musings from the sleep deprived

The latest idea thats been swimming around in my head remind me of the early Lazarus Long novels. This one family had been tracking its most long-lived members, and was trying to get certain of them to breed to continue those traits, often seeking out specific other families or particular individuals to reinforce those traits in their children and future generations.

The idea I’ve been having is similar in nature. I wanted the initial … hmm … maybe even significant portion of the book to be flashbacks to earlier days. In each case, a particular character would be highlighted and focused on, with the eventual end of the chapter focusing on a particular character trait that they have, and also some insinuation that some mysterious party has made a note of that trait.

In the early chapters where all this is happening, I’m looking the mysterious party to take on a sort of illuminati type feel to it, or close to it.

I love technology. I really do. I think its one of the core things about me that just drives my being. Its a difficult field, constantly in motion and driven by a strange set of forces. On one side of the rolling ball, there are the monolith companies driving billions of dollars into research to come up with “the next big thing”. On the other side are the small companies, even sometimes single people … who hit it big with an amazing idea, new invention, or new use for some existing thing. Either way, there is this momentum of progress that keeps the geeks of the world slathering through their webpages, tech news sites and magazines to see what toy they get to play with next.

I’ve had discussions with folks in the past who think we should still be swinging around in the trees by our tails, happily spending our days with simple thoughts. There’s something to be said for that, I agree. Simplicity has its rewards … life remains predictable, stable and comfortable. On the other hand, there’s an inate curiosity in me that has to know what the framerate I can push is using the latest video card with Far Cry, or what improvements I can get in my rendering projects by switching to a 3GHz processor instead of a 2GHz one. I mean, I really want to know. Y’know? No? Oh well.

This is also a pretty complex general topic. There’s all kinds of mini-asides that can be made about technology … our dependence on it, research driving its advancement, controls on it, and so on, so I fully expect to address many more of those topics at some later time. For now, though … I just wanted to be clear about my fascination with it, and leave it at that.

I currently work for SUN Microsystems as a Data Center Architect. Or a Systems Administrator. Or as a generalist of one sort or another. It seems to vary depending on what day of the week it is and how many conference calls are scheduled.

I expect I’m going to probably have quite a bit to say about my employer in the near future, but for now, I just wanted to comment on one trend going on internally. There is a current push trying to get the employees to blog, and if/when they do, to adhere to certain guidelines about what they say about SUN and so on. I’m not precisely sure what started that idea, or why they felt the need to respond to it, but they’ve provided a portal for SUN employees who wish to blog on SUN’s dime (hardware and bandwidth) . For the record, this is not one of those.

Immediately after making this resource available, there was another flurry of notices about what they felt folks should and should not say about the company in these blogs. Hmm… I’m still formulating my thoughts on that. There seems to be a conflicting principle present in those statements.

Blogs seem to be, at their very core nature, sort of free-flowing streams of consciousness expressing the feelings of a particular individual (or perhaps a group) on a loosely defined set of topics. It seems reasonable to me that if one of those topics might be employment, or someone’s relationship to their employer, that those streams of consciousness may very well, at times, express some elements of discontent. This is a nice, flowery pleasant way of saying that if someone isn’t HAPPY with their job, their blog is going to reflect those feelings. So, enter SUN and its desire to have the public opinion of the company be a good one.

They want people who work for them, who also happen to blog, to not disparage the company in their remarks and comments. Suddenly, this mechanism for expression has a filter, or watchdog. That seems to defeat the very purpose.

That having been said… I’ll go a bit further on the topic. If I, as a loyal employee of said company, want to do my best to have the public (and oh … say … the financial analyst community) view of the company be a favorable one, since it also benefits me personally when that is true, isn’t it in my best interest to not disparage them as well? I’d think so.

Finally, my own stance I think… I do want SUN to succeed. I want to see the analyst view of the company improve, their stock prices go up, my own vested interest in the company to benefit from those events. So no… I won’t say bad things about the company that might influence those elements in a negative way. What I will go on to talk about, though, is how some of the internal machinations of the company impact my life, and how the changes they go through internally impact me. Issues of morale, RIFs (reductions in force), management movement, company strategy, product placement, marketing and publicly issued statements all seem to be fair game and topics for discussion.

If you also happen to work for SUN, and find something I say in here objectionable, please feel free to let me know so we can discuss it further, and assess the impact of those statements.

Every year I do this exercise to see whats needed to fill out a “well-rounded” bar that can suit most needs for the folks that come over and want to mix drinks. Most of the books for bartenders list way too much, or are so outdated that they still think drinks from the 60’s are en vogue. Since we generally don’t drink too much hard liquor at home, this is, to some extent, an attempt to match our bar up to the tastes of the people who will visit.

I do enjoy Scotch (single malt), and good tequila, so there are several types of each. Beyond that, its mostly an attempt to have a good solid set of mixers so people can play around and try something new if they want.

Invariably, the things we end up using the most of are shots (tequila, jaeger, rumple, goldschlagger, etc) and the ingredients in the most common party drinks, like margueritas. There is usually a least one instance of scotch tasting for the expert and uninitiated. After reading this, it sounds like we’re a bunch of alcoholics. That isn’t really accurate. There are a few people who maybe go a bit too far, and they are invariably labelled as the year’s party victims (there’s always at least one), but most people keep it under control.

I don’t consider myself a heavy drinker. I drink socially (never alone), and usually about once or twice a week. I occasionally have a beer with a meal as well, but not normally. For all that though, when I do drink, I’m sort of a snob about it, and want very fine tasting stuff. Single malt scotches, never blends. Anejo tequilas, small batch beers that tend towards the very hoppy (IPA, ESB, etc). I’d sooner die than have to stomach a mass produced beer (the Bud, Coors and Millers of the world). I’d rather spend that very small amount of time I am drinking enjoying it. Just like life.