Behind These Eyes - January 2002

Sunday, 6 January

There was a trip to Florida in there somewhere...Actually we've been back for more than a week now, but the present is so busy that it's difficult to find time to chronicle the backlog of past, but I'm reluctant to skip the backlog and jump ahead to the present, because I know that if I do that I'll never get back to the past, if you follow me. And just forget about the future.

But I think this desire for expository completeness is more a hindrance than a help, because in the end I don't post any diary entries at all, past, present or future. So in order to prevent yet more present from slipping into the past backlog, I'll do a short, quick entry, firmly rooted in now.

Did you get all that?

When we left for Florida, the UK was in the grip of a cold snap, and we returned just in time for the beginning of another one. It's apparently been quite cold for England, mostly hovering around the freezing point or slightly below. (As you may have guessed from my rant in the previous entry, come to think of it.) Houses here are, on average, quite a lot older than American houses, and have correspondingly more quirks, many of which have to do with heating. Last winter I came to the conclusion that, even with the best of intentions, it simply wasn't possible to heat this house like I'd expect to heat a newer one. It's not well insulated and has only single-thickness windows, plus the doors don't fit exactly, so on the whole it is, you might say, well-ventilated. Also the heating system is complex and not really designed with the intent of heating the whole house to a uniform temperature, but rather to warm rooms individually. Thus, while the living room may be comfortably warm, the hallway, stairs and bathroom can be considerably colder (49° the last few days). People who know me would be astonished at the degree to which I have adjusted to lower temperatures; the threshold at which I am warm has moved down quite a bit, and the point at which the cold becomes painfully unpleasant has moved down even farther, but this cold snap has made the cold rooms of the house dip below my new tolerances.

Some weeks ago, we decided to try some of the standard tactics to reduce the heat loss and draftiness. We picked up some of that plastic film you put on windows and heat with a hair dryer, some foam insulating tape to fill gaps between doors and doorframes, and a draft excluder. Not surprisingly, considering the effort required to put these in place, they've been sitting in the bag they came in, undisturbed, ever since. Yesterday we got energetic and decided to tackle them.

I'd used the window plastic once before, years ago, and I remember being sceptical that it would have much effect at all; but after it was in place, I instantly became a believer. You don't feel all that much difference around the window itself, but mysteriously the ambient temperature stays higher than it did before. It's surprisingly effective. Well, even though I was already a believer, I was still astonished at the change when we were done. Last night the hallway, which as I mentioned previously weighed in at 49°, worked its way up to 63° by the time we went to bed. It lost only 7° overnight and right now it's 66°. These are still, to me, chilly temperatures, but what it means is that the contrast between a warm room and the hallway is not so great. There's no longer a cold breeze coming from the hall into the living room, which is especially important as my computer is nearest the door (never mind why, it didn't work any other way, trust me).

I guess I'd assumed that the heating arrangements just weren't capable of putting out enough heat. I hadn't given enough credence to the possibility that they were doing fine, but the heat was making a mad dash straight to the nearest window. We have been heating the great outdoors, it would seem.

All in all, a happy accomplishment for me. We only put plastic on the upstairs windows; we may yet do something with the downstairs windows, but they are more difficult, so if our current measures seem adequate, we'll probably leave things as they are. Plus we're out of plastic.

On the work front, you may remember that the company was anxious that I get my passport back because they wanted to send me to Germany. Well, that's imminent. Before our trip, we got their new server ordered, and it even got delivered (no small accomplishment when dealing with Dell UK--they have a dreadful track record with us), and I got it mostly set up. Last week and this week I will be finishing its setup, getting it shipped, and generally preparing (e.g. making sure I'm ready to install German versions of GW and the NetWare client, trying to get my handouts translated into German, etc). Next Sunday I'm off to Wiesbaden for a week. Current plan is that Mike will visit for the following weekend, and we'll extend the trip a couple of days after that.

