Brent’s Thoughts

First I would like to give a shout out to maxx for planting a shard of a thought in my brain and letting it fester. Second I would like to say that there are some things that I am having trouble dealing with at this position. Really they are little different than what I wrote about so long ago on 8/22. They just intensify as I become more aware of what is going on and less pleased with how they do things. I am now also starting to understand why there are a lot of companies that do not promote from within. It is all based on the principle that when you hire someone to specifically do a job you look at their skills and if they have the ones to do the job then you hire them, but when your company tries to be good about hiring from within you end up getting people into position that they have little to no qualifications to have. They then start “picking the job up as they go” and learn a way and a system to do things. Then after time that system becomes a somewhat defacto standard and it is a bad idea to break that because then you are making the person that came up with it look bad, or that is at least the way they think it is. Instead if they would look at it as a way to make things better and throw out ego in such a situation and realize that there might be other ways to do things then it is possible to make a lot of stuff work and function better. I was hired into my position because my boss realized that I had the knowledge and skills to do the job and that he won’t have to train me on most of the work, but now I am in here and when I suggest doing something that I know will work better or will avoid problems it is not accepted because it is not the way he or his bosses want it done. Unfortunately they are commonly basing these ideas on the stuff that I was talking about where they have learned to do it one way and are sure that way is the best no matter if it is or not. Then when I attempt to tell them the reason that I think there is a better way to do it (be it my way or another way which incorporates their idea) I am labeled as a rogue and a sarcastic employee, because I am attempting to not only find the best way, but also to enlighten them as to why there is a better way to do things.
On another note. I have now went for two days without booting Diablo into windows. Not a huge feat, but not bad I would say. Monday Pauline sent me a word document made under Office2000 and I was a little worried that Abiword wouldn’t be able to handle it, but it did. Popped it right up and it looked good. I was quite impressed since I am not even sure if StarOffice can work with 2000 style documents. Hopefully tonight I plan on getting the kernel recompiled to include support for NTFS filesystems, since redhats kernel didn’t come with support for it. This will allow me to get to all my files that I use under windows. I am also doing some work with CodeWeavers version of Wine so that I can run some of the Windows programs that I will need. I am also working to revive one of the greatest games there has ever been XCOM. It is still considered the best game regarding squad combat ever. First I started trying to get my old copies of the games to work with WINE, and now I have started a small email session with some people at microprose about when/if there is a new version of it coming down the pipe.

Well I would like to thank maxx for a fun weekend. He flew up here for the weekend to chill out with me and we had a blast. Now I have a few more things to add to the list of stuff on his page : ). Also I have gotten a external modem for Diablo and I am now able to use it to get on the internet in Linux. That coupled with the fact that I am having minor issues with Diablo in Windows has made me decide to try and switch to linux for my desktop. I have also written a new script which is about as large scale as anything else I have written. BootRip might be close, but it is not as neat and organized as this is so that might be part of it. The new script is called SMess which is short for Samba Messaging. Hit the link to open the page with its info. I have said this with all the other stuff I have written, but I hope to be able to write a GUI frontend for it.

I would say that I have slacked off again, but man it seems they all start that way anymore. Of couse I am not as bad as my friend maxx yet and let my life go for a year with out writing in here, but I digress. Since I wrote last, there have been a few developments. First my new machine lives… built a system out of the SOYO Dragon motherboard. It is a sweet system. Unfortunately when I was getting ready to move my hardrive over to it… it crashed!!! 40 Gigs of data pretty much gone. Rebuilt the system in time to run the swim meet the next day and rebuilt the swim meet database for that meet. I have lost a little bit of luster for work now days. I get tired of the duality of the place. At one time they want me to be a “Smart little technician” and solve the problems that they can’t or don’t have time to do, but when it comes to something that they think is “Extremely Important” they want me to be a good little robot and click the buttons to run the stuff without asking “why?” or “what is this going to do?”. Recently one of the Domain Admins (who so far has had a lot of trouble getting his scripts to work correctly) sent us a link to a script he wrote. This script was located in a directory which everyone had full access to (meaning that they could have changed his script if they wanted to), which no one else had looked at and which didn’t meet any of the parameters for what he was trying to do. I was talking to my boss about it and how I didn’t think we should run it without more information since it could potentially screw up our image on the machines. My boss, which doesn’t want us to do anything to the image without his say so, told us to run it and then ask tomorrow what it did. I said it would be too late then since it might have already screwed everything up. He didn’t seem to care and told me to run it anyway. I told him I was clocking out and he could have the other tech (Jeremiah) run it if he wanted to. Maybe it wasn’t the best thing to do, but I wasn’t going to be the one to screw up the machines, since it WOULD be listed as my fault and not the domain admins who would have screwed up the script. I hate stuff like that. So today I went back to writing scripts. It seems to be the haven for my mind when I no longer am interested in the task at hand. Two new scripts are being born from this… SmbTable and SMess. SmbTable is a somewhat trivial smbstatus formater and organizer, while SMess might be a pretty cool system in the end. It will be a clean Linux based system to allow the AMs to send messages to the reps out on the floor. Hopefully I can get it all worked out rather quickly. Most of my work now is working with SAMBA and trying to get diablonetwork.net off the ground. I am also working on a HOW-TO on SAMBA and Windows Domains. It is really a document on how to hide a linux machine inside a Windows network.