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Wake @ 0500.

Coach CrossFit @ 0600

Take Meg to school @ 0745

Work starts @ 0800

Work continues until 1930

Go home, eat, sit back down.

Work finally ends at @ 2200.

No training.

No playing. 

No time with the family.

Endless stress.

 ...days like this.

On My Feet

My journey to recovery continues, at full speed, and today brought several "Firsts:"

• First day back to The Office since having surgery. It went well as everyone was supportive and eager to help when needed. Lunch took longer than usual. Breaks did, too. But one of my favorite projects came closer to fruition and we're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. 
• First shower in a week. Been taking an awkward bath, instead. The Wound was sealed inside a Ziplock Bag and my whole leg was propped up, high and dry, on the side of the tub. Not an ideal solution, but it kept things clean and healthy. 
• First unaided steps! Spoke to the doctor today she said that some exploratory steps were permissible. As long as it didn't hurt (too much) and it did not cause any damage to the exposed portion of The Wound. So that happened. And the crutches have gone unused since we all came back home. 

Feels good to be fully upright and on my own legs again. Six days of half-hopping everywhere was definitely twisting up my back. Hopefully recovery continues at this pace,the wound keeps closing, and there are races and coaching and more in my future. For now, it is a victory just to be on my feet. 

Wounded Or Not

Wounded or not, IronNerd's work is never done. Today's adventures included: hoisting a DHCP service to replacing those lost by a dying router, swapping a UPS that didn't need to be swapped, ordering a 220v outlet at the last possible hour, and scrounging for nearly a dozen network ports on switches that had no holes to fill. The project comes to fruition on Monday. If it goes well, there will be more of them along the same line. If it doesn't go well... ...let's agree that it will go well.

Rest this weekend. Visit The Parents. Prep meals for the coming week. Hopefully heal. And then back in the saddle on Monday. One way or another.

The Big Pitch

Second visit to a big client today. Lots of new notes. Reports and admonitions. All the Sales and Partners and the CIO and IronNerd, together to present The Big Pitch. Selling ourselves and our vision for their digital future. Get them to come on board. In some form or another. They'd be a huge addition to our roster. With plenty of nummy technology to wade through. Lots and lots of it. One of our biggest assimilations to date. And another step towards achieving our goals as a small, local business.

Work. Work. Work. That's all you'd see of me recently. High end projects from a high energy guy. But something has to change, soon. This time last year, Your Humble Narrator was returning from a training camp in Chattanooga. Pretty much in top shape and ready to race. These days? See above! Work. Work. Work. And my shape is threatening to become: round.

At least we're done with The Big Pitch. Now on to other adventures.

In Da Mouf

My disappearances are never planned. They grow from a seed of discontent and blossom into mighty growths of Sloth & Lethargy. One day gets past me. Then one week. Ad nausea. For a while, there was significant volumes of training consuming my cycles. Like 2-4 workouts per day!  But recently my absence has been due to a boringly mundane reason: work.  My day job. That Which Pays The Bills.

After a coworker left, the main bulk of complex projects (and a full time schedule!)  fell very unexpectedly onto my shoulders. We forecast that it would be 6 months before they could generate 40hrs per week of work for me. We didn't make it 6 weeks! These days, it is non-stop at the office. And many nights my thoughts are fixated on projects: what's next, what needs to be done, what's behind schedule, what's going where.

It has negatively affected my mood and personal productivity. My fuse is short. My energy is gone. My time is completely gone. And nothing feels good any more. It is like slowly chewing through a buffet moments after major oral surgery. Nothing but numbness and disinterest in anything other than uninterrupted silence for as long as possible.

Trying to get back on track, though. Resume proper training. Reschedule mobility and recovery. Get in my steps. Get back to serious training of myself and others. Just try to shrug off the negativity of my nerdly ways during the day. And refocus on improving the situation while planning for a better tomorrow. One day at a time.That's the plan, at least. But, as Mike Tyson warned us: Everybody has a plan until they get punched in da mouf!

