HR is always looking for ways to help employees.  One of those ways is by giving various kinds of leadership and relationship training.  So, yesterday was our team's Strength Deployment Inventory training, and it was very interesting.
For those who know me, they will probably not be too surprised to learn that I'm a "hub", leaning towards blue-green and blue, especially in conflict: "Flexible-Cohering," close to "Cautious-Supporting" and "Altruistic-Nurturing."
As they read the attributes attributed to each color (or hub in my case), I had to get over the horoscope similarity--these things could describe anybody under a given situation, or how one wants to be more than how they are.  Once I was past that, I found it quite interesting to think about myself and my coworkers through the simplifying lens of the SDI score set.  My manager and one coworker are blue (altruistic-nurturing), and another coworker green (analytic-autonomizing).
So, one of my goals over the next while is to figure out how this impacts my communications with my peers.  That's the goal of the class, after all.
The class was sprung on me during the day, so I hadn't expected to spend my last 2 or 3 hours learning what color I am.  I guess I need to do the MBTI next so I can relate to all those other people in the world who know their colors.  I'll bet I can find all sorts of color schemes to categorize myself.  And I'll bet I'll not be surprised at all at my own outcome each time.  Now, if I could just get all the people around me to do the same things and to wear their colors on a badge or something, then I'd know how to deal with them as well.

My son is turning into a horseback rider - we've been riding 4 of the last 5 weeks and will probably keep going at that rate for the rest of the fall (and into the winter if he has anything to do with it.
Truth is, he spends far too much time inside, so this is good for him.  He really doesn't need to spend more time with the Pokemon cards or watching TV shows.  Okay, he's discovered Star Trek, the original series, so that's not as bad nowadays as it used to be when it was nothing but Disney Channel reruns, but still, he really needs to get out.
One of the fun things he discovered is that from horseback, you can reach the plums and apples from wild fruit trees on the side of the road or trail, even when all the lower ones have all been cleared out by walkers-by. 

It's a good thing that the computer world isn't simple.  After all, who'd pay me to work on fun things like AWS Elastic Load Balancer monitoring if it were totally straight-forward.
I'm currently wrestling with an nice Ruby Nagios plugin for doing CloudWatch monitoring,  I've got it doing AWS/EC2 metrics.  Now I just have to figure out how to get it to report AWS/ELB metrics.  Full documentation would have been nice, but, like I said, if it were easy, who'd pay me to figure it out?

When I graduate last month, I thought I was pretty much done giving my weeknights and Saturdays to (at least) this particular academic pursuit.  Silly me, what was I thinking?
The ICADIWT 2011 (http://www.dirf.org/diwt/) committee has asked me to prepare a 6000 word journal article for one of the DLINE journals (http://www.dline.info/), so here goes another Saturday.  Ah, the sacrifices we make for the pursuit of knowledge!

My oldest just started at BYU and is in an on-campus apartment with 5 other freshman girls.  Oh the drama! My daughter is apparently driving them crazy because she goes to bed too early (11:30 or midnight) and gets up too early (8 am) and actually wants to study once in a while.  

There are already hard feelings around the groupp: the kitchen cupboards were mostly commandeered by one girl (not my girl), complaints of too much noise at night and in the morning (some from all the girls), another girl (not mine) is recovering from a fairly serious injury that happened last week, the kitchen queen has declared her toaster a hands-off zone, some girls (not mine) have guys in the apartment later than other girls want (mine and others), etc.

Oh, I am SO glad not to be in that world any more.  Kind of like I'm glad I'm past the diaper stage with my kids.  It just makes my thoughts switch back and forth from "Yep.  Been there; done that; somehow survived" and "Ewww..." to think about it.

In the mean time, I'll be doing what I can to support the daughter through the challenges.  She's a great kid and generally very well liked by those around her, so I'm not worried that she'll get along well enough.

Last week was my first as a NOC architect at Adobe's Omniture Business Unit.  Each day, I was scheduled for  three to five meetings with the managers or members of various teams and given high-level overviews of the various activities in the business unit.  Overall, it has been the most thorough and timely organizational training I have ever received.

With tens of thousands of servers, switches, routers and applications to watch, this NOC architect position promises to be both challenging and exciting.  The environment already has an amazing set of tools, some of which are quite mature, while others are in need of some work.  My first order of business is going to be documenting and getting to know these systems.  Wish me luck.  There's a lot to get, so I'll need it!

My interests are varied, so I tend to work through books fairly slowly as I do other things.  I like to think that I get more time to savor and think on what I'm reading.  My oldest daughter (who reads at an inhumanly fast rate) tells me I'm just lame.  Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle: I'm a lame guy why savors his reading.

For academic reading, I'm currently in the middle of a number of books, including "Pearls in Graph Theory: A Comprehensive Introduction" and a couple of chapters of "R in a Nutshell."  Not being an by profession academic means that I go slowly through these sorts of texts unless I can generate a real need (easy enough with R, not so easy with graph theory as yet).  On a rather different note, I picked up "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes," some time ago, so it will find its way onto my reading list pretty soon.  

For my personal fiction reading, I'm working through C.S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strength."  The first two books in the series, "Out of the Silent Planet" and "Perelandra" took a while to get my attention, but eventually grabbed hold and wouldn't let go.  I finished "City of Ember" at my younger daughter's suggestion, so I have "People of Sparks" in the queue.  I've also burned through all the H. Beam Piper sci-fi stories I could get my hands on over the last few months (most are at gutenberg.net and Librivox.org).

My son and I are reading Atherton books by Patrick Carman -- the first book, "The House of Power" grabbed both of us and was literally a cliff-hanger (of sorts), so we have "Rivers of Fire" on order.  I've enjoyed reading to my kids over the years and we've been through some amazing book (including "The Hobbit" and the full "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, most of Roald Dahl's books, the EarthSea trilogy, several Patricia McKillip books, including the Riddlemaster series, etc.).  While I was in grad school over the last 5 years, reading to my kids (particularly my youngest) was the only fiction I took time to read, but now I hope to have more time for such diversions.