resolution

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New Year’s Resolutions 2010

January 1, 2010 in Personal / Relationships by Ezra S F | 3 comments

My resolutions for 2009 involved reading good stuff and being more social. More or less they were successful. I read fulfilled the reading goal by October. To fulfill the social goal, I attended most of the BrunchBunch, Athens Flickr Meetups, Athens Strobist Meetups, and even lunches with coworkers. These were by and large successful.

So, in thinking about 2010, my intentions for this year are:

  1. Read 12,000 pages. Unlike last year, I am not going to restrict the type of content except to say it must be in a book. Magazines, blogs, and news do not count. If they did, then I’d make the goal in a couple months.
  2. Learn to cook 20 new dishes. Considering I don’t cook, this is by far the most ambitious resolution. I’ll need to buy a cookbook.
  3. Participate in Project 365. (tips to get started) I considered 365 Days, but I don’t think I am up to daily self portraits. This is a Flickr group where people post daily submissions for every day of the year. I’ve previously failed this one, but I made it to 99 photos. Will be interesting with just an SLR and a bad phone camera.
  4. Have fun now not later. I haven’t visited the local state parks or much in Atlanta or even taken a personal trip. I keep procrastinating expecting it to be better later, making me an exemplar of Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences. (Also Carpe Diem? Maybe Tomorrow in NYT)

There lots of other things in the back of my mind for things I ought to accomplish this year.

  • I only went out on one date for all of 2009, which is actually more than 2007 and 2008 combined. Assuming I don’t chicken out, I may equal that in January 2010?
  • I need to cull the blog list down from 403 subscriptions to around 200.
  • No flying at all for 2009? The furthest I drove was to Panama City, FL? Obviously I should travel more.

    Resolutions For 2009

    January 2, 2009 in 43things, Books / Novels / Writing, Food, Personal / Relationships by Ezra S F | 3 comments

    1. Read 10,000 pages of science, economics, health, history, or policy books. For 2008, it was read 25 books. This year, I thought to change it page-based as the previous one shied me away from larger books. Two 350 page books vs one 700 page book shouldn’t be a concern. See Reading for last and this years’ progress.
    2. Be more social. A lot of will power is required to force myself to attend social events. Over the years it has only gotten worse. Before it reaches the point of requiring professional help, I probably ought to change my habits.

    Useful resolutions to me are things I realistically can and will accomplish applying moderate effort. Making too hard of a challenge will result in giving up too quickly. Making too easy of a challenge will result in doing something I would do anyway. Last year was the first time in a really long time I even bothered other than using 43things to make some goals I rarely have met more by accident than any real intent.

    Some resolutions I would pick I already do to the extent I realistically would….

    • Take the stairs and walk more. I already do these as far down the exercise more resolution as I realistically will go.
    • Eat better. I already mostly avoid red meat and eat lots of green vegetables.
    • Spend more time with family.

    There are resolutions I would never actually keep without support from family and friends I don’t really have to keep me honest and stick to the narrow path….

    • Less fat, less sugar, no soda, no sweet tea.
    • Exercise more.
    • Finances.
    • Organization.
    • Less time spent in front of the TV or computer.
    • More blogging.
    • I already do not smoke or drink alcohol.
    • Get a Master’s Degree.

    Hmmmmmm… Resolutions are bad for your health?

    I haven’t checked my blog in a long while.

    Christmas Blog Post 2008

    December 25, 2008 in Personal / Relationships, Photography by Ezra S F | No comments

    Last night I read Uncle Bill’s Christmas letter. He mailed it, but he apparently doesn’t have my postal address so I got the electronic version. Woohoo! His letter recaps the year for his family. Do any of you have such a tradition? Or a family member who does? Oddly my blog doesn’t provide much basis as it is devoid of personal information.

    So here goes….

    Family

    Mom went off to Houston in January to consult with one of the best doctors in the country about a health issue. How things fell into place to allow her to get better amazed me daily. I got to grandparent sit for a week where I made Nannie tell stories so I could post them on Youtube. :D

    William married Nicole, his high school sweetheart. I finally have a sister. It rained on us briefly, so if you are into superstitions, that means either: 1) kids, 2) money, or 3) good luck.

    I met Dad’s girlfriend, Sally, this year. She is definitely very nice. I’m happy with the match.

    Friends

    My only New Year’s Resolution for 2008 was to read 25 books this year. I completed that goal back in October. I’m thinking for 2008 to do a similar resolution. This time I’ll count up the number of pages and set a goal to read 20% more pages.