Created at 00:06

Tuesday, 15 January

The Wiesbaden trip didn't happen after all; as it drew closer, they became increasingly uncomfortable with the absence of their surrogate IT guy, who is still on holiday until the 28th. So, we're not going until the beginning of February, which is better as we hadn't really had time to prepare anyway.

Last Monday I went out to go to work, got in the car, turned the key, nyenny nyenny nyenny nyenny.... Car wouldn't start. I tried it a few more times but no change, except of course the sound changing as the battery started to wear down.

Well.

The Rover dealer is usually very busy; we have to book servicing well in advance, so I knew there was little hope they'd be able to take a walk-in (or tow-in, as the case may be). In fact even getting it towed was a hurdle to leap: AAA, or The AA as they're known here, has a nasty caveat in their standard service, namely they don't cover you within half a mile of your house. So, I called the Rover dealer, and confirmed my suspicions that they were booked quite solid; but they were able to have the car towed, against the eventual ability to have a look at it.

Meanwhile, how to get to work? We agreed we'd have to hire a car. The rest of the week was a process of calling the Rover garage, finding out they hadn't fixed it yet, and having to extend the rental of the car. Finally, yesterday afternoon, they finished with it, but it was too late to get rid of the rental car and pick up our car before the garage closed. So, the plan was that this morning we'd both go to the Rover garage, and both drive to the car hire place, which is right near Mike's work. He'd go to work, I'd drop off the hire car, and then take our car to work.

But as with any Plan A, a snag quickly came along. Before leaving work yesterday, I was told that there would be about 15 redundancies (layoffs) happening this morning, first thing. Either I would have to be there in time to disable the accounts and mailboxes of affected staff, or I would have to be available to do it at home. Given that we couldn't do the car swap until the hire car place and the garage were open, being at work early wasn't an option. So, this morning I fired up the laptop here at home, got ready, and waited.

Nothing happened. The email notification of the restructuring came out, notifying staff of 103 redundancies in the US and 23 in EMEA, but not listing names. Around 9:00 I called Simon, my manager, to verify that I hadn't missed anything I should have been doing. Nope; it seems there hadn't been any users who were deemed a risk. But I should continue standing by, just in case.

Around 10:00 I got the rest of the story. Simon was on the list. I had no idea that was coming. Jerry, Simon's manager from the US, and Greg, who has been here before, were both here in the UK to do the deed. They are staying for a fortnight to deal with the fallout.

We don't know yet what will change. This is the strangest layoff I've ever seen. Apparently the staff aren't really gone yet, they've just been told that their position is "at risk" of being made redundant. They have a week to consider options. They can try to find another position within the company, or leave and take an undisclosed severance package. It even appears possible that they might be able to argue for the preservation of their current position, because in a 2-hour meeting with Jerry and Greg, we were told to think about "ideas" for what we thought the department should look like when the dust settled, but nothing is being done yet because Simon might not actually be gone. His account isn't being disabled and his administrator-level access is not even to be revoked. This will not be finalised until Monday. There is little doubt that many things will change, but what or how is yet to be determined.

All of which leaves us in a position that is uncomfortable from more than one direction. We all, being techie geeks, aren't very good at having the right response to upsetting events, so I don't think any of us quite know what we should do or say. I would like to express sympathy and regrets, but I don't know how. If it were me, I'd probably find such expressions intolerable. Difficult to isolate why, though. More than one reason, I think. Simon, unfortunately, is someone who is very good at such expressions, and probably finds their lack quite disheartening.

Created at 23:05

Tuesday, 22 January

[The prophetess'] last and greatest commandment was said to be the words she had whispered to her favorite disciple just before she left. "Even when people are well-meaning, do not let them fool with your heads."

...The first Baidee, the Low Baidee, were those who followed her teachings. That is how the Baidee began, and that is how they thought they had continued, century after century, cleaving always to the teachings of the prophetess. They still began their services with the first words the prophetess had spoken to them as a teaching: "This I say unto you, be not sexist pigs."

