which always makes me breathe a sigh of relief because he reminds me that I’m not crazy.

If you are a manager and have to manage a group of experienced programmers, I urge you to read that essay.  You just may prevent one of your developers from committing heinous acts of insanity.

Happy Birthday to my lovely wife, Sandra!  I hope she enjoys the rest of her day, as much as seemed to enjoy her birthday breakfast :)

At the end of December my wife, Sandra and I will be heading to Guyana for the holidays.  Sandra is Guyanese, and we will be staying with her family there.  I am looking forward to the trip, partially because I will be meeting my father-in-law for the first time, and partially because I will be visiting the birth-place of my mother and the family that I grew up with.  As many of my closest friends know, I am half Guyanese on my mothers side.

I expect this trip to be very exciting in many ways.  Aside from trying to keep from getting sick because I’m not accustomed to the environment (food/water/weather), I hope to visit some very interesting places while I’m there, especially (if all goes well) Kaiteur Falls.

Although I’m half Indo-Guyanese, I definitely don’t look it, so I expect that I will raise some eyebrows while I’m there. Hopefully I won’t say or do anything to offend anyone, and instead form a few lasting friendships. There has been a lot of crime there recently, especially in Georgetown, according to Stabroek News, so I will try to minimize my time in the City as much as possible.

It’s unlikely that I will have internet access there as readily as I have it at home, so I probably woun’t be able to provide instant updates and pictures on my adventures there (but I will try).

Sandra and I have made some very detailed check-lists about what we should take with us, and what to expect at each point throughout the trip, but if anyone has suggestions, I’d be more than happy to hear them.

I’ve been told to take a lot of “Immodium”, because my fragile Canadian stomach may not be able to handle the difference in food.

I’m sure we’ll both be fine, and look forward to all the fun and new friends that await us.

I watched the second debate last night, and I was very disappointed.

Obama kept repeating his same old attacks against McCain, and McCain likewise.

The problem I have with these debates is that they are not moderated correctly, in my opinion.

Why wasn’t Tom Brokaw controlling the debate, insisting that they answer his questions directly?  Tom should have said something to the effect of “I want you both to answer these questions without resorting to criticism of one another.  I want a debate that focuses on solutions, and on your ability to answer the questions posed by the American people, not a debate based on what you think about each other.”

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