what’s new?

Not a whole lot. I’m still busy at work. The pace is quickening and my todo list is growing. For every thing I scratch off, I replace it with two more things. It will all be worth it…I have a feeling that Pirates is going to be an overwhelming success…or at least I really hope so. After all the time and energy that the team has poured into it, it would be a shame if it didn’t pan out. I work with some incredibly talented individuals. The developers, artists, and fellow operations folks are all extremely gifted. I can’t say that I have ever enjoyed going to work this much in my life.

The only thing that even comes close is when I was all-starring for In-N-Out. To work the amount of hours that I do now (and did when I was all-starring), you truly have to enjoy what you are doing, otherwise you just get burnt out.

I am learning so much along the way. I’m no sys admin by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m learning a lot along the way since I’m somewhat responsible for our boxes. And I have three really great sys admins on my team that are a great resource. I think the best part is that they aren’t afraid of letting me try to solve something myself the first time, then help guide me through it if I can’t quite make it happen on my own.

I’ve been writing a lot of perl lately. Lots of stuff for cacti, our monitoring tool of choice. I’ve been implementing a perl library to simplify a lot of the custom scripts that we are using to feed cacti data. My goal is to make our custom scripts easy to maintain and make it easy to spin up additional graphs.

Python. I’m no python hack, but I think I could be. One of the guys at work couldn’t get over the fact that I default back to perl because I just can’t stand the python syntax just yet. I love curly braces, dollar signs, and the $_ variable. I think my main problem with python is the indentation thing and lack of curly braces. That just seems so weird to me. I can’t get over it. I’m going to sit down with a couple of the dev’s and really talk about it sometime next week. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up being a game developer after all.

PHP is the bane of my existance right now. I really wish I was as comfortable with it as I am with perl. I am writing a web-based tool that our developers can paste their cvs commit output logs into and my tool will parse it and send out the appropriate messages. I tried doing it all in PHP, but I just couldn’t. I had to use PERL to do the actual parsing of the cvs logs. It’s better that way anyways because I made the perl script intelligent enough to work on a file or via command line input, so I will get more use out of it. I should commit it to our scripts repository so our other publisher can use it. Who knows…maybe I’ll post it here for all to view. If I could make someone else’s job easier, it would be worth it.

I don’t know what else is really new, interesting, or exciting. I’m considering getting a tattoo again. Two of them actually. Symmetry is important to me so I’m considering getting two red and black nautical stars…one on each ankle. Low enough that if I were to pull up a pair of crew-length socks that they would cover them completely, but high enough that if I am wearing tennis shoes with low socks (the kind you can’t see above the shoe) that you would be able to see them. We’ll see if I actually have the balls to go through with it. I’ll probably wuss out like I always do.