Here’s a couple of pictures of my new setup. You can click on them for bigger versions:

The last 2 pictures are of an excel document stretched across both screens. It goes from column A to column AY. Now if that doesn’t say productivity I don’t know what does.

Any way here is a Quicktime VR movie of my cubical. Click and drag your mouse on the image. To zoom in and out use the shift and ctrl keys. Click Here to view.

Small Version
Medium Version
Full Resolution Version

The pillar on the far right and left of the picture is actually the same pillar. You can see the Hitman and Call of Duty posters on both.

I think these turned out pretty cool. Byron also took some of our datacenter, his garage, and some other co-workers cubicals.

If you want to build your own, you can find the plans at:
http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=161123&print=1

We took a picture every 10 degrees. I then ran the pictures through a program called “AutoStich.” It is what puts all of the photos together into one large panoramic picture. The program is free and can be downloaded at:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

So what have I been doing?

In November Treah and I took a trip to Denver. I spent the week in AIX training, Treah spent the week site seeing. We also saw my brother (Ryan) and his girlfriend (Jes) when we were out there. The next week we went to Vermont to see my parents for Thanksgiving. Ryan and Jes rode back from VT with us and went to a WVU football game.

In December I finally graduated from the Software Engineering Master’s program. My parents and grandparents drove in from Vermont, my brother flew in from Denver, and Treah’s parents drove up from Beckley, all to watch the ceremony. The funny thing about December graduation at WVU, is that it takes place before the end of the semester. So even though I was pretty confident I had the grades to graduate, I didn’t know for sure. Anyway, here’s a picture of me and President Hardesty at graduation.

Later in the month we had Christmas with Treah’s parents. We spent most of our time in Beckley, but spent Christmas Day in Charleston at her grandfather’s house.

Now I’m stuck in the 3 day work week between the end of Christmas break and New Years. I’m hoping most of our troublesome users are out of work this week!

Mix in work, a couple days of school, football, basketball, a broken laptop battery, and you’ve basically got my life since my last post. I’ll try to do a better job keeping up.

I finished up the spring semester. I finished the semester with an A in Artificial Intelligence and a B in Software Reliability Engineering. I guess that means my programs are smart but are flakey.

I flew from Morgantown, WV to Burlington, VT for a long weekend. I did this to go see my little brother graduate. He almost has an MBA from Clarkson University. He has 3 credits left that he is working on right now by touring Europe for 3 weeks. Sounds rough. It was pretty funny, they gave him a diploma holder when he walked across the stage. Most people had a diploma in the holder, his said something like “You’ll get your diploma when you finish.” His friends were calling it an IOU.

This flight home taught me a valuable lesson, NEVER fly USAir. On the trip up every flight was delayed by at least an hour. I barely caught my connection in Philadelphia. I was supposed to be in Burlington around midnight. It was after 1:30am when I got off of the plane. Then to top off the evening they lost my bags. I didn’t get my bags back again until 6:00pm the following evening. Coming back to Morgantown, I went to check in at Burlington and my flight home was canceled. I was able to reschedule for a flight leaving later that day but it was still a hassle. The last leg of my flight from Pittsburgh to Morgantown I was the only person on the plane other than the 2 pilots. It was like having a private jet. The only bad part was they took me first to Clarksburg, WV to pick people up. When we got to Clarksburg no one was there to be picked up. It seemed as though they should have called ahead. Luckily USAir doesn’t fly out of Morgantown anymore. This weekend it switched to Continental. I hope they do a better job.

I’ve been working pretty much nonstop on the student portal upgrade at work. A co-worker who was the lead person from my group on the project left the university. So it is now my project. Chris and I spent most of last week trying to get stuff to work and to get support to actually answer our questions with relevant information. Next week we are in advanced Solaris 10 training so Jason gets to have fun with the project in our absence. I’m actually at work right now. I have been since about 7:00am this morning, on a Sunday. It’s our yearly fire suppression testing. We have to test to make sure our fire systems work. As a result we have to come in and shut everything down, test the fire system, then power everything back up. We’re also doing a bunch of updates as getting an outage is rare around here. We’re scheduled to have everything back up by 6:00pm this evening. I hope we’re done before then. I know what you’re asking yourself. Why am I blogging and not working so I can go home early. Our storage system takes about an hour to boot. Until that comes up we can’t do anything else. So I’m killing time right now.

