Get ready for a stream of consciousness post.  If I try to write up structured posts, I never finish and they sit as drafts.

Why work is more fun than video games

My weekday life is largely made up of work.  I leave my apartment by 7am, and I’m home around 5pm.  Sometimes when I get home, there are some tasks that need to get done after 5pm, and usually don’t tkae that long.  By the time I’ve had a snack for dinner, its 7 or 8 and I’m ready for bed.  That’s my day.

The weekend, however, is when everything gets accomplished.  Lately, I’ve been writing a to-do list Friday night so I know what options are on the table for that weekend.  This weekend, it lists:

Games: torchlight demo, Shadow Complex, start Fallout 3.  Shows: Diggnation, TRS, HDNation, Co-op, Twit, The Guild, This Old House.  Food: Sweet potatoes, finish milk, finish heavy cream.  Life: taxes, get stock+401k accounts updated, new netflix account?, bills.

I look at that list now and think, “really, Jason?  You’re listing what shows and games and food you’re going to eat?  Really?”  I can’t help it.  A few months ago, I was playing video games so I could finish them and move on to the next one.  I wasn’t having fun.  Shadow Complex was fun.  I really enjoyed the single player campaign.  Now that I’ve finished the single player campaign, I want to go back and complete all the minimalist run through and collect the other achievements.  I realized in the shower this morning that that’s dumb.  I don’t want to play through it again – that’s tedious. Why do I put myself through that?  I think it’s because I’m a completionist.  I won’t put a game away until I’ve played it all the way through and done all the side quests and experienced every possible thing in the game.

Anyway, back to the subject of this section..  all Friday and Saturday, I was working on getting one of our servers at work, unixdeva05, squeezed into a Xen HVM virtual machine – a P2V.  I realized that I’d rather be working with computers and playing with virtualization than playing an awesome video game.  I’d rather be banging my head against a wall troubleshooting a networking issue than banging my head trying to double jumping up a canyon wall on my big screen tv.

I’m happy I can enjoy work so much.  I wonder if there are only a few jobs out there that are truly fun.  Any job where you work with the ‘public’ I’d consider not fun (if only for the occasional asshole).  That rules out about three-quarters of the jobs out there.  Jobs that place an undue amount of stress on you aren’t fun.  I think I picked a good profession.  I only have to work with a small group of like-minded nerds.  I spend most of my time with inanimate machines.  My bosses handle the stress so I don’t have to.  And I’m good at what I do, so I’m never really frustrated.  Hopefully in 30 years, I’m still doing something similar.

Maybe Starcraft 2 will be more fun than work..

Pending life goals as of Feb 2010:

• Own a home
• Get married

Completed life goals as of Feb 2010:

• Get a job I enjoy immensely
• Get engaged to a smart, beautiful, funny girl
• Own a big screen tv
• Make enough money to have the opportunity to build up savings

I opened this blog on Feb 17th, 2003 when I was 17.   Happy 7 year anniversary, blog.  At 24, I’m doing pretty well.  Let’s see if this blog lasts until I’m 80.

Off to find something for lunch that uses milk and heavy cream.

Thanks to Ryan for the Google Wave invite!

If you would like one, please let me know. See sidebar for contact info.

Comcast’s internet is really horrible. It is so horrible, in fact, that this very website (along with my parent’s Internet access) will go down for up to hours at a time, multiple times a week. In the last month, since I moved this website off hostmysite and home, it has been unavailable for over a full day. Does it matter? To the two people who read it – no.

I’ve been twiddling my thumbs waiting for OpenSolaris build snv_128 so I can get playing with ZFS deduplication. In the meantime, I’m working on getting a Solaris 10 branded zone working and Sunray Server for the aging SunRay 1G I have sitting here to play with. However, Sun made it difficult for two reasons: Sunray Server is not free, and only allows a 90 day trial. Also, a Solaris 10 branded zone requires a physical Solaris 10 installation to work off of. This is getting too difficult.

Switched to Geico. Saving over $850 a year. I’m enjoying their customer service – they always answer my question to the best of their ability, and get me off the phone in 10-15 minutes. With Nationwide, I’ve been on the phone for 2.5 hours at a time – and I was purchasing home insurance — what a fraud they are.

Made some sweet black friday purchases. I’m excited to get my new PS3 in. Got Fallout 3 and Resident Evil 5 for $20 each. An extra controller from The Shack ™ for $30. And Planet Earth for cheap on Amazon. All is right in the world.

