[Cadre-politics] status embrace failure and anxiety

[Dan MacNeil]

BAR BANDS
I started this status report, sitting at Andy's [1], at 9:30pm on a
Friday night listening to some guy with a day job playing the guitar and
singing the standards. Counting the woman that works here, there were
three of us with laptops, absent-mindedly clapping from time to time. I
love gnarled, old, alcoholic bar bands and I love earnest young ones, 
they are
there for love or at least passion.

	[1] http://www.brewdawakening.com/

MEETING WITH THE PROVOST
This week I got an email from  John Wooding (#2 guy
@uml) asking for a meeting. After I confessed to a little
nervousness, John Wooding made a private little joke about increasing
the Prozac in the university drinking water and offered his very
slightly qualified assurance that we didn't need to worry.

If you care to read the tea leaves for yourself, most of the
correspondence is on the board list [2]  Tom Costello, Josh Harding,
Kristina Ickes and I will meet with John Wooding, Jeff Thompson and
Diana Prideaux-Brune on January 30th.

[2]
http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/divinerightofkings/2007-January/thread.html

If you know any of the players, please put in a good word for us.

LACK OF DAY JOB
So far the big change is that I leave the lab @ 7pm instead of 4pm and
and share the events of the day with Laura instead of the guys of
admin at cs.uml.edu. My email inbox is also empty. With more blocks of
uninterrupted time, it has been easier to "touch it once". [3]

[3] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22touch+it+once

Downside, the boomer grant paycheck won't start to roll into until early
February, but since Laura and I  came into small bit of unexpected
money, this is not as big a problem as we'd expected.

JOHN MILLER
Part of my empty mailbox is John coming back from vacation in Kansas to
handle a few problems that I'd let slide.

KAMALA KALLURI
The downtime database is moving along. The current challenge is 
abstracting the differences between SQLite , mySQL and Postgresql SQL.

For many, many reasons, It is nice to have the time to do the job right.

ERIC BRYANT
Eric doesn't officially start until January 20th, but so far he's
commuted three days from Cambridge, done a lot of work from home and
gone to the Mass Service Boomer grantee meeting with me.

ERICH JENSON
Same here, except commuting from Missouri is tougher than commuting
from Cambridge Erich's easiest to understand contribution is a partial
make-over [4] of the the water festival site.[5]

	[4] http://nodist.thecsl.org/waterfest/
	[5] http://lowellwaterfestival.org/

POSITIVITY IS OVER RATED

No, we'll not be flagellating ourselves bloody, but this week I won't 
pour sunshine in our half full glass.  Ignorance of one's incompetence 
is very highly correlated with incompetence. [6]

	[6] apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

So...  this week we examine an actually-we-do-suck-a-little-bit incident.

It took 8 days it took to fix a NFS/Samba problem that made the file 
server unusable for the BSM people. BSM is "Broadcast and Student Media, 
Felicia Sullivan, Christine Dunlap, Sunrise, etc, etc. NFS is  Network 
File System. Samba is software that runs on Linux and looks like a 
Microsoft file server to microsoft clients.

The root of the problem was design. We (mostly me)  decided to run Samba 
on a separate box than the one the hard drives were physically plugged 
into. Usually, running separate services on separate boxes allows things 
that don't depend on each other to continue on. The email keeps flowing 
if the web server is having trouble.

In this case, we introduced a dependency and another point of failure.
Files lived on hard drives attached to brave. The Samba box accessed 
files  through NFS. For everything to work, brave, NFS, samba and the OS 
on the samba box all had to be working. The last time we had such a 
problem, I'd upgraded the kernel on brave and rebooted without 
considering the effect on Samba.

When John got back, he isolated the problem to NFS but not further.
Rather than do more troubleshooting, we eliminated NFS. Once we started
work on the problem, it took only about 4 hours to  resolve it. I 
confess, I did better offering advice than doing actual work.

Getting started was in itself a problem. John was out of town and off 
the clock. I allowed myself to be distracted by three deadlines for 
grants totaling $28,000, the annoyance of a small unfinished UTEC 
project and a weekend with slightly more leisure than usual.

"Failure" is often a matter of choice. A student chooses a semester of 
beer over a semester of study and flunks. Another student chooses study 
over beer and remains a bit lonely. At the very least, last week, I 
could have made different choices and failed at different things.

Given a do-over, I'd still do  the contract paperwork for the Boomer 
grant, $20,000 is $20,000. Likewise the meeting at the Lowell Workforce 
Investment Board could have been blown off but they've promised us 
$4,000 for mvhub and said nice things about us to the state work force 
investment board. The state people have real money.  Likewise $4,000 
Essex County Community Foundation grant was probably ours to lose by not 
meeting the deadline. I probably made the right call here.

It was within my power to push the UTEC project off. Given our contract 
  [7], we get $10 per hour for exactly 10 hours of work per week, less 
than 10 hours per week means no pay, more than 10 hours means no extra 
pay. BSM (broadcast & student media) is paying us zero cash this fiscal 
year, but we need a fforklift to haul out all the political capital.

	[7] http://thecsl.org/links/utec-2006_contract.doc

On the gripping hand, the Samba (windows accessable) file server is in 
light use during the semester break and we had no complaint beyond the 
inital one.

Again, ignoring failure doesn't make it go away. Acknowledging failure, 
even dwelling on it is a sign of strength not weakness. In this very 
slightly sucky incident, I could have choosen differently for at least a 
different failure.


COFFEE

The eggroll cafe has re-aranged the furniture, the coach is now in the 
middle of the room and there is a table against the window. Now the 
people walking by have a better view than the back of somebody's head. 
Now the people sipping mocha, grande, decaf lattes have something to 
look at other than other people sipping mocha, grande, decaf lattes.

We are now on a first name basis with the woman that runs the place. No 
more "Sir" and "M'am".  Now it is "Dan" and "Sengli"