Brent’s Thoughts

Rose Parrish

To most of the people that might be reading this that name would mean nothing to you. Let me tell you if it doesn’t then it is your loss. Rose Parrish is one of the sweetest people that I know. When I was little her and her husband Leo were part owners of a race track in Anderson called Anderson Speedway. Me and my grandmother (Leo’s sister) went there a lot and enjoyed the races and helped to do stuff. After a while Leo and Rose grew tired of being a part of that track and sold their shares. They then started a track in Muncie which they were pretty much sole owners of (at least I never heard of anyone else). Now this whole time since I was little I have loved racing and loved to go to the tracks. My uncle Leo was a flagman and travelled a lot to other tracks and flagged races. Rose and Leo often came back with things for me from races and places. Aunt Rose (as I called her, for the longest time not knowing that she was actually Great Aunt Rose) made me a set of flags, they got me jackets and my Grandma sewed patches of the drivers I liked on them. They got me banks and all sorts of other stuff, but beyond all that they were just nice to me all the time. Once they had started running Muncie Motor Speedway, I started working for them in the concession stands sometimes. It was fun to be part of the help and to be helping them out, plus everytime I worked I got 20 bucks : ). Sadly during the 3rd (I think) year of the new track Leo died. This put a terrible strain on Rosie, but she resolved to finish the season that had started. She finished the lease on the track grounds and then let it go. She lived in Indiana for a few more years and then moved to Tennesee to care for her father as he got older. She lived there for a while and about a year ago she bought a farm that I think she truely loved. About a month ago I found out that she had been diagnosed with cancer and that it was pretty far along. Tonight I found out that she is in the hospital and that she has a living will which states that she doesn’t want to be put on life support. Thus I think that the chances are good that she will not be with us for very much longer.

We now interrupt your previously scheduled introspection about work for some thought on WKU-Linux. I find myself chaffing under the yoke of Executive Adviser. I think it is because when I was the admin of the servers I found myself spending time working to make things better for the group. The rest of the officers at that time were too busy with whatever they were doing, but I worked to make the group better. Now I have been removed from direct involvement in the group (partially by position, partially on my own), but I see the same crap happening. This time there is no one to continue to do anything. This annoys me. This time instead of being able to go on and make changes for the group, now I am forced to sit and watch as it fades into nothing while only being able to bitch and moan on the officers list and to Rob. I find this distasteful and I am starting to understand why Terzo just threw it all down and walked away. This group of officers has such a nice setup coming into it, they are no longer hated by the university networking, they have the respect of the people around them, they are no longer dependent on the CS departments wishes, and so many other things and they just don’t seem to care. I fear by the end of the year they will have become like ACM was… a joke. The only problem with that though is that we are not a big bullet point on Art Shindhelm’s summary to his higher-ups while being a local chapter of ACM is and he will work more to keep it alive. Another problem is that last year I had Maxx on the officers list who also acted like a catalyst, this year I have no one. Instead I get a president who takes everything I say as a personal insult and rages back no matter if I am suggesting a topic for the next meeting or attempting to actually shame/guilt the officers into actually doing something. It is getting tiresome and I am losing faith that it is actually worthwhile. I spend so much more time lobbying, working, thinking and doing to get the club to flourish than the others and they think that I am the one that is crazy. Rob stated that they are going to talk about why they are in the club at the next meeting. I am eagerly waiting to see what some of the reasons are, but I feel that I probably won’t get the answers that are the truth. It is too easy to say things like “I want to see linux and this club grow” or “I hope to help people to use linux” for the true answers like, “I need something to put on my resume” or “I was kicked out of every other group and this one is easy to stay in because there are no real rules” to come out.

Well today was a somewhat eventful day. Even as I type that though I think back to what happened and I find that it really wasn’t _that_ eventful.

**Interesting what seems to be a huge deal only because it took a long time to fix. As I find I am quick to do, let me give you the back story.**

This morning at work I went in to build a ghost item to send out to all the machines in the center. As I was setting it up I was forced to pull a file off of my machine’s hard drive. I found my machine wasn’t listed in the directory and so I searched it out and found it elsewhere. I thought little of it and went about what I was doing (editing batch files and running commands remotely **kinda cool stuff actually**). Next several machines could not find machines to map drives off of. Interesting, but not out-of-place in a cube farm where machines that are supposed to be _exactly_ the same with _exactly_ the same software often act is dissimilar ways. These machines where fixed by placing a secondary WINS server in the settings (yes they run WINS….I know I know). Shortly after that Supervisors stopped being able to print via the printservers. They where not able to see the print server. This cinched the deal for me and I started searching out reasons for the lack of WINS resolution from the Bloomington servers. It was quickly realized that the Bloomington servers had been updated by some of the techs in Bloomington and no one checked to see if they were running correctly. In the meantime I went back and did some work on another script to run to change some settings on all the floor machines. By 12 it was decided that we should change all the settings on the machines to point to our servers for WINS resolution (better than sending all that traffic to Bloomington IMO) so I was called upon to write a script to do this as well. This was accomplished rather quickly, but then the real hassles started in. Afni (or maybe more correctly, the techs in bloomington for afni) like to have all the control in Bloomington, thus they try to give us as little information as possible. Thus I was forced to wait 1 hour for the “official” word on what we were supposed to do, so that I could run the scripts that I had already gotten ready. This was annoying for me because I am used to finding the problem, analyzing it and then moving on the plan of attack (POA) to get it done. I have little patience for waiting to get the word from someone that caused my problems on how to fix it. The one good thing that came from all this was that Shane (who was not the root of all the problems) gave us the lead on helping the Opelika facility out with fixing their version of the problem. This involved little more than giving them my script and telling them to change it, but I think it may have been a big step in a good direction for him and us. Jeremiah and I (well maybe just I) would like more responsibility and maybe this is first step toward that. I feel though that a line I once read applies here… “Your master keeps you on a leash, it may be a long leash, but it is a leash none the less.” No matter how much we end up doing or how much I end up proving we will still be lower class techs than the people in Bloomington. This is the thing that drives me to be better right now, and I think that it is a good enough reason right now and has made me a little more hungry to understand and learn than when I was at Western.

