I broke down after watching TiVo at my friends’ house and bought one for myself. I figured that now, perhaps I could actually get the most out of my satellite feed, instead of bitching about not being able to tape Dead Like Me or the other really good cable shows that seem to be the major buzz. I opted for the standalone version, even though they make a TiVo/Satellite Receiver model. I figure if I ever drop Satellite, I’d just have a 35-hour recorder, so I bought the 40-hour standalone model. I’ve had it 24 hours and already I fucking love this thing.

Five Questions (from via )

1. What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not?

I’m a Site Operations Lead, though I was a Network Operations Engineer before eBay bought PayPal. My job is basically to manage and drive issues of varying degrees of urgency in order to maintain the maximum possible availability of the site to the world.

Chosen or not, this is what I do. I’m good at it. I would not have chosen this because I hate having to deal with stupidity on a daily basis.

2. If time/talent/money were no object, what would your dream occupation be?

Novelist or perhaps a Professor of Literature.

3. What did/do your parents do for a living? Has this had any influence on your career choices?

My mother is a retired elementary school teacher with thirty-six years of service to her career. My father is a balls-to-the-wall general contractor, and even at the age of sixty, he’s still building houses.

Out of the pair, my mother had a major influence on my life. I saw how she was able to perpetuate her passion for education through to her students and inspire them. If I ever became an educator, I hope I’m half as good as she is.

4. Have you ever had to choose between having a career and having a family?

No.

5. In your opinion, what is the easiest job in the world? What is the hardest? Why?

I think every job has it’s difficulties. Even retail hell has its up side and down side when compared to the rigors of office work. Every time I think that I’ve found a job that could be easy, it always surprises me as to how much I’ve been fooled. The grass is always greener, I suppose.

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I’m not talking about the car show in Reno, either. In spite of the lack of sunlight, the nights here in the South Bay have risen a little in temperature. Last night, I slept without anything on me, which is pretty unusual for me. I need at least the sheets covering me or else I’m not really comfortable sleeping. It’s kind of like trying to sleep on my back versus trying to sleep on my stomach. On my back, I start snoring and don’t actually hit REM sleep, which means I wake up once an hour when the snoring gets so loud I wake myself up. Needless to say, the heat of the nights around here has been making it so damned uncomfortable, I’ve been heavily considering a portable air conditioning unit, I don’t give a shit if it costs me a thousand dollars. I need to be comfortable in my own room.

The weather notwithstanding, things in my personal life have been in a state of change for the last nine months or so. Melissa moved in with us back then, though we’d been sort of involved with one another some time prior to that. I think there’s a certain amount of ambiguity that a relationship endures before any sort of formal declaration is made. However, it does need to be made and so it was. Circumstances have lent themselves toward putting as little distance between us as possible and ever since we’ve been living under the same roof. At the time, I think that I thought that things were probably moving too fast for us, but that thought was discarded rather quickly in the face of those circumstances. Over the course of the past nine months, though, we have come to really known each other well, though I will readily admit that we both still have so much more to learn about one another. With all honesty, following the last relationship I had, there’s quite a bit of insecurity to overcome before allowing anyone to get remotely close to me, but she has a way about her at times that’s charmingly disarming. They say you’ll know someone as much as you can by living with them; that’s certainly worked out for Todd and I. However, knowing myself as I do, I’m simply astonished she’s not uprooted and moved out even after one of my tirades. My patience can be tried and my frustration expressed in the worst ways at times, but she takes it in stride. There’s a lot of compatibility between us, and yet enough differences to keep it interesting. We have fun together, and the time we spend together is something I look forward to every day. When she started attending summer session at Foothill, I got a little taste of what it was like to wait for me to come home every day after school and work during the spring quarter. I really miss her when she’s gone. What can I say? I love her.

I’ve been working pretty hard lately. I know I have made mention of it in the past, but the days at eBay have been somewhat steeping in their workload. As I become more and more accustomed with the eBay side of operations, I’m noticing that my previously laid-back work ethic is being obliterated day-by-day and I’m coming home from work damn near exhausted. My sympathy for Stephanie has risen sharply, given I was always at home during that time. I’ll bet eBay tops Cisco in workload, though. I can’t imagine internal stuff being as b0rky as a site that’s accessed worldwide every second, every day, every year. Even PayPal did not have the level of maintenance that eBay requires. I figure, if I can work at eBay, I can work anywhere. Which kind of brings me to another point: career paths.

PayPal had zero in the way of upward mobility, and after nearly two years of working there, I figured I was either going to be NOC manager or I was going to be a NOC engineer for the rest of my time there. Since we’ve moved over to eBay, I’m not limited in that regard any longer, which is a prospect I hadn’t really thought about before. Given the options available to me, it seems like I could literally move into virtually any related group with ease. In all honesty, though, I’m still so new to the company that I’m going to wait a bit to figure that out before I give some sort of answer to my boss. I’ve been giving serious thought to either the DBA group, or Change Management, or Technical Documentation… either of those three are really my speed, and the people who work in the DBA group are incredibly awesome people to work with. Every week, I get to work with a new person from that group, because each of them sits a duty shift in the NOC, which is a really cool aspect of working at eBay’s NOC over PayPal’s. You have instant access to the individual from system administration group or the database administrator’s group in case a problem in their area arises unexpectedly. On top of that, no longer am I alone in the NOC. There are at least one or two other people who’re my peers to support me if multiple issues arise, or if perhaps aspects of a major issue need to be delegated. I wish we’d had that earlier, because it sure would cut down on response time as it does at eBay.

