Recirculating Cheese

(Gawd, I've been doing a lot of these lately. Maybe I should make a running icon, but I really like PirateBot.)

7.5 mile trail run in 70 minutes. Which isn't a bad pace, considering it was a lot of up and down, over serious rocks, roots, mud, puddles, and occasional dead things. This was an experiment where I changed two variables at the same time (always a bad idea): a) longest run yet, let alone longest trail run; and b) first major run in the Fila Skele-Toes (like Vibram Five-Fingers, only missing a finger, because they combine the last two toes in one pocket). The distance wasn't so much of a problem, as I finished with something left in the tank. The shoes fit fine, provided just the right amount of sole, but running without socks meant that little bits of sand and plant matter found their way into the shoes, and I got nascent blisters on both feet, at the front of the arch.

Anyway, the whether and how of the blisters will determine whether I run this 10 mile trail race on Saturday. But if I do, I'll be running it in my regular road shoes, because hell no blisters.

In other news, rode Ljufur this morning. He's a fat little pony, eager to please, but with occasional strong opinions of his own. He's completely different from Gemini, except when he's completely the same.

Oh right, and this is my first official day of unemployment, or my last official day of employment, I forget which. Today was about athletics, but tomorrow needs to be about taxes and unemployment insurance and financial stuff.

In the past week, I've added "goat wrangler" and "git wrangler" to my resume. Of the two, I currently have a much better handle on the goats.

Commenting on another post crystalized something for me.

I do not have, nor have I ever had, any career goals, just job goals. I want to work with smart and interesting people, on cool and useful stuff. But that describes the sort of company I want to work for, and the environment I want to work in. I don't have a particular technology area that I want to advance. Nor do I have a particular role I want to fill in a company. I'm not like "I want to be the Chief Robot Officer of the Robot company." No, I'll do scut work if it's useful, I'll work on stuff that bores the snot out of me if I don't have to pretend to care, and I'll re-implement the sockets library for the third or fourth time if there's a plausible business reason for it (DO-178B certification).

This makes the annual goal setting exercise seem especially pointless. I'll participate in product and project planning, and I'll work towards those goals, and in absence of that I'll work on whatever management thinks would be a good use of my time. But career goals, I do not grok them.

(And in all my working years, I can't think of a single time that I, my manager, HR, or anyone else has looked at last year's goals to see how I did against them.)

As previously noted, I released new software on Monday last week. The press release that was supposed to go out at the same time...still hasn't.

I gave a tech talk Thursday last week. The video that was supposed to be available by Friday...still isn't.

I have to admit I'm a bit conflicted about the technology. If the ISPs had been doing their job, they would have turned on IPv6 years ago, and we'd already be living in a dual-stack world. But there are costs associated with doing that (upgrading routers, upgrading home gateways, upgrading debugging and network management skills), and up til now, there's been no cost associated with not doing it. So it was pretty inevitable that we'd come to the run-in-circles-scream-and-shout stage before anything got done.

In my ideal world (which might still come to pass), we wouldn't need any kind of address-sharing technology (beyond the NAT we've already got. The network core (carrier networks, backbones, etc) could all go to IPv6 immediately. Servers should already be dual stack capable, if their providers would only provision them with v6. Many many end user devices could go dual stack or v6-only without users noticing. OTOH, my printer will never be v6-capable, but I'm not putting it on the global internet.

If it comes to the point where the carriers have to implement IPv4 address sharing, it will make everyone's life that much more complicated - users and providers both. We'll be ready for that eventuality, but it feels like we're doing the wrong thing for all the right reasons.

I swear, OpenOffice Impress is bad enough to make me wish I had PowerPoint.

So here I am in California again. Recall that I have some issues with the place.

I'm in Redwood City for the annual all-hands meeting. The last time I did this, my horse was put down while I was en route. New year, new horse...

Wednesday, I took my horse to the beach, and she was fabulous. I was a spaz, and left my helmet at the barn, so I resolved not to fall on my head. There also aren't any overhanging branches at the beach, which is what the helmet usually saves me from. In any case, Gemini was wonderful, ears up, looking around, lots of energy, but always under control. The hand gallop never turned into an out-of-hand gallop. The only trouble was getting her back on the trailer to go home, I think because it's black inside, and it was just about sunset. Oh yeah, and there was some head-tossing when she got excited (spit flying in my face), but if that's her worst fault, I can live with it.

Thursday, Kylie and I took advantage of the freakishly warm weather to visit the Newburyport parks. We'd been heading for Maudley State Park, but wound up at the trailhead for Mosley Woods instead. I didn't mind, because it gave me an opportunity to get pictures of the Chain Bridge, the only suspension bridge in Massachusetts. (I see it every time I cross the I-95 bridge, but that's not really a good place to stop and take a picture.) Unfortunately, those pics are at home, so you're going to have to wait for them.

Friday, I had my first shift as an MSPCA Volunteer Mentor. I practised on lyonesse and pywaket a couple weeks ago, but this time it was total strangers. I think it went well, and they seemed well served by it.

