IT LIVES!!!!

Yes that is right folks the trial run results are in and the car mp3 player passed!!! Several cool points were earned when I showed it off at the Linux meeting last night. It is pretty slick if I do say so myself. A few problems have washed out and a few nice ideas have surfaced as well. First and formost at the end of my init scripts I will be adding a small sound bite which well signify the readiness of the system. I am getting some static from the hardware, but I think once I build the case for it and place the RF sender on the outside that will be solved as well. Another noticable thing is this… if you are looking for a city with some dead air space DO NOT come to Bowling Green. There is crap (and I really mean crap) on every other click on a digital radio. The only reason there aren’t ones on the other clicks is that is would have bleed over. When you find what you think is an empty station here it is only as long as you don’t drive 2 miles, because stations fade in and fade out so bad around here it is next to impossible to tell if there is actually nothing on there or if it is just blocked by the nearest hill.
On the topic of work… I have started finding myself getting annoyed over things. Not all the time, but more than originally. I think it stems from one thing and pretty much one thing only. Managers suck!!! I know if you are a geek reading this that really isn’t anything new to you, but I need to get it out. In my world it is geeks that run the stuff because geeks are the ones that know the stuff. That is not the way that it works. Geeks are told what to do by managers who know less than the geeks, I have noticed that sometimes they know nothing about the stuff. Managers decide what to do based upon two key things: does this cost money, and will this piss anyone off. That is all there is. I have found that at afni there are a lot of times that things are done because if we change them it will piss the people that set them up off.
Example: Our network sucks. There really isn’t any way to sugar coat that. Here is about what I have figured it out to look like (there are more hubs in each layer). This is horrible, you should see the collision lights flickering all over the place during the day. Plus we found out that there are going to be adding more to the mix. But no one will make it better because it would make the inter-networking guys mad, that and it costs money. I mean I don’t think a network is ever fast enough for a true geek, but this one is really bad, poor design and it is out growing the capacity of the system. The funny thing is that there are no machines on the network that do not support 100mbit, but the hubs limit us to 10mbit. I mean even if they were running at 100 it would be better because the bigger packets would flush through faster and allow all the keystrokes for the remote sessions and stuff to get through faster. As it is now, we can slug whole pods by ghosting a machine on it, because it just waterfalls through the hubs slowing down all network traffic practically through the whole building.