• All work related blogging will now happen at My work Blog. All personal stuff will tend to stay here. Subscribe to what you care about.
• I noticed that I got a couple spam comments, I also noticed that I forgot to register for Akistmet, I have rectified the latter, and the former should follow suit.

So it’s been a week since I started working for the fine folks at Socialtext. It’s been an interesting, if humbling, few days.Going to repost some of my blogging that I’ve been doing internally. I might move my ST blog to an externally readable location at some point.

Expect more posting here in the new future as I figure this Markdown crap out.

08.02.07

Second day here.

Yesterday I was a little damp from sucking the fire hose that is the information flow around here to really put together anything resembling a coherent thought, much less a blog post.

So here I am, working from home at a startup in an industry I love. Thrown screaming (from joy? terror? we shall see!) from the comfortable and atrophic confines of academia. Surrounded by people who intimidate me immensely, but also inspire.

Intimidation factor is high. But I shall persevere!

Alright, enough of that. Today was a good day, working with Brandon and Lyssa these past couple days has been a welcome departure from the past year or so working in isolation alongside my coworkers instead of with them. Later, I worked with Lyssa and dealt with a few tickets. Then, I paired with Brandon and played with some scripts and poked at some of the ST APIs. We also spawned a dev environment so I can start to prod at things and start learning the code and developing scripts.

Then I dove headfirst into /corp and quickly found myself with 40 or so tabs open in firefox, and didn’t emerge until several hours after I was supposed to be ‘clocked out’. I suspect this trend will continue unabated for several days at the least.

I’m unsure how the effect of working alone at home is going to affect me long term. I tend to be rather hermit-like when I work, donning headphones and only emerging when I’m in need of sustenance. So, I can’t expect the effect will be large. I should work on finding people the real world to meet for lunch so I don’t go stir crazy eventually.

Random things I’ve learned.

• My… “inclination to forget” about my bloging, will not be tolerated.
• No one knows what my official title is, and that doesn’t really matter.
• People in support (so far) all have many pets, and the fact that I have three cats is relatively sane.
• Google Reader is probably not going to cut it… even though I wish it could.

Thoughts on communications.

• VoIP/Skype makes me far happier than landlines or cellphones.
• Three years (almost) of living on “Ventrilo”http://ventrilo.com/ for WoW has left me extremely comfortable shooting the shit (aka BSing) in skype and VoIP calls.
• Ventrilo’s default state is muted, VoIP’s default state is unmuted. Mixing these up is bad.
• I enjoy tacking on time to calls in order to BS; other people will/may find this obnoxious. I must watch myself.
• When I BS on voice I tend to be able to work with more fluidity on multiple tasks.

08.03.07

Continued Learning

Today i continued to work on picking up stuff around here. Worked on more tickets. Ran off mid-day to pick up my car from the dealer. I have A/C for the first time in over a year… it’s pretty amazing. Lurked in on Brandon working with zbir working on an LDAP problem with a client, and got my laptop ordered finally. I chose a Dell XPS M1330.

Shiny.

Deep Thoughts

I’m shocked at the volume of tickets that seem to languish around here. Recent St-Dev list traffic suggests that this is not something that I’m alone in noticing. Once I get going here I might have to watch myself that I don’t work on tickets all night. My last position got it fairly well ingrained in my brain that the RT queue needs to be empty. If a ticket sat for more than 24h my manager, cool as he was, would start breathing down my neck. Quite literally. Several times I would turn around to find him standing there. We’ll see how things go as I merge into the flow here. (Edit: this has gotten way better in the last week)

Started [brianhabererthingsthatannoy]. Figured that if nothing else I’m a fresh, critical eye. I also assume that when I find problems, I should write them down even if they are things people have been dealing with for months. We’ll see how useful it proves.

Thoughts on increasing random communication.

Read [cdent]’s [recreating_lunch] (however old it may be). I think that recreating an atmosphere of office social interaction is a good idea, but VoIP and Skype feel like bad avenues for casual communication. I’m tempted to suggest some form of groupvoip like Ventrilo for that level of social interaction.

Vent servers are poor traditional voip servers, there is no way to engage someone in pure one on one chat, nor is there a real way to not be on a call (other than being disconnected). However they make great casual social interaction space. You have a clear view of who is in which virtual space, who they are talking with, and who is actually talking. People are announced by name as they enter and leave spaces/channels, which is something I find frustratingly absent in voip sessions. (The bings and dings don’t cut it)

The main problem with that is that the Mac support is lackluster (or used to be, it might be better now) and the Linux client is nonexistent. There’s also the point that introducing yet another voice client for people to install is a bad thing. I also feel that people don’t like to talk, only type. Which is a deathblow to this kind of thing.

