Millennial Angst
I can see it now: a strong-chinned, chisel-faced hero, saying, “Mayor, you should cancel the Times Square celebrations; there’s a bomb, and we don’t know where it is.” The mayor, in archetypal fashion, replies, “No, the city’s economy depends on all these tourists. It’s too big to cancel.” “But mayor!” And so on, in the way that warnings about man-eating shark eruptions and angry volcano attacks get ignored for tourist-ridden Go To the Beach Day or See the Forest Week, and I’m not going to even bring up the killer bees movies and Smell The Flowers Day. After much to-ing and fro-ing, the nuke turns out to be hidden in the ball itself, and the hero keeps it from reaching the bottom by sticking one of those foam “2000” hat things in between it and the trigger at the base. You know, there’s even a natural countdown and scenes of a jubilant, unaware crowd to intersplice and juxtapose with the hero’s desperate struggle to wrest the non-conductive foam hat thing off the terrorist leader in the de rigueur mano-a-mano struggle atop 1 Times Square. It’s perfect. I’m surprised NBC hasn’t done it yet. All we got to whet our collective appetite in the apocalyptic these past few months was that movie where the strong-chinned, chisel-faced hero defuses the nuclear power plant’s Y2K problems with some duct tape and jumper cables (that’s him running on the bridge, after he’s set up the jumper cables with the duct tape) (I missed the beginning of that movie to watch X-Files, so I’m not sure if any warning was issued to the Dense Authority Figure).
So, before it all goes up in smoke or flames or Rapture, let me say that I’ve been busy. My email output, whether it be movie reviews or deranged, unmeticulously typed thinking that’s shot out into the aether, has been nada, or near nada. You may count this as a blessing, I suppose.
Basically, there was assorted work-related chaos, most of it centered around switching jobs. If you haven’t heard, I’ve left RIA, where I had been for about a year-and-a-half, the longest I’d been with a company since leaving Newgate in ’97 and entering the wolly world of Net companies. I’m now at Random Walk, a Java consultancy specializing in the financial sector (anyone who knows Java can send in resumes to me; I’ll happily and crassly take the referral bounty).
This switch happened at the end of August. For weeks before that, there was chaos at RIA, as I had to document everything I know. For weeks afterwards, I was cleaning up some things that happened after I left RIA, and settling in at RW, trying to recover all that systems administration stuff I used to know but haven’t used in years, and trying to learn many new things. Busy, busy, busy.
I’ve half-jokingly noted that a lot of tech people don’t really take many vacations while on the job. Most of our “vacations” are the gaps between leaving one job and starting the next; we can be ironicly literal and use the euphenism, “I’m in between jobs.” I didn’t quite have much free time this time around. (Come to think of it, the last time, when I started at RIA, I had just moved into my apartment, and spent much time roaming through the furniture showrooms downtown, trying to put more in the living room than a futon and a TV. That, and mopping.) I left RIA when they were moving their web servers from a colocation in Minnesota to a new one in Texas. Actually, I had put off leaving by close to six weeks because I had expected them to finish by late July, but our little D-Day kept being pushed back because of weird, stupid problems that the QA people kept on running into. They actually pulled the trigger for real the day right after my last official day. I still had my pager with me — they made me hold on to it — and was still paged at 3AM to fix an Oracle problem that happened during the move. I also spent the next few days, days I wanted to spend resting before starting at RW, on the phone trying to help on a performance problem they ran into when real customers started to come on line Monday morning. (Yes, I’m kvetching about nothing, and I realize that what I do is better than digging ditches for twelve hours a day, which is probably what my peasant ancestors had to do.) I think there were a couple of 3AM wakeups somewhere in there while they were fiddling with settings, but my memory if fuzzy.
Despite this havoc and the documentation project, most of my time at RIA was very sedate. Once set up and rationalized, Oracle sort of runs on its own, with me checking the logs and rejigging something now and then; no one was poking at it that hard. Yes, developers would come by with their problems, but most of these could be taken care of with, “well you do this” and fifteen minutes of time. True, there was the pager I had to carry everywhere, with relatively frequent weekend pages. True, there were the days when I had to get up at 3AM, and for some months this would happen almost weekly, until we finally finished patching everything we could think of. All the odd hours and the surgically implanted pager were par for the course in this industry. But for a given workday, I might spend a couple of hours actually doing work, and most of the rest of the day sitting there. This was perhaps the golden age of my email output to all of you: I just had time on my hand, coupled with boredom.