Push Pull, Clip Clop

Another day and another round of wrestling with server hardware. Yesterday was bad memory. Today involved adding fiber connections. Push pull, clip clop. All done and hopefully we can migrate some SQL services off of old servers and onto these monsters. Often time easier said than done, when my corporate cohorts in Las Vegas are involved. But we'll see how it goes.

After work, met Kimmer at Rooney's for the usual Friday Night Dance. Couple of pints. BBQ Sammich. Music in the background. Conversation in the foreground. He's a good guy with a heart even bigger than his chest. Fought more battles than I can count and still comes out smiling. A good example for me to follow. And his guidance is always appreciated. Glad to have him down for a couple of weeks. We both need it.

A Rest Day

9 workouts in 6 days and finally, a rest day.! Very happy to NOT be in the gym or on the road anywhere. 

Not that there is any rest for the wicked. Still had a full load at work: Dealing with vendors. Volunteering for a new Citrix adventure well ahead of the rest of the organization. Extinguishing numerous minor wildfires. And, as pictured, swapping out bad memory in an ESX host. Funny bit, there, after powering off the server, changing the hardware, and restoring power, my email starts blowing up. The Virtualization Dudes in Las Vegas start proclaiming, "Everything dropped offline!" Which quickly spiked by heart rate closer to 200BPM. Until they started laughing the second they answer their hotline. Of course, it was a joke. A naughty nerdy joke. Highlight of my day. 

My short-lived, greatly needed, REST day....

IronNerd's Office

My fifth favorite passion (aside from: family, fitness, reading and food:) is technology. Counted among  my many blessings is being able to earn a living by literally playing for hours with all manner of digital geekery.

Today, for example, my day was spent getting a new workstation (far left) online. At one point, my desk had three PCs (with three different versions of Windows) straddling SEVEN screens. All controlled by just a single mouse & keyboard. For bonus Dork Points, my convertible laptop and much-beloved tablet are included in the group photo.

For the techno-curious:

• Top two monitors (currently) work off my oldest PC, barely visible as a silhouette under the phone. Something like a Dell 520, from 2005. Runs Windows XP. 4GB of RAM. 70GB drive. Usually handles non-corporate adventures and has Office 2007 for helping users running that version. 
• Bottom four monitors currently work off an oldish Dell XPS system, the silver tower under my tablet. Probably refurbished around 2012. Quad core, 64bit, 8GB RAM, 200GB drive, Windows 7. Monitors the data center, handles all corporate adventures, and has Office 2010. 
• Currently squatting on the left, under the sad lonely screen, is the New Baby. Sweet little Inspiron with an quad core i7, 16GB of RAM, smoking fast 512GB SSD drive, and (finally) a functional DVD burner. Took me HOURS of updates but it is finally running a fully patched Windows 8.1 with Office 2013. It will replace the Windows XP box and serve as a heavy lifter to do some VM work. Especially a virtualized Windows 10. (Gotta stay ahead of the curve.)
• The laptop is a Dell XPS One that has stolen my heart. (Typing on it right now.) Also runs Windows 8.1. Also has an SSD. And boots from a cold stop to fully logged in within 5 seconds. Love it, love it, love it! Mainly use it for working remotely, and typing out my rants on Tales From The Eye. Great for watching videos, too!
• Of course the tablet is a 2nd generation Nexus 7. This thing will completely change your digital life. Only reason to get on my home PCs these days is to play a video game. Almost everything else done on a regular basis is done on the N7. Ultra portable. Ultra functional. This thing is a game changer.
• Tying all the Windows devices together with screen/keyboard/mouse sharing software: Synergy. Allows me to move across all the screens seamlessly. Could probably run it on the tablet, if needed, since Synergy has a Linux client. 
• A keen eye will spot my favorite coffee up lurking amid the packets and LCDs. Something old, something new. 

Combine it all together, and you have the modern IronNerd. Welcome to my world.

Surprises us

Shipping department either delivered the Arc of the Covenant or potentially the biggest server in the data canter. Box had to be nearly four feet high and just a long. Steel straps holding it together. So big it was mounted on its own skid pad. 

After cutting, popping, unwrapping, lifting, and unboxing, we discovered it was actually a modern blade chassis, with two blades. The box was a major illusion and they could have used something a quarter of the size.

