Moonlighting!

Ops guys are weird at the best of times. They work strange hours, act weird and have a big interest in guns. Generally you should not mess with them, especially if its open carry week.

So I'm not surprised that DJ ever question the fact that one of his guys volunteered for night shift work. Its kind of easy, since there are not customer to piss off if you take out a server or database and sometimes pull a wire on the wrong switch. Its all scheduled so the customer have low expectations. Somebody has even written a script that you can cut & paste from.

But then there's the rub. Dude was actually working for a competitor, some outfit in Dallas during the day and then doing work for us during the night. He was getting double pay for doing the same thing twice. Explains why you never got on answer on the pager when he was on duty, always claimed to be sleeping. We all heard Henry screaming down here in the dungeons all the way from the Management Tower.

Super dumb for DJ letting this slide. But then something super crazy happened. They kept him on and doubled his pay, the theory was that the company could not cut is wages because he was in too deep with the Chinese Mafia. Cutting his wage was like giving him a death sentence and that is totally bad karma. So dude is still here and making more money than ever! Whoever said Henry is not a humanitarian is on crack.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 177 lbs

Ethics training!

Wow, its feels so big company that we have ethics training. Apparently some manager was working outside the framework laid down by HR. So to keep us in compliance and to make sure we don't get any complications (e.g. law suits) we have mandatory training.

Turns out that a manager, who they would not name, was coercing his staff in ways which were totally illegal. What an idiot! Why would you put the company at that much risk? Crazy.

So we have to do the self paced web training, answer the questions and we can print a certificate at the end. A waste of my time, could be fixing bugs but if that's what we have to do… It also come with poster on every wall, its a sort of Manga meets Sponge Bob mash up with the slogan "When it doubt, do the right thing". The summary of the poster is that if you see something that you think is wrong then be a whistle blower and tell HR. I can see how this could all go very wrong. The old guys in Ops were playing totally old school hip-hop when they saw the posters, apparently is something to do with some famous movie from the 80's. Weird, I don't remember any Hip-Hop in Flashdance.

Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir has changed up the pager selection process again, we are back to the take-it-in-turns model. Works for me, can book that weekend in Tahoe now! The powder is mega deep at the moment.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 179 lbs

HaHA gets renamed HoMo!

Did not mention that we have a new corporate architect, Dave. He's been pretty quite since he started in October. He turns up at meetings, design reviews etc. and says nothing. He then goes back to his desk, pulls a diet 7 Up and then writes more Twiki pages (we are so old school, we don't even use Media Wiki).

This week, he presented at the Tech-Sess. The presentation was called "Why we are changing from HaHa to HoMo and make more millions". HaHa is our review process, the Hank Architecture Holistic Assessment.

It certainly drew a big audience, even Lucy from recruiting was there. Dave's big idea was that the HaHA needs to be less democratic, we need to basically rubber stamp patterns that Ops feel they can deploy + support and stop engineers f**king up with some new crazy architecture or deployment requirement, like reliable messaging. The first step on this long process is to rename HaHa to HoMo, or the Hank Orthogonal Modus Operandi.

Like what gives dude? I get the principal, but do you really think that just changing the name is going to make that huge a difference? I know that Henry always had a master plan for the naming of the company and that Hank Commerce was the final destination after visiting MyScrewdriver and TARDIS Corp. Apparently we have been in a law suite for years with the BBC over that last name.

So HoMo is the name, the process is new and the outcomes will be different, so says Dave. I'm looking forward to my first HoMo.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 (down 4 from last week)
Shots : 20 (up 4 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

The land that time forgot!

I love our Ops team, they sure know how to get things done and most of all preserve cash. During the first bubble burst they were buying and selling hardware on uBid for profit for the company, but I hear these days they are ensuring that we stay on biblically old products. Take for instance our Databases. 11g. Nope far, far too modern. 10g anybody, 9i or even 8i. Nope. We run 7.3.4 because, well I don't really know why. Apparently DJ is super friendly with the Sales Rep and he gets great dinners in return for us running on something that pre-dates the internet. There is some sort of uplift on the license for running something that old!

Then our O/S. Well RedHat 5, the defacto choice for a web company, we don't have that either. CentOs. Too good for us. We have some hand built Redhat 3 from the sources no less, because we are that cool.

Then our storage. WooHoo. Sun was way too expensive. EMC, super safe choice and they have a great executive incentive package, otherwise know as DJ gets a few rounds of gold at Pebble Beach. So we brought Kodak , Fuji or some other camera makers dusted off disks. They had a special that week for buy one get one free and a weekend in Vegas thrown in.

It gets better. Our servers. Dell would be nice. SuperMicro cool, Rackable even better. We have HP! Who on this Earth deploys HP? Oh I forgot, they have an incredible package that includes strippers at the Gold Club in San Francisco.

Awesome. Its not what you buy, its what the sales rep is willing to "throw in" that counts.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 (down 2 from last week)
Shots : 10 (same as last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

Production trip after trip!

Wow, I thought last week was bad. I was getting back to normal with some crazy bugs for the shopping feature. Then over came Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir and I thought "Oh hell, not again". But sweet, he came and gave me a pat on the back and we had a shot of whiskey.

Literally seconds later his BB was ringing and then I was a tidal wave as BB's around the floor went off. "Oh fuck" were the only words he said before running over to DJ's area. DJ's team run the web site and they all can walk on water. Seriously, one guy was in Desert Storm and walked across a burning lake of oil to nail some sucker from the Republican Guard. How cool is that!

Turns out that American City Bank were coming for an inspection. Made sense after giving us a pile of green. What happened was that some dick from the operations team went to tidy up the data center, pulled the wrong plug and everything went down with it. Databases, network, you name it.

The guy was dressed down (rightly in my view) at the company meeting by Henry and then marched out of the building. I think that's right. You got to stand up and be accounted for in a place like this. With awesome opportunity comes great responsibility. And if you can't cut it then Henry has to show you the door.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 3 bottles (down five from last week)
Shots : 5 x Bourbon (three up from last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (2 x pizza, 2 x Una Masa)
Weight : 162 lbs