It's crunch time, and I'm tired..
Ever have one of those weeks? Where all sorts of things go wrong, or at least seem to go wrong, and you can't catch a break? Where you feel your life might be a miserable failure and you're not sure why?

It's been one of those weeks for me.

Monday, Sandy wrecked her car. It wasn't her fault, some old coot just backed up into the front of her car. He destroyed the hood, bumper, and both light assemblies.

ouch

Then, Sandy's dad decided to help the situation by convincing both her and the old guy not to file a police report, and to keep it from the insurance company. Oh, that was choice.

At least I ran on Monday, and boy did I run.

BTW, if you're EVER in a car accident, GET A DAMN POLICE REPORT!!!

I spent Tuesday getting estimates for her car, and driving them up to Lake City for the old guy to agree to pay half of the bill. It finally came out to $1640 or so to fix her car.

By Wednesday, I had a pounding headache from all of the problems with the car and figuring out how we were going to pay for it. The old guy wasn't returning our calls, but he was calling the body shop to raise hell with them for the cost of fixing the car.

Oh yeah, in the middle of this I had my second to last test, plus a research project to work on.

And then, I also had a ton of work for my job, you know, that thing which pays the bills. I shouldn't have taken Tuesday off, it put me behind quite a bit and I spent the rest of the week playing catch up.

As it is I setup four compute servers (one with a terrabyte array, 3 in a mini-cluster), migrated 8 boxes to suse, diagnosed and corrected a problem with autoyast and Optiplex GX-270's, and a bunch of other things in the hours I was there this week.

One of my faculty expressed his concerns that David wasn't doing a lot of work lately. I suspect this stemmed from a project which he's been very interested in which has been pushed way behind schedule. He wanted to know if I could let David take over some other duties, like maybe working on this project that he's interested in.

I tried to explain that I didn't want David doing certain types of projects, without going into detail about how he is often careless and misses the details which can make, or break, a project.

It's not that David's a bad worker, he's fine if I outline exactly what steps I'd like him to follow in a project, and he'll follow them to the letter.

It's just the whole "creativity" bit. If it's not specifically listed as a step, it won't get done. Like "make sure all non-essential services are turned off" -- if I didn't mention that, it wouldn't get done.

Case in point, Tracey asked that we add one of the two new secretaries to the secretaries email list. While editing the list, David must have seen that the other new secretary was not on the list either. Rather than either adding her, or asking Tracey if she wanted the other new secretary on the list, he just blissfully added the one and ignored the other.

It aggrivates me sometimes. I suspect it's an experience and maturity issue, you know how kids are these days (boy I'm feeling old, but what the fuck I'll be 35 next month).

Slackers.

So, I decided to give David a project. It's not really what I'd call a big project, but it is relatively important.

Kehoe's been running processes on every workstation in the department, and unfortanetly when he's running jobs on a workstation, the workstation may be unusable for daily tasks.. About 6 weeks ago I received 15 Ultra 5's from CISE. They're not the best machines in the world, but they're capable of running a *nix operating system and a fortran compiler.

I've decided to let David setup a 12 node cluster on the suns. I'm letting him choose the OS (he's set one up with netbsd, one with gentoo, and one with debian linux). We'll let Kehoe decide which OS he's happy with, and then let David setup the 12 node cluster. I'm also going to make him responsible for documenting the steps he does to install each node, and the configuration of the cluster.

Once the cluster is config'ed, I'll let him continue to manage it. What the heck, it'll give him a project he's solely responsible for, and it will give me something I could show that he's working on that has value.

Now, if I could just get Oliver to move his stuff out of Room 11 so I can have some space in there for our server racks...

Posted at: 02:13 on 06/12/2003   [ /diary ] #