Bashing around

While I'm stuck at my desk for several hours, with my computer bogged down with several remote desktop connections, I thought I'd slide over to my Ubuntu box and start messing with things.   I mean, I've got nothing better to do that sit and stare at bars that slowly move across the screen to indicate progress.  Really, I don't.  

But then automation is not something that has been properly built into the company I work for.  As we expand and grow (as we are doing right now) we haven't taken any time to develop and use tools that provide monitoring or automation for almost anything.  The only way we currently know if something goes down is a phone call from a store.   That's a backwards process. 

Slowly but surely, parts are building their selves into automation and remote management, but not at a pace that it should be happening.  I think as a company we've entered the 21st century, but there's a ton of stuff that needs to be done.  Far too much is fly by night, hope like hell it works.

Maybe I'm talking about pro-activity as opposed to reactivity.  I'm not terribly sure.  I just know the way we are doing things is not the right way to do them.  Too much legacy junk that serves only small purpose without providing much.  But someone decided we need to keep all that stuff.  Great.  Have fun. 

So I don't know how to do it in Windows...  maybe there's a way to do it in Linux.  People tell me its the greatest thing since sliced bread, and even better than peanut oil.   So off I am, to design and automate an entire network using nothing but Bash scripts and a Window's users knowledge of Linux....   Am I a glutton for punishment or what?

long nights and long days

So I haven't been updating.  Anything.  Well...  I've definintely been learning a lot.

At the moment, I'm exhausted but still running.  I'm in the beginning of an update to seven locations.  It's some fun stuff.  Is this the second 15+ hour day in a row?  Day one 8 to 1900, then 2030 to 0030..  so...   11 + 4...   15 hours that day.   Today was 8 to 1800, and then 2030 to who knows when.   It's not really pleasant when the 40 hour week is just another name for Wednesday, and you've still got Thursday and Friday to go. 

This is what I got my self into, in one sense though.   I'm not terrible sure I enjoy that all that much.  The initial goal was to make myself considerably more important to the company by taking on responsibilities that needed to be done but no one did.  Great, and it worked like a champ.  I picked up skills left and right.  And all those skills are now taking over every single moment I have.  

At some point, I assumed the additional personnel we hired would be worth their weight and they would learn something.  But we hired (what I think) are the wrong kind of people.  They are hesitant, slow, and unwilling to take charge or responsibility.  They are horrendously afraid of screwing up or doing something wrong.  And you can't be that way.   There's too much in this job where you have to be balls to the wall and just go crazy.   There isn't a nice way to do it.  You have to be willing to jump in the fire to learn and get good. 

The people we've hired use the kid glove approach, and a year later I've only lost one responsibility.   Is that something I wanted?  To take on all this responsibility and to become the person everyone else calls when they have a problem?  Sure, it sounds like a great job.  But it's also one that doesn't give any other benefit.  You get a lot of phone calls and that's about all their is to it.  No extra pay.  No extra benefits.  No comp time..   just 50 to 90 hours a week of balls to the wall work.  

Logical Tests

Just after posting the last blog, I thought of a book review I read somewhere on Amazon about a statistical financial book.  The reader complained that even those this book was based on statistical fact and interviews with real life human beings, it is not worth reading because of a logical test.  I think the review was about The Millionaire Next door, but I don't feel like searching through 112 pages of reviews to find the specific one.

And I'm reminded of Douglas Adam's thoughts on logical tests... 

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely products of a deranged imagination.

Moving on... 

Work wise, I'm fighting OPP and communication problems.  OPP is other people's problems, and is generally used when a company refuses to admit that their equipment is badly built and unreliable.  That's pretty normal with many of the vendors we deal with.  You can find these people because the instant a piece of equipment quits working, they instantly blame your equipment or wiring.  It couldn't possibly be their equipment.   It's strange though...  OPP is usually associated with people selling unreliable equipment. 

3rd deviation

I'm not sure what to say.  I generally have something I want to talk about when I write these, but I don't think I do this time.  Maybe I do...  maybe I don't.