Rare that technology surprises us. But when it does, we get caught up in the excitement and whimsy. The lust of revealing the unknown. And HELL YEAH, brand new technology. That sort of adventure never gets old.

Robotic Bastard

Back to the battle with technology. Second day of waging near-constant war against backups. Like playing digital Jenga with the smoldering soul of an unblinking, multi-million dollar corporation. Pull out the wrong puzzle piece and the whole delicately crafted construct falls down around your trembling ears. Summoned all the king's horses. Summoned all the king's men. And we finally put Digital Dumpty back together again.

First piece was a new backup-to-disk solution that didn't behave. Finally spanked it until it complied. Of course that means half a dozen of us on the phone with three different accents and an over-eagerness to control the mouse.

Second piece was the backup server. It didn't like the new storage. And of course IBM can't modernize to an actual Graphical User Interace (GUI) so my morning is spent on the phone with one of their lead nerds as he talks me through the specific, arcane syntax required to reconfigure their command line interface (CLI.) Tedious, painful stuff. One wrong keystroke could have wiped everything. But we managed to get it stripped down to the bare bones and rebuilt properly.

Final piece was the tape silo. Robotic bastard. Refusing to play nice. Lost count of the number of inits and reboots and replaced tapes it took to make the sun/moons/stars line up correctly. Week of no training. Headache for lunch. Not even a pat on the back, or a pack of cigarettes, for ol' Johnny. Par for the course, though. All a part of the gig. Still glad to be employed. While wrestling robots still pays well.

Mower Part Two

Husqvarna made Mower Part One. Swedish company. Products probably assembled in America. Tennessee. Georgia. South Carolina. See the trend? As you can imagine, the brand new mower turned out to be Craptasticly American. And after less than four uses (not even a month of ownership) Mower Part One decides to gasp out its dying breath. And it would mow no more.

Familiar silly dance with the support line. Check the gas? Yes. Check the oil? Yes. Air filter? Yes. Spark plug? Yes. Sorry, they said, bad unit. Gonna have to do a big long dance, they said, with our third party provider. Haul the unit over there, they said, leave it for a week, Third Party will fix it for you. 

Hell with that, says Jon. Taking that sumbitch right back to Lowe's. Leaving it on their doorstep and disputing the charges, if need be. You don't take Ol Jon's hard earned money for a third rate piece of hardware that doesn't last even a month. Nope. Not gonna happen. Not without somebody catching bruises. 

Now there's a brand new Troy Bilt in the garage. Mower Part Two. And it's gonna got some damn grass!

On A Monday

Never a dull moment in these parts. I certainly live in interesting times.

• Liam sick this morning. Stayed home, without any electronics. Took a nap on the sofa. Him and Molly Dog snoozing on a cool Autumn Monday.
  
• A pair of drives in a RAID 5 array die, taking a bit of data with them. Of course finding the actual problem (versus the symptoms) took a while. Fixing it took even longer. You'd think the folks who get paid to work on SQL would be able to offer advice on fixing problems. You'd have thought wrong. It was pretty much a tag team shotgun fight with me & KV versus SQL & the array.
  
• Pulled my right hamstring while reaching down for a napkin. Bothered me for hours. Hoping it won't interfere with my training tomorrow. Whole bunch of hurt, just for a napkin.
  
• Cindy's neck acting up. God Willing she graduates in like 49 days.
  
• Meg officially the busiest 11yr old on Earth with music and art and theater claiming parts of her days.
  
• GH flying home from an interesting trip. AE still struggling just to make ends meet while just one paycheck from the street. AG starting a new relationship. Lightning alone. All these relationships spinning madly through the ether. Never slowing. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. Sometimes both. Sometimes neither.
  
• A project unexpectedly gains traction. Perhaps the worm has turned and my perseverance and mostly-charity-work will pay off in the long run. One way or another, I'm eager to know.
  
• Last minute reboot of the Citrix systems before I wander to bed. 

The rest is rust and stardust. 