That’s all for today’s brain dump…

So, it's been a while since I've had a chance to update. A lot's been going on, and I've not been able to keep everyone up-to-date with everything going on in my silly little life. So here goes an attempt to relate what's been going on.

Socialtext

So my emo-hair-tossing entry a week or so ago was in response to some events that occurred that caused me to retract my acceptance of the Socialtext job, and retract my resignation at UITS. Let me tell you how much that made me want to kick puppies.

Thankfully, things got sorted out ( For now; if you want the obnoxious details get in touch with me), and I'll be starting my new job on the first of August. A lot of the stuff that's going on is in the realm of "sketchily confidential company information", and since I just signed an NDA, I'll refrain from spewing it all here for now. Once I work for them I'll probably have a better idea where the line is for what I can (and should) disclose on a public blog such as this. I will say things are good now, and I'm optimistic that they will stay good.

I'm pretty nervous about starting work at Socialtext. This is the first real (non-educational) company I've worked for in seven years, and the first full time job I've ever had outside of the time I've spent at UITS. It's going to be weird transitioning from getting up and heading in to an office, to getting up and heading to my own office. It's going to be a weird transition period, but I have high hopes. I like the people I'm working for and with, and I enjoy the industry. So I guess I'm not all that worried.

Speaking of my office, Jenn and I spent last weekend swapping the contents of our rooms. I now have an office to my very own. It looks like a sty right now, so pictures will have to wait till I've at least attained some level of sanity. I like having my own space, and I look forward to using some money to eventually make it a nice work/play space for myself. I need to get some nice shelves, I forgot how many books I have accumulated. I got rid of approximately 7 trash bags worth of crap I no longer needed during the move. A lot of it was really old debris from life before I met Jenn and it had no real significance anymore. I found the experience cathartic.

Random thought; I need to figure out what I'm going to do about a new laptop for work. I've been rocking my Dell D620 for a year, and I love the line. I'm debating between keeping a similar machine in a similar form or moving to a Dell M1330. Socialtext sent me an email that strongly urged me to get a Macbook, but I'm not feeling much like drinking the kool-aid. I'm really leaning towards the M1330, it's stunning and is sporting LED back light, slot loading cdrom and other niceties. Only problem is that I might not be able to get one till a month or so down the line.

UITS

I've been going through a four week resignation notice at UITS, it's been a little uncomfortable and tedious. I feel bad that I quit, came back, and that I am now quitting again. I wish this had gotten handled better. I think that these events introduced a lot more friction than I was hoping to create in my leaving. So far my old manager has been a great sport about the whole thing, and my new manager hasn't said a word to me in weeks. So there's that.

I have my last EdCert class next week, and I'm not looking forward to driving up to Indy three times, and then having to go up there on Friday as well for some LSP appreciation event they are throwing. Should be a mind numbingly good time. However, I'm kind of looking forward to teaching the class. I always enjoyed the class, I just hate driving for an hour and getting up at 5:30am.

As I clean out my cubicle here at uits, I feel sad that I'm leaving. I had a lot of fun times here (and, yes, a lot of horrible times). I've grown up a lot while working within these walls, and so I tend to wax sentimental about my time here. I think it's a good thing I'm leaving, even if I ultimately come back for some reason.

Jenn wanted me to keep a list of the stuff I found in my cube, and I'm keeping an informal list of the randomness on the wiki at http://wiki.weirdo513.org/?title=CubeContents.

So a few weeks ago I applied for a position at Socialtext, a company that deals primarily in social software. I've been interviewing with them for a couple weeks now, and on Thursday Ross Mayfield called me during lunch and offered me the position. As of Monday afternoon, I have officially accepted their offer and given my notice at IU. My last day is July 13th.

This is an amazing, and fairly daunting opportunity. Indiana University has become my little safe haven, and I'm comfortable here. I finally realize how dangerous of a situation that can be at a place like Indiana University. While there are some amazingly intelligent and compassionate people working here, there are also many people just wasting away until they can retire. I don't want to end up like that, even if it's a low likelihood. I like the people here, but I feel that I need to move on and get some different experiences. So this is going to be a good thing.

So the new gig is Senior Technical Support Engineer. I'm not completely sure what that means in the grand scheme of the company yet, but I stand to learn a lot in a very short period of time. Since I've also been getting into wikis and social software, and I'm loving this stuff. So, I can't wait to sink my teeth into Socialtext.

One of the nicer things about the Palo Alto based company is that a large portion of the employees telecommute. This means that I don't have to leave Bloomington anytime soon, but it also means that I will be working from home for the foreseeable future. This means I will be needing to set up an office in my house post haste. I've been looking at finding a desk that's more conducive to work, but I can't find one I like yet. I also have a whole host of items to replicate so that I can have a conducive work environment. But overall I'm looking forward to having a real office at home.

