One more Espresso shot

Here after an uneventful drive. I have a Ford Focus again this week. Not a great car by any means, but it is passable transportation.

Facebook continues to be broken. I cannot post, I cannot comment, I cannot even "Like" a post. The new layout blows. All of the things I worked to get rid of now show up in the Live Feed. News Feed mode seems to have about a 19 hours lag time, perhaps purposefully pushing people to the Live Feed, where we have to figure out some different shitty interface to get rid of all of the crap. I cannot even post on Facebook that I find it annoying. I think mle292 talked about syndicating feeds from LJ or Blogspot, then people who insist on staying on Facebook can subscribe.

In other news, my company's Project and Portfolio Management system is borked. None of the hours entries from my team have progressed, meaning I could not run my report on Friday, meaning I took heat from the client for not having the status up to date and it is not even my fault. As opposed to the times where I have purposefully waited until Sunday to do it since my team was working on the weekend. What do you want, incomplete information on Friday, or complete information on Sunday night? Apparently incomplete information on Friday. So noted. Note that I also have to fucking drive here on Sunday. Keep in mind if I post the status on Friday I am not updating it on Sunday. I work enough. Fuck.

On a hugely positive note, yesterday was a very productive day. We brewed a Trappist Ale. We moved the Cream Stout to the Secondary. And we bottled the Pumpkin Ale. The Grand Cru is gone, the Nut Brown Ale is going fast. The Scottish Export will be ready on Saturday, the Pumpkin Ale about 3 weeks from now. I think mle292 is getting another Secondary this week so we can have yet another brew in flight.

Work started today with a meeting I called at 7:30am. I needed to get it out of the way and there was no other time for it to happen today. By the time I got out of my meetings (about 10am), I found out that our development server had crashed. Server, up. DB, up. Connectivity between Application server and DB, up. SQL query works from Application server, check. Application works, nope. Crap cakes! We left the office at 7pm with the dev application still non-functional. Approximately 10 people not making much progress with 2 weeks before testing and 5 weeks to go live and I just lost about 60 person hours.

I did however get to talk to my Mom and wish her a happy birthday. Then after dinner, I talked to my Dad for a few minutes while he was traveling from Lincoln to some BFE spot in Nebraska, while I was in the thriving metropolis of Cedar Rapids.

Not last week, but the previous, I was payed to golf. Hmmm. Well, not really payed to golf, but I went golfing on work time, talked about work stuff, and had the green fees reimbursed. Ok, so maybe occasionally I do get paid to golf.

Today I rescheduled meetings, updated 4 or 5 Excel spreadsheets, read updates on a few documents, approved time and expenses and that is pretty much it. Amazing it does not take all that much to fill up the better portion of a day.

Now, if I just had that last piece of information, I could update the Portfolio management system and get my project entered (that alone takes over 2 hours for a single project). Yeah, Portfolio management systems are pretty rudimentary yet, and this one (Changepoint) is pretty damn slow too. Once the sales guy sets up the client and billing and PO information, then I can put in my project. Each activity needs needs people. Each person needs a location and bill code. You might think once the bill code was setup, it would be in a drop-down box. Hahahaha. Fool! It must be hand-entered for each person, for each activity. Spelling counts! No, there is no way to check it before you save. Why would you even think that would be possible. If you get it wrong, you must edit that entry then save it. Still not show up right? Edit it again. Did I mention that part where each Activity must have people entered, and you have to do this for each person in each activity, and nothing is "carried-over" between people or activities? Yep. Seven activities with 2 people? 8 items to create (original project + 7 activities), 14 person entries to add and save, check each one, then roll-up the project and re-save it. Oh, and the non-drop down, non-fill in fields? Yeah, I need to find those in another project/activity and copy-paste to something like notepad so I can copy-paste them back into the new items. o.O Sadly, this is a highly rated package.

I guess that is why I have most of my meetings over coffee or lunch, or the occasional round of golf. My goal for next summer is to have many more meetings on the golf course. I mean, I have like 20 golf shirts (polos) - I should get some use from them.

I am forced to work with a new (new to me) reporting application. It crunches OS performance metrics into cubes and allows the creation of graphs. The problems with this reporting are vast, and close to insurmountable.

The documentation does not specify the calculation methods. You just have to trust it. The only trending it does is linear progression. The summaries do not include percentiles or quartiles, only min, max, average, and count (yes, basic SQL math).