I start my summer course next week. I only have 3 credits (1 course) left to take this summer then I’ll have my Master’s in Software Engineering. The course is in something like personal software development. The syllabus looks like it will be a lot of programming projects. So that should be fun. I’d much rather write a program than write a paper.

I think that’s it. I’ll try to do a better job with keeping this up to date. Sorry about that.

Let’s break that $3.8 billion number down a bit. There are 18 days in this year’s tournament (March 16-April 3), 8 hours in a typical workday, and 60 minutes in each hour. The number of US citizens between the age of 15 and 64 is roughly 198,141,869 (via CIA World Fact Book), and the current unemployment rate is 5.1% (also via CIA World Fact Book).

$3,800,000,000 / 18 = $211,111,111 per day
$211,111,111 / 8 = $26,388,888 per hour
$26,388,888 / 60 = $439,814 per minute

$439,814 / 188,036,634 = $0.00233898039 lost per minute per working employee in the US


I’ve spent about 20 minutes writing this post and researching my numbers, and I am at work. So I guess I just wasted $0.04677960785. I hope you guys like this 5 cent blog entry.

Here’s a link to the article:

‘No work please,’ it’s basketball time

This company in Cincinnati is requiring employees that need access to there data center to have an RFID chip injected into there bicep. I hope this doesn’t become a widespread practice. I think if WVU ever started this I’d be looking for a new job. I don’t mind having to carry a card with an RFID chip on it, but having one implanted in me takes it to far. If I were to ever leave the company I could just give them the card back, but this chip in my arm would be with me forever.

Scary!

As of January 1st, my job title at work changed to Senior System Administrator. Along with this came a hefty raise and an increase of vacation accrual rate. I now accrue 24 days of vacation a year.

I have been pretty tied up at work ironing out problems with our WebCT Vista install and our F5 BigIP Load balancers. Again people didn’t test everything they should have when the systems were implemented so it meant a crisis situation for me. Got to love incompetence. I have one more problem to figure out this week and I should be done with this.

It has been a great time to be a Mountaineer fan over the last couple weeks. WVU football won the Sugar Bowl. This is the first bowl win under Coach Rod. It’s also the first BCS win in school history. We ended the season with a #5 ranking. Slaton rushed for 1128 as a true freshman and White rushed for 952 as a red shirt freshman, I see a bright future in Morgantown. WVU Men’s Basketball is doing great too. We’re now ranked #16, and have beat two top 10 teams in the last 2 weeks, both on the road. We are on a 10 game winning streak, making our record 12-3, 4-0 in the Big East. This puts us in 1st place in the Big East. Yesterday WVU broke a school record and made 20 3 point shots (60 points!) in a single game. 8 of those came from Mike Gansey (tying a school record), he ended the night with a career best 33 points. Kevin Pittsnogle added 30 points, with 4 3′s. I think we’ll be around #12 when the new poll comes out this week. On a side note Pitt is one of the 3 teams in the nation that is still undefeated. They’re playing Louisville today and Louisville is up at the start of the 2nd half. Keep your fingers crossed that the Cards hand Pitt there first loss. Another side note is that 6 Big East teams are in the top 25.

The weather in Morgantown has been crazy lately. I think we hit 70 degrees on Friday, then I woke up to snow on Saturday.

I think that’s it for now. Stay tuned for my next post as to why best buy has made there way onto my walmart list.

I think Treah and I are mostly done with our Christmas shopping. Only a couple of presents left to buy. I am impressed that we are this close to done so early. I’m usually at the mall Christmas Eve, or sometimes even the day after Christmas.

Anyone looking to buy me something, here’s a link to my Amazon.com wish list.