Category: Work Horrible Work Page 1 of 2

This Post Is a Meta Post About the Post I’m Too Tired To Work On Which Is a Post About Being Burned Out

On August 22, 2022

In Apple, Link Dump, This Sucks, Vegan, Work Horrible Work

I started writing this overly wordy post about how burned out I’ve been feeling lately. This is not news to anyone since I’d wager most people who didn’t have their work lives wildly disrupted during the pandemic are equally fried and as ready for the scrap heap as I am.

I had a few free hours this weekend and tried to just concentrate on writing that smaller thing that seemed less intense than the much, much longer thing I’m also puttering away on. I was completely wrong about that. The end result was an intense wave of brain fog and fatigue that knocked me entirely out of commission at 10 PM on a Friday night. This is not at all normal for me.

After I concluded that absolutely nothing worth sharing with any one was going to be accomplished that night, I just poked around on the interwebz for a length of time likely equalivalent to what I’d spend writing something that wasn’t a link dump with a lengthy explanation.

As a side note, I’m giving Ulysses a trial run as an editor for things longer than 1000 words. I have not yet decided whether it is for me yet but it does give me some separation from a web browser which is a nice break if nothing else. I recently acquired one of the M1 Pro Max (it just flows off the tongue like a song) MacBook Pro’s and decided that I should stop doing everything in the damned browser if I was going have a machine that substantial. I still have very mixed feelings about Apple but this generation of machines is pretty damned good at least until the new version of the OS comes out and makes me regret my earlier words. The weird part is that I actually enjoy this keyboard which is significant because I often go to ridiculous lengths to avoid ever typing on the keyboards built into laptops. So, yeah, real tools like a goddamned grown up. Totally weird, right?

Unfortunately, this wasn’t prompted entirely by a fervent need to complicate my workflow. Draft is performing strangely for me over the past few weeks and the ‘Oh boy’ moment was watching my cursor, unmanned by me, mow backwards over something I’d just finished up and losing 650 words or so. Nope, haven’t reported as a bug or anything yet but until I have some free time that actually feels free I’m going to stick to editors that save text locally. There are too many unstable layers to that stack although I’m guessing Chrome is the guilty party. I’ll come back to that extraordinarily handy tool when I’m less terrified of it potentially eating a bunch of words while I watch in horror.

Things I saw recently:

This hardware-centric examination of a 1996 photo of animators working on Final Fantasy 7 is one of the those things that I started reading out of general interest in all things FFVII but ended up being far most interesting. The idea that an SGI machine had the capacity for 8 GB of RAM in the 1990s when hard drives were generally measured in megabytes is mind blowing. SGI and IRIX were always fascinating to me but, mostly because I work with excruciatingly boring commodity hardware even on the server side of the house, I’ve never had to opportunity to do much with that family of machines other than stare slack jawed at it. I made the mistake of looking at ‘vintage’ SGI hardware (specifically the Onyx line mentioned in the article) and I am now reassured with complete certainty that I will never own any piece of hardware from Silicon Graphics.

Holy shit! A Next Level Burger opened in Denver! I will soon venture out on another leg of my ultimate quest to become the most overweight and unhealthy vegan ever. I’m not happy about the potential impact this will have on our local heroes Meta Burger but I suppose this was somewhat inevitable.

I would have never guessed that DMCA takedowns were an escalating issue on Reddit. Maybe it’s because my use is largely limited to geeky/work/funny areas. If you follow the link, the actual number is startling.

Unsurprisingly, dictionaries are too risky for Florida schools now. I wish I had adequate words to describe the sounds that came out of my mouth when I originally read this. It’s also saddening that I now have a Google Alert set up for book banning in the United States. That’s really where we are folks. Maybe the uncertified veterans being welcomed into classrooms as teachers will just start shooting books deemed offensive?

What To Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing

By goneaway

On August 18, 2022

In Link Dump, Linux, Work Horrible Work

So, yup, it most definitely has been a year or slightly more since I’ve paid much attention to this place. Typically the near daily notifications that some plugins were updated are the only real reminder that this site, or more properly domain, has been spitting on the floor and making the Midwestern tourists uncomfortable for coming up on 20 years. That is terrifying and I almost wish that I’d kept copies of the earlier versions of this site so I could be sure when it first lurched into motion. The earliest versions were Movable Type and before that some random and awful Perl I cooked up.