Had another fantastic week and weekend. At work, we’ve been exploring various NAS solutions and weighing the pros/cons of various options and price points. I’ve been writing a lot of “collector/reporter” scripts, collecting some piece of information from our various machines, stuffing all that into a database, and then producing interesting/informative reports so we as Unix administrators can make better decisions. I’ve also had an enjoyable time tweaking our automation for patching and building out new servers — it’s becoming a well oiled machine!

A few weeks ago, I signed up a wide range of system administrator blogs from both recommendations (by google reader and friends), and by reading linked blog articles, and subscribing to those I enjoyed. In these few weeks, I’ve found a treasure trove of information from interesting articles.

Here’s my current Google Reader subscription list (with favorites bolded).  Amazingly, I’m not overwhelmed with reading, but I do get one or two good articles a day — I suggest Google Reader to anyone with a list of sites they visit daily.

Uncategorized

• mytvrss [http://www.mytvrss.com/tvrss.xml?id=910807]

Unix Sys Admin

• A Unix System Administrator’s Blog [http://www.sysadmindayph.com/blog/feed/]
• Admin Arsenal Blog [http://feeds2.feedburner.com/AdminArsenal]
• BASH Cures Cancer [http://feeds.feedburner.com/BashCuresCancer]
• c0t0d0s0.org [http://feeds.feedburner.com/Wwwc0t0d0s0org]
• cmdln.org (a sysadmin blog) [http://www.cmdln.org/feed/]
• Everything Sysadmin [http://feeds.everythingsysadmin.com/EverythingSysadmin]
• F-Secure Antivirus Research Weblog [http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/weblog.rss]
• Field Commander Wieers [http://dag.wieers.com/blog/rss.xml]
• Last In – First Out [http://lastinfirstout.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default]
• Learning solaris 10 [http://learning-solaris.com/feed/]
• Linux Journal – The Original Magazine of the Linux Community [http://feeds.feedburner.com/linuxjournalcom]
• MDLog:/sysadmin [http://www.ducea.com/feed/]
• My Etherealmind [http://feeds.feedburner.com/etherealmind]
• My SysAd Blog — Unix [http://feeds.feedburner.com/sysad]
• nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog [http://feeds.cyberciti.biz/Nixcraft-LinuxFreebsdSolarisTipsTricks]
• Planet CentOS [http://planet.centos.org/atom.xml]
• Red Hat Knowledgebase : Article List – English [http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/community/feeds/documents?community=2001]
• Standalone Sysadmin [http://feeds.feedburner.com/standalone-sysadmin/rWoU]
• Sysadmin Ramblings [http://ramblings.narrabilis.com/wp/feed/]
• SysAdmin’s Journey [http://feeds.feedburner.com/AUnixSysadminsJourney]
• TechRepublic Blogs [http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/wp-rss2.php]
• The Blog of Ben Rockwood [http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/rss.xml]
• The Life of a Sysadmin [http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/blog/rss2.xml]
• The Lone Sysadmin [http://lonesysadmin.net/feed/]
• The Storage Architect [http://thestoragearchitect.com/feed/]
• The Sys Admin [http://www.syadmin.net/blog/?feed=rss2]
• UNIX Administratosphere [http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/feed/]
• unixville – the house of unix [http://www.unixville.com/rss.xml]
• Utah Open Source Planet [http://openclue.org/feed/rss/]
• VCritical [http://feeds.feedburner.com/vcritical]

Deals

• DealCatcher.com [http://www.dealcatcher.com/rss.asp]
• Newegg.com RSS Feed – Daily Deals [http://www.newegg.com/Product/RSS.asp?Submit=RSSDailyDeals]
• Woot! strainer [http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=Arg4xfK92xGoZliMzKky6g&_render=rss]

Hardware

• *Hack a Day* [http://www.hackaday.com/rss.xml]
• Engadget [http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml]

Developers

• Joel on Software [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml]
• OSWD: Open Source Web Design [http://www.oswd.org/rss/]
• Racker Hacker [http://rackerhacker.com/feed/]
• Ruby Fleebie [http://www.rubyfleebie.com/feed/]
• Scott James Remnant [http://www.netsplit.com/feed/]
• The Rubylution [http://rubylution.ping.de/xml/rss/feed.xml]
• VoIP Tech Chat [http://www.voiptechchat.com/feed/]
• Zscaler Research [http://research.zscaler.com/feeds/posts/default]