Well sorry for those that are actually reading this that I haven’t updated it yet, but here it is. The job at Afni is pretty good. While not quite the technical level that I was hoping for it is still enough to keep me learning and interested. I am picking up a lot of information about Active Directories and Domains under WinNT and 2k. For those of you that know me more for my linux knowledge or lifestyle you may find it odd that I would enjoy learning that stuff, but you also have to know that I have been running Windows2000 since it was in Beta3 stages. It is also what I ran for the biodiversity center. I have also started to educate my fellow Techs in the wonders of Linux and am learning a lot of about using linux as a replacement for windows in a company where _everything_ is windows. I am starting to lose out on time with Pauline a little, but I hope to fix that problem soon. I am also feeling a little detached from the people at Western and the Linux group. I think I will be able to solve this once I again start checking my mail on the linux server. I find myself thinking that I don’t have enough time, but I am not sure if this is because it is just the first week and I haven’t figured out the best way to work things, or if this is the way things are going to be. It really shouldn’t be any different than when I worked at Western as far as a time scale since I worked there until 5 at night most of the time anyway. Here I have been leaving at 4:30 so I actually getting a thirty minute head start to the time, but I am feeling that after work I should head home for some reason. Not sure why that is exactly. I am sure that it will wear off soon though. : )

Well first to pull up some stuff up from earlier this week. First and biggest (as it will have effects later in the entry) is that I was wrong about Bloomington. Afni headquarters is not in Bloomington Indiana, it is instead in Bloomington Illinois.

This throws a pretty good sized wrench into my plans.

So after today I feel better about my job at afni. More people are starting to ask me information and that is a good feeling. I am also starting to pickup more about the network and how it is ran at afni. We have been working on isolating the specific registry keys that turn off the fading effect on the menus for W2k. Having finally gotten them isolated, I started to work on a script that Shane had started to make them turned off whenever anyone logs into the active directory. I brought it home and researched it a little and came back to the server room with some more ideas. I called Shane to talk about some of it and apparently this impressed Shane. He offered me a job at the Bloomington building as his assistant. This would put me above all the techs in afni, but now I have a new problem. I think I would like to work with Shane and I would like to get back into working with servers again. The pay raise that taking the job would give me would be nice as well, but moving to the middle of Illinois starts up a new set of expenses. So while I would like the job and like to accept the responsibility, I do not think that I can accept it. I hope Shane will see it from my point of view because after talking to him for just a bit I think that we could be pretty decent friends. There is a lot of extra crap that goes on at afni. Person X wants to be talked to before Person Y is consulted and such. I guess that is probably the same no matter where you work, but it would be nice to have everyone do their job and do it correctly without all the extra hassles.

Hmmm… Today Shane Mi$$ey from afni called and stated that they had decided to not hire from outside and that they were going to withdraw their offer. I said alright and then ask what had brought that on. Shane stated that he had decided that he didn’t have time to mess with hiring someone. I ask him if this was because I had written them a mail asking them some questions and talking about the pay rates I would have liked to have. I quickly realized that he was attempting to get me to accept the offer. After he answered the questions that I had I agreed to work for them and to start Monday. : )

Well Afni called me today. They would like to hire me. Only problem is that they are offering a bit less than I wanted. It is helped by the fact that I can continue to live here rent free (+12000$), but still I would like to be making more money. Everything else about it is good. The main head-quarters is in Bloomington Indiana, which means when they move me up to it I will be moving to a spot that is pretty much equidistant from both of the places I would like to spend my time. I get to stay here. I get to work on machines for people. I get to work on some servers. I stay near my family and friends. I stay near WKU-Linux. All great things, but there always must be a downside I guess and the one thing in this is the money they are offering. Now here comes the life altering revelation for the day… wait for it… Money has never been that much of a thing for me. Why is it now? I guess I just thought that I went to college for something, and that something was to get a job I liked (which this is) making fat cash (which this isn’t). I mean there is a job here at the CS department as a Course Instructor that pays near 40K why not just take it? I am sure that given the skill set of some of the other Course Instructors that they have hired I could get it, but would I then just be becoming like them? I mean Bill Spees, while he would have been a good computer history teacher, was a lousy OS instructor, but they kept him on for another year. What afni is offering me would be more money than I have made in my life, and probably more than a lot of other people making at the high point of their lives, but I guess I was just expecting more.

Well I had an interview with a company called Afni. The position is more of a Tech Support position, but there are still more servers there that I will be running than what I have at the BioDiversity Center. The great thing is it is right here in Bowling Green. The bad thing is they don’t want to pay near what I wish I could get. Of course if I continue to stay here with the Family then I can take a pay rate of about 12K less because I won’t have to pay rent or buy as much food. Also there is the possibility that I can advance to the headquarters in Bloomington, IN. That would be the best as it is almost dead middle of all the places where I have friends and family. Anyway during the interview I was made to take a quiz about the stuff I knew about computers. I passed it with flying colors only leaving one question blank and getting all the others correct. During the interview they told me three times that I was “over-qualified” for the job. I believe that the job will be mine should I want it.