That was a completely different time for weblogs. This was the “before times” when readers of web pages hadn’t yet had all of the attention span beaten out of them and slideshows would have been novel but not the content that truly drove eyeballs. I was never immune to any of this so I dropped off posting here in much the same way that most of the people who read this site regularly back then would have stopped reading what I posted. It does not really matter but the habit of writing something about the things rattling around in my brain also hit the ejector seat button during that time. Social media has never held much attraction so I basically exiled myself from the web for a very long time other than work related stuff. In retrospect, it would be better to remain offline since most of what I loved is long dead and over. Pardon me while I take brief respite in yelling at a cloud.

Possibly more interesting things:

1. For reasons that I cannot pinpoint, I’ve started using Notion for work. This is not usage mandated by my employer since the hated Monday.com is their tool of choice. I started looking at applications that let me create to do lists without requiring me to learn some TLA Esperanto and keep a list of the shit that I actually did on a day to day basis. The most common question that my managers ask me is what the hell do I do all day. This is a fair question since my work style involves bouncing from thing to thing all damned day and sometimes ignoring major project work to grab some of the low hanging serotonin yielding fruit of quick piece work to feel like I’m actually getting things other than reading terrible documentation and smashing my face into the keyboard done. I ignore most of the features of Notion other than these two (and have banished the Gratitudes from the diary section like the lingual STD that they are) and have cruised along with a free account for the past month or so. If I had to use all of the features, I would absolutely hate this software but being able to pick and choose the useful parts while pretending the parts I don’t need/find noxious don’t exist is pretty damned useful. I’m also a big fan of being able to flip between the desktop client on my work computer and the web interface on my own machines if I suddenly remember something when I’m goofing off after work. It’s awfully handy to copy and paste the contents of the day in question directly into Slack when the inevitable request for details comes in. I like that it doesn’t seem like work to use it and that I’m able to avoid becoming one of those workflow obsessed goobers whose accounts of building tiny and lifeless worlds in Notion. Reading accounts by these insane people actually made me avoid considering this tool for a long while.

2. In the spirit of bringing back the culture of BOFH workplace vengeance, I’m composing a list of things that will cause one of your account passwords to suddenly expire and possibly require a very long and very complex password for its reset. The gold standard for this is always the Excel format spreadsheet required for some ridiculous thing or another and, in the process, wasting a bunch of irreplaceable minutes futzing around in an application that I have absolutely no use for. In the interest of equitable exchange, you will waste your time changing passwords and possibly repeat on a bi-weekly basis if you are particularly insistent. I haven’t yet formulated proper punishments for being pushy about fantasy sports via work communication channels but that is most definitely a work in active and malicious progress.

3. If you’re a linux person and, for this particular link an Arch user, then it might be time to consider something other than the default kernel. Those default kernel builds are great for making sure that almost any machine can boot but they tend to be more than a little flabby. Here’s a guide on switching kernels on Arch. At this point, I have a hard time using a desktop linux system that isn’t using the Zen/Liquorix kernel. I get disappointed when I have an extremely powerful processor and the desktop feels about as responsive as it did when I was running a PIII 233 desktop with a spinning disk.

4. The mayor of Venice does not fuck around with tourists being idiots. This made me happy.

Probably About Time For Some Words

By goneaway

On November 10, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Oh God, Politics, Work Horrible Work

Although Joe Biden wasn’t my first or even second choice for a presidential candidate given his propensity for being a grabass of slightly less odious proportions than the asshole we’re trying to get rid of, I’m glad someone reasonable seeming won the election. I think another full term of Trump would have finished off the tattered remnants of the United States. I don’t think that my positive reaction has nearly as much to do with Biden’s election as it does with the election of a woman of color as Vice President. I’m glad that shit is over with and we can now just amuse ourselves with watching judges bat down ridiculous lawsuits and then of course the Four Seasons press conference/slapstick comedy hour was just more icing on a cake already slick with sugar.

My wife is officially discharged and home from the hospital. She’s going to have to use a walker for a while and is having some interesting challenges navigating our house which has about as many stairs as any newly built house possibly could in even the worst case. It’s going to be a while until she’s fully recovered and we won’t know how much her leg will recover from the strokes until much further down the line of physical therapy and healing. It is good to have her home.