I keep thinking about the portrayal difference presented by "The Millionaire Next Door" between what the average millionaire looks like and how they are portrayed.  It seems to me that we are force fed the idea aberration as normal.  According to the research, the average millionaire is not some flashy, exuberant money blowing persona that is portrayed on TV and throughout life.  The average millionaire blends in so well as to not be noticed.  The book describes it as a Texas analogy that I'm sure I've heard before...  all cattle, no hat. 

The point to the statement is what you see on TV is generally all hat, no cattle.  It's an example of lots of flash but not substance.  Which once again makes me think the purpose of most TV is to glorify outliers.  Here's the TV data point...   Do some research on whatever subject you can find.  Take the average, and ignore them.  Look for those behaviors sitting around the 2nd and 3rd deviation.  That's where your new show idea is.  Because really, that's what modern media pitches.  Media pitches the 3rd deviation as normal, and says "normal" is the 3rd deviation.  It's a complete flip of what everyone sees and believes.  No wonder people have little faith in media.

Now, if you haven't guessed it here I'm using a statistics method to compare TV.  The method is standard deviation.  Take any data set.  The middle 68% of the data fits in the1st standard deviation.  Expanding to 2nd standard deviation, you are adding another 27% of the total population.  The 3rd standard deviation adds 4.7% of the population, and encompasses 99.7% of all the data sampled.  Credit to Wikipedia, as I didn't remember the specifics.  If you make a program about the 3rd standard deviation of a research subject, you are making a program about approximately 5% of the population.   But because of the presentation, that 5% of the population is appears to be the middle 65%.     

A second idea would be to go completely opposite and pitch the story of pure average of that study.  Considering the shock and horror generally associated with media, you'd probably get something completely watchable and benign simple because it hits so close to home with so many people. 

I guess there's something to be said for "all cattle, no hat".  And that's point where I'm aiming to go.  It's interesting how convoluted and strange the path is, though.  Years of indoctrination and subliminal imaging have to be wiped out in order to recognize just how much you've been taught that the 5% of the population is 68% of the population.  And half of it has to do with changing word usage. 

On HSA accounts and being sick...

So I haven't followed through very well with blogging on a more consistent basis.  I swear its work causing all the havoc.  And the upper respiratory infection I had the last couple of days that I finally dealt with.  BTW, I'm beginning to love my HSA account.   It is doing exactly what I planned for with it.  

Here's the problem...  my spending for health was not matching my consumption for health.  In essence, I was spending about $7 or $8 for every $1 of coverage I got through the health insurance.  The problem is that my family doesn't get very sick.  So I end up spending a lot of money on insurance but don't get much out of it.   Now...   a bit of math...  before, I was spending $168/week for health insurance.  Now that is last years' rate for family.  All told, that equates to $8,736 out of pocket expense regardless of whether I go to the doctor or not.  And if I have to go to the doctor, then I end up paying another $30 copay plus any cost of prescription I pay for.  If it was a brand name drug, I think the cost was $15.  So If I went to the doctor 4 times amongst the family in a year, and got 1 medicine per year, that would be $8736 for premiums, plus $30 copay and $15 for medicine.  So...  $8,736 + ($45 * 4) = $8,916.  That's pretty horrendous.

Now, I pay $118 a week for premiums, so $6,136.  On top of that, I contribute $50 a week and my job matches $50 a week into a Health Savings Account.  Based on my contribution alone, that would be $2,600 in the account by the end of year.  Combine that with the employee match, and you have $5,200.  Now...  If I never get sick, that $50 I contribute and the $50 my job contributes stack up and stack up.  It's not a "use it or lose it" proposition.  Because the insurance company thinks check-ups and shots will keep people healthy, I pay nothing for those.  My son had his 3 year well check and 2 shots and my daughter had her 2 year well check and a shot and I paid nothing.  The insurance company covered all of that.  

