Geek

So last night I started my latest round of on-call. I shall carry this torch until Wednesday morning at 8:00 a.m. This is something that comes around every seven weeks or so and honestly, it’s the one thing about my job that really bugs me.

It’s not the “on-call” that bugs me really. It’s the circumstances. You see, my job is basically comprised of two parts. One part of my job is developing, planning, building and maintaining a pretty robust “event management system” (troubles, outages, changes, stuff like that) software package. This is the part of my job that I love and this is what makes me thrive in my career. I get to build pretty web pages that do really nifty things and I get to see users be able to do their jobs effectively because of the application that I have built. I get to stretch my geekiness in ways to make people more efficient and that’s something I really enjoy doing. I could do this part of my job forever and not really complain about it. I’m on call for this 24 hours a day, seven days a week and because the application is of my design and basically under my control, if I do my job well, I don’t get called (barring any sort of hardware or network failure). When I’m called for this it’s because I’ve done something wrong, so I make sure I do everything right. That’s easy to handle. That’s in my geek blood.

The other part of my job is being part of a team that maintains the software platform that monitors the entire network of the communications company I work for. The Network Operations Centers use this software to make sure that grandma can let her fingers do the walking via telephone or via internet, whenever she wants to walk her fingers. The software that did this when I was hired onto the team was a brilliant piece of design, did its job very well and didn’t require a lot of coddling. It was sleek, fast and efficient. While routine maintenance was very important to its health, many elements were “set it and forget it” and it was all geeky with the way it worked so I loved it. On-call with this was pretty much 24/7 for me and in 18 months I was called twice. Piece of cake, right? Unfortunately, when it was time to upgrade in preparation for tripling the size of the company, the company that provided the software at the time didn’t do very well in the bidding department when it was time to evaluate options for looking to move to something bigger, so the company migrated to a new platform that seemed to be quite popular with similar companies.

Knowing that co-workers and the like may read this I will soft shoe my way through this and simply say that I’m not a fan of this convoluted cluster of stuff that we are maintaining now. It feels like a constant game of Jenga with only 3/4 of the blocks that is being played in a very stiff wind. To make it doubly interesting, much of the interface is written in Java and only likes to run on Internet Explorer. There’s a lack of intuitiveness. What makes sense to me often isn’t what the software wants to do. I feel dumb. Sigh. Double sigh. Triple sigh.

Because the stiff wind occasionally moves to a gale force, on-call has the potential to be quite busy. I try very, very hard not to be frustrated by calls I may receive in the middle of the night and to do so I count to 10. A lot (my odometer is getting ready to roll over to over one million burgers served). But the geek side of me is constantly asking myself why this new software platform has to be so complicated. I’m concerned that I might develop some sort of involuntary twitch whenever I’m asked to do some sort of task on this system. The biggest reason for my discomfort is because I feel like in this part of my job I might be letting users down because the software just isn’t doing what it’s suppose to do, and I can’t determine if it’s the software, the people the installed the software, the person maintaining the software or the sun, the moon or the stars. However, since my position with the company is comprised of both of these roles, I just do what I can to the best of my ability. That’s all that is expected of me, but this just runs contrary to my personal achievement standards.

So last night was the first night of on-call and it went by without incident. Yay! I have found that it’s often hardest for me to get through that first night of on-call and I am thankful to whichever on-call god deemed me worthy of an incident free night. Only six more nights to go. I am hoping to use this on-call weekend to be productive at some projects I’ve been cooking up in my head.

I’ll relax next weekend.

I don’t know a lot about birds. I know they fly. I know there are eggs involved. I know they make a chirp, cheep or pip like sound most of the time unless they’re overly musical. Other than that, I don’t know their habits or anything like that.

When I work from home I break up the morning and afternoon by taking a 15 or so minute walk up and down the road. It’s a good way to get a little bit of exercise and it gives me the opportunity to stretch my legs and my brain.

Up the road a few lots is a large meadow. I think it used to be a hay field but it hasn’t been farmed in quite a few years. There’s a lot of wild brush, leafy bushes and the like. When walking along this stretch of the road there are always three black birds with red and a splotch of yellow on their wings watching me very carefully. Over the past several weeks I have noticed that they like to form a perimeter. One goes up on the tallest electric pole near this area, another goes on a tree that’s close by and a third perches on the wires.

When I pass the pole, the third bird then starts to follow me a bit in a very rhythmic pattern. He or she flies out from the wire, circles rather low over my head and lands back on the wire a little farther up my path of travel. He or she does this three times until I pass a thicket of green leafy growth, then they stay on the wire. All the while the three of them are making chirping noises with the one on the wire being the most chatty.

