So I’m writing from a room at the Hilton, somewhere in the northwestern part of the DC metro area. I’m here for a 5-day training course on the most exciting topic in this corner of the alpha quadrant: Oracle Database backup, recovery, and tuning. I mean, I can’t begin to describe to you the joy I am feeling right now.
Seriously, I’m not a huge fan of traveling or sitting in a classroom for 8 hours straight. Here are some things I don’t like about traveling:
- Eating like crap for 5 straight days
- Paying for Internet access
- Not being at home in my cave
However, there are some good qualities:
- A fancy hotel stay that is paid for, including a king-sized bed
- Spending only some of the money my company gives me for mileage and food, and keeping the rest
- Not having to go to work for a whole week (hence, not having to pay for gas)
I’m sure a lot of the people I’m in class with feel the same way, except they’re all middle-aged and have families. And that’s the thing about these IT training courses. They’re filled with middle-aged people who are getting in late in the game. They are the career switchers, the people who finally realized that there’s money in IT. And that only means one thing: they’re not nerds. Nerds like to learn about many different technologies, and they do it in their spare time. Most of these people are only there to learn what they need for their job. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s hard to find someone to relate to.
Alas, I am learning things that will help me at my job, and that is the point. Also, I like MySQL more and more every day.
That is all.
Technology is an investment. You spend a couple hours learning how to do something new, and hope this new piece of technology will save you time in the long run, or provide you with some cool new widget that is worth the time you put in. But with every investment, there is a break-even point where the return on the project isn’t worth the time and money put into it. For most people, this break-even point is fairly low. The potential return isn’t worth “the hassle.” Some people are able to see the long term investment potential. Their threshold for technology hassle is much higher than other people. We call these people “nerds.”
I may have reached my break-even point. The time and money I have been investing in these projects, specifically FreeNAS, are not worth the potential payoff. FreeNAS has continued to frustrate me, and I feel that only by spending huge amounts of time learning the underlying technologies will I be able to get it to do what I want. My FreeNAS project is just an example of my recent technology frustrations. Tonight I found out Windows didn’t want to recognize the file system on a hard drive. So if I want all 460 gigabytes of data, I will have to recover it all using shady data recovery tools, something I have only painful experiences with. In response to what I considered poor planning and engineering on Microsoft’s part, I proclaimed that I would immediatly switch to Ubuntu, using XP only for gaming. At the time, this sounded good, but my experience with Ubuntu has also been frustrating.
I guess I’m at the point where learning new technologies might not be worth it, unless I’m getting paid for it. I’m taking a serious look at it. I might just need a break to evaulate what my goals should be, and I might be right back at it soon enough. But maybe in a couple weeks I’ll be looking to sell some equipment.
I know a prime working incentive for googlers is their 20% and a lot of good products have been developed as a result (ie GMail), but I think the most recent addition to GMail Labs is seriously stretching the idea. For those of you who don’t know, Google released Mail-Goggles which is designed to save us from sending unwanted e-mails after trundling back from a night at the pub. I don’t know about you, but if I were so inclined to talk to someone while inebriated I’d be more likely to use the phone in my pocket instead of waiting to walk home and then operate a keyboard. And why math. Its already hated by the vast majority of people so why should we continue to give it a bad rap by involving it with drunken frustrations. But then again some of us actually get better at math after having a few beers. Maybe highest level asks for a structured proof of something interesting like the Heine-Borel Theorem or its close cousin the Bolzano-Weierstrauss Theorem.
Being the laziest member of the Sector, I realized that I shouldn’t try for long in depth posts because they inevitable sit unfinished in the draft stage for weeks on end until I delete them because I forgot where I was going. Since my last post, the 46th mersenne prime found by UCLA was officially announced and is a whopping 13 million digits. What is even more interesting is that it was found by a cluster of 75 XP machines magically working together without so much as a hint of BSoD.
Secondly, for those of you who aren’t readers of Slashdot, DARPA recently released a list of what they consider the 23 toughest math problems. Essentially its a call for research proposals for tough questions the average person doesn’t even know exist and have been unsolved for years (in some cases centuries). Its actually a fascinating list that also includes several of the Millenium problems (such as the Hodge Conjecture and the Riemann Hypothesis). In my opinion the most interesting of the questions are actually those that involve multiple subjects instead of pure mathematics such as the creation of scalable game theory or the creation of accurate models to predict evolving large scale networks. I’m actually excited to see what kind of results come out of the proposals because even if none of the questions are fully solved I think the initiative can still be a success by helping jump start further proposals and grants into solving these and future questions.