Now, for me and my wife getting sick and getting medicine, it was about $170 each plus another $30 each for medicine.   Remember that money in the HSA account?  That's how the bill got paid.  So...  that bit of savings paid the entire bill.  The HSA works like a good emergency strictly for medical emergencies.  Then I get to spend my emergency fund on actual emergencies. 

Second part...   What happens if I get in a car wreck?  The cap per person per year, prescriptions included, is $5,000.   As of yet, I've contributed roughly $200 towards my cap.  Anything over that cap is paid in full by the insurance company.   In the case of a family car wreck, the family cap is $10,000 per family. 

Personally, I'm willing to take a few more first dollar risks if I get to save big bucks.  That's also the point of having an emergency fund so you are financially capable of taking those first dollar risks. 

The end of education and Bash!

So, I think I'm done messing with education for a while.  I think the Khan Academy has just about everything I wanted out of basic education for a while.  Or at least it seems it does.  There is still the issue of examining what they are teaching and what sort of bent they have.  With math, it's fairly easy to not have a political ideology, but with other subjects it's always hard.  Even listening to the TED talk from Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, he seemed to think his work at a hedge fund wasn't really work with a meaningful end.

All creation and transfer of money is meaningful work.  Behind that hedge fund are a lot of different peoples' lives.  In effect, the job of that hedge fund is to help provide a future for all the investors that put money into the hedge fund.  On top of that, thousands of small companies need the stock purchases from the hedge fund in order to get working capital to grow and expand.  See?  The hedge fund provides a service towards all sorts of people.  Where there is a need, the need will be fulfilled. 

The second thing I've been messing with is writing BASH scripts for a Ubuntu box sitting on my desk.  I'm kind of working at creating some sort of automated tool to report network status, even if the report isn't up to the minute.  Kind of like a good way to see if large portions of the network keep falling off or having problems.  I guess it's that random desire of all system administrators to know what is going on or to have some place to look in case emergencies happen.  Maybe an attempt to be proactive instead of reactive.

And the script generally works, I just can't get the darn array to work.  And I suppose that would be okay if I wasn't completely lazy, but I am.  And I want the thing to be simple to modify.  Instead of having to type every single line and IP address out numerous times, I simply want to create a list IP addresses once and update/modify that quickly and simply by adding/changing one line.  

But right now I have to modify 3 lines, and if removing those 3 lines involves removing a store, it involves re-indexing potentially a lot of arrays.  Estimating 3 per location and 63 locations that would be an adjustment of 180 some odd array values.   That's unacceptable.

But I did get the array to work while thinking about all this mess.  So that's a bit of progress.  Next thing is to set up a job to transfer the contents of my www folder to the etc/www folder on a periodic basis...   Sounds like some fun.

Birthday Presents

There has been a surprising lack of updates and content here.  So it's time to change that.  My birthday is in a couple of days, so my family decided to celebrate it yesterday.  I decided to add to my book collection again.  And once again, I've gone broad as opposed to narrow in my choices. 

I was in Barnes and Noble contemplating a book on Java programming.  The one I have isn't structured well, and it doesn't explain well enough.  In some aspects, it works but not well.  Anyways, I was going to get that when I started thinking about the last time I was thinking of making this choice.  I think it was Rich Dad, Poor Dad that talked about how poor people pick up more skills instead of learning broad subjects and turning those into work opportunities.  And the same thought came back to me: I think I have the right skills to get paid more, or to go into business on my own.  What I don't have is something intangible.  I haven't quite figured out what the intangible thing is, though.

So I decided instead of picking up another skill, I need to figure out the intangible and make it tangible.  In the end, I picked up two different books.  The first is 48 Days to the Work you Love by Dan Miller.  The second is The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley and William Danko.  

Work is something all of us feel we have to do, but at the moment I do not like where I am working.  In many aspects, I do not feel like I am following the real definition of work.  A j-o-b is not something I'm interested in.  So...  the problem is me, and I've got to figure out how to fix me.  It's a "you are the problem thing". 

Fun stuff.  

If you haven't figured out yet, I have a tendency to read a lot of books.