    Some fellow Flickr users started an Athens Flickr Meetup. I’m hoping this is something to continue in 2009 as the weather improves. (Though who knew Georgia would be 20 degrees Farenheit above normal in December?)

    RingsAdrianne and Britt asked me to be the photographer for their wedding. I spent hours looking at professional photographer portfolios for ideas about what I should capture. You see, while I do have a camera, I had never really taken photos at a wedding. Heck, few people invite me to weddings, so I was a little unclear what happens. In the end, I think it all turned out pretty well. Adrianne is happy. So I am happy. Working in computers became a profession because it was a hobby. Maybe photography will end up the same in the end? Posted 840 photos to Flickr this year. Started freelovephotography.com to show off my photography.

    Las Vegas in July? Dumb. Star Trek: The Experience made my geeky heart soar.
    NCC-1701-DNCC-1701-D @ ST: TXP

    Pointless

    August 14, 2008 in Corporations by Ezra S F | 3 comments

    So I wanted to open a support ticket. However, in thinking about what I can ask for the company to do arrayed against what they are willing to offer for support, I realized… I am not going to get a resoultion for the ticket.

    1. It is functioning as designed.
    2. They are just going to tell us the workarounds we have already implemented.

    So, what is the point? Other than distracting employees of the company with something they are never going to solve, I get no benefit. I just get to be the passive-aggressive, CYAer, paper pusher who gets to point at the fact I opened a pointless support ticket to justify my employment.

    Yes, the problem could trigger a cascade of events which would result in the failure of services for about 3,000 active users. We stood at the brink twice yesterday and the day before. Because we DBAs are responsive, we saved it. The next time we will do the same.

    The company is not going to release another patch for the product unless forced to do so (aka glaring security hole). So even if we could convince them of a bug, then no resolution would be provided in this version. I’ll have to replicate to see if the same problem exists in a newer version they do adequately support. If so, then I would have justification in opening a ticket.

    Now… how to I identify an 8GB section archive…

    Better: Closed or Resolved

    May 16, 2008 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | 9 comments

    I just read:

    Clients are receiving responses to and closures of long-outstanding tickets. In the past quarter we’ve reduced the number of outstanding tickets by 15% (1500 tickets).

    We closed several tickets because it was decided no resolution was ever going to be provided after the ticket was open for 6 months without the tier 3 or higher folks providing a single response other than, “Maybe we can look at it next week.” Hopefully these were not in this count.

    On the other hand, an attempt at a fix for a critical bug may actually be tried? Right now we have one campus with about 1,500 students affected. Those numbers will bloom to 30,000 or more students by the start of Fall term.

    Finding Sessions

    February 6, 2008 in Blackboard Vista, Database / Oracle by Ezra S F | 4 comments

    Clusters can making finding where a user was working a clusterf***. Users end up on a node, but they don’t know which node. Heck, we are ahead of the curve to get user name, date, and time. Usually checking all the nodes in the past few days can net you the sessions. Capturing the session ids in the web server logs usually leads to finding an error in the webct logs. Though not always. Digging through the web server logs to find where the user was doing something similar to the appropriate activity consumes days.

    Blackboard Vista captures node information for where the action took place. Reports against the tracking data provide more concise, more easily understood, and more quickly compiled. They are fantastic for getting a clear understanding of what steps a user took.

    Web server logs contain every hit which includes every page view (well, almost, the gap is another post). Tracking data represents at best 25% of the page views. This problem is perhaps the only reason I favor logs over tracking data. More cryptic data usually means a slower resolution time not faster.

    Another issue with tracking is the scope. When profiling student behavior, it is great. The problem is only okay data can be located for instructors while designers and administrators are almost totally under the radar. With the new outer join, what we can get for these oblivious roles has been greatly expanded.

    Certainly, I try not to rely too much on a single source of data. Even I sometimes forget to do so.

    Computer v Human Diagnosis

    January 11, 2008 in Computers, Philosophy by Ezra S F | 1 comment

    I just finished How Doctors Think yesterday.

    First impression was doctors don’t spend very much time thinking and gathering information to make a diagnosis. That impress struck a very negative chord with me as it sounds like in my profession of database and computer administration we spend hours picking apart the data we have to diagnose even minor sounding issues.

    The better impression ought to be doctors spend very little time with a seemingly routine diagnosis. When confounded they spend more time doing analysis. They also have to deal with the patient’s lack of patience.

