Yay, new icon for me! Bought their Greatest Hits the other day and wish
I’d had it around years ago.

I haven’t posted about me in a while, so let me summarize.
February and March were rough in a million tiny little ways that added up
to a lot; I had a series of (unrelated) medical problems which led to
sufficient antibiotics to leave me pretty blah after they’d done their
work. That’s all clearing up now leading to a much happier mendel; I’m
a little hypersensitive to being in poor health for any reason
and it’s hard not to put life on hold while I deal.

Work’s going very well — I’m now very much a member of the server group
in IT at Mitel, and while I’m still the point person for the stuff
brought over by e-smith, I’m starting to take on a lot of projects for
existing and new infrastructure. This means I’m back on Solaris a lot
again, plus a bit of HP/UX and a bit of Windows. Lots of catching up
to do across the board after years of Linux and Digital Unix before
that. It’s refreshing to be working on that class of system again; while
things are a bit more organic than I’d prefer, the scope reflects
Concordia’s pretty closely so it’s all pretty familiar.

On a related note I’ve been picking C back up again, having hardly
written anything in it from scratch since deciding academic comp
sci was not my thing. I’m pretty stale but it’s all coming back, and
I’m finding trivial a bunch of things that I was completely stuck
on back then, which is a refreshing feeling. I still haven’t found
an appropriate itch needing scratching to get myself to apply
myself in C, though.

On the e-smith side it’s pretty clear that the big outstanding
operational problem is going to be MySQL; I’m replacing a lot of
ad-hockery with more correct tools, and I’ve got Jeremy Zawodny’s
new High
Performance MySQL on the way, and it’s nice to know that
forecasted scalability problems are going to stick to one domain,
but the culture surrounding MySQL is really, really frustrating.
MySQL has an odd learning curve; working with the system (the
“hello world” equivalent) requires understanding a whole bunch of
concepts at once, and then it’s smooth sailing for a long time,
and then you hit the reliability/availability/performance wall
and it gets hard again. I’m hitting that wall, but the majority
of the documentation and newsgroup and mailing list traffic tends
to be aimed at the people trying to bootstrap themselves. Incidentally I
think I would make a good R&D toolsmith if the whole sysadmin thing
doesn’t work out somehow.

Candice and I recently celebrated our tenth month together,
and things are every bit as wonderful as ever. Sometimes I have trouble
believing that I could find someone who fits with me so well, and vice
versa. I’m a pretty lucky guy. It’s funny that I write so much about
work and so little about my personal life, but that’s all just comfort
levels, and nothing should be read into it.

Guitar’s coming nicely but I’m plateauing. I think I need lessons for
the discipline and direction. I also need to get equipment to record
myself; with a drum machine I could put something together to post,
but I need mics and preamps. Then again, I hear the lo-fi scene is
big. Maybe I should find a computer mic and go wild. I haven’t played
much bass or flute for a while, though — it all comes in phases,
I guess.

As a reward for reading the whole thing, have an addictive flash
game. I can’t get much past 14000.