Reckless Abandon

Reckless Abandon

A job interview today.  To be sure, I'm still employed by my current company.  Also to be sure, I don't make a considerable lot and what I'm aiming for is akin to a very large raise.  Calculated in year terms, at best it would take between four and seven years to get to the point I'm aiming for with this job.  Sure, compound interest and compound raises of 3-5% are great, but one big kick towards the goal is good.  And the goal is simple: more money. 

Call me greedy and I just don't care.  I find that the people laying claims of greed have two agendas: 1) they make considerably more to you and can't see why you would want to leave, or 2) they make considerably less than you and are jealous.  I'll reiterate this statement again: I'm a Christian, and I believe in the new covenant.  If I get paid more, then that is God working in my life and I need to give more.  It's all God's money anyways, and I'm just a steward of that money.

Biblical ideas aside, the goal was talking about interviewing for a job while you are still employed and your employer doesn't know you are interviewing.  The job is with a major company at a major location in town, and sounds pretty good. 

But what do you do?  There's always a few questions that you need to answer well or you are shot.  The big question is: why are you applying for a job with company X while still working for company Y?  And that question has to have the correct answer or the rest of it doesn't matter.  If you say "I hate my boss", you've messed up and need to go find another interview.  But if you do hate your boss and translate that into something saying corporate policy prevents professional growth, then you sound like a go-getter and not a scumbag. 

But my second question is...  do you give your current job the opportunity to counter the offer?  Or do you just give a notice and bounce?  That is a question I have no idea what the answer is.  Part of me says you always have to give your current company the chance to counter.  Part of me says if you're company really cared about you they would have already offered you more money.  I guess it narrows down to why you are applying for a new job in the first place. 

Feelings

I get these feelings sometimes, and I can't really explain them I can just say what the feeling was and point to the social/moral/political reasons I feel that way.  

And the current feeling is thus.

Romney is going to win.  

Businesses are prepping and acting as if he is going to win.  I've been in a mildly constant job search for the last few years.  Just a running thought as to what else is out there.  In two years, I was contacted for one job.   In the last six months or so, I've been contacted for at least 5 jobs.  So what has changed?  I finally updated my resume three weeks ago so it no longer has the wrong phone number.  Email is still the same and has been since the '90s, so nothing going there. But there is a presidential election going on.

I have watched all three debates so far.  Romney/Ryan has trounced Obama/Biden in 2 of the 3.  The only non-whoopdown was the last debate between Obama and Romney.  Romney still won, and Obama has finally quit showing his disdain for the average person.  The average person cares about the debates, and wants a president that acts like he cares.  So far, the Obama/Biden ticket has come across in the debates like disrespectful, arrogant people who don't care.  You can say what you want, but actions speak louder than words.  And the actions of the Obama/Biden ticket haven't been all that impressive.

I got this same kind of feeling last election.  McCain/Palin was a worthless candidate with "me-too" people.  It was the Who's Baba O'Reily all over again.   "Meet the new boss/same as the old boss".   It was the ethnic diverse ticket versus the gender diverse ticket.  And neither side painted a bold difference between their choice and the other side.  Romney/Ryan isn't trying to be some hunky-dory social acceptance ticket.  It stands for something and has a direction it wants to go.  You may not like where it wants to go, but at least it's got a direction. 

Still, Romney/Ryan is spending too much time letting the opponent dictate the issues.  I've quoted this article before, and I'll quote it again...  real titans don't whine.  You want to lead like the best, lead like the best.  Quit the backwards whining talk and grow a pair.  I don't care, nor do the American people care, what situation you came in to.  We expect results.  And if you don't produce results, you got to go. 

Maybe the college professor in Obama should have spent more time on Maslow's Hierarchy of Human needs (as applied to the macro scale).  Maslow says that what needs you currently have met will dictate what will motivate you.  In short, it doesn't matter what you think of social issues if there aren't any jobs.  Social issues are the arguments of those with food in their bellies and a roof over their heads.  A government that is worrying about social issues when there are no jobs is attacking the wrong level of needs. 

Left VS Right

So I spent yesterday designing touch screens.  Or at the part of yesterday I wasn't sleeping after a location upgrade.  

Anyways...   Proprietary Bob has the old version and the new version of everything they do.  The old version communicates through a bus that can cause all sorts of havoc.  In the new PCI compliance style interface, the old system doesn't work as well as it used to.  A customer can swipe a card and be out the door before the register ever realizes the card was declined.  So you have new technology, linked together using the best of the best of 10baseTX technology.  And you can get rid of the old tech and everything works in sync because you don't have to worry about whether Proprietary Bob wrote CSMA-CD into their algorithms.  By the way, you can tell it's a bus...  They have a piece of equipment that all devices communicate through.  It's a wired bus with a proprietary name.  But it can be replicated with a $10 off the shelf phone jack splitter.  Awesome work there, Proprietary Bob.  Awesome.

