Loss of control...

My child is infuriating. Why? Because he is no longer under my control. He is a follower who will obey the things I ask of him and I can always overpower him but he is also his own person able to tell us the things he likes and dislikes. He is able to assert himself both physically and verbally and he knows how to both woo and frustrate his parents. He also hits and it drives me nuts, I want to grab him and pull him away and tell him loudly he's doing things wrong and sometimes, just sometimes, when he hits *ME* I want to whack him.

The obvious issue here is that I can not do things like that. I can not hit my child, I can not be forceful over a child I want to instill gentle qualities in and I can not control him. Instead I know that I now have the arduous task of guiding him. I only say arduous because it's hard for me or Kate to do, it's hard to take a person with raging emotions and ideas that move more rapidly than they are explained. A person who can reduce to screaming and tears and bashing his head over the fact that you are offering him EXACTLY what he wants. It's hard to take that person and guide them to all the emotions and values that you want them to have while controlling all of the negative values you do not want them to be party to in yourself.

I think that in my mind I would relate it to trying to be a bar star while stopping a friend from drinking. It's something that you just can not do and be successful at it.

What does this mean to me? What does this mean for Kate? More importantly what does this mean for our dealings with Sebastian? I think it means that the qualities we are shooting to instill - completely relies on us to model and consistently display the qualities ourselves. This is a lot like being a good manager or lead. You need to model what you would want your team to look like.

This is a problem. Both of us are ruled by our emotions in so many ways.... we are going to have to change ourselves to change our son. I thought I would have seen this... those parents. Y'know the ones who seems almost hoity toity and are really "clean" people, not swearing in conversation (even without their kids around), modeling clean lives are the ones who I almost think have the kids who have those high quality values. But I could be wrong... It could be that those people really are just jerks and their kids are only good because they beat them... I'll never really know. In the end, I know that I need to make changes in me to adjust to a better work environment. Things like swearing in conversation. With luck those changes in me will start to help me mold Sebastian as well.

If you read this you really should read what my wife Kate goes through. She stays at home with Sebastian. Something that I have stated I would love to do but secretly know that I would do a horrible job by comparison. She deals with his sweetness and his unholy jerkiness day in and day out and not only tries to model good behavior and demeanor but, much to her own discredit, does a really really good job at it.

Advancements

Today my second server became a link aggregated 2GB/s network unit. It joins the first and is now the second server in EA using this connection type. So far my users are only achieving 70mb/s on the primary unit so I think they have some overhead.

RAM on the other hand might need to be increased as now that they can use so many other things [ Like streaming video ] they are using a lot more RAM on the unit. 3GBs out of 4 were being used most of today so I may have to order more.

I asked today for a new training class from both the infrastructure manager and from the COO of my studio. I figure that two chances are better than one. The only problem with this is that I *JUST* realized the course is in Calgary and NOT Vancouver as I originally stated. BLARG!

So now I either have to see if I can be sent to Calgary for 5 days or wait about until Vancouver decides to host the class. [ Which won't be until next year now ]

Well we'll see where I end up. ** I just talked to Kate and she doesn't want me going so close to her due date so I guess I wait till next quarter**

I also talked with my network guy today about the traffic that would occur if I added an Xgrid system to my work. Seems that it would be ok and if I can get the servers I want then he can even make them all 2GB/s to improve the connection speeds. Now I just need to see if he'll do it to a couple of users too.

I sometimes wonder if I am too demanding.

Monsterous issues.

It occurs to be me that I never wrapped up the post concerning the issues I was having with my Mac unit. So time to do that.

The problem: My server's authentication to Active Directory kept failing, making it very very hard for all of our users to connect / stay connected to the server. The end result was that people were constantly disconnecting and not happy what-so-ever. I was unhappy as I kept having to reconnect the server to AD every 12 hours. PITA.

The fix: Take the server off AD, turn it in to a Open Directory only server. Once this was done the server ran for 132hours without issue before I rebooted this morning for software updates.

The Lesson: screw windows.

So basically I do plan on taking cross-platform integration if possible through Apple, but that is another $2400 USD so I need someone to pay for it first.

I will create a monster

So. I now have two, count em, two Apple Xserves at work. I'm shooting for another 3.

Why you might ask? Especially if you work with me.... The answer is simple. Solidify my position make myself invaluable and then threaten to quit and ask for a raise. MUHAHAHAAHAAA

No really, I am just anticipating that with Pro Tools 7.4 coming and supporting the ability to have nodes like Logic Pro does right now that we will need some processing power that can be stored in the server room and listed as mission critical.

