An update on the Lee-Man

Hi All:

I see I haven't updated this blog in a while, so it's time for an update. I know the many many folks following my exploits will want to know what the Lee-Man is up to, so here's the down-low.

I did get a job. I work for a company that does "I/O Virtualization". I have only been working there a few months, but I've already learned much about PCI and SAS.

If you're not technical, you can skip this part ...

The idea with I/O Virtualization is simple: you leverage one I/O card to work on several servers. Each server gets the impression that it has its own I/O card.

Okay, enough technical talk. This is not a work blog, but since my work is part of my life, I guess it qualifies via the back door.

Biking
On the biking front, I got a nice new Chris King bottom bracket for my Single Speed SiSSy. She used up her previous two bottom brackets, each lasting about a year, so I decided to get a bottom bracket that will last a little longer. The CK actually has a special fitting that allows me to use a grease gun to re-inject new grease in the bearings. And they are purty, being colored Pewter, which matches my Chris King rear hub. I just need to replace the crappy WTB front hub with a Pewter CK, and my SS will be set for life. Oh yeah, I also still need a custom Ti stem, maybe from Black Sheep.

I rode SiSSy up the hill behind my house this evening, after work. The BB creaked a little towards the end of the ride, but that's not unusaly with the EBB on my single speed.

If all of this sounds like a foreign language, you're probably not a mountain biker.

Everything
Besides life and biking, there's the new animals. We now have 3 German Shephard dogs and 2 tabby cats.

The oldest dog is Misha. We rescued her from the Larimer County shelter, in Colorado. She is lovely and smart, but old, with ... issues. LOL She is a real pain in the ass.

Then there's Cayenne. He's our most excellent German Shephard from TeMar kennels here in Oregon. He is smart, strong, brave, and not well enough socialized, so he scares the crap out of many people (including my neighbor Mark).

Cayenne was gaurenteed, which meant that if he had hip problems, we got another dog at half price. (It's not like you can return him!) Well, sure enough, he had hip problems, though minor. They are enough for us to get another puppy at half price, so we did that. Cayenne is just getting over a broken right rear foot. He broke it landing wrong while playing disc with Cyndi. He had a hard cast for 6 weeks, and now he has a bandage and 3 weeks of careful recorvery before he'll be close to what he was (running-wise).

Our third GSD is our new puppy Jalipinia (obvious named using a pepper theme, to match Cayenne). She is maybe 10 weeks old now. She has not quite master the whole inside bathroom bad outside bathroom good thing, but she's trying.

Then there are the two cats. We got Gar and Kicker from the Cat Adoption Team in Sherwood, OR. They are a great non-profit group that had quite a selection of cats. We didn't have much money at Christmas (since I was out of work), so Cyndi gave me permission to get a cat as my present. I found many great cats, but the two I picked had to be adopted together. They were loving, smart, seemed brave enough to handle our dogs, and they needed each other. Since I had room for 2, I took them. I love them so much. Many night one or both of them sleep on my water bed with me. That's nice, since Cyndi doesn't like the water bed and sleeps elsewhere. :(

I guess that pretty much covers the life of the Lee-Man for this installment of Boring Theatre.

Please continue to add those great comments, fans!

Sunshine on a cloudy day

I am feeling pretty good today. I think I may have a job. I have felt a little lost without a job.

It's funny ... when I first started working, I resisted labeling myself as an engineer. I would instead say I worked as an engineer. But, inside, I always thought "I'm more than that ... at least I think I must be." Even then I didn't want my work identity to be my true identity -- it was just supposed to be one of the many hats I knew how to wear. But some place along the line, it became most of who I am.

Deciding who you are is kind of hard when you don't have kids. When you have kids, you already know who you are (and the flip side, which is why you are here). But without kids and without a job, the question can loom large. I'm just glad I may be getting a job.

Funny that I may have missed a chance again (3rd time) to work for Google, but timing is everything, and Virtensys is a darned cool company (and local).

An Update

Hi!

I thought I'd update the cyberspace with what's been happening in Lee-ville.

Life

This has really been about my work. I was laid off in December from Wasabi Systems, a company in Norfolk, VA. I've only been laid off twice before: once as a dish washer, in high school, and once while working at Data General in RTP, North Carolina, in the early 90s.

In high school, I was a lazy-a$$ screw up, so I think they really fired me, but they didn't want to pay the unemployment insurance! LOL

At DG in North Carolina, I was the only engineer laid off out of 100 engineers in the kernel group, and I think part of the reason was politics (I think I pissed off my 2nd-level manager one day while driving!). That time, I found a job within a week and I never filed for unemployment insurance. And that still was very hard on my ego. I felt like I was not a good person.

But this layoff has really been a challenge. Actually, to be more accurate, it's been kind of crappy. I was really hoping this job worked out at Wasabi. I turned down a couple of other jobs for this one, including a rather lucrative and interesting offer from Google (I would have had to move to the Bay Area). And then when Wasabi had problems, we were told that everything looked good until March. That turned out not to be the case.

I must say that I really liked almost all of the people I worked with there. There was one guy that I believe was single-handedly destroying the code base, but other than that all the folks were super smart and nice. (Names left off the protect me!)

I immediately contacted Google and a company called Isilon, both of which had offered me jobs, as soon as I was laid off. I also talked to VmWare, which had offered me a job in the past. VmWare was not currently hiring, Isilon didn't like me as much as last time, and Google had to think about it. [Update: I may still talk to Google ... we'll see.]

I am hoping to stay in the local area, since my father is getting up there in years, and I'd like to be around him more than once a year. I am talking to a local company now about a possible job. I hope it works out.

Biking

I have not been biking as much as I should, but I rode the Single Speed today for 90 minutes in the cold and sun. It was fun and hard. I still have my summer (i.e. harder) gearing on the bike, and there was mud and snow up on Mountain Top road. I would have been grinning if it weren't for all the mud and the fact that I neglected to bring my front fender along for the ride.

Everything

I haven't been doing much on the "everything" front. The universe tries to teach me, but my dumb laziness seems to keep getting in the way. I have not picked up the Course in Miricles in quite a while. I'd like to change that.