Diverse

Another graduating class at work today. Yearly event. 50 brave souls getting doused in Diversity. I asked to give an introduction to the commencement speaker. Brought my own broken board. From 2010. Told them the bad news: their euphoria eventually wears off, they could eventually slip back into their old manners and roles and moods. But there's good news: they could break more boards. Different ones. At work. In their community. At home. With friends. With family. Or just personal boards. I showed them my latest one: an Ironman Finisher's Medal. And I challenged them to come back one day,to show me their own broken board.

I hope they do it. I hope they challenge themselves. Expand their horizons and try to help reconnect the frayed threads of this crazy world of ours. I barely recognize Jon From 2010. Would he recognize me?

And the distance keeps on growing. Hopefully it grows for them. For all of us. Diverse. But united. Out of many, one.

On A Monday

Here's how my day goes down:

• Wake up to the most amazing series of cramps, in my hands and forearms. Still walking funny. More Ibuprofen for breakfast.
  
• Driving through the neighborhood, on the way to work, and a squirrel blurs at the edge of my vision. Something goes crunch under a tire. Young couple on their morning walk. The girl covers her mouth. In my rear view mirror, a half crushed smear of brown. Its front legs twitching. As if trying to crawl.
  
• Get to the office. One of my PCs is black. Eight years old, anyway. Windows XP. Not really NEEDED to do my job. But very helpful. When it isn't dead. Later it will turn out to be a bad power supply.
  
• Fire up the other system: 488 emails. And the day is just starting. Another hundred or two hundred emails will climb on top of the mound. Almost faster than I can clear them out. Takes nearly six hours before I whittle it down closer to one hundred. That's what passes as manageable these days.
  
• After hours, a trip to the gym. 19 miles on the bike. 45 minutes and 48 seconds. Lots of sweat. Reminds me: I'm alive.

And a quiet house lulls me to sleep. 

Compressed

Worked from home while Cindy took a day-trip to Jackson. Yet another printing outage. My own account locked out. A missing lunch order. Security theater on display by the AF Base. Gigi's car woes. Pruning down hundreds of work emails. The same with hundreds of backlogged personal emails. Trying to catch up on these journal entries. Fitness plans falling through. Texts. Instant Messages. The agony of sifting signal from the noise of Facebook growing to a crescendo. And all the while, two beautiful growing young kids loom over my shoulders. All compressed into just one sitting.

Tired tired tired of being a nerd.

But it pays the bills.

And I have miles to go before I sleep.

NOLA Visit

Ran this morning. With Luke. Before work. Learning experience there. Terribly hot. Think my system has developed an intolerance for Gu. At least while running. Sat in my stomach like a gnarly little brick. Had to throttle back. And only did 5 miles. Instead of six. Good workout though.

Drove into NOLA, after. Work-related. Check out some potential hardware. Backup to disk. Instead of to tape. Vendor ran a touch late. His client ran later. Met in the bottom of the French Quarter. Obscure sammich shop. Sample of cane-sugar beer. Spinach and artichoke dip. Super delicious pobody. Some kind of slow-cooked pork with garlic and jalapenos all-but-melted into it.

Interesting product. Not sure if we'll take the leap. Or not. Trying to align the moon & stars.

Sweltering on the way in. Mid-90s. Deluge on the way out. High 70s. Three hours of road time. Then office hours.Oh, the lonely life of a wayward geek.

Endless

Some days, work is endless. Voracious. Could have stayed sixteen hours without reaching the bottom of my private rabbit hole. Ninety grand in new systems  to install. A dozen old servers to decommission and remove. Power to redistribute. Networking to untangle. Planning for applications. And migrations. And upgrades. (sigh)

In the middle of that digital whirlwind, a drive flies offline. Recovery from that flop. Vendors constantly nipping and crying like hungry little bluejays. "How's your cloud?" asks the Prez as he passes. Tickets flooding the queue. Two hour meetings. Conference calls. Surprise visits from lost Las Vegas VPs. The cell phone bleeping. Instant messenger chirping. Emails. Emails. Emails.

Kids home from school. Meg fighting a cold. Cindy's battle to finish her degree. I need to plan dinner for Wednesday. I need to take Meg to the doctor. I need to print up study guides. I need to finish the taxes. I need to worry about the air conditioner. I need to find ways to cut my spending. I need to be more helpful. I need to stop being selfish. And I need to ignore the ever present call of training.