The Primitive, or "Low," Baidee still clung to the naive prophecy, claiming that [she] had never meant to prohibit brain surgery and the techniques to cure mental illness, but only psychological manipulation, particularly religious cultism. The High Baidee, however, had carried the word forward, through centuries of theological disputation and political manipulation. Over the centuries they had defined meaning and eliminated heresies and had set up a canon against which future innovations might be judged. Where the Low Baidee found a prohibition against sexual discrimination in the words of the prophetess ("be not sexist"), the...High Baidee found a warning against bestial behavior ("be not pigs").

..."Be not pigs" obviously meant "take not into yourself the substance of pigs," and that obviously meant "eat nothing resembling pigs," such as anything having four legs or hairy skin or a snout and so on. Since on [another planet] there were creatures which resembled pigs but laid eggs, eggs were likewise prohibited...

--Sheri S. Tepper, Raising the Stones

A sort of miscellaneous catching-up entry is due here, I think...

The continuing saga of the cable modem...well, continues. It's become ridiculous for the last couple of months. The thing that frustrates me the most is the complete indifference Blueyonder shows. They seem to think there's nothing unreasonable, when we are dead in the water, to saying they'll schedule a technician to come out a week from now. A week! During which they magnanimously offer (but only if we waste yet more time by filing a request) to refund what we've paid them. I don't know about anybody else, but I don't want to pay 50% for a service that only works half the time; I want to pay 100% and have it actually work. Imagine if your electricity were handled this way! Power's out. You call the electric company. They'll have someone take a look in...a week! Not, mind you, that the technician will necessarily be able to fix the problem. Meanwhile, you can't use the lights, everything in your refrigerator and freezer goes, you can't call anyone (if you have an electricity-dependent phone as many of them are these days) and so on. But not to worry! The electric company will see its way clear to refunding the £6.50 you would have paid for that week! That makes it all OK, wouldn't you say?

There is some hope, though; a customer service person finally got in touch and I got to express my discontent. No idea whether any change will result, but they did agree to open a ticket with the intent of getting to the bottom of whatever our root trouble is. Right now they are monitoring us, so that they will (hopefully) be logging what happens when things next go wrong. Of course now everything is working perfectly, for the longest it's worked since November.

We've built up a long list of things we ought to be doing, so this weekend, we ignored the whole thing and did some tinkering with the server. Some time ago we bought a new hard drive to put in it, to alleviate our space crunch, but installing it meant a lot of reorganising, so we hadn't gotten around to it yet. We tackled that, and also moved it upstairs into the small guest room. This was also quite a project, because it meant running a network cable downstairs and getting power and network into the closet where we put it, and so on. Much of this was handled by Mike. The additional hard drive went smoothly; we'd made backups to prepare for a worst-case situation, but didn't end up needing them. Previously, the server had only two hard drives, with a complicated configuration. The C: and D: logical drives were mirrored on both (physical) drives. The leftover space on the (physical) drives was configured as a single volume set, the E: drive. Now, the new drive is completely unmirrored and replaced E:. The two original drives are now completely mirrored. C: is unchanged, D: is a lot bigger than it previously was. (As is E:, as it now consists of the entire new hard drive.)

That ought to hold us for a few months, I think...

One project that has, most shockingly, moved past the we-ought-to-do-this-someday phase is dealing with the latticework in the hall. It's as if someone had mounted a trellis on the full length of one wall in the hallway. It has a strange, ornate overhang, as well. Most strangely, the wall behind the latticework is painted...orange. Hmm.

So, we want to rip the latticework off, and put something quieter on the wall. We actually bought the stuff we'll probably need for this project, which means any minute now we might get out a crowbar and go to it. Any minute now.

