Ancker’s Limited Infinity

So its been a while….since a real post anyway.

I’ve discovered what its like to be a workaholic again. I’m strangely drawn to it I think.
I wake up early every morning, I think its the summer that does it to me. I eat some breakfast and end up getting bored sitting around the apartment. I eventually just decide to go to work.
You’d think that going in early would mean that I’d leave early…you’d be wrong.
I end up working until four like I usually do, then something comes up, or I go talk to someone, or like most of the time, I’ll just be working on something and not really want to stop until its done.
Then I realize that its 630 and I’ve been at work for 11 hours. I drive home and pour a bowl of cereal and walk straight to my home office to write an email about something I remembered on the way home.

What’s all this for? Nothing really. I work for the State, so those bonus things people get in the Corporate world don’t exist here. And raises aren’t exactly stellar either. If you get a cost of living raise you’re doing spectacular.

I guess its just that I like what I’m doing. I enjoy getting the complicated stuff that no one has done before. The members of my group are so knowledgeable and experienced that sometimes I’m happy to do something that they don’t know. I certainly appreciate all of the help and advice they give me when working on projects, but as with any group of highly intelligent people, there are going to be differing opinions of the ‘correct’ way to do something. Its nice to have been largely left alone to design and implement at will these last few months.

I can only hope that everything I’ve done ends up working exactly how I planned and I don’t end up looking like a moron three years from now.
However long my tenure at the University all I can hope for is that I’m remembered as a darn good Network Engineer.

On a different note…I sat in on Vendor presentations for 10Gbps capable test gear last week. Due to state law, I can’t actually mention who we had in until the RFP process is complete. All of the vendors were great and I got the chance to really throw some packets around. I set up a test network on the ICCN that pushed packets 900km/560miles around the ring and back. We only had enough equipment on hand to ramp up to 4Gbps but it was neat seeing the network take a beating. We didn’t want to push too hard because it is pushing production traffic. On Friday we set up a software loopback on one of the wavelengths that runs to Chicago and ran an encapsulated ethernet BERT. We managed up to 10.3Billion bits per second. I was pretty stoked.

This weekend was pretty good. Family Reunion on Saturday on top of a Formula One weekend.. I was happy to see FOX picked up the French Grand Prix. The race was broadcast in HD. Unfortunately FOX had it on tape delay so I wasn’t able to use the live timing features on the website. FOX apparently has picked up the British Grand Prix as well. So yay, more HD F1. (Its still not as good as in person)

This week ought to be nicely uneventful. I have no plans for the fourth and I took vacation for Thursday and Friday. I have some golf to play and a wedding on Saturday.

I find myself yearning more and more to get into the seat of a race car. Maybe I’ll start looking at my finances and see if I can afford getting to one of those race driving schools to see if I have the skill I think I have.

Good enough post for today. I’ll try to keep this up. Not that anyone is reading anyway. :)