Comics

• Ctrl+Alt+Del [http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=xtNQ0GR63BG1G2RmnkartA&_render=rss]
• Cyanide and Happiness – Only the comics [http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=9b91d1900e14d1caff163aa6fa1b24bd&_render=rss]
• Dilbert Daily Strip [http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip?format=xml]
• Penny Arcade – Comics [http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=d3088cbf172e042ebe763037aa4d402e&_render=rss]
• xkcd.com [http://xkcd.com/rss.xml]

News

• Lifehacker [http://www.lifehacker.com/index.xml]
• MacRumors : Mac News and Rumors [http://www.macrumors.com/macrumors.xml]
• Slashdot [http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot]
• Wired Top Stories [http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index]

Unix Backups

• NetBackup [http://www.symantec.com/connect/taxonomy/term/1741/all/feed]
• NetBackup HOWTO’s [http://www.netbackuphowto.com/feed/]
• NetWorker Blog [http://nsrd.wordpress.com/feed/]
• The Backup Blog [http://thebackupblog.typepad.com/thebackupblog/atom.xml]

Podcast and Music

• Free iTunes Store Downloads [http://freeitunessongs.blogspot.com/atom.xml]
• This American Life [http://feeds.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast]

Have more suggestions?  Feel free to comment!

Finished gluing my model, so I’m attempting to do the first of many coats of paint today. I figure if I put the base white coat on today, I’ll spend the next week detailing, and I’ll do decals next weekend.

Finally updated my Facebook account to use an active email address and jump ship from a few groups. Not sure if I’ll get more involved on Facebook, or keep it relatively un-updated. I’m not sure that connecting twitter, facebook, friendfeed, identi.ca, and my away message is important. Maybe that will change.

The TV reception has been getting worse. New neighbors? Increased solar storm activity? http://spaceweather.com/ suggests not.

Looking for a more lightweight alternative to dropbox with a CLI with perhaps more storage for my git repo. I wish github offered private repositories for free.

If anyone reading this would like an @parrott.ws email account, or yourwebsite.parrott.ws, please let me know. I’m very happy to provide a gmail account or CNAME reference for free to family.

Perhaps ironically, I got a lot done on my long vacation! My model is coming along nicely. The saucer section is completely built, and just needs a fancy coat of paint.

jason AT parrott DOT ws is now working, and dad is moved over as well. Superiorserve’s website has been moved home, and I’ve all but canceled my HostMySite account. I have all my mail filtering into my fanatic@gmail account!

I even made some progress on Gears of War, but I’m stuck on the last chapter of Act 3. It’s seriously impossible.

Can’t wait to get back to work tomorrow. I’m looking forward to working with KVM a bit more, testing some installs and getting down to business. Also, I learned a bit about dstat and the io process accounting that RH backported into 5.4 — can’t wait to see what that’s like and how we can apply it to our benchmarking. Also, I found that we can register our servers with rhn within the kickstart. I’m excited to test that out and make sure it works as we expect it to – especially when we run very tight with licenses. Perhaps by converting a bunch of our machines into VMs, we’ll save a bit on license fees.

On my todo list for next weekend are: finish up the model and start the painting process; purchase and install snow leopard on my macbook; get to the grocery store since i’m out of snacking food; pick up some cash from a chase atm; finish up on gears of war — I’m so close; and get some high availability features working for my websites at home.  If one server dies, I need it to failover seamlessly.  Perhaps I can command it to failover via twitter. That’d be very 2009 of me.

Sometimes I wonder why I use wordpress with all of its security issues – even Gentoo masks the package. But the dashboard is very friendly, it looks fantastic, and has a ton of plug-ins and themes. I’ll just have to keep running “webapp-config -U -h www.jasonparrott.com -d / wordpress “

I’ve finally moved my weblog back home to a few servers running in my basement.  It’s actually been running there for a little while now, but there was a bug in PHP (#49079) which was placing all my new posts at year 0000! Now that I’m running bleeding edge 5.2.9-r2, I’m crossing my fingers new bugs don’t crop up.

It’s taco night at the Parrott apartment. The ground beef is slowly defrosting on low heat – I prefer the slow defrost vs shaving off layers of beef as it cooks on high heat. I’ve also finally gotten started on my model (see my latest twitter post for pictures) USS Reliant. I’m excited to get that into work and out-do the Star Wars model guy.

I wonder how well superiorserve.com will work at home. I’ll find out. Definitely not spending the money on hosting anymore. Also, it’ll be interesting to have superiorserve.com hosted at Google Apps – probably a lot less spam. I need to find a short domain name – my email address is still too long.

