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2007

  • in General
  • 2 min read

Runnin' down a dream

In almost 5 years of blogging, one of my cardinal rules, though unwritten, was to not talk about work and my job on this blog. You hear stories today about prospective employers doing Google searches on interviewees or looking them up on MySpace or Facebook. (Interesting sidenote: since converting my blog’s identity from silwenae to Paul Cutler, a Google Search of my name takes me to the #2 result on Google, up from about 10 6 months ago).

Rules are made to be broken.

After 15 years of working at Best Buy, I resigned my position this morning. I believe it came as a surprise to most of my co-workers, who thought me a “lifer”. But this past year has been one of reflection for me, as January was my 10 year anniversary of working at the corporate office after 5 years in the retail stores, and May was my 15 year anniversary.

I’m not leaving retail behind forever, as I’m going to a small software publisher, who, well, publishes software to sell at retailers.

Best Buy has changed immensely since I’ve started. From 75 stores in 13 states, we now have 875 stores in 49 states in the US, as well as stores in Canada, China and operations in the U.K. I started as a part time cashier, and worked my way up the ladder managing my own store as a General Manager in 5 years. I then spent 10 years at the corporate office, holding positions as a Product Manager, Sr Buyer, and others working in Service, Business Development and lastly as a Merchant.

Change is hard, and a bit scary – Best Buy is really the only job and career I’ve had in my adult life. But I’m looking forward to the challenge of a new position, and in a way starting over. I’m going from a company of 120,000+ employees (5500 at our corporate office) to a company with 45 employees.

One of my co-workers who I have grown close to over the past few years left me a card and a CD with songs she thought was appropriate to me leaving. The song choices were amazing – and one of them was Tom Petty’s Running Down a Dream. I’ll post the set list in a few days.

I’m excited at the opportunity, and I’m looking forward to the change. And don’t worry, I’m back to my unwritten rule of not talking about work and my day job.

Go Pack Go!

My father and I were able to purchase season tickets again this year from a family member.

I spent this past Sunday driving to and from Lambeau Field (about 4.5 – 5 hours each way) and it was definitely worth it.

Prior to the game, there was a convention in Green Bay this past week hosting most living Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. Before the game, Brian Williams of NBC introduced, by war, those living Medal of Honor recipients who were able to attend the convention and game. The four living Wisconsin recipients were also honorary captains for the day. Prior to kickoff, four F-16s did a flyby.

Most of the drive to Green Bay once I hit Wisconsin was cloudy and rainy. Sure enough, the drizzle started at kickoff for 30 minutes, but by halftime the clouds parted and the sun was shining brightly.

The game was a nailbiter – after a 10-0 Packer start in the first quarter, I had visions of the Saints game from last year which I was at, where the Packers jumped to a large lead only to give it away. The defense was phenomenal, as was the special teams play. The offense, well, let’s just say they have their work cut out from them.

I brought my new Digital SLR (Canon Rebel XTi) to the game, but I ran out of battery by kick off as I was practicing taking photos with it during pre-game. It was the first time I’ve used the telescopic lens, which I was very impressed with when in Sports mode on the camera firing off 3 shots / second. I still have some learning to do on proper focusing when using that lens though. You can view the set on Flickr here, and here is one of my favorite pictures I took watching Favre warm up:

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Next game: Sunday, October 9th against the Chicago Bears. This will be the first time I’ve seen the Bears at Lambeau, and is the only real rivalry the Packers have.

PackageKit

As a Foresight user, I’m very excited about the future of PackageKit, which was highlighted in the August Foresight newsletter.

PackageKit will be a graphical front end for helping manage software packages on your computer, including installation, removal and updates.

Ken VanDine and Elliott Peele among others are hard at work getting Conary to work with PackageKit.

The new PackageKit website / wiki is up, and I just finished porting Richard’s Docbook documentation (that he blogged about this morning) for PackageKit to the wiki, available here. The basics are there, and I’ve got the ToC and most formatting done, but it could use some help with proofreading and getting the tables set up.

  • in General
  • 1 min read

Boom! Crash!

The shelving in my office closet came crashing down a couple of days ago. Lots of books, CDs, computer parts and boxes are currently strewn about my office. This picture doesn’t do the mess justice:

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It’s been a long week between my hard drive crashing, the shelving ripped out of the wall, and my onging DirecTV nightmare, which I’ll expound upon once it’s over.

That feeling of dread

I’m watching TV this past Sunday, streaming TV shows from my networked hard drive (a Buffalo Terrastation) to my Netgear EVA as my DirecTV is still out. I had noticed that when I hit play, it was taking a much longer time to start the show, but they started, and then halfway through one show it stopped, and couldn’t connect.

Walking into my office, all the lights on the Terrastation are flashing. The web interface came up, and the diagnostics report that one of the hard drives has failed.

Ack. Ugh. Many bad words I don’t want my children repeating.

A feeling of dread. Panic setting in – what isn’t backed up? What am I going to lose? What will my wife think?

I run some more diagnostics, generic drive failure messages. The Terrastation won’t give me status on the raid array because of the drive failure. Why, oh why was I running in drive spanning mode and not in a raid configuration where if a drive failed I’d still be ok?

The Terrastation has 4 160GB drives with the option of drive spanning, RAID 0, 1 or 5. Running a small version of Linux, which I always meant to hack with a custom firmware but never did for SSH access, it has FTP and Samba. I had Samba shares set up storing all my music, photos, videos and backup shares for both my wife and me. The Terrastation streams that content to my Netgear EVA at my home theater, the Sonos music players all over the house, and the hacked Xbox in the family room.

The lost data appears to be minimal – I have a full backup of my music on my desktop’s hard drive, and it looks like I have a copy of most of the photo’s, though I need to double check. Ironically, I lost most of the video’s I’ve downloaded since my DirecTV dish has been down, but that is what Bittorrent is for.

I’m not sure what was in the backup directories, I know I haven’t backed up much lately.

Now the question is – when is redundant backup not redundant enough? Do I want to take one of the extra computers I’m not using and install FreeNAS or Openfiler? My good friend Mr. Holzer recently built a FreeNAS server using compactflash to boot the OS with a bunch of hard drives. The price of external drives keeps falling as well, do I want to just be lazy and buy another one of those?

I hate that feeling of dread – I’ve lost my personal music collection and had to re-rip it at least 3 times now. I know hard drives don’t last forever, and I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Foresight Linux Newsletter Released

Issue 6 (Aug 2007) of the Foresight Linux Newsletter has been released. This month’s issue features an update on the Foresight Linux 2.0 development and release dates, upcoming speaking engagements by members of the Foresight Linux team, and an introduction and overview to PackageKit.

This month’s newsletter is available at http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/newsletter/2007/09/01/ or you can subscribe in your favorite feedreader such as Liferea, Bloglines or Google Reader by adding http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter to your feedreader.