It is all endless.

But at least I'm never bored.

So What Next For Bello Noch

It isn't every day that you look to discover a helicopter hovering outside your office window. Let alone one dangling a zoot suit wearing clown with a red, foot high mohawk. Upside down. Only his toes keeping him from falling hundreds of feet. To certain death.

But that is how Bello Nock heralded the beginning of a new month-long show at Beau Rivage.

How boring was the rest of this guy's day? One minute he is spitting in the face of gravity and dangling his nuts from beneath a gas-powered whirligig and the next he is eating beans & corn bread in the bowels of a casino.

So what next for Bello Noch? Jump over a pool of electrified sharks while riding blindfolded on a burning unicycle? Juggle sticks of lit dynamite? Strip naked, drench himself in honey and Pop Rocks then run into a cave full of starving, methed-up Kodiak Grizzly bears?

And the best part? The man gets PAID to do these things. Always hoping he lives to collect his check. One near-death experience at a time.

Went Atomic

Thirteen hours yesterday. Eleven hours today. Cleared off old backups. Created new ones. Staged the latest Microsoft patches. In the office by six in the morning. Then a printing upgrade. And the reboots. What happens next? Of course things went atomic. But thankfully (as if it were a consolation prize) only the Citrix environment burst in flames. Several hundred folks completely offline. Others unable to open our primary customer-management applications. Spent the better part of two hours on the phone with Citrix support. Still unable to identify the problem. Maybe some additional patches would help. Maybe pull off the new patches, one at a time. Hours of work, with no guarantee of success any time soon.

Fortunately for Your Humble Narrator, he made snapshots of all the servers involved. Powered down the affected systems. Snapped back. Powered up. Voila. Everything restored to its former glory. More than a dozen hours of work erased with a couple of mouse clicks. Alas. Easy come, easy go.

The users were able to connect. The applications fired up. Sunlight through the storm clouds. And I nearly puked when it  all drew to a close. The severity of the outage finally biting into my old bones. Damage I'd wrought. Three hours multiplied by several hundred folks. Add up the cost of their loss of productivity and it likely amounts to more than my annual income. Not a cross I bear lightly.

Shortly thereafter, the Prez calls. His cell to mine. Wants to hear directly what I'd done. Was nice about it, of course. Gave him the exact times and efforts. Promised to make it right next time. And off we go, each to our own adventures. Not fun being on his radar. I crept away. As quickly and quietly as possible. No chest thumping or braggadocio from This Old Nerd. Lived to fight another day. Hopefully less atomic next time.

Southern Gaming 2013

Once a year a casino-based convention comes to town: The Southern Gaming Expo. Vendors circling overhead like shrill, angry gulls. Property executives get tan to make the rounds. And free parties litter the night like beads after Mardi Gras. Free food and free drink? Sign me up! But... there's this whole non-drinking issue Jon's been wrestling with recently. And the non-drinking side of the brain won the fight with the pro-drinking side. So Jon didn't partake, but he did attend the biggest party of the week.

My old drinking partner, Tracy, was there. Haven't seen her in probably a year. Or more? She came down with Rex last year, I think? And before that, I was in Las Vegas. Anyway, she's over in Louisiana, now. New property (for her.) New role. Lots of challenges. Her GM was with her. So we didn't have much time to catch up. But now that she's two hours away, instead of two days, maybe we can meet in the middle (NEW ORLEANS!) some time and compare notes.

Also got to hang out with my online video game brother: Mikey, aka Ribo. He works for MS Gaming in Jackson. Since I missed last year's expo, I haven't seen him since 2011. But we rumble sometimes on Borderlands 2. (New expansion due soon!) His wife, Sam, was there. Telling me about her adventures with the Dept of Marine Resources down here. (Apparently a big scandal that I've only vaguely sniffed) The Right Honorable Judge Rob was with him. And his bride, Amanda. We talked about video games, gaming, getting older, taxes, schools, society, and my near-termination a while back. Good times, good food, and what looked like really good booze.

Already looking forward to next year. Maybe I'll be drinking again by that time...