Life Requires a Sense of Humor

Aris, my roommate, just now left for work. He’s working a full day even though it’s a Saturday. He just reminded me that this is another reason he’s not paid enough…

Here’s a snippet of the conversation we had right before he walked out the door:

Jeremy: Why are you renaming your windows domain? That’s a lot of work, and complicated… reconfiguring all the clients and servers…

Aris: The thing is, our domain is messed up: your domain is supposed to match an internet domain that exists and that you own. Our domain is set to thecompany.net which doesn’t exist; so we need to change it to thecompany.com.

Jeremy: Why don’t you just buy thecompany.net?

Aris: Um… because… *no answer*

Jeremy: Because we’re not decision-makers and we just do what we’re told… I would do the same thing I guess.

Aris: This is why we should start our own company. To do things that make sense. I don’t think that’s so much to ask.

Dovetails nicely into a conversation I had with my good friend Joel over lunch yesterday. He is the a lead software engineer for a UPS company and is the technical lead on a major project to provide a complete power management solution for a new airport that’s being built. Sadly, due to the organization of his company, somehow the regional sales force of the parent company has authority to make technical and architectural decisions. That’s just asking for trouble.

Apparently the client originally wanted “redundant servers”… so when he flew out there and did the initial implementation he setup two servers in parallel. He also added a little code into the software itself so that the servers were aware of each other and kept their configurations in sync. Now it turns out that they expected “clustering” which to them apparently means a single IP address. Now “clustering” is a sexy word that makes you sound very sophisticated and technologically savvy. However the sales team apparently doesn’t quite understand how “active-passive” is a step down from two servers essentially running “active-active”. *sigh*

Funny how working in the field of technology affords so many opportunities to pour your best into doing something that doesn’t make sense at all. :) ‘Tis the pedestrian and mundane reality of life.

Well back to class prep now… I’m rewriting a DBA class for a customer in Las Vegas so that I can teach their developers a bit about Oracle. Hopefully I can teach these guys to do a few things that DO make sense! (And hopefully I can finish up soon because I plan to go listen to some awesome live Chicago blues and do a little swing dancing tonight!)