When I come back down the road on my return trip, I am on the other side of the road opposite the meadow and directly under the wire. The birds resume their same position but the one on the wire doesn’t do the trinity circle thing. He or she just watches and dumps little poops on the lawn under the wire. The conversation between the three of them resumes until I am beyond the tree. Then the three of them fly back across the road and into the meadow, assumedly to whatever they’re protecting.

I find this fascinating.

So when I feel the need to lose myself in my non-technology-related, but still entirely geeky hobby of my collection of school clocks made by The Standard Electric Time Company, I look at old yearbooks on classmates.com. I mentioned this activity in a blog entry a couple of months ago and this trend is continuing on hot summer nights when my brain is a little too tired to write code.

My have a methodical way of finding old yearbooks to look at; I think of one of the longer roadways in New York State and then using Google Maps, I search each town along the selected roadway to see if there is a corresponding school district. I then see if there are yearbooks available and go to one of the early years, but with a minimum year of 1950. The yearbooks before 1950 are kind of hard to come by and are rather sparse in content; I blame this approach on World War II. Once I determine that the school in question was kind of art-decoish in its design, I look through the pages of these old yearbooks and look for clocks in the background of the hundreds of photos of smiling young (and well groomed) people. I’ll probably find one or two photos with a clock for every dozen yearbooks I look at. 99% of the time the clock just happens to be in the background, but once in a while a school will show a really good shot of a clock as a symbol of the passage of time or something, like this photo of the original master clock from the elementary school I attended, courtesy of the 1952 yearbook (from when it was a K-12 school).

That clock was found in the main office of the school up until the mid 1950s and I never knew what it looked like until I found that picture in the yearbook. Geek satisfaction.

It’s interesting to see that each school had its own character with the design of their yearbooks. Even though different students planned and coordinated the yearbook for each school year, there is often a strong similarity in the style and content of the photos from year to year. I think it’s because the school probably used the same photography studio or photographer year after year. I’ve also noticed that many schools of that era had grand staircases that were featured prominently in yearbooks, though only one or two that I’ve observed were as ornate as the staircase that was found in my elementary school.

Since I basically pick random schools in the Empire State to look at, once in a great while I might recognize someone as I’m scanning through the pages looking for a clock in the background. For example, one of my elementary school teachers graduated from Lockport High School in 1969 and I just happened to catch a glance of their name as I electronically flipping through the pages. That was kind of cool.

I still haven’t found another school that had the same style clocks that got me interested in collecting these things to begin with, but I’ve seen several close cousins. Maybe the clock from the elementary school in my collection is now officially a one-of-a-kind (since the others were all replaced).

That’d be kind of neat.

It was a short statement.

“My Mac won’t boot up.”

Now that’s not something you hear everyday. Macs are plug and play, right? Set ’em and forget ’em. It just works.

And it does just work, 99.9% of the time. I told Jamie to turn the computer off and just leave it; I would take a look at it before he got back from the tour he was about to embark on. I figured it was hot in his room and that the Mac was having some sort of overheating issue. I knew I felt overheated at the time.

Well I never got around to messing around with his computer so when he got home from the tour on Sunday afternoon he tried to start things up and ran into the same issue. It was time to flex my geek powers.

“I have four years of work on there!”

I had to assure Jamie that there was no reason to panic, after all, he had an external hard drive. Unfortunately, said drive wasn’t plugged into the computer.

No backup.

Ok, now I really had to flex my geek powers.

Now, here’s the thing (I should rename this blog “Here’s The Thing”). I have all sorts of tools and doodads to fix an issue with a Windows computer that is in this predicament. I’ve dealt with so many PC crashes over the years that I pretty much know what I’m doing and I can usually grab the data that is thought to be lost, even if I have to resort to voodoo and sacrifices. But the thing is, I never had to do this sort of thing on a Mac before. What to do, what to do.

Well, I’m not going to bore you with the minute details because that would be, well, boring, but after six or so hours, I was able to announce to Jamie, “I’m copying your Music and your Pictures folders over”. I was able to get to his data and copy it over to a external hard drive that I normally use to store my backups. The look of relief on his face said all the thanks that was necessary.

Inspired by this little Mac adventure, I have since rearranged our methods of backups for the entire household (we use a GoFlex Home NAS and am looking into additional backup services.

If you gain just one thing from this blog entry, please let it be this: always store your data in more than one place. It’ll save yourself from panic mode in the future. Because every computer can crash.

Even a Mac.