This was not a bad thing, given the circumstances. The first couple of months of 1998 were taken up with the move to Riverside Drive, and the sundry things that go with that, like buying furniture so I wouldn’t have to sit on the floor. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) The remainder of the year was consumed by illness and the Near Death Experience. A year of not doing stenuous things was helpful.
But, a year on, it got annoying. I actually had planned to start looking for a new job after the large colocation move project was finished, and perhaps switch maybe around now. What happened was that in midsummer, I got a phone call from a friend wondering if I might be interested in a DBA/SA job at Random Walk. It was basically perfect: I had wanted to do more SA work at RIA, to keep whatever unix skills I had from getting totally dull, but there never seemed to be much opportunity, given that there were two full-time sysadmins there. Thompson, after all, is a huge company, and RIA is but a small part: roles are relatively well defined, and it’s not obvious how you’d move from a DBA position and do something more interesting. RW also had more fascinating projects, and I’m learning things once again: at RIA, the online group’s sole purpose was to support the Checkpoint website. At least from my perspective, there wasn’t a bottomless ocean of knowledge and subtle ramifications that could be explored over years. It had started to get dry.
So, despite incentives to stay through the duration of the move, I picked a day that I thought would be reasonably after the change died down, so I could leave after the chaos died down. Of course the move didn’t happen as scheduled for a number of reasons, but I had set a date, and I was more or less gone when I’d said I’d be (except for the conference calls and pages in the first week). RIA wasn’t a bad thing — I was there for a long while after all — and it was necessary at the time.
One of the neat things that I’m still amused by is that I don’t have to wear a pager at Random Walk. We’re a development house, and don’t have production web sites that have to be up 24x7x365, with dark hours when things could be bounced defined as 2AM to 6AM. No tether compelling me to think about setting the pager to vibrate when I go to a movie and changing it back to pierce-veils-of-sleep-audible when I get home so I won’t miss a late night page. I tell of my lack of pager and how my dreams are no longer haunted by its unearthly, Lovecraftian trilling to other sysadmins, and there’s always a startled expression on their faces.
Besides workplace matters, I haven’t been up to that much, in retrospect. Most of what I’ve read consists of the New York Times, the Economist and a handful of other periodicals, not to mention the online magazines. Bookwise? A bunch of computer books, mostly, a little bit of trashy science fiction (“Island In The Sea Of Time”, fun read: Nantucket goes through a wormhole and pops up in 1250 BC), a little Truman Capote, a big chunk of Daniel Boorstin, maybe some Stephen Ambrose. That pop science “Code Book” and one about the Spanish Flu pandemic are mixed in somewhere. I may or may not have reread the Odyssey this year: it might have been last year. I’m sure there are other things, but it’s hard to recall them sitting in front of the computer. If you were to wave a given book off my shelves at me, I’d be able to tell you, but not right now. Maybe my brain has gotten fuzzier with age.
I did go on a free-Shakespeare-in-various-parks binge, so at least I can say I didn’t waste the whole summer watching Jerry Springer and playing Quake. The Shakespeares were Richard III, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Macbeth, the last of which was up at Ft. Tryon park on the tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson valley on a nice summer evening. Of all of these, I liked the Gorilla Rep’s Twelfth Night the best. Macbeth, despite the setting, wasn’t that interesting.
I didn’t really travel this year, but, then, that doesn’t make this year particularly different from most other years — that lack of vacation time except between jobs again. The furthest I went was to Dallas, for work, as part of the preparation for moving the RIA servers there from Minnesota (these are unix boxes, I didn’t have to be physically present to actually work on the machines). I went to talk about Oracle to the half-dozen Sybase DBAs they have down there. Bizarrely, I’ve been to the Dallas area once before, for an Earthweb training trip, and the RIA offices down there are more or less the next couple of streets over from the place I was before. Basically, I’ve been to Texas a couple of times in my adult life, and haven’t seen much beyond that same damn suburb of Dallas and the DFW airport. I did go up to the exotic locale of Rochester, NY, for a wedding: that was the other noteworthy trip this year, though, arguably, I didn’t leave New York State beyond taking the Interstate through Pennsylvania to get there. Saw a Great Lake. Saw Binghampton on the way; what an awful place. Saw the Corning Glass Musuem, too; it was half-closed because of construction; but there was a guy there making a goblet. Oh, in terms of going to bizarre locales this year, I did serve jury duty, and see the insides of the Criminal Court building. That was probably the strangest place.