As for my current work? Well the LSPS stuff was looking a little bleak, even if the people were looking pretty amusing. Being the Linux poster boy in a room of windows support guys? Not really what I need to advance my career.

However, I will miss that A pass come time to take classes.

This past few days at work have been a bit surreal. I show up at the same time, but there's this weird feeling when I realize I don't technically have the job I'm pretending I still have... it's a bit weird. Things are still up in the air in regards to whether I'm losing my computer, my cube, or other miscellaneous items to which I've grown accustomed.

I applied for the first job I've applied for outside the university in like five years. That was a bit of a trip. That, and realizing that I've been working in one way or another for IU for the past seven years, five years if you only want to count my full time working. It's kind of a shift for me to think about not working at UITS anymore after this long.

But enough about all that, we'll figure that out as thing develop. No sense freaking out about things that may not even happen.

I've been keeping busy these days.I started listening to the Penny Arcade ( Downloadable Content ) and the Kevin Smith / Scott Mosier ( SModCast ) podcasts. I'm still going through the backlogs, but they are both extremely amusing. Granted the Penny-Arcade one tends to err on the side of video gaming minutia, but it also strays into topics like parenting and they generally seem to keep things on a somewhat approachable level. And, much like his films, the Kevin Smith casts are very NSFW.

Turning to gaming, I picked up Elite Beat Agents and Yoshi's Island for the DS. I've been playing a lot of of Elite Beat Agents, and I've almost beaten the second to last difficulty, but the last song is a pain in the ass, and I've not taken the time to sit down and beat it yet. For those of you who have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, you should really check it out. Short explanation is that it's a music rhythm game that you use your stylus to tap along with the beat of the song on the touch screen of the DS. It sounds painfully tedious but it is one of the most fun experiences I've had with my DS so far. People seem to be complaining that it's too hard, so I would caution people to head down to target (or any other download and play station) with your DS and try it out at their download and play station, but it's really a quite enjoyable game. Here's a video of someone playing the Japanese version (Ouendan) of the game I can't find a good movie of someone playing the English version. (Bear in mind that that is a video of the most difficult board in the game on the hardest difficulty).

Yoshi's Island ended up being a perfectly wonderful sequel to a great game, but so far nothing to scream and shout about.

I'm also playing a lot of Warcraft still, and enjoying my choice to swap servers to play with friends. It's been a lot more fun to log on and have people to talk to... grated I'm still like 6 levels away from playing with them actively, but I'll get there.

I got bored last week and started getting episodes of the office, because I hadn't seen any of it, and people keep freaking out about it. The first few episodes didn't hook me but it's gotten a lot better in the late second season. I started the third season today and it's been good so far. I recently ran out of Disk space so I've not had much room for new media.

So today I found out that my job as I know it, no longer exists.

So before you freak out, I did not and will not "lose my job". But, the job that I will have in a week or two will not be the job I had last week. Essentially the group I work for, the Unix Systems Support Group got shattered in the most recent UITS reorganization here at IU. My group no longer exists, and two of the team members will join a three people from another division that got shaken up, and form a 'New USSG' under the moniker of the Grid Infrastructure Group.

Myself and a colleague got shifted to a different department altogether. Basically what happened is that my group did a lot of grunt work for the division, as well as doing all of the Unix and Linux help desk support for the campus. So now they have split the grunt work and support off into different divisions at UITS. This means my job has changed from 'Sysadmin/Programmer/Linux Support/Teaching" to "Support/Teaching" which feels immensely less useful to me furthering my career. I got to meet my new coworkers today, and they seem like nice enough guys, and like 3-4 years ago it would have been an amazing opportunity, but I think it's not quite what I'm looking for in a position right now... But, nothing is known about anything related to the new position at this point so it's hard for me to really make any kind of assessment.

I'm not sure what I am going to do at this point, I have another coworker encouraging me to apply for a sysadmin job in his department, and a friend encouraging me to apply for a job with his private company, so I'm not without options at this point. The whole 'not having a job' situation isn't what I'm worried about in this whole mess.

Both myself and my coworker who got moved are of like mind in that we didn't leave our last jobs to work in this new department, we came to work for specifically for the USSG, and while that doesn't mean much for a lot of people who read this blog, it means a lot to me to finally be working for this group. It's pretty depressing to finally get to a place where you're happy and content (albeit underpaid) in your job, to enjoy your work and be excited to come in to work, to enjoy your coworkers and your boss, and to look forward to each and every group meeting because you know it's going to be punctuated by intense laughter only to have that taken away.

My manager keeps insisting that everything is going to be alright, but I have been here too long too be at all optimistic about these kinds of things.