    In tier 3 support, we spend even less time with routine issues. “Try another web browser and call me in the morning.” anyone? When we don’t know this gives the “patient” something to do while we go investigate the real cause (looking at logs or stats). Unfortunately, our computer “patients” want resolutions in minutes or maybe hours. Few find taking a few years to heal a computer problem acceptable.
    :(

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    Better Way to Count

    January 3, 2008 in unix by Ezra S F | No comments

    Our awesome sysadmins have put the user agent into our AWStats so we are tracking these numbers now. They discovered something I overlooked. Netscape 4.x is 10 times more used than 7.x or 8.x. Wowsers! Some people really do not give up on the past.

    Back in the Netscape is dead post, I used this to count the Netscape 7 hits.

    grep Netscape/7 webserver.log* | wc -l

    Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! The above requires running for each version of Netscape. This is why I missed Netscape 4.

    This is more convoluted, but I think it its a much better approach.

    grep Netscape webserver.log* | awk -F\t ‘{print $11}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

    It looks uglier, but its much more elegant. Maybe I ought to make a resolution for 2008 to be elegant in all my shell commands.

    This version first pulls any entries with Netscape in the line. Next, the awk piece reports only the user agent string. The first sort puts all the similar entries next to each other so the uniq will not accidentally duplicate. The -c in the uniq counts. The final sort with the -n orders them by the uniq’s count. The largest will end up at the bottom.

    Coradiant TrueSight

    December 2, 2007 in Conferences, Work by Ezra S F | 4 comments

    Several of us saw a demo of Coradiant Truesight yesterday (first mentioned in the BbWorld Monitoring post). Most of the demo, I spent trying to figure out the name Jeff Goldblum as one of team giving the demo had the voice and mannerisms of the actor’s characters. Had he mentioned a butterfly, then I definitely would have clapped. The other reminded me of John Hodgman.

    Something I had not noticed at the time, but a reoccurring point of having Truesight is to tell our users, “Here is evidence the problem is on your end and not ours.” This assumes the users are rational or will even believe the evidence. They wish the problem never occurred (preference) and a resolution (secondarily). Preventing every problem, especially issues outside our domain, probably is outside the scope of the budget we receive. So, we are left with resolving the issues. Especially scary are the users who take evidence the problem is on their end or their ISP’s end to mean, “This is all your fault.”

    Resolutions we can we offer are:

    1. Hardware change – We can replace or alter the configuration of the hardware components of the network, storage, database, or application.
    2. Software change – We can alter the configuration of the software components of the network, storage, database, or application.
    3. Request a code change from a vendor – We can work with our vendors to get a code change. These take forever to implement.
    4. Suggest a user resolve the issue -
      1. We can provide a work around (grudgingly accepted, remember the preferred wish is the problem never occurred).
      2. We suggest configuration changes the user can make to resolve the problem.

    Truesight provides us information to help us try to resolve issues. Describing the information provided as “facts” was a nice touch. At Valdosta State, I gave up on users reporting the browsers accurately and captured the information from the User-Agent header. Similarly, at the USG, I’ve found users disagree ~30% of the time about the version of the browser according to the User-Agent string. Heck, they have errors in the name of the class ~40% of the time. My favorite is something took 15 minutes, but all I could find was it took four minutes. Ugh. Because Truesight is capturing the header info, it ought to be much easier to confirm what users were doing and where problems occurred more accurately than the users can describe.

    After receiving all the “facts”, we still have to determine the cause. Truesight helps us understand the scope of the problem by how many users, how many web servers, and how many pages are affected by slowness to what degree. As a DBA and administrator, my job identifying cause ought to be easier, though quantifying how much easier probably is difficult to say.

    Part of why: (Mostly speculation.) Problems identified as a spike in anything other than “Host” are external causes. These are causes in front of the device. Causes behind the device are “Host”. If these were more narrowly broken down, the maybe we could better determine cause. That would require knowledge web browsers typically would not know like the server processing time, query processing time, or even the health of the servers.

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    All Your Cache Are Belong to Us

    August 1, 2007 in Blackboard Vista, Work by Ezra S F | No comments

    Interesting incident with Blackboard Vista last night.

    The user interface for the server “lost” the default icon sets for the organizer pages. Other icons were not affected so changing to another icon set did not help. A legendary Blackboard support guy happened to take our call. I understand why so many other Bb clients like for him to work on their issues. We may need to ask for him personally to look at any other high stakes, immediate resolution issues that pop-up. Problem is he is in Australia, so we’d need to stay up late to discuss.

    The browser’s copy of the HTML literally had src=”" instead of the src=”/webct/images/large_chat.gif” (or other image name). We ruled out many things, so we considered the idea of a cached setting. Restarting a node cleared up the issue for that node. The cache did expire before a coworker restarted all the other nodes (25, ugh). So everything came back as it should.

    Very interesting.

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