Funerals and Servers

The past fortnight had been a rather dreary affair, in many cases. Like most corporate salaryman, there was a large number of meetings mostly crammed within the past week, and the week before that I was again down with some kind of combination of a head-cold.

While I acknowledge that meetings are necessary as a means of communication for the different organs of the organisation to synchronise their actions towards a higher goal (often known as the corporate goal), but the downside of such meetings of course is that those of us who are quite low on the corporate ladder will need to find some other means of getting what we need to do done. But I'm mumbling again.

Two significant events occurred last week, and I will write a little on each here. The first is that I attended the wake of a colleague's parent, and the other was the handling of the servers that were finally in.

I'll be blunt. I'm not a fan of attending funerals, particularly of people that I don't really know that well. It is not that I find funerals morbid -- they are actually interesting, but more on that later -- but it's just that it is one of those many situations in life where one gets thrust into a crowd of strangers that are related by some rather obscure relationship that no one really knows about beforehand. I don't really like being in a group of strangers, especially if there is no real goal other than to mingle and ``network'', execu-speak for making tenuous connections in the hope that one day the connection may prove to be useful for business. This is of no difference; I felt a little discomfort not because there was a dead person in the room, but that I had to sit there and act interested among a group of people that I have little to no understanding of, even though many of them are my colleagues.

But the social discomfort aside, the funeral was an eye-opener of sorts. It had, in some sense, confirmed what I had earlier thought about funerary rites in general -- they were made for the living more than they were made for the dead; really, would you actually care what was being said and done given that you're already dead? The colleague whose parent the wake was for spent some time recalling about the parent's life, and how the last stages of the journey were like. We just sat there and listened politely, with little to no questions being asked -- what was there to ask about, really, on a person that we hardly knew ever? But it was obvious that as my colleague went on with the description, there was a certain sense of detachment -- there was awe in the voice, and little to none of that depressive feel that one would commonly associate with anything funereal.

Maybe I do find a little more solace among the dead than among the living.

On a less morbid sounding note, I had my first taste of the steps in deploying real servers in a real data centre. It was, to say the least, fascinating. Thankfully I didn't have to physically do the set up -- we had vendors to do that kind of thing. I was, however, exposed to the whole bureaucracy that was involved just to help get things into place, and that alone was worth a lesson or two. I am contemplating if I should get certification for specific server products as a means of building a set of standard skills that I can easily demonstrate to others, as opposed to relying on pure bravado and hackery to achieve. But all these certification things cost money, and I'm not sure if it is something that I can easily get sponsorship for... it's something to think about anyway.

And that's all I care to write for the moment. Till next time I suppose.

Brute in a Suit

``You can put a brute in a suit, but he will never be a gentleman---he just looks like a brute, in a suit.''

That's the kind of feeling I get each time I put on my work clothes and head out to the office for yet another day of helping towards building a cool system. I was never a part of the gentry; I was not of the high-born, even if it is actually to be possible to be a part of the modern nobility in a young nation like Singapore. If I had to choose the role in society that I have been bred for, I would go as far as saying being that of a Knight, with some notions of what a high-born ought to do, but being of a more practical temperament and pragmatic attitude towards life.

Not to mention also the general need to have to always ``fight'', and the whole code of behaviour that I somehow manage to keep stowed away at some part of my mind, which makes it neigh impossible for me to attempt truly reprehensible actions even unconsciously.

At work, I had to wonder about how to deploy something on a CentOS system, used as a proxy to RHEL. It felt like a throwback to an earlier period of GNU/Linux system use, almost like the time when I was running Slackware, where I had to basically grab and build most of the packages that I needed. Thankfully, there was still the presence of yum which helped reduce much of the problems of dependencies. However, the CentOS/RHEL universe of packaged binaries is significantly smaller than the multiverse that is Debian/Ubuntu, and having worked with the latter architecture for so long, I have been fat from the ease of using apt-get to get me whatever I want from the multiverse.

So it took me a while to figure out how to get the things that I need for deployment. It really didn't help that I had been running a rather nasty head cold for nearly a week and a half; it was almost impossible to read the mountains of documentation that were necessary for the understanding of what was going on and extract the salient points that helped with the undertaking. I was on the verge of delirium, but still managed to pull enough sanity together to get some things done. That easily cost me around two to three days of good work.

After writing so much here, one question remains. What's the theme of this update? That, I will leave it for now and walk away from the keyboard to get some much needed sleep.