DrBacchus' Journal

I'm completing week two of being an IT manager. Last week, I went home every day falling-down exhausted, from trying to understand a sizeable codebase (861157 lines of code - yeah, I know, that's small beans to some of you, but we have a small team), trying to understand the business process, and trying to understand the dynamics of team interaction.

This week has been better, although I've had a horrible head congestion thing that has rendered me almost deaf all week, which is extremely frustrating, and tends to cause me to retreat to email rather than just going to see people and resolving confusion in person.

I think I've finally gotten an understanding of how the code fits together, and how the database fits together, and while I certainly would have done it differently, it appears to be largely a matter of style, rather than one of substance. It's good code, and it works - it's not how I would have done it.

Anyways, last night I went home and was able to have coherent conversations and not fall into a coma right away. I consider this to be progress. Any day now, I'll be able to contribute actual functional code, rather than just stylistic tinkering.

And, Paul, if I've learned anything from you (I hope I've learned a lot, but, you know, I had to choose just one thing) it's the Positive Power of Donuts.

I just retired a server that has been doing loyal service as a variety of things over the last 6 or 7 years. It was an old Dell desktop machine, and it served as my mail server, DNS server, database server, and quite a few other things. I think I may have just realized one service that didn't get migrated off of it - a couple of IRC bots which have been dormant for quite some time.

For a while, it also hosted fajita, the bot who answers most of the questions on #apache, on irc.freenode.net, but that moved off about 2 years ago.

And just a few moments ago ...

rbowen@shiraz:~% sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now

Broadcast message from root (pts/1) (Mon May  5 20:36:46 2008):

The system is going down for system halt NOW!
rbowen@shiraz:~% Connection to shiraz closed by remote host.
Connection to shiraz closed.

The goal is eventually to move everything up to slicehost, and I'll probably move my mail servers to Google while I'm at it. I'm tired of being a sysadmin, but not tired enough of it to just have a normal web host.

I now have Windy Day, my favorite painting by my favorite artist, hanging in my office.

I just want to point out how incredibly cool it is that I have conversations like this with my wife, and how lucky I am to have a literate, intelligent wife.

Finally biked to work on my 7.3FX that I bought 2 years ago for the specific purpose of biking to work. I never did before, because Harrodsburg Road is a good place to get killed. But now I have a sidewalk (almost) all the way to work, although the last 2 years of construction on Clays Mill have left the sidewalk a rather pathetic shadow of its former self, with breaks every dozen yards.

Took 20 minutes, and I wasn't above 7mph more than 2 or 3 times. But once I get past the rubber-legs phase, I figure I can do 15mph the whole way and get here in half that time. Really looking forward to not being out of breath after walking up the stairs. Perhaps biking to work isn't enough to get me back in shape, but it's a start.