Like it says: no news. That's the latest from work these days. I'm still hanging in there, doing whatever it is that I do these days. So far, that's been everything but sweeping up at the end of the day. Oh... wait. I did that too once. At least I don't have to clean the toilets. Never say never, though. If I tell anyone at work that I had a job in high school cleaning toilets at a transmission shop, I'm sure I'll get picked to do that at the office too. They're always pleased when I tell them I have experience in something. They love the concept of "doing more with less". It's just so sexy these days.
I just wish I knew what it is I was supposed to be "offically" doing -- even if that official word was only good for a couple weeks or something. Lately, I do a little programming, a little fixing customer issues, a little internal IT stuff... and a lot of talking about doing in between any other odd job that pops up. An example is in order.
Yesterday I was the engineer on call up at our data center in Irvine. I didn't know I had to be the on-call that day when I left the house. I got the page midway during my 45 minute commute to work. It's not like I mind driving another 45 minutes to Irvine. (The hour and a half coming back at night isn't so fun though.) But some warning would be nice. I had plans to talk about stuff yesterday. No biggie.
So anyway, I get to Irvine and I'm trying to be productive and get my remote management stuff working in the midst of telling the Ops guys to reboot NT machines and/or restart IIS. (I kinda like playing BOFH sometimes, I admit it.) We're trying to push "one dot oh" of our software out the door. There's really no official version number. We just want to release something so we can show everyone how handy it would be to let the programmers write programs instead of work a broom or do backups. And just when I get some cool bit worked out, I get an email asking me to walk across the street and "look at the condos". (There is a rather large apartment complex -- excuse me, "Executive Suites" -- across from our data center.) That's as much detail as I got. Look at them. So that was enough trying to write code for that day. I could see how this was going to play out. I shut down my editor, closed my compiler and ssh windows, and left nothing but Pine running. This was going to be me squeezing info out of mgmt, via email, in order to put out some fire.
See, I know that our data center people are not liking the fact that we're using an office space for storage. So I think my company wanted me to find a condo in order to store the piles of shit we moved from the La and SD data centers and just threw into this room. Really: there's just this one room with piles of shit in it. Except for a couple cabinets with doors, the rest of it is just stuff we crammed in there since we were in such a hurry. Miles of cable, tons of 1U rails, buckets of screws, that sort of thing. I could just see us hauling that crap over to these fancy apartments. We'd be like the Beverly Hillbillies if they had servers. "Jethro, make sure you git all that there CAT5 and stuff it up agin the closet..."
I went across the street and played like I was a big shot company guy. My story was that we had traveling executive/salemen types that need to show our data center warez early in the morning sometimes and getting up from San Diego was hard in the early morning so we needed executive suites to park them in over night. They actually bought it. I got applications, took a tour, saw the workout room, looked at the pool, all that. I even turned on the kitchen faucet, flushed the toilet and "Ooohed" and "Ahhhed" at the Corian counters when I was touring the "Brushwood" model. Just because I felt like Abraham, my guide, deserved as much. I had to stay in character, after all. I got the docs, brought them back to the colo and wrote up a review of the condos. Word comes 30 minutes later to "rent one... today". Have you ever tried to rent a horribly expensive condo (about two bucks a square foot, in case you were wondering), under a corporate account, when you have no signing authority and don't know any other details, with no money, in two hours? It's that kind of thing that makes my day fun. What the hell, I get paid pretty well, right? I went back over, talked to another rental lady, sent some faxes, got more info, and set everything up. I could write a personal check for $132 and get keys to a fairly nice apartment in my company's name tomorrow by nine am. Spiffy.
But I don't think we'll rent one after all. They told the colo people that we're going to blow $1300 on an apartment to store our junk. I guess the colo guys thought we were crazy. After all, who needs to store things in a high-tech data center? I have to call back Abraham and tell them that the salesmen won't be coming.
In the meantime, I'm going to try and force the development thing. I'm toying with the idea of working from home for an entire week. I think I can bust out my stuff in a week if I really pack it in. Then I can show my ersatz boss that we have a thing everyone will like and that they would be wise to continue funding further development since it'll make everyone's life easier. It's a theory anyway. All I really want is to write software and invent cool stuff. Failing that, I'd just like to know what it is that I'm going to be doing. I'm getting too old to have a mystery job every day. It's wearing on my soul.
...and it's called Enfrastructure.