I did basketball classes this year. This is mildly laughable, since I hadn’t touched a basketball since high school for the phys ed requirement. I did have a theory for dribbling the ball — fingertips not palms, loosen the wrist — but the practice left something to be desired, especially when the coach had us dribble in between our legs: one near miss convinced me this wasn’t something I should try at home. After two sets of classes, I have a decent appreciation of how a basketball team is supposed to work and can get an outside jump shot in often enough to give me at least one moment of glory a game. I still can’t dribble confiently, though, and my layups don’t go in, i.e., I have no inside game to speak of. Interestingly, Random Walk is in a corporate basketball league. I haven’t had a chance to play with the company, as the games tended to conflict with class, but we’ll see if anyone knows what the hell I’m saying when I yell out “downscreen, downscreen!”
I probably won’t take the next set of classes. The first set went through without a hitch, but for a while during the second set I was jamming a finger a week. This wasn’t a big deal until my right index finger — the mouse button finger — got clobbered over and over again. I feel my livelihood depends on part on my ability to type and point and click. Losing even more flexibility on that finger may consign me to digging ditches.
The highlights of basketball this year was playing outdoors in the crappy courts in Tompkins Square Park with friends and occassionally people wandering by (we’re not worthy of the good courts, I think). You know: sun, the outdoor air, the heat exhaustion. There were also episodes at Battery Park City and once at the courts at West 4th Street, really early before anyone good got there. The most annoying moments were in there, too, especially this paunchy middle-aged guy (we’ll call him “Hollywood” for his mirrored sunglasses and haircut) was on my team, and kept on yelling for the rest of us to do stuff, while he didn’t do much to work up a sweat. This was one way to lose 11-3 repeatedly. The worst parts were the occassional physical accidents, like my jammed fingers and running full speed while not realizing that the teammate yelling “Pick! Pick!” was talking to me. Ouch. The guy setting the pick was about my height but outweighed me by 20 pounds in solid muscle: I more or less bounced off him like a fifty cent SuperBall. It wasn’t that bad all in all, though. No obviously broken bones, no concussions, no dislocations.
I didn’t stop doing the gym thing while basketball was going on, as most of my exercising is informed by fear of death — I started going to the gym last year after getting out of the hospital. Through all this, I’ve inadvertently lost about 20 pounds during the year: I vaguely recall weighing up to 185 in blubber sometime at the beginning of the year, but I’m now bouncing between 160 and 165 in non-performing muscle and blubber. I say inadvertent because weight loss was not a goal, more a side-effect of exercise and a liver friendlier diet: considerably less fat, more carbohydrates, much green stuff. Take that, you quack Atkins diet! (I was watching a coworker pick away at her sandwich at a recent company lunch. Eat the meat, slathered in mayo, leave the bread and lettuce. I was tempted to do a *cough*Atkins*cough*kidney failure*cough* but didn’t.)
While I may not be the embodiment of health — a scarred liver has implications — I’m well. More than a year’s worth of blood tests have shown the interesting numbers going to normal ranges and staying there. The most recent tests had one of the numbers (AST) slightly higher than normal, but I think it’s a spurious result: it can go up from a number of reasons, including exercise. And, anyway, we can’t expect perfection. I’ll just keep it in mind for the next regular tests in six months. Best of all, I’m now producing antibodies to a particular hepatitis antigen that indicates how active the HBV is, meaning that the virus is dormant, and will probably stay dormant. HBeAg- and HBeAb+ is actually the goal of gruelling interferon treatment, and I seem to have gotten there on my own. (It happens to a few percent of chronic HBV cases each year, and the hepatitis flare last year might have been related.) The biggest real negative event, healthwise, was my root canal, and that was more or less painless, the worst part being waiting three weeks to get a permanent cap.
And before I seal myself in my bunker with enough canned beans, toilet paper and propane to last to the fourth millennium, watching for the Rapture on MessiahCam, let me say: I have this memory of when I was much, much younger, and trying to calculate how old I’d be when 2000 came around. I don’t recall if I got the number right, as I hadn’t mastered arithmetic, or something like that. This may or may not be ironic, as I did get somewhat better at math, but has since seen most of my skills fade away with burnout and disuse. In any case, what I have I accomplished now that I’m thirty, besides hiding from everyone on my birthday a few months ago?