long story. that’s a sun e10k in the hallway at work. it was such a symbolic posession for a company doing bioinformatic computing. but none of the IT staff ever had the right vision. the machine was misused and grossly underused. but i was lucky enough to learn how to run it.

anyways, i’ve decided to change scenery. starting october 16th, i will be working for a different company. my focus will be similar, but the equipment and software used will all be diffierent.

let me back up a little bit. when i moved to california, i started my professional career as a unix systems administrator. i was hired by a contracting firm. i was out on various contracts got great exposure to a variety of environments over the course of seven years. then i felt the hurt of the tech downturn. i was unemployed for a while. i was back on a gig i wasn’t too enthused about. that time, i looked for a new place. i quit contracting and went full time at a scientific company. i’ve been there for four years.

why am i making this change again?

that’s the most easy and difficult question to answer.

on my way home from work today i was thinking about how to answer that. of course this isn’t the first time. i certainly knew the answer when i started looking for jobs elsewhere. i had some answers when people who were interviewing me asked. and i had little to offer when my own employer asked me. now, composing this blog post, i’m at a loss.

the easy answer now is it feels right for me and that’s really all the answer i need. i have control over my own life. leaving my current employer both hurts and feels good. hurts, in the matter where i’m leaving some coworkers and a director i respect and enjoy working with. feels good in that my new commute will be half, the department seems more healthy, and the company looks stable.

every place has its good points and the bad. this new place will have its own matters-of-suck but will have some good points too.

i can say easily now, that job hunting sucks. most unix IT jobs are held by exclusive searches and headhunters. and they are all getting in the ballpark of 15% commission. they hold all the open jobs. and they all use the internet to find people jobs. why else would they take my reinvented, evolved resume and turn it into a list of keywords and product names. a lot of headhunting is likely off-shored too, as evident by getting lots of VOIP-like caller-id calls, some of which had such poor voice quality I could not make out information left in my voicemail box. another hint that these head searches are search engine based, is the fact that I mention a partciular product as a minor point on my resume. I was getting job offers where the crucial experience required was that product. If a human had actually read my resume, they would have overlooked it.

this job hunt has been an emotional experience for me. this year has really be emotional. dad. burning man. layoffs.

i have reserved some personal time for myself between jobs, but it will not be enough.

so for now, i will finish this post. put on journey and turn up the volume. and finish the last of this valrhona dark bitter chocolate.

(800×601)

today i brought my 4×5 to work, to show a coworker. it was my first time packing it all into my mini trekker classic. i usually carry it in a lowepro side bag. everything fit fine.

i was looking around work for something interesting to photograph. there are lots of interesting cubes, but no real scenery. i decided to set the tripod up on top of my desk. i brought the camera nearly up to the ceiling for this shot. i exposed a sheet of ilford film as well – another for the growing queue of sheets to be processed.

this is a picture of the dolphin resort. the swan and dolphin hotels have been my life for the past week. i am back from sans 2006.

i was going to update at night but found myself too tired to really do much. the days were mostly conference and class work from 9am til 9pm. i met lots of cool people, learned lots of cool things. i have lots of notes, which are on their way to california via u.p.s. ground. when they arrive i’ll annotate my notes with them and post something more substantial.

i have a lot to think about now. briefly, i am not reaching my potential. every workplace has its drawbacks and its sour apples. i definitley know those at my current job. my biggest challenge is being spread so thin. dealing with everything from changing forgotten to passwords to working on site level disaster recovery planning. i really wish i were more specialized. but that’s hard to do at a small company. i need to find a way to manage my time more efficiently. i wish i had a few more days off from work so i can think more about everything.

i’m so tired. i miss eating real food. and california. and ryan and boman.

i have to work on the invites. boman will help me out a little on the techncal details. but i’ll do the rest. good small art project. (did he even wake up today?)

i need to bring this loaner laptop back to work. and format it before i hand it back – i ran some bins from a rooted filesystem on it. it’s totally hosed :)

i don’t like interacting with vendors.

was up until 2am doing chores. i was so tense, when i drank some water before bed my stomach got tied up in a knot.

overslept my alarm by an hour (and still got only five hours of sleep). had trouble with the ticket validator at the train station.

i have nearly a week’s worth of work to do this week (thursday and friday).

- filed more reports than ever, helped others file reports

- got flack on a poorly scheduled and potentially dangerous internal audit

- dealt with multiple groups of external auditors

- none of my 2005 “goals” were done to completion (only one of them has measurable work done)

- the admin i helped hire got fired within the same year

the good items to report:

- did not go postal or flip out under pressure/stress like he did during the data center move

- did not start using pot or other mind altering substances, alcohol consumption remained level

- will return to work after the holiday break is over

part of working for a biology related company is taking part in conversations about life. today at lunch the question came up, what prevents [humans] from living forever?

what we gathered was that the human body’s cells replace themselves every few years. cells can only replicate so many times. you multiply the two together and you get the theoretical lifespan of humans.

the other thing to think about is, every time a cell divides mistakes are made. the copy is not 100% correct. accumulating mistakes is why older people are more susceptible to illness than younger people. it’s why individual lifespan varies so much.

the only ways to prolong life are: reduce the mistakes made in replication, increase the number of times cells can replicate themselves, and reduce the frequency at which cells replace themselves (regenerate). these are the three important variables.

someone suggested that reducing caloric intake would reduce metabolism and tweak the system enough to extend life.

ok, i made the mistake of answering a page and email from work. a website is down. i login and i can access it fine. this is what i get, i guess. the email doesn’t specify a time or method of access, so it’s hard to tell what (if anything) was wrong. if i didn’t need this damned job to make a living i’d work in a video store or library.