The rest of this week has been pretty much booked up by JTAF. I have an early afternoon meeting with an old friend over at Paramount’s Great America to discuss some plan for live programming. Wednesday, I must jaunt up to the city (San Francisco) to meet with two different hotel staffs and the live programming department head to walk the layout, approve it, and then negotiate additional rooms at one of the hotels for our guests of honor. Am I looking forward to those meetings? Sure, I am. It’s nice to be back under some sort of project again, but I’m hoping that I don’t stress out as much as I did when I worked Fanime as a division head. I need my nerves to stay intact for work.

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So, I’m definitely liking this S2 stuff. I spent a little time reading up on the new documentation and thanks in large part to , I finally found Component to be quite awesome in layout and theme. I’ve set up the basics, now, but I’ll explore a little more since they’re still mid-production of the S2 code, and things aren’t finalized yet. It looks very promising, though.

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From an email received today:

“The Governor and Legislature have increased fees for community college students to $12 per quarter unit beginning Fall Quarter 2003. Students who have registered for Fall Quarter classes at Foothill College and have already paid fees will be sent a bill for the additional amount.”

I’m currently signed up for eighteen units, which means instead of paying $126 for the quarter, I’m now paying $216 per quarter. While this is a pretty irritating increase, I guess after attending for many years, now, it was bound to happen. I just wish it would happen not quite after I get done paying for all my fees, because now I’m paying an additional $90 to the school just because the state governor mishandled the budget. Feh, I can’t really get too mad at California’s Governor, as despite all of this bullshit, I actually feel sorry for the guy about this recall business. If they do recall him, I hope that lawyer in San Francisco is successful with his lawsuit. After all, if the Governor is unable to serve, then the Lieutenant Governor should step in. Let’s keep in within the party.

In other news, I’ve been pretty much working to get JTAF onto its own site. I’m also trying to set up the neomail web client so that everyone on the domains can use their mail aliases appropriately. I might have to really work my own personal sysadmin mojo a bit in order to get it to work, but that’s a good learning tool for me. Next thing on my agenda is to market the shit out of the con. (Hey , isn’t this your backyard? I could use some help if you’re free that weekend Anyway, working now on getting some sort of T-Shirt design for use by the con, and reworking the design of the flyer for distribution this week. Also, looking into advertising space in some of the local periodicals (Campbell Reporter, Palo Alto Times) for a small ad a weekend or two before the actual date. Right now, I’m just obssesed with getting flyers out there. Everyone I’ve talked to have not even heard of the convention, which is bad with only 40 days before the con actually starts.

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After an hour of reading some of the documentation from exim, as well as getting a verbal refresher in MTAs and how/why certain variables will not get read in the order of which they should. Needless to say, the problem of fixing some of the mail relay problems on faye have been solved. Finally, emails can be sent out from the game and guests can actually use the @request command like God intended. Thus, no more wizard-handholding and changing passwords on-the-fly. The next step is getting some sort of webmail client reinstalled and put it back in use by the good folks who actually donated money to the game. After all, I’m going to try my hand at setting up a mailing list frontend like we had before. But, of course, at the pace at which I move, it’ll be another six months before that even comes to fruition.

Last night, after work, I settled into my chair at my desk and I downloaded and installed Trillian Pro 2.0 Beta 1. For the uninitiated, Trillian is a unified instant messaging system that allows one to use AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and even IRC within the same application. Think of it as a sort of Swiss Army Knife for instant messaging. Version 1.0 Pro is one of the most robust applications I’ve ever used and it’s worth the $25 a year for me to subscribe for patches, support, and other useful updates. The problem with 2.0 is that it will take your Yahoo and ICQ lists and re-request for authorizations if necessary. I ended up talking to several people in the middle of the night because of it, including some old friends I hadn’t spoken to in years.

One of those old friends was Ray Nagar, with whom I had only met once, but following that meeting, we ended up speaking heavily through IM. His production company, Project760, produced an anime show locally called World of Anime. They covered anime news events, conventions, and then would broadcast on public access cable throughout the Bay Area. When I was the director of promotions and publications for the 2001 edition of FanimeCon, I handled all press relations personally, and despite WoA reputation, I had to really call in favors to get them press access to the con. Ray was a friend, and it was his move to otaking.org that really put us on the map as far as the anime world was concerned. I think worldofanime.otaking.org was one of the most heavily trafficked subdomains we had had since www.washu.net’s massive mp3 archive.

As our renewed conversation continued, he mentioned that he was putting together a convention/party of sorts up in San Francisco this September, called the Japantown Anime Faire. He was feeling a little overwhelmed by the amount of planning, communication, and coordination it takes to put a con, albeit even a small con, into reality. I offered some monetary assistance, I even pre-registered, even though I probably wouldn’t attend. But it was the vision he had that inspired me to volunteer for staff. I offered my services and put in my vacation time for that weekend to help him out some. Once again, I break another promise to myself wherein I just decided to never staff an anime convention ever again.

Once more into the breach, dear friends…

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