I also started a new job today which pays more and is potentially more interesting work. I can’t and won’t mention the company but I’m hoping to actually manage to stay at one company for more than two years. It has been a while and the job market for systems admin work that isn’t centered around AWS is slightly better than it was a couple of years ago so there is at least a little pressure to try to keep us happy and in place. It was probably the worst time to start something new but I had two choices of start dates and the thought of remaining at my old job for another month was unbearable.

That’s where I’m at. How the hell are you?

So Much Shazbot

By goneaway

On October 31, 2020

In Apple, Cool As Fuck, Life During The Plague Years, Link Dump, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses, Work Horrible Work

I’m trying to stick with my pledge to not make excuses for my absences because why would I? This typically means, and will in this case, a link dump but I should also mention some of the things going on away from the keyboard since that’s where my focus is most of the time lately.

I’m starting a new job in just over a week. I managed to scrape up a week off between the two which fills me with joy and dread simultaneously. Colorado is back up to Safer At Home Level 3 which means there won’t be a whole lot of anything going on in the city and my house has rapidly degenerated into a state approximate to a 1990s punk house while my wife has been in the hospital over the past three weeks. That’s one of the weirdest parts about being largely confined to home; you’re stuck in the middle of it, realize in full what a godawful mess it is becoming, and cannot summon any enthusiasm for doing anything about it. That’s where I am right now.

Speaking of hospitals and my wife, her projected release date coincides with my first day at the new job. It’s hard to say in just words how relieved I am that she’s getting ready to come home after the sheer number of ‘so scared that I spend the day trying to not break down’ scares that we’ve had over the past couple weeks. I have no clear idea yet what the fiscal impact is going to be but I’m fairly certain that a 3 week hospital stay will not be inexpensive even with relatively good, for a stagnant startup, insurance coverage. I’m trying not to even think about that now but it looms eternally in the background along with all of the other worries that come with ~~stupid~~ adult life.

Here are some sights I saw:

1. You may or may not care about skate shoes. I happen to care a bunch but mainly because I’m always trying to find vegan skate shoes that don’t look like a hacky sack wrapped around my foot. The Savier story is pretty goddamned interesting. I read this story during lunch and ended up falling down an incredible rabbit hole chasing down a bunch of shoes and people who make shoes mentioned in the story.

2. Although this examination of Apple’s newfound commitment to lessening e-waste versus what you’re actually going to buy which incidentally comes in even more packaging is factually correct it is also a frustrating read for me. I have a cheap/old iPhone from Sprint-Mobile that is about ready to go back to the mothership because I have actual use for it. I’m also replacing my OnePlus 7 Pro 5G with a Pixel 5. It’s shipped and should be here shortly. Uh oh! I’m switching phones with different charging standards!! I have several warp chargers for my soon-to-be-ex OnePlus. Will I throw these chargers away? No, because they’re still useful as chargers for other USB-C devices. They may not charge what I’ve plugged it into up to 80% in a scant few minutes but in the wide world of Covid-19 I’m not away from home or even my desk very often. I can wait the extra 20 minutes in most cases. The point here being that because all of my phones excepting my cheapo iPhone all use a standard charging cable that magically just works (that phrase seems oddly familiar – perhaps from another lifetime?) with most of the devices that need charging. I need to charge my Kindle? Easy, just unplug the USB-C cable and plug the microUSB cable into the brick. The multiple wireless charging stands that I used with my Pixel 3 XL — they still fucking work with the new phone two versions later.

3. I really enjoyed reading one man’s 35 year history with Amiga machines as constant in his life. The stories about his nascent experiences with computers and the warm nostalgia that surround those memories was really heartening for me.

4. I also enjoyed this criticism of the odd design decisions Zoom made when implementing end to end encryption because it was a easily digestible and entertaining explanation even to someone who is really not all that interested in the specifics of encryption. The furry stuff creeped me the fuck out but I guess nobody rides for free?