So I'm up here at Enfrastructure for the day. In swanky Aliso Viejo. Land of the SUV and golf buddies and goat cheese pizza and seeing and Being Seen. This place is every bit as absurd as any of those concepts. I have some down time before our meetings, so I just took a brief walk around to see what was what. I found a breakroom, if you can call it that. I'm sure I've screwed up the chi or the feng or whatever of the place by labeling it a mere breakroom. This room is to breakroom as Aeron is to beanbag. But more on the Aerons later... this place is lousy with them. I decided to get a cup of coffee and take a moment to truly appreciate the museum-quality example of "dotcom" excess typified in this one room.
They have an automatic coffee machine, with free (free as in umbrella, it would seem) ceramic mugs. It makes coffee in three strengths. It makes espresso and cappuccino. It makes tea. I only got a coffee-flavored coffee, but I'll try the other types next. The machine is black and stainless, and sits on a Corian brand counter next to a complete set of built-in SubZero fridges. Again, stainless. Embedded in this counter is a ceramic (or stone?) sink with one of those $800 German faucets I wanted to get for my house. It has the little steel squirting attachment as well. Above the counter are wall-to-wall brushed stainless steel cupboards. Below the counter are more built-in stainless cupboards and a Bosch dishwasher like my folks have. Halogens suspended on wires illuminate the whole affair.
If you walk around the breakfast bar fronting all this, you get to the waist-high Ikea stools and tables. Blonde wood and brushed aluminum on porcelain flooring. Those tables are sectioned off from the hallway by a raked sand and stones Zen garden, complete with "water stones" (I didn't make up the labeling -- that what it says) in a gentle waterfall configuration. The net effect is a tiny babbling brook type of noise which makes you want to pee. I assume it's supposed to be soothing. On one of the little tables next to the breakfast bar is a tiny little banzai tree set in some stones and a coffee table-sized book. The book's title is "Zen". In case anyone was dense enough to miss the Zen-ness the first moment they walked in, they spell it out for you. I guess marketing people use this room as well.
On the wall hangs abstract art. I think they are supposed to depict flowers, but they look like 25 square feet of random colors to me. The art is lit with halogens as well. I didn't really expect to see a price, but I looked reflexively. I also automatically wondered how they got all the art in the room (since some of them are too big for the elevator) and how someone would get one out and to their house if they happened to buy it. These thoughts surprised me. So I looked at the art closely. It's made of real paint. I suppose the artist who painted it would be one of the smartest people involved with the Internet Revolution. He made money just like Levi Strauss did, and will almost certainly outlive this silly company. There's a lesson in that, and some advice as well, I think.
This one breakroom, (one of out of five in this one building of three), is on an exterior wall. That wall is made out of glass, floor to ceiling, with brushed aluminum frames between the panes. It's supposed to look completely open, and the effect is fairly complete. Tracy wouldn't want to be anywhere near it for fear of falling. Below on the ground is a garden/park of sorts. It has tropical plants surrounding a dual walkway to a middle bit which has another Zen-ish sand thing with rocks and a couple secluded benches. There's also some more fountains there, but I don't know if they have water stones since I can't read the signage from this far up. The whole thing has a vaguely Japanese look about it. I got the feeling that if I were Japanese, I would be offended. It's hard to explain, but it's far too obvious and garish and overstated to be anything but some American's idea of what a high-tech Asian garden should be like. Imagine a Japanese thinking Disneyland Tokyo is what a cross-section of America is like and you get the idea.
Walking back to our offices I pass more art on the wall. They are smaller than the art in the breakroom, but in a similar style and similarly lit. I didn't look, but I assume that they are real paint as well. This was a smart artist. I estimate it would take me about 20 minutes to replicate that painting, or create another of the same style. Maximum profits come from minimal investments of time for this painter. Buckets of paint, stacks of canvas and I could send all the kids in my neighborhood to college. I would really love to paint myself a power boat and a summer home. The person who decorated this place is P.T. Barnum's wet dream. Maybe it's the Venture Capitalists who funded this silliness who are the real suckers, though.
I take a right and pass by the receptionist for this floor. She is sitting in a wrap-around desk thing (Ikea again). She has a 20" flat panel monitor. It's probably hooked up to a 1.4 GHz Pentium with a huge drive and lots of RAM. Makes AOL IM crash less often, I'm sure. She's on an Aeron chair, and there's another one right next to her. Guess you need a spare sometimes. She has halogen desk lamps (completing the look -- did I expect anything different?). I'm looking at like $7,500 worth of stuff, easy, not including the art (impressionist foliage) behind her on the wall. One receptionist... seven grand. One receptionist, seven grand. Seven grand to outfit one receptionist. Insanity. She looked at me funny when I started laughing.
