Rampant insomnia has taken over this week and has resulted in a lack of blogging. In lieu of actual content I give you this video by comedy troupe Derrick Comedy. Regular blogging resumes tomorrow.
Starting tonight (Sunday night) I get to spend all week working during the maintenance window to finish two of my aforementioned projects. For those of you who may not be familiar with the joys of maintenance windows, that basically means that instead of my usual 8am-5pm type hours, I’ll be working more in the neighborhood of 8pm-5am for the week. On the one hand the hours suck, but on the other hand there’s no management around and no traffic. It could also be worse, since last week I worked alternately days and nights, which is a really good way to drive yourself crazy. I don’t know how some people can deal with having a schedule like that varies so much all the time. Especially that whole 28-hour day thing. Blogging will occur at odd hours.
I will be attending the 2009 Second Amendment Blog Bash with my friend Mike. I have basically no excuse not to go seeing as how I’m an NRA Life Member and this year’s annual meeting is at the Phoenix Convention Center, barely a mile from my office. I plan to be at the meeting all three days, but Mike will only be able to attend on Saturday. See you there!
So I’m only just starting this thing and blogging is unfortunately irregular. Last week was one fire after another at work and this week I’m taking a Cisco multilayer switching class and studying for the Cisco QOS exam.
Class is going well. As usually happens with these lab-based classes, the instructor lectures for an hour, then I write out my configuration and apply it in about 20 minutes while the rest of the class takes two or three hours to troubleshoot problems that they could have avoided if they had planned their implementation properly. I spend that time making my network pod hack-proof or otherwise completely overengineering solutions to problems that I don’t have.
Fortunately the instructor is a gun nut and a friggin genius when it comes to networking and network security, so when he’s not helping other pods we shoot the bull about guns and Cisco. Good times.
I’ll try to get something more substantial up on Thursday after I take the QOS exam.
So I decided to start blogging. I still have no idea what I’m going to write about on a regular basis. It may be work, shooting, video and other games, politics, daily life, or something I haven’t anticipated. I’m starting this blog partly as a journal, partly to improve my own writing and debating skills, and partly just for fun.
I will be blogging anonymously because I would like the freedom to write about both my work and private life, and in the meatspace I generally try to keep the two as separate as possible. Being an internet engineer for an ISP, I’m not under the impression that blogging anonymously is any sort of guarantee of anonymity, but it’s better than nothing.
Let’s not mince words. I intend to talk about guns at this blog, possibly a lot. Guns are not always welcome at work, and all too often the mere mention of firearms can be grounds for a good talking-to, either on or off the record. Too many bloggers, like Joe Huffman, Chris Byrne, and Kim du Toit (to name a very few) have been fired or denied employment based on opinions they’ve expressed on the internet about legal activities that they engaged in while not on company time. It’s only prudent for a blogger write with a pseudonym.
I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only person on the internet currently using the handle “Eseell”. I’ll go into the origins of the name in a future post. In the mean time, if you see an Eseell online, it’s probably safe to assume that it’s me.