I have recently created a small node farm for the Music Audio guys and they are loving having it. Infrastructure at EAC however deemed it NON mission critical due to the fact that it is running from desktop machines. No fail-over, no rack mount, no need to worry about it seems to be their view. Well now I am stepping this up a notch or two.



That's how I want to roll. It's really the only way to do it. Have them all be 8core 3.0Ghz machines with 4gb RAM each. An 80gb and a 500gb drive to do generates and like WHOA Robert is your mother's brother.

Now the only thing standing between me and it is..... Money. Well that and convincing Charles and Marcel. Those should be interesting sells too. However when you look at how pretty, functional and stylish the above is... you can't help wanting to purchase when you look at what I currently am working with...

4 G5's in a network closet is hardly how I would like to be supporting a group of audio specialists.

My brain 'splode

Fantastic weekend

Sebastian and I played all weekend long. It was a hella amount of fun.

We hit the park, we played soccer, we played in the sandbox, we wrestled fooled around playing hide and seek and generally had a great time. It was the best feeling of 'dad' that I've sported in a while.

We went to the mall and hit the playpit and rather than sit on the sidelines I got in there and chased him around, directed him to go through and over and under and around stuff and made him scream with glee as I jumped out from behind things. It was a lot better than my usual sitting on the sidelines and waiting for him to tire out. Although I was tired out by the time Kate came back from the first store.

We hit up a photo booth and got our pictures taken and even got a good one out of it! Then ran about and kicked balls around the Old Navy store. I think a few of the Old Navy employees were less than thrilled about it. Who cares?

We watched (well me and Kate - Seb was asleep) Hot Fuzz on the weekend too. Man that was literally the best cop movie I have seen.... like..... ever. The 'surprise' ending of the movie made it even better. We also watched most of Snatch... I needed to see it again, it had been too long and I had forgotten so much of it. Most because Sebastian woke up right near the end and came to sleep with us.

66 Days until the new baby comes along! I am starting to get that going on a holiday excitement although I'm not too sure that my brain is fully informed of what is actually going on. Perhaps it's like those sunglasses in Hitchhikers Guide where everything goes black at the slightest glimmer of danger. I'm using some old internal defense mechanism to stop myself from seeing what's really going on...

Well, if new baby is even half as much fun as Sebastian is then it should be all worth it cuz man this kid not only has the crazy, but he IS the crazy.

Let's give em something to blog about...

Like construction! NON STOP! These people across from us have been rebuilding their house all day everyday and it's driving me nuts. They are out there till 9 or 10pm with circular saws and air nailers. They work on the weekends and somedays have gone until 1:30am! Like seriously.... SHUT THE FUCK UP! I finally registered a complaint tonight although I am so furious about them still working right now I want to call the cops too. The lack of respect for the people that they are about to live around is disgusting. How do they expect to not be hated by everyone around them when they've pulled this shit for a solid month now?

GAH!

Why don't I post everyday?

Have you read this shit?!

On Saturday night I installed my new server and it went quite well until I said the magic words.... " that went wayyyy easier than I thought it would. Was it really that easy?" BAM! Screwed.

In case you didn't know... That = "Well at least it isn't raining" or the very popular "well at least it couldn't get any worse".

After that bomb.com there was about 4 hours of network troubleshooting with my infrastructure network guru and at least an hour and a half on the phone with apple. In the end we got it all figured out and the systems was running with a nice 2gb/s network configuration. Some throughput testing hit 952mbs/s which is twice as fast as anything else onsite. Sweetness.

So I reckon'd it all to be wrapped up at this point. I went to the beach today with Seb and got a call from the Oncall Tech asking me to take a look in to some stuff with the server.... After 9.5 hours of "looking in to it" a $700USD call to Apple and 5 hours with another of the infrastructure team we are still no closer to having the windows connection side of things working. Everything looks to be configured correctly but it will only try the authentication locally instead of heading upstream to the AD servers. It sucks. I feel really crappy about the whole thing. I wanted this to be a swift and seemless transition that had people singing my praises and thinking things like "hey that guy deserves more money". Instead I feel like I've let a lot of people down and that the powers that be are going to look at this with a "shouldn't have trusted him" sort of view. Which Sucks don't you know.

In the end I have to call Apple again tomorrow and spend even more time on the phone and deep in the server config to try and figure this out. With one Game 2 weeks from ship and one coming close to this needs to be fixed like tomorrow.

The stress from this had my ankle hurting like I had snapped the damn thing in two all day.

And hey, this doesn't even touch on how much I feel I let my family down today being gone all afternoon and night...