I took the steel and glass elevator to the bottom floor, where the cafe is. You get there by taking a left out of the elevator and then a right just after the spa. Yeah, you can get naked and get in a sauna and then get a rub-down. They have appointments every 15 minutes. How can you have an RSI when you've just been freshly Rolfed? In the cafe they have the same soft-pop music playing as they do in the hallways upstairs. In fact, now that I think about it, everywhere not inside an office has this ubiquitous music. It's supposed to be hip, I think. It's like being in a Gap commercial. Anyway, I walk through the glass doors (labeled "Cafe" in the hippest looking sans-serif font you can imagine; these labels are everywhere) to find a sea of blonde wood Ikea tables and matching modern chairs. Each one has a little banzai plant on it like they had in the breakroom. I couldn't find any books laying out, so I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be Zen or not. To my left is more glass walls looking out onto the garden I saw from above. You can't see the fountains or the tables, just plants and the paths going to them. It looks like a jungle -- I'm in a little island of excess. To my right is a bar. It has beer taps and wine racks and stemware and all the normal bar type stuff you'd expect. Next to that is a Starbucks. Yep, they have an official Starbucks. Farther down on the right is the place where you get food. All steel and halogen and light wood. I didn't look at the food. Organic soy-based feta spinach wraps I'm sure. It made me want a chili cheese dog.
Also on the walls at major entry points are flat panel plasma displays. They're Sony displays, and they cost about $14,000 each. I noted the model number and looked them up. I saw about 25 of them when I was there. That's 25 of these 14K monitors from the front door to the cafe, then from the elevator to the office where I was. That's about 100 yards total. That's one thousand dollars a foot. And this from a company that's currently downsizing. All these monitors have dynamic cycling content playing on them. One time I saw a 3D exploding view of the building on one, with a red flashing "You Are Here" arrow superimposed on it. Maybe a floor plan etched into a solid gold sheet wasn't an expensive enough map so they had to go the multimedia route. Another time I saw this vaguely New Age montage of all the companies who have offices here, and why it was such a happy place of the future. I saw what looked like a music video on another. I also remember seeing a still image of a wooded scene. Sometimes you can't pay enough for paint apparently. It was Big Brother feeling, not happy feeling.
I went back upstairs just shaking my head. All this brushed metal and brand-name equipment. I even saw a Kinko's in here. No wonder there's financial trouble in the dotcom world. This place cost a mint just to build, much less outfit. How they expected to pack enough dotcoms in this building to offset the cost of the initial outlay is beyond me. Most of the offices seem empty. I walked around a little more, and saw more of the same, so I won't bother to describe it. Garish excess everywhere. I thought Qualcomm was bad, but money once flowed here like water from a burst dam. They had big plans and big dreams and somehow they got a hold of a haystack of cash. And now the dream is pretty much ending; you can see the cracks starting to show. It's like what you read about during the fall of an empire. Lots of excesses, like people feel as though they can delay the inevitable with style over substance. Put one more coat of paint on the peeling layers. Print the marketing materials on glossier paper. Pour more money down the drain and it will eventually clog up. I'm left with a bad taste in my mind, like I'm whoring and pandering to these people. These crass Southern Californians with their BMWs and Lexii and good hair and expensive chairs. Their unimaginative style over any real substance. I'm supposed to be impressed and instead I'm just appalled and embarrassed. These are the kind of people that will lay employees off with 1/20th the thought it took to make the purchasing decisions to buy the most expensive kitchen they could find for no valid reason whatsoever. The worst sense of dread came when I realized that I might have to work here every day.
I didn't see one person in black leather the whole time I was there. The facade is not complete, and it is all just an illusion. So I decided to steal the coffee cup I got from the expensive machine. I want to get a little excess for myself while I can.
So the guy replaced the cable modem. I told him to look at that first before checking the lines for signal quality (my friend Greg had an older cable modem and it had very similar problems). So he saw my five year old modem and got me a new one after I steered him into the thought. It probably helped that he saw my office first and asked a couple questions about what I did; we even ended up talking about Linux after it was all in place. He especially liked the command line history of bash... :-). The new cable modem works like a champ.
He had me run MSN's speed test app. It says I'm getting 1519.6 kbps. I've run it a couple times over the last half hour and that's about what it always says.
I decided to test it using something besides their JavaScript thing. I created a one MB file (true megabytes, not HDD megs) and scp'ed it to and from 27.org and toro. Here's what I got:
| 27.org | toro | |
| upload: | 34 seconds | 34 seconds |
| download: | 3 seconds | 4 seconds |