Quiet...

It's finally quieting down around here for the holidays. I hope to be able to catch up on email over the next couple of days. My inbox has essentially exploded recently - I'm up to 1400 unread messages! Nevermind my personal email. I've been unsubscribing myself from several aliases, because I just don't have time to keep up. I can't even think about netnews anymore. *ugh*

Not So Silent Night

Made it to Live 105's Not So Silent Night this year (finally!) on Friday night. Show was great! We missed the local band and Taking Back Sunday, but got there in time to catch a great set from Muse. The Killers had some serious sound issues - it was all kick drum! They sounded much better from outside than they did inside the pavilion - I couldn't stand listening to them, even with my ear plugs in. Franz Ferdinand was outstanding - very high energy. There was an amazing impromptu set from Lyrics Born - it's always very impressive when a rapper manages to sound better live than they do produced. Modest Mouse was disappointing. MM just couldn't get their act together - huge delays between each song, dragging the show to a halt. I would've loved to have heard some of their less mainstream stuff, but they didn't seem to get to it before I got bored and left.

Now I've just got to wade through the thousands of new email messages I have - and that's just at work!

Status

In response to some recent comments... No, Martin, I have not learned to juggle yet, though Tobin took your lessons to heart and is quite good now. I think he's ready for fire. Nobody had a camera to capture my cat in the office, but she'll be back I'm sure. And yes, I'll take a beer if I ever make it to Amsterdam. ;-)

Work on solaris10_update1 is moving steadily forward and is keeping me busy. We haven't opened our gate yet, which is when the real excitement begins!

*whew*

Big River at West Valley closed this weekend - I will now have my weekends free! It was a great show, an outstanding cast & crew and just lots of fun. That will be my last theater endeavor for awhile now, since my tasks on Solaris 10, Update 1 are ramping up fast. I expect that I will have many late nights ahead of me, which will make it impossible to rehearse for another show.

Cats

So, where would a cat be happier: in an apartment where the carpet was being cleaned, or with me in my office. I guessed in my office, and it seems to be a good bet so far. This is her second day here, as the carpet cleaners failed to show up yesterday. Since cats do mostly sleep all day, it probably doesn't matter where she is.

RTI Madness!

We had a major build closing last night, so I was in the office until 11.30 PM reviewing RTIs (request to integrate) and watching changes go into the gate. All went well, and I'm just a bit drowsy today.

Live upgrade

I finally entered the brave new world and used live upgrade (vs standard old fashioned upgrade) for the first time yesterday afternoon. It was so amazingly easy (once my friend told me how to work around the fact that my function keys are remapped), I can't believe I waited this long to try it. If you are trying to use live upgrade & your function keys are remapped, use Ctrl-F then the number to map to the function key (like Ctrl-F 6 for Cancel).

We've Launched!

Quite an exciting day yesterday - it's great seeing so many people excited about our technology.

I'm personally excited about being able to more openly talk about the work I've done on Solaris 10 and all the exciting stuff that is coming in the future! I've been working with the Solaris 10 Platinum Beta team, so lots of folks have already gotten their hot little hands on our new software, which is very cool. I really believe that the Cryptographic Framework will make a huge impact once it's available to the general public. Very rewarding feeling.

Sun management hosted a party for the S10 engineers at the Tech museum last night - we even got free t-shirts again :-)

Caffeine

Read this article today that explains why I had such a hard time giving up caffeine last year: WebMD Caffeine Addiction Article

I guess I was one of eight that had severe symptoms. I swear, I was nearly completely nonfunctional. I do sleep better now, and my heart rate is no longer as fast as a bird's, so I guess it was a good thing to give up.

Brain working

The cold is now mostly out of my system and my brain is functioning again. Spent much of this week embroiled in BT2.0 issues, code reviews and RTI approvals. Looking forward to getting more done soon. This weekend's performance should be much better.

Microphones

So, tonight Big River is opening - and tonight will be our first night with body mics. *ugh* I generally don't like being mic'ed, as I can hear an echo of my own voice and I think it sounds tinny. Now, before a live audience, I'll get to experiment with a head mounted mic and multiple wig changes. It will definitely be interesting! Still have that lingering head cold as well, but a real audience always brings out my best, so it should prove to be a great time.

Sick

So much for trying to add more stuff to the blog this week, as I seemed to have caught a bad head cold that's been going around.

I've spent most of this week attempting to work from home, but mostly just resting. I even had to miss rehearsal Monday night. Missing rehearsal the week before opening is generally frowned upon, but I figured it was better for me to stay home instead of spreading my sickness to the rest of the cast.

So much for having a productive week! My energy level seems to be up today, so perhaps I can still get something done.

Off to tackle the inbox.

Time for a first post

Ok, I've been delaying making my first post here, pending having enough time to say everything I want to say. Well, it turns out I'm very busy and never have a large chunk of free time, so I'll just try to do more frequent short updates.

I work in Solaris Networking and Security Technologies group, where I've been a development engineer for about 3 years.While in SNST, I've primarily worked on the Solaris Cryptographic Framework's userland side (uCF). Prior to that, I was a development and a sustaining engineer on the SunScreen firewall product for nearly 5 years. Wow, I'm an official oldtimer at Sun now.

Over the last 5.5 years, I've been spending quite a few cycles consulting the BugTraq2.0 team for a rollout of new software to track defects for Sun. It rolled out a few weeks ago, which is quite a relief for me.

That's it for now... I'll try to flesh things out a bit more later.