Answering Questions Without Being An Asshole

By goneaway

On October 19, 2020

In Cool As Fuck, Do This Later Dummy, Work Horrible Work

I really enjoyed this guide on answering questions in a helpful way because I answer so many questions in a given day and, these days, through more avenues than I have in the past. I always try to give equal attention to either a question about something technical in my workplace as I do someone asking about which Chromebook to buy for their child who has now been learning at home for more than half a year at this point. I think this guide is a good very litmus for whether or not you’re being an asshole when asked a mediocre question by giving you some somewhat obvious (if you’d thought about what you were going to say instead of just spitting out whatever popped into your head) tools to better your participation in the troubleshooting process. I have the habit of casting everything as a troubleshooting process because that my actual marketable skill. I think in this case it is very much a collaborative effort to troubleshoot an issue just not as linearly as I’m used to.

It’s something worth considering because if you’re getting a proper question posed after doing a little bit of prep work before passing it on to me then I feel like I’m being met half way between let me Google that for you dismissiveness and a question so specialized in an area where my knowledge might be lacking and will have to do more research than you would to learn how to even begin looking for an answer. I’m always happier with the amount of effort I have to make if I feel like the person asking the question has done a little bit of pre-work. I’m not even sure if that preparatory business necessarily helps the process but it makes me feel like I’m another piece of helping someone find an answer instead of just a convenient sucker to pass the thinking on to. Cynical? Yeah, a little but I think it’s at least defensible given the tendency of people in general to throw up their hands in surrender when confronted with something that isn’t immediately familiar.

I’m going to categorize this one as a ‘Don’t Forget’ as well and keep the link handy for those days when questions are coming in at a relentless pace and I forget that people aren’t doing it because they’re clueless jerks. People are asking me because they’ve tried and weren’t successful or they aren’t even sure what exactly they’re even looking for.

I Had A Great Interview Process With One Company and The Rest Felt Punitive Comparitively

By goneaway

On October 15, 2020

In Work Horrible Work

I’ve given a tentative acceptance for a new job until they’ve had time to do reference checks. That typically guarantees that I’ll get the offer because even in cases where I’ve been terminated it usually boils down to me being relatively expensive and not being particularly patient with managers who practice a retail style of management that involves repeating the phrase ‘customer service’ so many times that it loses all meaning. I tend to treat the folks I support slightly better than they treat me but I don’t tolerate yelling or abuse from anyone. At my present job I have ejected the CEO from his office after he became verbally aggressive and got in my way while I was troubleshooting a fairly straightforward issue and people thought I was nuts for that. Maybe I’m not destined to be a greeter at department store but I am generally very good at what I do. Unlike most of the job offers (and there have been a bunch over the years) that I’ve accepted over the past six or so years, I’m actually excited to start work for this company because their interview process actually made me believe that they weren’t completely full of shit. That’s a tricky one, right?

Most interviews that I’ve taken part in over the past decade or so have been insanely stressful and intentionally humiliating. I’ve grimaced my way through so many situations that depended entirely on situations that were a single step removed from an A+ exam from the early 00s that I’ve probably defensively wiped many of them from memory. I left those interviews feeling less like I’d been either evaluated or even challenged and felt more like I’d been part of some hazing ritual that evaluated how well I could answer quiz show style questioning on what the letters in obscure networking acronyms meant and how I recovered from being heckled while white boarding infrastructure architecture. I’ve said this many times before but interviewing at software companies is one of my least favorite things to do because of the predetermined expectation that you’re going to sweat blood, recall obscure edge cases irrelevant to the role you’re interviewing for, and generally be entertainment for a room full of folks who’ve been trapped in the amber of their roles and now want to challenge an outsider to a pressurized dick measuring contest.

Anyway, bitterness over past interview experiences aside and excusing the usual cliches that come along with the interview process like me wearing a shirt with buttons on the front of it, this process was so linear and stressless that it energized me after each round was over. Granted, there were seven rounds of interviews so I can’t excuse the amount of time that I was expected to commit but I did enjoy each of the conversations that I had.

Obviously I can’t name companies here or any of that tempting but ultimately self-defeating sort of thing but I can mention what I think worked well.

1. Most of the interviews were me talking to a single person. I enjoy conversations deeply when I feel like I’m both hearing everything the other person is saying and I feel like they’re actually paying attention and reacting to my answers. The panel style interviewing process that’s become such an overused standard is at best uncomfortable and at worst feels oddly confrontational. I had a great time talking to everyone during this interview process and, judging by the amount of actual laughing that happened during most of my interviews, the folks talking to me were engaged as well. That just felt good even in my situationally weakest interviews.

