Tag Archives: Work

2020 In Review

It’s not saying a lot to say that 2020 was an odd year.  There was a lot going on, and I certainly had a lot in my life that wasn’t planned for.  Still, I’m still here, still healthy and doing well.  As usual, this is the first part of my end-of-year blog posts and I’ll talk through the year through the lens of how it went, where I’ll save how I did on my resolutions for the next post. Continue reading 2020 In Review

You’ve Got to Start Some Time

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down to write.  So long, in fact, that I just noticed my 2020 blog notebook is empty, even though it’s already September.  There are a lot of reasons for this, and they all boil down to “I haven’t made time”.  When I look back to when I was writing regularly (not just the scattered posts of last summer) and further back to when I was posting regularly, I have to ask myself what the difference is.  Then, I laugh, because there are a lot of differences.

There is, of course, that the world is different now.

Continue reading You’ve Got to Start Some Time

Looking Back at 2019 – The Broad Strokes

As the end of the year approaches again, I start to think about how the year went in the big picture sense.  As usual, I’ll have my resolutions post next (the last blog-day of the year), but I do still like to take the time to review everything else.  At the top level, this year was pretty good – I’m happy, healthy, and able to keep a positive outlook.  On the other hand, there has been a lot of craziness, stress, and rough spots that made the year less than ideal.  I’ll talk a bit about each below the fold.

Continue reading Looking Back at 2019 – The Broad Strokes

Looking Back at 2018 – In General

This time of year is always a time for me to look back and figure out how the year went.  When I think about it, there’s always the stuff that I intended to do, and the stuff that I did in the in-between.  I’ll write about my resolutions in the next post, but here I just wanted to write about how everything that wasn’t what I was planning at the turn of the year. Continue reading Looking Back at 2018 – In General

Dedication to the Job

Alasdair Stuart said something quite poignant at the end of Escape Pod 391 (that I just listened to the other day), and it really resonated with me.  It made me think about my job, and why I show up every morning at 7:00 and leave at 4:30, or 5:00, or 6:00 without a single word that my job is draining the life from me…  …Because it’s not.

Here’s Alasdair’s snippet: Continue reading Dedication to the Job

Looking Back at 2017 – In General

Well, here it is, the last week of 2017, so it’s time to kick off my retrospective of the year.  All things considered, this year was pretty decent to me if a bit on the rough side.  I made some pretty significant life changes, and managed to come out the other side in good spirits.

Here are a couple of sweeping generalizations around how 2017 worked out: Continue reading Looking Back at 2017 – In General

Looking back at 2015: Part 2

Health, Work, and Life Balance

Over the course of 2015, I feel like I have been able to improve my healthy habits better than I ever have. I’m exercising more, eating better, and generally taking better care of my body. While my habits and work are still mostly sedentary in nature (and I don’t expect that to change), I feel better about the time that I take to be healthier, even if it cuts into all those things.

As with most people my age, my job takes up most of my time, but I still love what I do. I work with great people, I get to do cool things, and I feel good about the work that I do at the end of the day. I don’t know that I have anything more to say here that I haven’t already said – it’s good. Continue reading Looking back at 2015: Part 2

A Day in the Life: Part 2

This is a continuation of my series on a typical day in my life. The first part is here.  This part sets up what my day job is like in probably more detail than anyone wants to know. I’ll talk about why I love my job in another aside.

Another Morning

Once I get to work, my day isn’t quite as time stamped and regular as the rest of the morning, but there are some key things that I’ve come to count on. I make breakfast in the work kitchen, and start getting caught up on my morning e-mail. Ops gets a lot of automated e-mail (including normal e-mail, it’s not uncommon for us to get 200-400 e-mails/day), however, a lot of these convey valuable status on the state of the system, so it’s useful to know first thing in the morning. Additionally, we have some daily processing that gets kicked off at ~6:00am, since this is in the critical path for a lot of our near-real-time products, it’s good to have a pulse on that processing earlier rather than later. Typically, gathering an understanding of the state of the system can take until 9:00 or longer depending on what’s going on.

The Operations stand-up is at 9:00am every morning. This is (in theory) a quick, 15 minute, standing meeting with my team to organize the morning and keep everyone on the team apprised of the goings-on of the system. Each day, someone is scheduled to be the ECS lead (responsible for the care and feeding of the EOSDIS Core System – our primary data management system for NASA data), while a second person is scheduled as the V0 lead, which (for historical reasons) is the backup (responsible for our non-ECS operations). During the stand-up, the prior lead and backup provide anything notable from the previous day, as well as any outstanding items. Then, everyone else statuses on their tasks, and any impacts from their work the rest of the team needs to know about.

Continue reading A Day in the Life: Part 2