Saturday, it snowed and all that, and you know the rest.

The State of the Paul? I dunno, busy.

Right after the Cheyenne post, I went to California for a week. Few weeks later, I was in Philadelphia. (I was there the night they won the World Series, in a downtown hotel, and the street party was deafening, and went on until at least 2am.) Then last week, I was in Minneapolis for the IETF, the first one I've been to since 1991. I'm not going to Malta for the IETF Interim Meeting in January, because that's cancelled. And here I thought I might be travelling less, working for a 501(c)3.

And what is all this world travel for? For the job that's consuming my brain. It's not that it's more demanding than any other job at the same level, but I'm not really accomplished at working from home. I screw around, and end up working late nights and holidays, because my cow-orkers are everywhere from Amsterdam to Australia, and I've come unstuck in time.

One thing I've been working on is porting our DHCP code to OpenWrt, an open-source (Linux) platform for home routers. It's a cool platform, and it's given me lots of ideas for side projects that I don't have time for. But this work is just a jumping-off point for other stuff that I'll talk more about when it's further along.

I owe a lot of people a lot of mail, I know that, and I'm getting to it. Tomorrow is a work holiday (Buy Nothing Day), which means I won't be spending too much time on work...

Got my severance check last week. Since I no longer work there, they cancelled my direct deposit, and issued a live check. I like my credit union, but they only have 3 branches, so it's kind of a pain to actually go to the bank.

Another check arrived in the mail today - my semi-annual bonus from the Incentive Compensation Program. Equivalent to another 8 days salary. Pennies from heaven, I know, but I don't have much incentive to work harder for WIND. More like parting guests for our (losing) contestants, really.

Also got a statement of my stock option positions. With WIND at $6.50, they're all under water, but a miracle might occur before they expire, in two months time.

Still, I have a healthy financial buffer, but it's time to start talking to companies, because who know how long it could take.

Talked to a recruiter from Enterasys - anyone know how they are to work for?

A few weeks ago, my boss called the group together (6 engineers and one QA guy), and said "Everything we're working on here is going Elsewhere." Most of it is going to our Beijing office. The project I've been working on for the last year is going to Dallas. In return, we get a project that Dallas had just started, and we get some bits of technology from Stockholm.

So now we have to distill years worth of experience and deep understanding into a number of 2-hour teleconference training sessions. Or rather, frobzwiththingz and tactical_grace have to do that. I talked for a little over an hour, and got to say things like "You don't need to understand the internals of this. It's open source, it's been tested on more platforms than we have available, and it just works. Port it, test it, and call it a day. (Also, our customers don't seem to be using it.)" Plus, all the real details they might need to know are in a number of ancillary documents I wrote. PowerPoint is good for overviews, bad for deep understanding. When all the training classes are over, we're sending one guy there for two weeks to do the real work of getting them up to speed on building and debugging our code.

Owing to time difference, I started at 8pm, which is 9am Friday morning for them. There was no earthly need for me to go into the office for this, so I did the class from the comfort of my own dining room. Talking to these guys was a bit like talking to the plates - not a lot of feedback. They may be completely overwhelmed with the fire hose of information, or their English may not be so good. Or both. More reason to put the real details in the ancillary documents, and let this class just be an overview.

Anyway, it's done, and I can go back to working on Arisia.

Today's unwelcome teachable moment: This Stuff Never Goes Away.

This morning I gave a dog&pony demo (as part of a much larger set of dogs&ponies) to an unseen audience (conference call) that included the entire management chain between me and the CEO. I don't like giving presentations, and I rushed through this one, missing a couple points that I had mentally rehearsed, but hadn't gotten into the script.

Then I had to start on my self-review (due Friday), something I like even less than presenting. Not that I haven't accomplished anything in the last year, but it all ends up feeling so fake.

Kylie is transitioning to the middle school program at the Montessori next year, and Francie and I had a meeting with the MS teachers this morning about their concerns about her, having observed her for a day a couple weeks ago.

In the car on the way home from school, we talked about how This Stuff Never Goes Away - the writing, the presentations, the work contracts, the reviews of same. You can choose to embrace it, you can choose to suffer through it, but you can't often choose to reject it without quitting the stuff you enjoy as well.

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Talked to Dan this evening. He's started on his round the world bike trip - left DC 6/1, currently on the VA/NC border, having (he swears this is true) ripped his carbon fiber handlebars in half. Being who he is, he has fiberglass repair tape (intended for his leg), and did a field repair of said handlebars. But the sponsor that supplied the bike (Toyota United Pro Cycling Team) is working with Fuji to build him an actual touring bike, because a double-chainring carbon-fiber racing bike is NOT the thing to haul a touring trailer (not to mention Dan himself) across the country.

(He's also got a kids oriented blog.)

I guess the This Stuff Never Goes Away tie-in is that Dan has spent the best part of the last year organizing this trip, lining up sponsors, talking from everyone from corporations to news outlets to the State Department to the Jordanian royal family about the trip, and the mission of the trip. All it takes to go from concept to reality is a helluva lotta time, money, persistence, and cohones.