Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up
its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.- Joseph Addison
It’s been a hell of a couple weeks. I’ve been professionally violated by security and process auditors repeatedly over the span of the last few weeks, experienced one of the most exhausting on-call shifts ever last week, and have been running around in a seemingly endless state of tired and really annoyed for most of the month of October.
Since I haven’t had a chance to write much recently, I’m going to attempt to make up for it by directing you to the blogs of a couple people who have.
I’ve known Drew virtually for at least several months. Maybe longer; my sense of time has always been a little screwy. In any case, he’s a pretty amazing guy, and meeting him in person at this year’s Burning Man was definitely one of the high points of my trip.
Recently he’s been doing a trek to various fascinating parts of the globe and documenting them in his always very intelligent, insightful way, and I’ve really enjoyed keeping up with his travels. He’s also one hell of a photographer and his legs look amazing when he wears a skirt, but don’t tell him I said that.
If you’re into queer, beer-swilling, Aussie metalheads, I have some good news: one actually exists. If you’ve ever followed that filtercore link at the bottom of the page you’ve already been introduced to the author of World Wide Jeb. He’s just started the latest incarnation of his blog, but I think I can guarantee it’ll be worth reading; Jeb is, without exaggeration, one of the most consistently hilarious writers I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. I have to be extremely drunk and have someone spin me around ten times and point me at a cliff before I get one-tenth as funny as Jeb is on an off day, and I’ll never look as good in a purple mohawk as he does. I secretly hate him for all of that, but he’s a great read anyway.
It’s become a regular thing since then. The next time we all went bowling together, the bet was USDA Prime steaks for the winners, to be provided by the losers. Though the best Dave and Scott could do was USDA Choice and (oh, the horror!) Select, it was a pretty good dinner nonetheless.
It’s not that things haven’t been relatively interesting lately. I’d go into the details of all the little mundanities of my life over the past several weeks, but I’m almost totally decaffeinated at the moment, and I really don’t trust myself not to babble incoherently if I try.
Today I had every intention of correcting that, since I have a little downtime here, but I’m a little farther down than I’d expected. I’ve been spending the last couple of days coughing, sneezing, and pounding shots of NyQuil in a feeble attempt to fight off a particularly nasty cold. All I’ve wanted to do for the last couple days is sleep, and I’ve done a lot of it. Other than a few brief waking periods caused by a hyperactive pager (I’m also on-call at work this week), I’ve been asleep since around midnight Friday. It doesn’t exactly make for riveting blogging, as you can tell.
I’ve been telling people for a while that it was going to be a rough summer for me. I’ve got two data centers to help get online by the end of July, a few other fairly large projects I’m working on, and enough turmoil at home to suck up the rest of my time. Those, however, have nothing to do with why I’ve been so wiped out this week.
My spirits have been kept afloat, however, knowing that I’ll be seeing my beloved 
Then there was the other gigantic client who’s been trying to get a point-to-point line working with us for months. I’ve had the thing set up and ready to go for so long I don’t even remember when I did it, but I get pulled into conference calls every few days where they try to tell me I’ve either put in incorrect firewall rules, bad routes, or any number of other things I haven’t done. There was another one of those calls yesterday, and I watched another couple hours of my life drain away while I sat on a call with their firewall guys, their network guys, their QA guys, and a handful of random managers answering all the same questions yet again. At this point I should just have them dial into my voicemail, and tell them “Press 1 for me to tell you the routes are there again. Press 2 to hear me say the firewall holes are all open. Press 3 if you want me to beg you to check things out on your own damn network again before dragging me into another boring conference call.” Fortunately, this time someone with a clue was actually on the call, and whaddaya know? Their routing was hosed.