2. While all of the interviewers were frank about having their feedback hidden from one another to prevent a single poor impression from biasing everyone they were also very upfront about their impressions at the close of the interview. I never felt like I ended an interview with no idea how I’d performed or what the litmus for success might be. That was also refreshing and removed a large amount of the post-interview doubts that typically plague me. That was also refreshing and felt to me less like some black box bullshit and more like people interested in genuinely trying to get what I was all about. I’ll confess that I did tailor some of my answers towards what I thought they might want to hear but I think that’s become standard operating procedure these days.

3. Generally all of the interviews involved solving one particularly knotty technical question and I was able to talk through it with the interviewer instead of producing something in a cone of silence while the people interviewing me tapped randomly on keyboards. One of the theoretical situations was technically impossible to solve all the way but the interviewer told me during the course of trying to work my way through the situation that they were more concerned about the process than the solution. Once I’d presented as much of answer as possible then we dissected the question mutually which felt much less like a gauntlet thrown down and more like collaborative problem solving. This also was much more comfortable than I’m accustomed to and made me feel more like I was working through an unfamiliar issue with a friendly colleague. Take note of this because the opposite approach — how big is your algorithmic dick — makes me lose all enthusiasm for both the interview process and the team I might be joining. Oh! So, you cribbed your approach from a Fortune 500, venture capital funded unicorn, huh? Why aren’t you a Fortune 500, venture capital funded unicorn you fucking poser?

4. For the first time in what felt like a century, I knew what was going on and what was expected of me in each phase of the interview process. The recruiting person always pitched me time slots when people were available instead of asking for my availability over the course of several days. The ‘does this data and time for this duration work for you” approach was also super refreshing and left me feeling less like I was an unpaid peon doing unpaid work for the potential of a prestigious position and more like someone who was setting aside a large amount of time while still working for another company and needing a little bit of flexibility.

5. Every interview had a very tight time frame and everyone that I spoke with asked me periodically if I still had time to talk more. I’ll admit that every single one of my interviews took more time than was allotted but I never felt like I wanted to escape and was willing to continue the conversation from what was initially 30 minutes into over an hour because the conversation was interesting enough that I actually wanted to continue.

6. When I completed my final interview, I had a follow up call with the hiring manager. The absolutely brilliant part about this conversation was that the manager asked me about every single concern that anyone interviewed me had about my experience or average tenure length and gave me the opportunity to address it before they made their final decision. Again, leaving the black box of opaque assessment and hiding behind the anonymity of HR software made me so much dehumanized than I have in past interviews. Being able to address concerns directly is so much more helpful than getting a generic ‘moving forward with other candidates’ robot response. I feel as though even if I hadn’t been chosen that at least being given the opportunity to address concerns that interviewers had would be less disappointing in the end. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gotten to the first interview stage and received one of those canned responses with no explanation or qualification for the rejection. I was very relieved to encounter neither rejection nor a generated response. That makes me feel as though I’m working towards something instead of against something.

The Things That Made It Past The Collection Of Calamities I Call My Life

By goneaway

On October 14, 2020

In Apple, I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Life During The Plague Years, Link Dump, Oh God, Politics, Work Horrible Work

It’s been an inordinately busy week. I’ve been spending my days slogging through work, interviewing with another company (shhh), and visiting my wife in a cardio thoracic ICU nearly every night. My wife is recovering from two small strokes that she suffered either during or after surgery. The main effect is aphasia which means she struggles with verbally expressing thoughts. This is painful because my girl is a talker and is brilliant at relating something that happened in a story and I hate to watch her struggle. That said, the doctors have said that the recovery process from this can take a very long time and she’s improved dramatically from yesterday. It’s difficult but it doesn’t feel like the end of the world, just a change. I’m okay with things changing and generally uncomfortable with catastrophe. I know she is having a terrible time being stuck in her head and I need to be better about filling the silences. I have a feeling we’re both going to have to adapt on a level that neither of us is accustomed to. I’m just happy she’s awake right now.

These are some things I noticed today:

1. To begin with, most Apple hardware has an unpatchable vulnerability stemming from the T2 chip and the outlook is not looking great in terms of mitigating this issue. I’m sure there is some amount of karmic retribution here but I’ll settle for vague analogy about putting all of your eggs in a single basket. I’m typing this on a vulnerable machine in the spirit of living dangerously.