So tell me, dear statisticians, does the CPU Busy % taken at 15 minute intervals averaged across 20+ servers for 28 days mean anything? Ok, let me rephrase, does it provide any level of useful information? No. No it does not. Why? First, there is no algebraic order provided. Is it just taking 53760 datapoints and averaging? Is it averaging each server first then averaging each day? Is it averaging each day, then across servers? Second, the data is so diluted it is meaningless. You could have several servers that are pegged and several that are completely idle, everything running at some even percentage, and anything in between. Yet these are the default graphs that it displays and that people are ga-ga over. I spent five hours trying to tease useful information out of the system. The closest I got without making graphs for each server was to show bar graphs of average and max (for a given time period) per function. Still, if I needed to do something with that, i could not. Even the Max is a mystery, unless I want to start extracting the raw data myself. Is it a maximum of the maximum (highest number found)? It max the average of the maximums (max per day per server carries forward)? You might think some interesting trivia like that might be in the documentation. You would be wrong.

So, on Monday I get to dive into it again, make some pretty pictures, call the vendor and ask for answers, and then tell the client the tool they purchased should be replaced by a freaking abacus and graph paper.

I am unemployed now, by choice, for 6 whole weekdays. No longer at the Bullseye. After Thanksgiving I will start back up with my former employer doing to the consulting thing. I will focus on Project Management and Subject Matter Expertise in the Enterprise Management technology and IT Governance (ITIL) space. I am looking forward to get back into consulting.

I had very good experience at the Bullseye and would recommend it to people. I made many good friends there. I was fortunate that I was a Technical Architect and then promoted to Sr. Technical Architect and was involved in many highly-visible projects throughout my time there. I was able able to drive my vision on some aspects of Capacity Management and Performance Management. I was also able to provide input on Configuration, Change, and Incident Management. And I was responsible for all of my team's web presence. And I got to learn SAS and DataStage. Pretty cool.

Work stuff:
I have a couple of really cool projects right now and I just finished another cool project.

By cool I mean converting 100's of person hours per year to a script that takes 10 minutes to run once per month. Next is to convert 100s of person hours to another script that runs once per week (which will be much more difficult). So when I say I can replace someone with a very short script, I mean it.

On the bad side, there are a few people who Just. Don't. Get. It. You have no testing completed, you have the first three tiers of your application in shared components which give us no idea your portion of them, and you want me to tell you what new servers you will need this year and next year, all by Friday this week. I received the technical architecture on Thursday last week. Eat Me.

And the other ones - I am not on your project, someone else is. It is not me. Stop inviting me to your meeting and invite the assigned resource. I really do not care about your little dedicated Windows servers and your purchased application. Especially since it took you over a week to just tell us which windows services belonged to your application. Also, pick a goddamn name. I am tired of seeing it listed as the random selection of one of 6 names.

Sadly, nothing as cool as a TARDIS. 

But, I did learn about a function in MS Excel today that would have saved me much time had I known about it a few months ago.  When you get up from falling over because I said something positive about Microsoft, especially MS Office, you can read about it.

You can use VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP to reference data based on the contents of matching cells (somewhat like a SQL query).  So if you have a sorted list on one tab, and an unsorted set of the same things on another, rather than painstakingly copy and pasting from tab to tab, you use these functions to copy in the right data.

It is important since I get a dataset every week where the objects (SAN switches in this case) are in a different order.  Now I can say look at the rows in column B (switch name), when you find the same name in a row in column X on Sheet2, put the value from column EE for that row in this cell.  We used absolute references ($B$2:$EE$99) so we could make use of the Copy down function to populate the other cells of this column.  Yes, there are really over 135 columns in the source data.  Not all of them are used and the designer of the spreadsheet really liked merged columns.  Also, they either got paid by line of code, or by how convoluted the code looked.

I rode my bicycle to work this morning. It is locked up about 15 floors below me. From home to the office (including parking) is about 6 miles.

How do I feel? I'll tell you once I ride home.

Yesterday, at about 4:00pm, I beat the evil datatype conversion monster and solved all 45 fields.  All hail my mighty powers of string manipulation and type conversion.

Monday mornings. Ick. Oh, well. Short week for me! Off to MI for Thanksgiving per usual. Going to visit some relatives and consume copious quantities of Turkey.

I was double-booked on meetings this morning, then they were both cancelled, enabling me to actually get some work done, yay!

So, I have a new spreadsheet in my inbox. We need to enter our "Wins" and categorize them according to Bullseye Mission and Area's of Focus. I cannot wait to waste more time that I do not have on rewriting status information and copying in bits from emails into Yet Another Fucking Spreadsheet. If it was not going to be sent to D.Ops I would consider putting something in there from a Star Trek technobabble generator.