Therapeutic

My first stint of four weeks between INR readings turned out to be flawless. Despite my inconsistent diet and periodic consumption of alcohol my levels have stayed within the therapeutic range ever since the Great Blood Clot and Pulmonary Embolism Fest of 2014.

Best news: I get another four week reprieve before visiting the bloodsuckers again.

Bonus: I managed to remember to fast until the lunch hour so finally got the ol’ lipids checked too.

Inches and miles

They‘re forcing you to virtualize your production SVN server. Your physical server has eight physical cores that can act as sixteen thanks to hyper-threading.

The virtual machine they give you has two cores.

You ask for sixteen. They hold at two. You make the switch-over and go live and the new virtual machine tanks. You ask for sixteen cores and they ask you to contact the software vendor to ask for a guide on virtualization performance tuning. You escalate.

Half a day later they give you four cores.

Four cores can keep up for almost five minutes of truly serious load before tanking. You mention that adding cores seems to be improving. They argue why this should not be working–using arguments from theory. You point to the performance monitoring and ask for sixteen cores.

Three hours of arguing later they give you six cores.

You and they are all on the same conference call. You and they are both watching the CPU load. It takes almost fifteen minutes to get the CPUs to peg with six cores. You wearily ask for a mere eight cores.

They give you eight cores and ask you to not mention this to anyone else because, obviously, you’re the 1% of the virtual machine user population and they don’t want this getting around. Theoretically you should have been okay with two cores after all.

Little over an hour later of work under an artificially heavy load and the machine with eight CPU cores hasn’t hung.

Huh.

How was your day?

Shoot the receptionist first

Why I Drink reason #376:
Security theater emails that make the most convenient doors off-limits because they’re “unsupervised”. They’re badge-access controlled and have video monitoring but apparently that is not enough. So now when a disgruntled employee wants to shoot up the place, they’re just going to have to shoot the receptionist first I guess.

I’d be super pissed if I was a receptionist.

Historical record

It was nearly a decade ago when I first watched Pure Pwnage [1]. Weird because in today’s planning meeting I was reaching for a jokey reference during a conversation about how a co-worker’s gamer skills are now as to compared with his skills in the Atari 2600 era. I asked if he had uber micro these days. And then I remembered where I heard that. And then I had to see if that was still around. And then I shared links.

Reminiscing on the intertubes. pwning n00bs for nearly a decade. Wow.

And then, gratuitously: BOOM! HEADSHOT!

[1] http://www.purepwnage.com/original_series/video/life-pro-gamer

Quitely rebelling

I’m hoping the polite reply, with CC’s to the entire sales and marketing teams, suggesting that someone’s CRM data is flawed properly conveys my annoyance. Sending out cold-call emails insinuating we had previously discussed a project leveraging a firm’s product really touches me here. /me points to a “bad” place on the doll. Do people actually get these emails and think to themselves, “Oh, yeah, I entirely forgot about that storage project I hadn’t ever thought about before. We should totally do this.”?

Unrelated…sort of. Last Friday I received a letter from a provider of commercial services that was blatantly trolling for ways to avoid upholding their side of the agreement. It included a toll-free number to be called so this matter could be “resolved.” Calling the number, one is immediately shunted into an automated voice-analyzing system intending to “resolve” this with as little investment on their side as possible.

I fed it unintelligible-to-it answers to break out of the script and talk to a living person. Only, instead of getting a “concerned operator who is standing by” I’m subjected to several minutes of heavily clipped classical music while I wait. Eventually a “customer representative” picks up the line. So I put him on hold while I went and poured a beer off the tap. It felt good.

I think I’ll start putting people on hold who put me on hold. I need to get a recording where I play horribly compressed music and intermittently interrupt that to announce that, while I truly value the service their company is providing, I’m currently conducting other business and that the next available me will take their call as soon as he becomes available. Then I can put the phone next to it while I go pour another beer.

And while I’m here, can I point out just how dissonant many bits of corporate jargon are?

‘Customer representative’ is not someone representing the customer or the customer’s interests. A customer representative is representing the company in its interactions with the customer. It should be ‘company/corporate representative’.

And hold music. Why do we do this? And since we do this, why do we make it as annoying as possible. Vivaldi’s The Rite of Spring is akin to having a banshee screeching in your ear while driving in stop-and-go traffic. When you play it over the phone, it loses any sort of philharmonic fidelity that might otherwise redeem the recording. When you compress it to AM-radio levels of degradation and then push all of the levels up to their maximum so as to clip every single note, you have the musical equivalent of dragging your teeth while sucking on a lemon chalkboard. Yet this is how a company chooses to help me while away my day, waiting for them to deign to speak to me. Because they value me as a customer.

Sorry about all of this. Just having a more emphatic than usual ‘get off my lawn’ day.