2. Tangentially related to Apple, this brilliant person adapted an iSight into an acceptably modern camera by packing the pretty shell with a Raspberry Pi and doing some 3D printing to piece it all together. The responsible mad scientist also created a GitHub repo for all of the necessary components in case you want to play along at home.

3. My son’s school was scheduled, rather optimistically, to resume in person learning next week. We just received notification from the district that they’re now pushing that date out until late November. I really and fervently hope that when our idiot in chief runs out of steroids and dies that we, as a country, start to take this a little more seriously and listening more carefully to scientists when they try to warn us about killing ourselves. I am completely in support of calling everything off until we have a safe and effective vaccine. I have enjoyed hearing about attempts Trump’s fundamentalist supporters have made to square up their fervent belief that their draft dodging, adulterous fuck boy is somehow the torch bearer of Christianity while having his morbidly obese life saved by a treatment utilizing stem cells. At some point does your brain just throttle itself and eventually turn off?

4. My ballot arrived in the mail today. I look at voting like an act of exorcism. I’ll fill it out tomorrow and drop that shit off. Make sure you do the same even if you disagree with my politics completely. You owe it to yourself and everyone else in the ragged remains of a country to participate in this so-called democracy.

Too Burned Out To Fake Past The Burnout

By goneaway

On September 23, 2020

In This Sucks, Work Horrible Work

I wrote this long and excruciating post last night about having a bad case of the Mondays and failed to post it because it felt more purgative than like something I should make available for a hypothetical (read:imagined) audience to read. What it did make me realize after venting a godawful amount of venom is that I’ve let the burnout progress too far and I now dread every work day because I can’t succeed. The most I can realistically hope for is to put out most of the fires by the end of the day and, if I’m super lucky, have time to eat lunch.

Obviously this isn’t a sustainable job for me any more and although there are still a few jobs that aren’t paying grossly below pre-pandemic market I still feel a bit stuck after accepting this position (for less money and less responsibility — only one of those two is still true now) and approaching chew my leg off to escape this trap levels of needing to get the fuck out. I’ve walked away from more rewarding (both financially and in terms of what I was working on and learning) positions in the past mostly due to feeling restless. I’m fixating on retroactive regret about that and it doesn’t feel like things are going to improve any time soon.

I don’t take job hunting very seriously and I never have. The process is so drawn out and awful that I barely like to think about it before an actual interview takes place. I think this particularly awful situation and the impending recession that is going to bump salaries down yet again has galvanized me a bit more to actually, you know, try a little bit harder. Typically I don’t have difficulty with the human interaction parts of interviewing. Despite being a pretty introverted person I’m also a social pragmatist that can usually make the best of undesirable social interactions. I feel like I need to put a little more effort in but I’m also having an inordinately rough time caring very much. I recognize the need or the expectation but I can’t summon enough genuine interest in the process to pass for someone invested. That’s sort of the golden litmus for burnout; utterly lacking the energy to fake enthusiasm or the will to tell the lies I know are required for positive outcomes. It isn’t making me happy with either my current situation or my own outlook on the world.

When You Have A Problem So Bad That Burning Down The Office Would Be The Only Logical Solution

By goneaway

On September 5, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Microsoft, Security, This Sucks, Work Horrible Work

I’ve tried to write out my thoughts about this a few times but I always end up being overwhelmed by the ever widening scope of related things that end up being pulled in. What I’m hoping to do, and this may never be read by another human and/or web robot, is use my cane to tap around the perimeter of this vexing problem that I’ve faced at nearly every place I’ve worked: Active Fucking Directory.

At the moment I’m completely mired in the weird middle space between wanting to switch completely over to something that functions less like a needlessly complicated wrapper around LDAP and more like a secure-ish authentication method that performs a bunch of single sign on functions. It would also be nice if maintaining this shiny new solution didn’t become my full time job as well. The short answer, in my situation at least, is that an answer that simple and comforting doesn’t exist at all.