As a productive employee of a large telecommunications company, I feel it is my duty to have a landline at the house. While we don’t live in the footprint of the company I work for, there are some old habits that just don’t go away, so we have a wall phone in our kitchen with an extra long cord. Don’t tell anyone that it actually uses the Internet to communicate with others whilst our fingers do the walking.

The phone in the kitchen rarely rings. On the occasion that someone calls the house phone, we generally never know who they are. A random series of digits come up on the caller ID. 99% of the time the caller is a telemarketer.

During our lunch just moments ago, the house phone rang. Earl answered it. Apparently he hasn’t watched the same 1940s and 50s films that I have watched recently, the ones instructing the public on how to work the phone in a polite manner, because he didn’t answer, “Hello, this is Earl.” He said, and I quote, “What”. His manner was not overly jovial but it wasn’t offensive.

The caller was apparently taken aback by his curt greeting and stammered his way through part of a script when Earl said, “Who is this?”. Again, he wasn’t overly jovial but he wasn’t rude.

He then hung up the phone.

Apparently the caller said the wrong thing at the wrong time. I have to giggle because when Earl hung up the phone he did it exactly the same way as Grandpa Country used to hang up the phone: he just hung it up. No formalities, no farewell, no words at all, just ‘click’.

This prompted a very short discussion over lunch as to why we have a house phone. People that want to reach us do so via text message or email. If there is an emergency in the house, we’d reach for our iPhone. As mentioned earlier, the house phone is using VoIP (over the internet) so the whole “911 is going to pinpoint your location” thing might not hold water. And, to the apparent horror of many folks, we have to dial all 10 digits to call anywhere, local, long-distance, all of it. I mention this little horror bit because they’re looking to add another area code to our region and people are horrified by the idea of having to dial all 10-digits all the time. We’ve been doing it for years. I even do it on my iPhone. People need to keep up with the times.

Maybe we should get rid of the phone and save a few bucks.

As an avid user of Apple products (I’m typing this on my iPad4), I am bound by religious dogma to be ecstatic of anything that Apple does in the way of innovation. This is just one of the ways of the world and it is something that I fully accept.

Yesterday, Apple released iOS 7 Beta 3 to its developer community. Luckily, as a developer, I am part of that community (read: I have paid for the privilege of being part of that community). I installed iOS 7 Beta 3 on my iPhone 5 within 15 minutes of it being available. At no time did I lose any productivity time at work, I swear.

This is my current home screen on my iPhone 5. Normally I have a photo of Earl and Jamie and me (or some other family type photo) as my home screen because I like the idea of having a little photo frame in my pocket, but iOS 7 has eliminated the little “swipe bar” to unlock the phone. Now you just swipe anywhere on the screen and it feels weird to to swipe across someone’s face. It feels unnatural. Because this is a beta and nothing is ever written in stone with software, especially in the beta phase of testing, I’m not too worked up about this. It’s also really not that significant to get worked up about.

While I’m very excited about the new functionality that is starting to show itself in iOS 7, I have to admit that I am not excited at all about the new design elements, especially the typography. As you can see in the screenshot above, Apple, more specifically Jony Ive, the lead designer and engineer of the project, is favoring thin, “modern” looking fonts throughout this new version of iOS.

I’m not a fan. I’m not a fan because it just feels too “dainty” to me.

Now, I don’t know if I’m getting more set in my ways as I get older or if my tastes are falling even more out of step with the consensus of the general public, but I don’t want an expensive piece of technology to feel “delicate”. I don’t want a light, airy experience with my technology. I want to be able to embrace it, grapple it, and maul it. Perhaps this is just a quirk of my already quirky personality, but this is one of the reasons that I use Apple hardware to begin with; I like the metal and solid feel of my iProducts. If I wanted something delicate, I’d buy a (much) cheaper piece of plastic and silicon and call it a day.

As I continue to use my iPad with iOS 6 on it (the version everyone is used to), I find myself more comfortable with the experience because it feels less “delicate” and more resilient. Yes, the interface could use some freshening up, but I don’t think it needs to be so fresh that it feels like it’s been through a TV commercial that makes women roll their eyes (due to the unnatural talk between mother and daughter) and men downright uncomfortable. (You know what I’m talking about.)

I guess I’m going to have to find a way to butch my iPhone back up a bit. The user of an ever-so-slightly bolder font in this latest beta is a slight step in the right direction but I don’t think we’re going to ever get back to that feeling of “metal and hooah” that I somewhat feel in iOS 6.

Maybe I’ll put a piece of duct tape on the back or something.

After upgrading to the latest beta of iOS today, I commented to Siri that her voice was changing.