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It's official!





more details later...

Update on the situation... to paraphrase, the doctor said, "Dude... your back is fucked up."

Basically, I have some serious muscle spasms in a bad spot between my left shoulder blade and spine. The doctor gave me Vicodin, Bextra, and Flexoril. He told me I have to undergo physical therapy. That's it. Drugs and a referral... just what the doctor ordered.

EL is picking up her girls today and I'm waiting on the boys. Kirk is on a crazy ass road trip from Maryland as I type this... Sean will be arriving in Austin tomorrow and driving down to Houston... Greg comes in tomorrow morning at 8:30 and Jason flies in tonight at 11:30. Rob is MIA, but I'm sure he'll show for the wedding. I have two things left to do on the wedding prep list and I've almost dropped the ball on them both. Sushi and music. Shit. If she can juggle a million things, I surely can do these two. I'm such a 'tard.

I can't wait to get out of the office today. Vacation will commence. Ringers will be off and work will be thousands of miles from my prescription coated mind.

Finally going to the doctor this morning about my back.

Home at last...

Here's a 10D print interpolator stepping action for Photoshop if you don't have Genuine Fractals.

Two days. I can make it. Two days is all I need to endure. I'm typing this on the bus and was just thinking about the morning ahead. My boss is holding a meeting to review reports he directed Joe and I to do regarding every device in the corporate network and the risk associated with running that equipment... shit like potential for outages, mean time between failure, business purpose of device against risk it posed if down, mitigation of each risk as defined, cost associated with those risks, whether or not the money has been budgeted to allow mitigation. Total bullshit. Fluff. Let me give you an example... let's say you have a few thousand routers and switches on the network and a certain percentage of those are modular. Let say you run for years without a failure on the chassis, but have had a handful of failures of port adapters or line cards (modules) over the years and they were different module types and the mode of failure was unrelated. Let's also say that depending on where you are in the network, there are redundant failover mechanisms and alternate pathing so the network self heals, yet in other parts of the network that doesn't exist. How do you generalize to the platform level and associate statistics. Obviously, you get your statistics where most people get them... you make them up. I would rather not complete the document than turn in bogus numbers. What a shit sandwich. After that meeting, we all have to meet for our weekly engineering staff meeting. The have deteriorated in content over the last couple of months to talking about how many different ways we can turn in the same time reporting so "The Bobs" have pretty graphs and charts to better outsource us with... joy. After that meeting, I have another meeting with my boss to discuss the asinine idea management presented last week of consolidating our distribution and access layered network into a collapsed core design... big, big mistake. So Joe and I have to present pros and cons and try to convince them since the opinions they used to pay us to bring to the table are worthless under the new management. "This is a good idea because it looks simpler." Actual quote. I feel like I'm duct taped in the backseat of the car Thelma and Louise are driving off the cliff. Hang on and enjoy the ride to destruction. After we present our expert opinions against their idea, we have to provide this stuff in writing. I've decided I'm going to carbon copy the vice president. I may get fired over it, but I won't support a piss poor design like that... I'd rather resign than watch a bad decision of this magnitude get implemented. It would be bittersweet to be in the I-told-you-so situation, but I'm not willing to be the little bitch that has to fix it when it doesn't work. I'm guessing this probably brings us up to around lunchtime. After the lunch part of the day, I have another meeting with my boss to discuss the flowcharted workflow and procedures associates with the way we audit all changes made to routers and switches on the network. I got tagged with this because I'm the guy that has been doing all the configuration change auditing on a daily basis. Basically, I get up in the morning and review every single fucking config entry that was made anywhere on any router or switch on our entire global network and justify in a written report to my manager, his boss (my director), his boss (my VP), and the VP that oversees network security... daily... that the changes were all good and within our corporate standards and that they pose no danger to the network at this time. My stamp of approval so when something breaks, I'm already covered in gasoline... all they need is to flick the match my way. WOOF! Kill da wabbit! Kill daaa waaaabbit! Everything these days is a witch hunt. Every single aspect of any activity that goes down at work now is followed shortly by my boss or his boss inquiring about who they can pin it on. It sickens me more than you can imagine. So, after at leat half of my day has been wasted on useless meetings, I must find time to do my real work. The sad part is, my boss and his boss actually believe that if they take up our work day with their proven unproductive agendas, that Joe and I will finish all the work associated with out actual job after hours or at home. Wrong. I would not have a problem with that type of thing if the things we were doing had an ounce of good. Unfortunately, they are misguided and evil. This entire post is making me wish I was riding the bus to the bar instead of work. This situation could easily be rectified by a half dozen double Crowns. Ugh! I'm done bitching. I'm just gonna get some coffee for my constitution and some KY for the ass reaming Joe and I will take yet another day and try to keep my chin up.

I hate.

EL is a tax genius. I owe the IRS three grand. Dammit. I hate this shit. Anyhoo, all that aside, we are T-minus 5 days to the wedding. Yee-haw! I just have to make it through 2 more days of office hell and I'm free. I'm all set for some R&R. Jason flies in on Wednesday. Greg and Kirk should trickle in on Thursday. Rob is driving up from Corpus on Friday (I think). Sean however, is MIA. I have no idea when or where he'll show up. I just hope he makes it to Austin by Saturday. Actually, I was hoping he'd make it to Houston by Thursday at the latest, but whatever... I'm getting married! Woohoo!