Here are the problems:

1. This needs to meet all of the requirements of the eleventy billion master service agreements that we’re supposed to hit. These are constantly changing and some of them we just sign off and ignore until one of our customers proposes an audit. Some of these requirements would be better left to a capable MDM solution but …

2. My budget for such a solutions is, well, um, if you could just cut checks to my company for using your solution that is about the only that would make it through our finance department. The finance folks are not looking to invest money in anything ever so that becomes a rabbit hole I’m not going to willingly crawl into.

3. To make things absolutely and utterly disaster-tastic we also just hired a CTO who seems like a cool enough guy but wants to have more input into the infrastructure we’re implementing. The real rub here is that he really just wants to implement a SaaS solution that is the namesake of the company he just jumped ship from and I have heard nothing but gnashing teeth and the sound of hope anally escaping the human body from other folks I know that still do infrastructure work. So, I’m in a holding pattern right now while I fervently hope that one of the interviews I’ve had recently bears fruit and I can hit the ejector seat button thus escaping with a few tatters of my sanity intact. Maybe I’ll get budget approval for something more expensive than anything I’m proposing and doesn’t work either? Splendid.

4. Another thing that happened in the midst of all of this was an office move, a company rebrand, a phone system replacement, and a few other ball crushing tasks that I might be defensively forgetting. Just a few minor things that need to happen all at once and posthaste. Our IT department, at least for anything that doesn’t live in AWS or Salesforce, is poor old me and I report up through 2 levels of managers. The usual song and dance occurred after the move was sprung on us/me; we’ll just have an MSP come in and do some of that work for us because that is always painless. I got a few things out of that: some new networking hardware (Meraki because the techs were either morons or thought we/me were morons) and a new server to host the software used to manage badging and security cameras. Like most security and monitoring software it requires me to install components from Windows Server 2000 to get it successfully running so I’m completely okay with isolated that garbage onto its own server and away from any infrastructure that actually matters. It did not get me any new server hardware that I could because there’s much money to be made reselling software licensing, of course. The MSP folks built us a sort of functioning Active Directory server in AWS but didn’t do most of the grunt work before their contract budget was consumed. Thanks guys! I was hoping to spend a couple weeks running hastily written Powershell scripts on a production machine. This also sounds amazing!

5. Here’s the punchline to all this: The server that really, really needs to be replaced is a 7-8 year old Dell PowerEdge that has been outside of a service contract for several years and spent most of its life in a switch closet/sauna basically the size of a closet with no real cooling. It is obviously a ticking time bomb despite having a backup domain controller even older that takes more than 15 minutes to reboot when I do something terrifying like rebooting it. Oh, yeah, and this is hosted on a Windows Server 2008 SBS box. Yeah, it really is that grim. The message from on high is that I need to somehow keep this incredibly robust and reliable machine running for a unspecified period of time until there is a decision and budget available for a cloud solution that will likely do measurably worse job of handling authentication and won’t serve any policy at all. Maybe that means I’ll finally get some budget for MDM? Probably not.

We are an Office 365 shop (this is what that service is called no matter what stupid renaming convention they try to employ) so everyone in the company that has absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about immediately tells me how we should just migrate on over to Azure Active Directory. This, of course, is more telling of how much coverage Microsoft pays for in trade magazines than anything else and has caused me to explain far too many times that (cue the theme music) Azure Active Directory is not fucking Active Directory in any meaningful sense.

At the end of this highly purgative post, I’m left with some questions that mostly should be posed at the huge corporations that create the software I’m supposed to keep things up and running with because cruel and unusual is industry standard. One very, very important question is: why the fuck isn’t Azure Active Directory analogous to Active Directory? That’s the most painful question. Look, I know it’s blindfolded brain surgery dangerous to expose an AD server to the internet, right? That’s been pounded into our heads since Active Directory was a relatively new thing. Don’t ever allow your AD server out into the world without galoshes and a rainsuit. That’s IT canon. BUUUUUT, the other Microsoft product that was absolutely, positively unsafe to expose to anything but a RADIUS-backed VPN was Exchange and now Exchange or at least a distant cousin of it is out there on the web eating apples full of razor blades and taking Tylenol from open packages all willy nilly. Obviously O365 isn’t the most secure platform in the world but it only seems to roll over dead a couple of times a week. Why can’t Microsoft spend a few cycles on that sort of work for AD? Oh, because all the data transmitted between a client and the AD server is full of delicious data that isn’t well protected. Extra fabulous!

