sean’s place

Education and Work

Been working longer hours… 52 hours this week - but I got a ton of stuff done. I think I may have exceeded expectations a bit, at least when it comes to the breadth of what I know. I’m not a “typical” college grad; I paired my college education with real-world experience at LLNL and Intel and educational jobs as a tutor and grader. I may have joked about the lab being a world unto its own, but now I realize now how invaluable the education I received there was.

I am really starting to appreciate the blend of education I received (often at the expense of my pleasant demeanor…) in terms of what I’m able to do now as a grad. People often heckled me about how much (old) hardware I have and questioned it’s use. While some of it may have sat on the floor for long stretches, it all proved worth it when I could on-a-whim install a new OS on some machine and just play with it. Learning is all about experimentation, and I like to experiment. I think this is exactly why I’m comfortable in pretty much any open-source Unix and can make a fair pass at competent on proprietary systems. Hell, I can even do OS X and Windows.

I know at least two of you who read this are pursuing degrees in computer science. It’s one thing to have a degree, but the market now is such that a degree won’t get you a job in the field. The US market for developers and engineers are whittling down to the people who actually care about what they do. They enjoy writing code, designing software systems, and experimenting with new stuff. This passion will get you the experience that will help your marketability. At least one of you who reads this understands this…

Anyway, I think I’m done ranting a bit. As I write this, I am thinking of ways to get a newer version of OpenBoot on my Blade 100 (which simply refuses to get taken…). The 15GB Seagate drive promptly died 5 years and 1 month after its manufacture date and OBP is refusing to boot from CDROM for some unknown reason. Thanks to the fine folks over at Debian, I have a fresh install of Debian going onto the 1 working drive via netboot (you have to give that to Sun, netboot is really useful and this machine is really old.)

[Update at @ 17:36 - A sweet tip from ciaranm in #gentoo-sparc got my cdrom drive working again. I took the machine outside and gave it a pretty severe dusting off and recabled it. Works fine now. Going to give Solaris 10 a try now...]

I also sit here dreaming of a faster pipe. I tried getting AT&T to bump my DSL to 3mbit, but I’m rather unfortunately far from the central office. I installed Ubuntu on my work machine, and I sucked data off the DS3 like it was a fire hose. Sweet delicious 45mbit.

Anyhoo. I also got paid yesterday. Sweet mercy me, I haven’t had this much cash in a while.