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Thu Dec 30 08:59:30 2004
If you have a woodburner, firepit or fireplace, you may find this data interesting.
Wed Dec 29 16:23:25 2004
Vacation
It's "Use it or loose it" time. I haven't used any, so I've got 2 weeks of vacation starting Dec 21st, running through Jan 3rd. First of all, I've been blessed by awesome weather. Over a foot of snow landed early on. The truck and I loved it. I was thinking about shoveling out my driveway, but when my ex had to park on the street for fear of the 16-inch divits left by my tires, I decided it was just fine the way it was. We don't take kindly to visitors in these parts, see? Besides, I rather enjoy the feel of the truck launching over the snowplow hill and slamming down on the ice.
I got a shop-vac for x-mas. It's awesome for catching all the Bella-bunnies running around my house. (Bella is my Newfoundland, she sheds enough hair to clothe 10 Chihuahua every day.) I also made a thing for Leah. It's a container for cats. They go in there and eat, and the dogs cannot reach their food. The only problem is that it has a design problem. The cats can get back out again. Oh well, at least it keeps the dogs from getting sick. She took some pictures; maybe I can post them later.
Update: picture
Thu Dec 16 11:12:34 2004
It's OSP time.
What does OSP stand for? I have no idea. It's one of those corporate TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms), but I think it might be something like "Objective Service Performance" or similar Admino-babble speak for "Review". It's like NCC's answer to TPS reports. We get these OSPs at the beginning of the year, and at mid-year and year-end we are graded on them. This grade is used to determine our raises and bonus. Sounds simple, right? Let me give you and example:
Goal / Objective: Develop trending process model to identify gaps in information necessary to effectively report on production components/systems.
Now what in Sam-hell does that mean? I don't know and nobody can tell me. I think management just makes this stuff up to watch us squirm. But wait, lets make it more fun. Our grade is based on how SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant to Goal, Timebound) our solution was. With the focus on 'Measurable'. The Adminosphere likes to think they can put dollar values on what I consider common sense.
Still not fun enough? OK, now picture this. My managers (my three direct managers, we're not counting the dotted lines across the org chart) spend the majority of their time trying to look good for the managers above them. They spend very little time (zero IMHO) doing anything to help the people that work for them succeed. What's that mean? We get to write these reviews ourselves. They come up with the OSPs at the beginning of the year, and we have to fill in a field called 'RESULTS' explaining how we succeeded at that 'Goal'.
So, today is the day where I have to shift my brain out of "diagnose, design, solve" mode and into "fuzzy admino-babble and fake numbers" mode. Lets address the OSP quoted above:
Developed custom monitoring scripts that interface into the Patrol Agent to fill gaps where the standard Patrol Agent monitoring was insufficient. These scripts were implemented on the SwiftNet, Avotus, PPM, and NDM projects. Leveraged reusable code to reduce subsequent delivery time by 75%. Deployment of these scripts enabled timely alerting of critical subsystems related to those projects reducing downtime from a possible several hours to timeframes agreed upon in the SLAs.
It sounds good, but I don't have enough fake numbers in there. I don't know how much it would cost us for those services to be down. I don't have any idea what they even do. I just monitor them. I think I can make up for it by equating webclicks to time saved for another project I put together. Lets see if each we click reprents a time savings of 5 minutes, using a dollar per hour cost of $35, and checking my logs, I have 3985 hits, that’s a savings of $11,623. Not too bad, I'll definitely use that one, but lets try again. I wrote an inventory script that tracks software across UNIX platforms. If we were audited, we could be dinged $250,000 for lack of compliance. Since I track 10 high-profile pieces of software, we have a potential cost avoidance of $2.5 million for infractions. Of course you may say that they would collect the data manually. OK, my script does the work of a team or 5 working over a week, and they would probably collect the data twice a year, (and this team is worth $70 hour) that’s a savings of $28,000.
I have 16 of these OSPs to answer to. My head is swimming. Admino-land is no place for techies. Lets see, 10 minute coffee break, potential cost savings calculated in time avoided at the therapists, savings = approx $25,000.