The other non-option would be something like Direct Access which is already deprecated, requires the very most expensive edition of both the client and server pieces that it would run on, and only runs on Windows which is not real world useful unless you’ve landed a sweet gig at Contoso or Margie’s Travel. That leads me back, all the way back, to the always on/pre-logon VPN issue which means more expensive software seats and more moving parts that I can absolutely guarantee will break each and every time the wind picks up because I’ve foolishly made decisions like that in the past. In the end, I have no fucking answers and I’m feeling like one of those sad photo-op polar bears stranded on a melting mass of ice with nothing to do but wait until the sea eventually consumes me bringing on the sweet oblivion that erases all of this fuckery.

I Nearly Quit/Walked Away From My Job Today

By goneaway

On September 1, 2020

In Link Dump, Work Horrible Work

That title was supposed to evoke drama or intrigue but it’s also mostly true. The company I work for which, as always, shall remain nameless is bucking real hard for a sale. You can hear the potential of big dollars in every contrived story about how we desperately need to conserve cash despite allegedly sitting on huge piles of it. There’s a huge pile of shit in there somewhere and whether or not that bullshit is about the amount of money the company is setting aside for a rainy day despite being stretched beyond functionality or about how all this paper shuffling is actually in the name of dominating the market for whatever it is that our software is supposed to be really good at doing this quarter. We’ve basically thrown all of our resources at hiring impressive-sounding executives and haven’t backfilled any of the positions that do things other than attend meetings and affix their names to ghost written glad handing for the pages of some trade magazine.

The feeling that it was past time to chew my leg off and flee from the trap started during a meeting when I found out concretely that most of the projects, at least the ones that have real impact on my workload and sanity, have been shelved. To be fair, we did also hire a CTO and wanted their input on how to prioritize the work we need to do to stop drowning in tech debt and running all of our capex into the ground with hardware refreshes gradually making their way into the five year cycle. At the same time, I’ve been fucking over my fellow rank and file workers to handle a bunch of firefighting tasks to make the C level folks look good and being expected to handle all of the wrath from people who can’t have their issues addressed in a sane span of time any more. Any operations role contributes to feeling like a punching bag on the particularly bad days but I was losing my mind by 10:30 AM this morning. I also found out that some work I’d promised to finally complete for our support staff was going to be pushed aside so another C level Sales hire could have their laptop a full week before their start date because, reasons. Fuck every bit of that. I logged off early today after completely running out of fight. The worst part is that I’m stopped caring at all about the day to day because I can’t plan and can’t prioritize and feel like I’m working in a call center or something.

Anyway, so disasters in professional life and my horror about them aside, here are some things I thought were interesting today:

1. I had a great time working with a Raspberry Pi for the first time and have enjoyed how little advertising I see due to the deft hand of Pi Hole. The first hit is always free and I ended up buying another Pi and setting up openmediavault early this evening. I’d nearly forgotten how much fun setting up personal servers can be. Yes, it was a matter of snapping together some inexpensive pieces of hardware and attaching an unused 2TB external hard drive to that but it was more fun than I’ve had working with any other bit of technology in ages. It was also an expensive alternative to the pricey NAS hardware that I’ve been eyeballing lately especially while spending most of my life in my house. I guess it’s about time to find somewhere accessible to store the gigabytes of comics that I’ve been downloading. That way I’ll be able to not have time to read any of them from any device! It’s going to be like living in a dystopian Jetsons!

2. I’d be more intrigued about the story behind some guy flying with a jetpack near commercial airplanes in Los Angeles if it wasn’t so damn likely that this was result of a start up, flush with cash from a new round of funding, disrupting air traffic control or something equally inane and contrived. The headline from that story definitely grabbed my click but I was really hoping less for instant millionaire publically measuring dicks against all the other millionaires trying to be the first to endanger planes full of passengers and more for something like the hilarious (and also intensely sad) story of Larry Walters and his solo lawn chair flight into commercial air space.

3. If you needed more reasons to despise the way that Amazon treats its employees then here is a super gross story about buying their own Pinkertons to spy on employees organizing. That is blatantly disgusting and shameless. Imagine interviewing for that job. Is there a personality test? Do you enjoy helping drastically increase the fear and distrust at your workplace? We have the perfect job for you and your lack of human empathy.