Category Archives: The Plaid Mentat

The Plaid Mentat

Hacking My Blog

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Starting on Black Friday and going solid through Cyber Monday (after which it slowed only a little), my blog has been getting hit by a distributed brute-force password attack. All weekend, I would get pings that WordPress had blocked yet another IP address, and I couldn’t help but be of two minds. On the one hand, I had to laugh a little – over two hundred IP addresses had been blocked, and I don’t believe they would be able to brute force a 150 bit password with four guesses each. On the other hand, it’s not the IP addresses that are blocked that you have to worry about; it’s the ones that weren’t and succeeded, or, worse, exploited some other vulnerability. Was the brute force password attempts just a distraction?

This gives rise to the question, “are my security measures enough?” Since I was thinking about them anyway, I went ahead and took the time to upgrade a few things that were lacking, and took a hard look at some of the other things I could do. Continue reading Hacking My Blog →

The Plaid Mentat

MileHiCon 47

Last weekend, I attended MileHiCon – a Science Fiction literature convention in Denver, CO. Jess and I have been going to MileHiCon pretty regularly for a while, but this is the first time that she has attended as a participant. Now that she’s a published author (and because she volunteered), she participated on and moderated some panels and fan forums which was pretty neat. For my part, I went to somewhat fewer panels this year, caught the 20 pound Critter Crunch tournament, and sought out some of the lower-key con activities to avoid burning out early. In this, I think I was mostly successful; on Sunday, I was tired, but not dead tired as has happened in previous years. Continue reading MileHiCon 47 →

The Plaid Mentat

A Day in the Life: Part 3

This is the last entry in my series on a typical day in my life. The first two parts are here and here. This part will cover my evenings after work.

Evening Time To Get Away

Once I get home, Jessa and I usually discuss dinner – in the same way I imagine very few couples do it:

“What do you want for dinner?”
“Food. What do you want for dinner?”
“Food.”
“What kind of food?”
“Edible food”
“What kind of edible food?”
“Good edible food.”
“Oh, too bad, we don’t have any of that.”

This discussion usually doesn’t last too long before someone folds and we decide what to eat. Once dinner is ready, we settle down for our one hour of television per day – an episode of some show that we like, watched on DVD. We batch watch shows by season, then move on to something else. Our current rotating list is: Criminal Minds, Doctor Who (there’s always more Doctor Who), Leverage, Millennium, or Supernatural. We just recently finished White Collar, and our previous shows have included such things as Death Note, Stargate SG1, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Warehouse 13 among others. This is Jessa’s and my family time and shared experience together, and gives us things to talk about.

Continue reading A Day in the Life: Part 3 →

The Plaid Mentat

Aside: I love my job

I really enjoy my job, though precisely why I do is quite difficult for me to convey in writing – it’s tied up in what I do, who I work with, and just how much fun the daily problem solving is for me.  If this sounds strange to you, this post is likely going to be difficult to grok.  For everyone else, here I go…

What I do

I am the Data Operations Supervisor at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. I’ve been working for the NSIDC off and on since 2005 (I started as a student while I was working on my graduate degree), and consistently since 2010 (when I graduated and came back to work full time). My job is currently split between data operations tasks, high-level architecture/engineering, and administrative/supervisory stuff.

The data operations tasks take the bulk of my time, but because I have one foot in architecture, I help bubble up things that would make the job easier/harder, while also integrating new technologies/techniques into our operational stack. Going back and forth between detailed troubleshooting and high-level work in particular makes this very rewarding as I get to tackle problems from both ends – how to fix it now, and how to keep it from breaking tomorrow.

Continue reading Aside: I love my job →

The Plaid Mentat

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 →

The Plaid Mentat

Aside: Sometimes I Wake Up at 4:00am

As many of my friends and family know, I’m a morning person. When I wake up in the morning, I’m awake and ready to tackle my day. Not only that, I’m at my most productive in the morning, especially early in the morning. One way this manifests is that occasionally I wake up between 4:00 and 4:30am. Oddly, this is something that has happened to me for a fair amount of my adult life, but I’ve never really understood why – it’s simply that, some mornings, I wake up, completely ready to face my day much earlier.

Even though I typically end up with less sleep from the night prior, I actually look forward to these mornings. As you might imagine, there is almost no one else awake at that hour. In particular, anyone in my circle of friends is either at work still or just crawling off to bed (most people I know fit in the “night owl” category). So, with no distractions and my mind at its peak, I find that I’m able to get a lot more done, and be a lot more creative. It’s also early enough, that I’m not typically distracted by my imminent departure for work. As such, this is a windfall of free time that I can use to tinker with something, try something new, or even get some writing in.

I’ve occasionally thought about planning my day so that I could consistently get up this early by going to bed earlier.  Since I’m more energized in the morning than I am in the evening, I’ve often thought that if I could skew my schedule so that I went to sleep at 8:00 and woke up at 4:00, I could get the best of both worlds – enough sleep to make it through the day, and wake up at 4:00am.  The more pragmatic part of me knows that this wouldn’t work though – between my job and family time, it’s not really feasible to get to bed that early.  Instead, I just roll with it, and when my mind and body say that I need to wake up early one morning, I do.

The Plaid Mentat

A Day in the Life: Part 1

There are no typical days, but my days have a pattern to them that make it so that I can expect what’s coming. As part of getting back into blogging, I wanted to write a bit about what that looks like. The next few posts might be incredibly boring to some, but maybe a few people will enjoy.

Morning Glory

For me, a typical day starts at 6:00am… …Sortof. One particularly bad habit I have been trying to kick is my morning battle with the alarm clock. It starts sounding at 6:00am, but I get a lot of use out of the nine minute snooze button, and I don’t actually fully wake up and get out of bed until around 6:45. Once I’m actually out of bed, the rest of my morning ritual is pretty pedestrian – get dressed, brush my hair and put it in a ponytail, and grab my cell phone off the charger. With the exception of grabbing my flannel and work bag, I’m essentially ready to go at this point, and it really takes me no more than about six minutes (which is why I have a tendency to sleep past my first alarm).

Continue reading A Day in the Life: Part 1 →

The Plaid Mentat

What are my good habits?

After my last post, I started thinking about what my good habits were. I could also write about my bad habits, but I find that bad habits are harder to think about because they can tend to be more subconscious. Also, I want to like writing, so I think I’ll write about my good habits instead.

Below, I’ve compiled some of what I think of as good habits. These are changes that I’ve made in my life that I hope have a net gain. How do I judge this? Well… …It’s completely subjective. It’s whether I think it’s a net gain, and that’s what matters to me right now. Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Continue reading What are my good habits? →

The Plaid Mentat

Habits

I’ve been thinking a lot about good habits lately. Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to cultivate more good habits. I know I’m getting older (not old yet), so I have felt the need to make myself a better person. However, it seems like the more good habits that I try to squeeze in, other things drop off, like it’s some sort of zero sum game.

For instance, I recently started taking the bus to and from work every day. This takes about twice as long as driving (-) but I save on gas (+), I get time to read while I’m on the bus (+), and get more exercise walking to/from the bus stop (+). However, it also has ripple effects – I haven’t been cooking at home as much, so we have been eating out more (-). Also the bus is on a fixed schedule, so I tend to stay late at work more often (-).

This isn’t so much an expression of frustration, so much as a recognition of where I am when I say to myself, “I want to make time to write.” This is an experiment – can I make time to write without giving up too much else? In this case, I’m giving up some of my reading time on the bus in the hope that I will be able to update my blog more often. The tradeoff, of course, is that it will take me longer to finish anything that I’m reading…