Nature's Disco

If you use CaptureOne and Photoshop in your 10D workflow, here are some optomized finishing actions from Simon Stanmore. I'm sure they are cool to tinker with regardless of your workflow tools, but they are optomized for C1 RAW coversion and PS post processing. Anyhoo, I'm tired. I need a nap.

Michael and I were just discussing progress. Oh what a different a little practice makes...


pee ess... Hatley's Photo of the Day today rawks! A photo of a winged ant taken a few months ago:









A photo of a winged ant taken this weekend:





Can you tell a difference?

hehe...

My weekend was just wonderful. Friday evening was relaxing and great. I discovered that the pinched nerve pain in my back disappears when a wondrous concoction of Vicodin and beer is applied generously. Saturday morning I got up at the ass crack of dawn to photograph flowers. I had a great time. Saturday afternoon was relaxed and fulfilling. I spent the entire day with EL... my favorite thing to do. Saturday night, Sam, Lou, and I did the midnight ride for charity in the Woodlands. It was like 20 miles or something... the weather was fantastic. We had a great time. One guy did the entire course on a unicycle... crazy. Sunday, I was sore. Ouch. EL and I played spades at Harry and Charla's until the wee hours. We were quite drunkified when we finally got to bed. The only negative aspect of my weekend (other than it being over) was my boss calling me late Saturday night wanting me to work. Ugh! I need a new job... seriously. I'm all excited because Wednesday is my last day at work until September 8th. Wahoo! We're donging the wedding bells on Saturday and the party is ON. I am so ready.





Lunch.

I put up about 39 new photos over at 13th Stone. Please take a moment to check 'em and rate 'em. Thanks.

Everything is all squared away... disaster adverted. You know, I think it's moments like this that are taken for granted by executive management. Anyhoo, after all the traffic rerouting was completed, I went to a meeting called by my boss to discuss a topology change to a collapsed core environment. Just because something looks simpler on paper because there are less little lines and boxes in the drawing DOES NOT mean that it is simpler or better in the real world. It was like talking to a child that is determined to get his way at any cost. Damned be all reason and logic... ego and ignorance are the words of the day. Fuck all everything else. It's this mentality that endangers our business function. It is this very naivety that will be the downfall of the resilient network that so many experts have worked hard to cultivate and nurture over time to deliver. It saddens me. I will now and continue to go on the record as adamantly disagreeing with the poor network design choices being tabled at the discussions. It may cost me my job in the long run, but I won't compromise my principles and doing what is right.

Nothing like coming in to AT&T having 126 DS3's down with one of yours in the bunch. Fuck.

Today was nothing but trouble. I spent probably 2 or 3 hours in HR laying it all on the line. I wasn't planning on going, but I was so enraged on two separate occasions at the audacity of my management that I had to go and get some official record of what was being said. I'm not really sure how I can sum things up since you have no background of what has happened in the work environment, but some of the major points were deal breakers for me. I am officially on my way out the door. No turning back short of both my manager and my director being let go first. I'm probably looking at a thirty to fifty thousand dollar pay cut no matter where I go in this fucked up economy, but you can't put a price on your peace of mind. If making life in the workplace so miserable that you'd do anything to leave was their intent, then they did their job well. Kudos to them. I dare say this but once since I know some of my Navy buds read this, but these guys are worse than the worst you could find in the goat locker. HR has all the facts now... all of them. I'm done. Fin.

So, it's 6:30 and I'm just leaving downtown... typing this on the bus... looking forward to finding employment somewhere that appreciates me... some place that understands quality of life is important. I want the land of the 40 hour work week and uninterrupted weekends.

I've come closer to quitting my job than ever before just now... about 10 minutes ago. I got up and walked straight to HR. I fucking hate my immediate management's inability to pull their head out of their asses and run this department the way it should be run. No one here has a spine... or a clue. I work to support my household, but it is living hell every second that I am here. Fuck this place. Every inch of it.

Over a year ago, we drew up an new core design for our corporate headquarters and spend millions on equipment and implementation to provide a redundant tiered infrastructure... core, distribution, access... that would support our current needs and future growth. The design was that of the two top network guys in this Fortune 20, global corporation... a CCIE (me) and a guy with about 25 years of hard network experience (Joe). The design was presented all the way up through the CIO and approved. Now, a year later, my new boss with no technical background to speak of is holding a meeting to discuss collapsing the design to a single core because "it looks like it would be simpler". When confronted about the motive, he retorted with the same my way or the highway attitude that he always gives trying to be funny. I'm a highly skilled, highly experienced engineer that gets paid a lot of money to do my job right. I come from a management background and I sit in a cube that I share with the other top network guy here. There is no respect. There is no trust. There is no quality of life here. There is nothing but disgust and hatred for what once was a job I loved... one that I awoke happy in the morning to come to. Fuck this bullshit. Anyone out there looking for a good CCIE? I'm officially on the market.