By the way, Cisco needs to update the CCNA.  In the description of a bus, they should indicate the best place to find one is a landfill.  Also...  should you ever see a bus in a working environment, quickly slam it in to a wall and break it...  claim you slipped if necessary.  Buses are worthless old technology and the world will be happier without them.

Now that you're up to date, we can go back and talk about touching things.  Essentially, Bob has given you the option of putting the sales list on the right side of the screen or the left side of the screen.  When you are not designing the thing, whether to put the list on the right or left isn't a big deal.  When you are designing things, it is a big hairy deal.

Now... the default is the left side.  I'm going with the assumption that most of the world or employees that would be using this thing are right handed.  And moving the right hand over the screen would block off a display on the right hand of the screen if the elbow flew out like Joe Cashier was about to go throwing elbows in his infamous throw-down of '02.  Now, if Joe Cashier moves their arm like T-Rex, then we've got a limited range of motion thing going and the elbows aren't going to be blocking off right hand side of the screen. 

The real problem is I can't predict how other people are going to use devices that I have to program and design.  If the device is designed well, it won't take 50 pokes to the touch screen to sell a pack of gum.  But designing the thing correctly makes a lot of difference in terms of speed and customer satisfaction.  And because I'm the tech who works on new projects, then I have to design those things. 

The astute out there will be saying this: isn't that an operations issue?  And the answer to the question is yes. 

But the real answer to the question is operations is spineless as a general rule.  They are willing to destroy a single persons' life for miniscule infractions but they are unwilling to make the large decisions that could negatively impact a business.  Screw one person: perfectly fine.  Screw 700: no way.  In IT, we have no designator between the two decisions.  In the end, a choice has to be made and if no one else will make the decision IT will.  Because someone told us to accomplish a task, and we'll get it done with or without the blessing of others.  Because others generally don't know what they want. 

IT is a dangerous job in that we have to go and screw everything up the first time so give the operations side an idea of what can be accomplished.  And then we have to rebuild what we created to please operations.  It's a painful cycle.

Digital Convergence

Growing up with fiction, they talked about the great digital convergence as if it was some strange and amazing phenomenon.  And it really is.  As I write this, I'm transferring all my music to a new computer across the room using Team Viewer (because domain/non-domain file sharing is a pain and it's quicker).  It provides something we never thought possible.  After spending years working with UltraVNC, Symantec PCAnywhere, and Famatech Radmin, I find Teamviewer to be the best of the group.   

 

Teamviewer does what it's supposed to do, and works pretty darn good.  It also provides something Windows XP doesn't: a data transfer rate.  Windows data transfer has always perplexed me.  You would think it would transfer items between a computers in the order selected, but that is incorrect.  It generally picks up 2-3 of the last items, puts them first, and then transfers everything in whatever order it feels like.  That's not what I want when I transfer files.  I want to transfer files in a logical, repeatable pattern.  What happens if that transfer fails?  Then I have to go back and transfer individual folder after individual folder, looking for that one random file that was missed.  Eventually, (hours after I should have stopped looking) I find the point at which Windows quit transferring. 

Perfect example of XP transferring data weird: while copying this from Microsoft Word, paragraph 2 ended up first and paragraph 1 end up second.  Strange....

I guess I could also use DropBox, but that's only a 2GB limit.  Right now, I'm working on a 13 GB folder named A-D.  Before the digital age, my CD collection was around 200.  There's no telling where it is now, or where it would be if I hadn't lost a lot of it here and there.  The acquisition of data itself used to be important to me, now not so much.  I would acquire hundreds of gigs of music and movies, and never watch any of it.  Most of it is now gone from a purge several years back. 

I still burn CDs and DVDs for work fairly often, so that part of the old style of system isn't gone.  Moving pure digital sounds interesting, but there's too much proprietary stuff in the business world to go there.  I suppose you can go with straight off the shelf equipment like eGenuity does but I'm still not convinced that is the way to go.  I still have to reboot the SQL server every three or four days because something has gone funky and isn't working.  With any luck, I reboot a VeriFone Sapphire less than once every 4 months. 