At work, we finally learned our fates today. Not surprisingly, rather than have a UK manager for a UK IT group, we will individually report to the most appropriate existing manager in the US group. That wasn't very hard to work out. All we have to do now is make it work. There are some good things to be said about this. First and probably most importantly, we won't be able to help but get rid of the destructive us-them relationship. There won't be any us-and-them because we just joined Them! Second, we can take better advantage of the US staff and the things they've already done. Right now we don't really know what they have, so we tend to re-invent the wheel. And many things we just don't have time to do, they are already doing, and often have a dedicated staff person to handle; we may be able to transfer those tasks entirely. Dealing with the complicated Dell equipment leases comes to mind here, as does purchasing.

It's not always easy to be upbeat and positive, of course; this all means a lot of change and uncertainty, and no guarantee that it will all end happily ever after. But there's no point being all Eeyore-ish until we've had a chance to see how it works out.

We're seeing Dream Theater on Friday; that should be a great show.

Created at 22:21

Tuesday, 29 January

The cable modem was down all weekend again. Sigh. It seems to work whenever we're not home, and go down whenever we are.

But that's the voice of cynicism. Mustn't grumble!

The Dream Theater show was, as expected, excellent. They are a scarily talented bunch. It's quite funny to watch people who are trying to bang their heads when the time signature keeps changing...

Work is settling into its new shape. I've been used to a laid-back, just-get-things-done management style. Unfortunately, it seems I've re-joined a bureaucracy. Status reports, official hours, career planning, training plans, vacation schedules and all the other happy trappings of the corporate world. Of course, I may be getting an overblown perception of how it will be; after all, we've only just been absorbed into the main body. The paperwork that is currently drowning us may just be a one-time tidal wave. Once we're settled in, it will presumably slack off.

Work helps keep me distracted from work, if that makes any sense. Time marches on, and the already-scheduled trip to Germany has arrived. That will provide a few days' change of pace.

And anyway, mustn't grumble.

Meanwhile, developments on an unexpected front. I mentioned in passing, back in November, that we had set up a computer for Helen. She took to it very quickly and was already browsing like a pro before we'd even returned home from the weekend, leaving Kevin in mortal fear that she'd find a way to buy a pig over the internet or something. Well, she still isn't letting any grass grow under her feet. Out of the blue, she has begun work on her own web site. How's that for progress? From no computer to having her own web site in about two months. Wow.

More fiddling with our home server last weekend. One long-standing imperfection has been network speed. Mike's RISC PC has a 10Mb network card, whereas both my PC and the server have 10/100 cards. The NetGear box is also 10/100. Naturally we'd like to run at 100Mb where possible, but when we first set up the network, we found that although Mike can communicate with my PC when it is running at 100Mb, there's something wrong with his communication with the server. If the server runs at anything other than 10Mb/half-duplex, his write speed falls through the floor (to something like 40KB/sec). Clearly it wasn't a shortcoming in his network card, because it could talk to my PC just fine. It would be easier to ignore if it were my PC that he couldn't talk to, but with it being the server, it's a problem. So, we've been running everything at 10Mb/half duplex. This problem has been on the Solve Someday list for quite a long time now.

One thing we could test, in order to isolate the problem, was to put a different network card in the server. So, this weekend, we popped one in, fired it up, installed what might have been the right driver, and rebooted. Blue screen. Oops. In the end we had to take the network card out to prevent the driver from loading in order to bypass the blue screen. So we tried a different driver. No blue screen, but it didn't work either; the driver wouldn't load. So we tried a second network card. Its driver loaded, but wouldn't see the network.

Hmm.

We'd been using the same slot for both these cards; it happened to be the shared PCI/ISA slot. We tried the slot next to it and lo and behold, suddenly everything worked. A problem with that slot, I guess. There was probably nothing wrong with the other card, either, or the second driver we tried.

Anyway, we set the new network card to 100Mb and Mike ran some benchmarking read/write tests. Happily, it gets quite reasonable throughput to this other card. Problem solved.

Created at 00:25

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