Dinner’s almost done — got to go!

Every once and a while I enjoy writing about what I’m up to.  It’s fun to look back in five years to see what I was up to (see my 2003 entries at the beginning of this blog).

I’m not a fan of going out on weekends.  Perhaps you don’t know this, but I’m not a fan of busy streets and shoulder-to-shoulder shoppers.  I’d much rather go to the grocery store at 8am on a Sunday (every three weeks or so — fresh produce, good stock, and generally intelligent people at that hour).  I’d much rather go out to dinner on a week night.  But weekends are like vacations.  I can take a shower in the middle of the day.  I can dive in to projects, stay up late, and sleep in.  I can make big meals and put time into recipes.  So, even though my weekends may be “dull”, I’m saving money and relaxing (without the people-induced headaches).

Saturday, I got up late and patched a few servers for work.  I was done in an hour — no big deal =).  Played with Tversity (free Windows app for media streaming to the tv, xbox, etc) and added Diggnation, Totally Rad Show, and Co-op RSS feeds.  Now I can turn on my TV or XBox360 and stream the latest HD videos.  I played a bit of Fable 2 — I’m enjoying it so far — and printed out a checklist/cheatsheet of all the collectibles in the game.  Its four pages long and now I can easily enjoy finding every gargoyle, silver key, and chest.  My evening ended with catching up on tech news with Lifehacker, Slashdot, and Engadget.

Today, I woke up and had a wonderful morning with my favorite way to spend a Sunday morning — with CBS Sunday Morning!  Today’s episode had a bunch of re-runs, but its still a great show anyway.  Also watched Face the Nation, then McLaughlin Group (link to perfect Youtube clip from the show).  This trifecta of television gives me my pop culture news, art news, and politics.  All in 2.5 hours.  By the end of McLaughlin Group, I’ve had some scrambled eggs, caught up on digg.com, and decided on what my schedule is.  In the shower, I had an idea to build a water-proof computer so I could catch up on morning news while I clean in the morning.  I also want to get some of those bath crayons so I can take note of my grand ideas!

Well, now that the sun is going down, I’m having some rum+coke and about to fry up a burger.  I haven’t decided which movie to watch – Gone Baby Gone or Fullmetal Alchemist.  There are still a ton of movies in my queue before I’d consider getting a Netflix subscription.

My current shopping list:

• Laundry detergent
• 2 Fluffy pillows
• Microsoft Points (want to get Braid, Castle Crashers, Uno, Fable 2 Pub Games, and Catan for XBox Live Arcade)
• 3 Indoor plants for the bedroom and main room.

My food list:

• Sloppy joes
• Mozzeralla on bread

My todo list:

• Explore openFiler + iscsi + Fedora KVM
• Enjoy fable 2
• Update blog (Done!)
• Visual Studio 10 beta (Any fantastic C#/F# tutorials out there???)
• Get a webserver replacement (with failover) running at home for superioserve.com and jasonparrott.com
• Buy some iPhone apps with my christmas iTunes giftcard (I’m such a pack rat — I need to spend it!)

I, like a lot of people in the world of video gaming, love Blizzard.  Just about 100% of the games that are released from Blizzard’s doors are critical successes.  I also like making money.  It seems like it should be easy to combine the hundreds of hours I sink into Blizzard games with my love for making money.  Some ideas for businesses based on Blizzard’s releases of Starcraft 2 and Diablo III:

• Any iPhone app that provides any functionality that has SC2 or DIII in the title will be downloaded a ton — now to figure out what content to put into it
• A website that allows clans/guilds to host their website with plugins to b.net for chat, character design, scrapers (client add-on for guild members?), calendars, wiki, etc
• A typical guide/walkthrough — sell for $$
• Create videos of tough game segments and link back to a blog
• Run a thotbott-like program to create a database of game data

Any website would need a few things to be successful:

• A quality design that helps people “trust” the site
• A metric shitton of content that you can’t find (or not easily) on other sites
• Updated daily
• Social (see updated daily) – wiki, comments, upload/posting
• Cross-device – mobile device, in-game app, website
• Content that people have to keep coming back for
• Unobtrusive Ads (premium content + no ads?)
• Un-sucky forum/message board

It’s easy to create a web app these days.  Its hard to keep the content flowing and people coming back to your site.  Maybe that one great idea will pop in sometime soon.