There are tradeoffs and differences in all equipment, but as much as the digital convergence was sold as being a life changer, I'm not convinced yet.  Sure, it changes the way I do things.  But it's still the same things over and over again.  I may not spend as much time transfer files to disk and walking it across a hall, but I do spend just as much time installing and configuring the software.  Let's think...   13 GB of music would be roughly 3 DVDs at 4.7 GB per DVD.  That could be burned in approximately 10-15 minutes per DVD.  Including setup, we're talking one DVD worth of material transferred every 30 minutes or so.  In the last 30 minutes, I've also transferred 5 GB worth of data using TeamViewer.  Approximate time to completion jumps up to about 2 hours.  The only difference between me burning DVDs and transferring using TeamViewer is that I'm perfectly willing to work on other things (like writing this) while TeamViewer is transferring files.  I wouldn't be willing to do so while burning a DVD.  That's got to be something, right?

the last fiction I'd ever read

I don't read fiction anymore.  My life has changed a lot over the last 15 years or so, and fiction books are one of those things.  I still read a lot, but it is all non-fiction.  It was probably sometime late in college that I quit reading fiction.  The last piece of fiction I read was William Gibson's "Spook Country".  It was a good book.  I liked the story.  It wasn't the Gibson I'd grown to love with Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, but it was Gibson nonetheless. 

I used to spend a lot of time delved into the worlds of other people, vicariously experiencing what they did.  I watched as Paul from Dune grew up and conquered the known universe.  I listened to stories from Piers Anthony about Death driving a sports car (or at least I think it was a sports car).  Neal Stephenson presented the internet as swashbuckling world where making faces move was more important than anything, and a crazy guy finally got his wish of nuking the U.S.  But I don't read those books anymore.

The old me loved them for what they represented.  They provided an escape to go when things weren't looking so rosy in my own life.  They were the escape I needed when I didn't like what I saw in my own life.  Most of the heroes in the stories were all the unlikely kind.  They stepped in from normal shoes and landed on a mountain, one crazy step at a time.  Many of them claimed they were "pawns of fate" and other strange statements, basically taking little responsibility for their lives. 

But that wasn't true.  These people stepped into situations that they didn't create, but they turned those situations upside down and on their head.  It wasn't always the prettiest sight, and things didn't always turn out as planned, but they took control of their own destiny.  And it was never easy fighting against the system.  But in the end, it was worth it. 

And I looked at my own life, tumbling through nowhere and ending up in places I didn't want to go and I wished I was that person who would just step out on a limb, without knowing the full extent of the limb or whether the branch would hold my weight.  I couldn't see through the fog (to make this paragraph so thick in metaphor that it hurts) and was afraid to step around, finding my way. 

But the Marines got rid of the fear of stepping into the unknown.  I remember sitting in some forest trail at Camp Pendleton, California during infantry school, acting as the squad leader for a life fire night assault.  It was pitch black, no moon.  We would sneak through those woods in darkness, setting up to destroy a fake enemy.  Claymores had been planted ahead of us, and they signaled the attack.  Rounds fired away.  Magazines emptied.  Sounds of buh-buh-buh-budget cut and butta-butta-jam came through the night as Marines ran out of ammo and continued their attempt at the assault.  It was beauty in precision and craziness, completely overwhelming to the senses and surreal in ways I can't even begin to describe. 

I didn't even understand what happened then.  I just did things.  Mechanical actions, much like a marionette pulled along by strings.  No happiness, no joy... just a surreal sensation of being wherever I happened to be at the moment.  No joy, no fear, no anticipation, no desire, no care.  It was a very empty feeling and I didn't like it and hadn't for years.

FYI, we didn't do so hot on our night ambush.  The people who were supposed to set the thing up didn't follow orders and screwed up royally.  No one died, but it was still annoying.  At the night assault course, we set the hill on fire as we went through fire and movement with live ammunition.  It was beautiful.    MOUT town was another surreal experience.  Two months before, I could barely climb the hill I ran up twice.  We practiced live fire room clearing, and slept on buses as we moved out of there, on to the next thing.  Always the next thing.

After my third tour in Iraq (as motor transport for all three, not infantry), I read the last piece of fiction.  At some point in my life, I realized everything I had experienced was enough to fill those books I'd read, and they had all passed me by.  I'd done what I had to do, but in the end I never really took charge of my life and stepped out on a limb.  It was always safe actions and safe moves.  Except for that time I went hunting a guy in the middle of the night during a security halt.  Not sure what to think about that anymore. 

After a while, I realized I had lived the crazy life.  My story book was there.  I just had to take charge of my own life.  I had spent enough time living my life through others.  It was time to take charge of my own life.